Valtesse de la Bigne

Émilie-Louise Delabigne, known as countess Valtesse de La Bigne (1848, Paris – 29 July 1910,Ville-d'Avray) was a French courtesan and demi-mondaine.

Daughter of a violent alcoholic father and a laundry maid from Normandy who had become a prostitute, she started work in a Paris sweet-shop aged 10. She had six siblings. Aged 13, she was raped in the street by an old man. She modelled for the painter Corot, whose studio was in the district where she lived. She became a prostitute very young in the lorettes rather than the grisettes or as a courtesan. This was clandestine prostitution, often in doorways and with the risk of police arrest or having her hair shaved off as punishment.

Quickly moving onto rich clients, she trained at the Bal Mabille on Sundays and worked in a women's underwear shop on the Champ-de-Mars, frequented by high-ranking officers, enabling her to dream of social climbing. There she met and fell in love with a 20-year-old man, Richard Fossey, with whom she had two children, though she continued in prostitution and Fossey left her two years later without marrying her. She entrusted her two children to her mother, but later placed one – Julia Pâquerette – in a convent, fearing that her mother had gone back to prostitution.

She took the pseudonym 'Valtesse', due to its similarity to 'Votre Altesse' (your highness) – she later advised Anne-Marie Chassaigne to take a pseudonym too. She also resolved never to marry but to gain money and social position by other means. She profited from the 'brésiliens', foreign clients visiting Paris and aspired to join the 'archidrôlesses', a group of courtesans.

Jacques Offenbach brought Valtesse to public attention with a small role at the Bouffes-Parisiens and proposed that she act in his productions. Her debut was as Hebe in Orphée aux Enfers – one critic judged that she was "as red and timid as a virgin by Titian"

She became the composer's mistress and thus gained access to fashionable restaurants like Bignon (the former Café de Foy) or the Café Tortoni, where she met Zola, Flaubert and Maupassant. Even the starvation of the siege of Paris did not dampen her aspirations – she was made a countess by Napoleon III. Known among the Tout-Paris for his scathing humour, the journalist and writer Aurélien Scholl wrote: "During the siege of Paris, all the women ate dog. It was thought that this nourishment taught them the principals of fidelity. Not at all! They demanded necklaces!"

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