Diamonds & the Demi-monde

One thing I LOVE to read about is the success of my fellow sex workers. Women enter this industry for a variety of reasons, but something common to each and every one is their entrepreneurial spirit. We all have different end goals, and we’ve all decided to shun the socially acceptable labour routes and leverage a particular skillset instead. Hats off to us, because it’s a route that takes some guts. So yes I admire us all, but there’s one particular escort or courtesan that I have long especially admired, perhaps not always for her methods, but definitely for her destination. And it was a somewhat gloomy autumn day 6 or so years back when I first happened upon her story.

You see, a pair of big yellow diamonds were going up for sale at Sotheby’s in Geneva in late 2017; I am fascinated by gemstones and especially diamonds, and I regularly watch auctions. The Donnersmarck Diamonds were described as ‘a pair of extraordinary Fancy Intense Yellow diamonds with impeccable aristocratic provenance’. Auction houses and jewellers love to tell a tale or two in order to sell their wares, and accompanying the usual imagery of these fine diamonds was a provenance reference to a woman named La Paiva, and even more interestingly, a description of the diamonds belonging to arguably the most famous of the 19th-century French courtesans. My interest was well and truly piqued.

I began to do a bit of research and reading around La Paiva who had started life as Therese Lachman in 1819 in a Moscow ghetto. She married a Russian tailor of modest means, bore him a son and then decided there had to be more to life than this. So in her late teens, Therese buggered off to Paris, leaving her infant son and new husband behind. Shocking behaviour for a woman, I know. At this stage you could be forgiven for thinking Therese must have been one of the most beautiful women on Earth. It can be the only plausible explanation for that level of social mobility (tailor’s wife in a Russian ghetto to owner of massive yellow diamonds in France). But no, according to the accounts of people who met her, Therese Lachman was an entirely unremarkable and somewhat harsh looking woman. What’s more she was poorly educated, a fact that mattered a great deal at the time.

What Therese lacked in beauty and education, however, she made up for with dynamism, willpower and determination. Despite starting her new life in a Parisian slum, she worked in brothels and used the money to put together an upper class wardrobe and hang around in high class places. It was not long before she was able to hook her first high roller client come lover: Henry Herz, a famous pianist. Herz bought Therese beautiful clothes and wonderful jewels. What’s more, he introduced her to higher society than she was used to…musicians, journalists and intellectuals. He also, somewhat foolishly, left her behind in charge of his affairs in Paris when he travelled to America. Therese’s extravagances while he was gone (bearing in mind her young age) left him in a ruinous amount of debt and she was promptly tossed out of Herz’s home onto the streets by his family.

Destitute in Paris once again, in her late twenties, but now with contacts, Therese would remind herself of her belief that everything in life happened through willpower; circumstances did not exist, they are made as required. She once again plied her feminine wares and went in search of a wealthy man, moving to London for a time in search of British aristocracy, then to Germany where she met a Portuguese Marquis whom – her husband back in Moscow now dead from tuberculosis – she married in 1851. Therese Lachman was now Madame de Paiva.

Ah so this is where the story ends, you’re thinking. Therese and the Marquis live happily ever after and he gives her the diamonds for her 40th. Job done. But no reader, it does not end there. A few months after her wedding, presumably sick to the back teeth of her new husband who was nowhere near rich enough for her liking, Therese (hereon referred to as La Paiva) cast the Marquis aside telling him to go back to Portugal so she could remain in Paris as a titled courtesan. She wanted to find herself an even richer husband and an even better life, and she would do just that, via a man of glittering wealth: Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck; a Prussian soon-to-be Prince, industrial magnate, and one of the richest men of his time.

Von Donnersmarck didn’t come easy. La Paiva would pursue her next prize around Europe, from Constantinople to Naples, at great financial cost to herself, miraculously appearing at events and dinners he was attending, always placing herself under his gaze. It was time consuming and laborious, but the three million French Francs a year she would net by first becoming Donnersmarck’s mistress then later his wife (approx £39 million a year converted to GBP and allowing for inflation since 1860) would make the years of hard work worth it.

It was von Donnersmarck who would buy La Paiva those coveted yellow diamonds that would sell at Sothebys for just shy of 8 million dollars in 2017, along with many many more sumptuous jewels, some from the jewellery box of the deposed French Empress Eugenie. A chateau was purchased outside of Paris on the road to Rambouillet and von Donnersmarck would also build La Paiva the ostentation private mansion Hôtel de la Païva, located at avenue des Champs-Élysées. Now at the pinnacle of Parisian society, La Paiva would host lavish open houses, teas, dinners and salons, and Hôtel de la Païva would be a meeting place of men of letters and diplomats. It was the envy of many nobility who had previously shunned her as a worthless Russian whore. La Paiva would profit hugely from the advice of visiting bankers and economists, and she would help her husband manage his fortunes and business interests relating to his mines, estates and other industries. La Paiva had always been a shrewd businesswoman, but now she was one of the richest and most shrewd businesswomen in Europe.

How La Paiva’s life ended is up for some debate, though it would seem that she and her husband would spend her final years living in a castle in modern day Poland, where she would die aged 65 in 1884. It’s hard to get a true picture of La Paiva as a person. One story recounts her being thrown from a horse, which she immediately shot dead. Another tells the story of a servant she employed to open and close her chateau shutters dying of exhaustion. Some commentators even accuse her of espionage in the Franco-Prussian War. When it comes to her demeanour, the few surviving accounts paint a picture of a lavish, greedy and brutal lady with no redeeming features. An ugly, aging woman caked in make-up, who abandoned her children and left suicides and ruin in her wake.

Today however, we recognise descriptions like this for what they most likely are: steeped in misogyny. Society has a tendency to reframe assertive women as aggressive, and those females who seek out a wealthy spouse are derided as gold-diggers. I find it hard to believe that La Paiva could have really climbed from such humble beginnings to the top of Parisian society without some – in fact many – redeeming qualities. She simply must have been charming, witty, fun and whip-smart for starters. In reality, she probably possessed every quality her detractors say she lacked including some level of physical beauty. And most important of all, and in her own words, she possessed that all-important trait of willpower.