La Païva

Esther Lachmann (7 May 1819 – 21 January 1884), generally known as La Païva, was arguably the most successful of 19th-century French courtesans. A notable investor and architecture patron, and a collector of jewels, she had a personality so hard-bitten that she was described as the "one great courtesan who appears to have had no redeeming feature". Count Horace de Viel-Castel, a society chronicler, called her "the queen of kept women, the sovereign of her race".

Rising from modest circumstances in her native Russia to becoming one of the most infamous women in mid-19th-century France to marrying one of Europe's richest men, Lachmann maintained a noted literary salon out of Hôtel de la Païva, her luxurious mansion at 25 avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris. Completed in 1866, it exemplified the opulent taste of the Second Empire, and since 1904 it has been the headquarters of the Travellers Club.

Lachmann also inspired the promiscuous, traitorous spy Césarine ("a strange, morbid, monstrous creature") in Alexandre Dumas, fils's 1873 play La Femme de Claude.

Born in Moscow, Russia, Esther Lachmann was the daughter of Martin Lachmann, a weaver, and his wife, the former Anna Amalie Klein, who were Jewish and of Polish descent.

On 11 August 1836, aged 17, Lachmann married Antoine François Hyacinthe Villoing, a tailor (died Paris, June 1849). They had one son, Antoine (1837-1862) who died while he was in medical school.

Lachmann left Villoing shortly after her son's birth, and after traveling to Berlin, Vienna, and Istanbul, she ended up in Paris, near the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis and assuming the name Thérèse. Around 1840 she became the mistress of Henri Herz (1803-1888), a pianist, composer, and piano manufacturer, whom she met at Bad Ems, a fashionable spa town in Germany. The relationship gained her entry into artistic, though not aristocratic, society. Richard Wagner, Hans von Bülow, Théophile Gautier, and Emile de Girardin were all friends of the couple. Though Herz often introduced Lachmann as his wife, and she was commonly called "Madame Herz," the couple never married, since she already had a husband. The couple had a daughter, Henriette (ca. 1847-1859), who was raised by Herz's parents.

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