In the archives of the Paris police there is a leather-bound volume known as The Book of the Courtesans, containing the criminal files of a group of women called Les Insoumis— The Rebels. These are their stories.

THE FILE

April 24, 1872

Assé, Caroline [sic]

She came to Paris from Alsace in the late 1850s. Tall and très belle, she made her debut as a courtesan at the age of eighteen. The procuress Madame Lang of No. 63 rue Pigalle brokered numerous “introductions” to rich gentlemen. She met fashionable women and frequented the spa towns, eventually making a name for herself. She was often seen at the races with a young woman called Pepita Sanchez, and the pair were considered among the “top brass” of the old guard.

She lived with a young man named Delahante who she “exploited as much as possible.” At her request, he gave her twenty-three thousand francs [over €100,000 today] to buy some diamonds. When one of his friends remarked that they did not appear to be worth even ten thousand, he asked Caroline to return the diamonds and give him back his money, offering another ten thousand for a new set.

“Of course, Caroline Assé [sic] refused,” the police said.

January 1873

By 1865 she was living at No. 61 rue de Ponthieu, near the Champs-Elysée. Her protector was a Monsieur Colbert, a rich young officer with an annuity of twenty-five thousand francs, of whom she demanded ten thousand francs per month [€48,000 today]. When his father learned of the relationship, he urged his son to get rid of her, and said he was prepared to do anything to sever the relationship. The young Colbert was seized by despair at the thought of leaving Caroline, and tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head. Fortunately “the project was aborted,” and the following year he agreed to leave his mistress for good, who the police said “only loved him for his money.”

When the Suresnes pimping case went to trial, Caroline’s name was found in the notebooks of the Widow Rondy, an implicated procuress. Her address was given as No. 10 avenue Rapp, on the left bank near the Champ de Mars. The police found no trace of her there, although she was well known to popular pimps. They believed she was now living near the Champs-Elysée again, at No. 4 rue d’Albe.

There was no attending photo.

THE RESEARCH

The Count de Maugny was strolling near the Champs-Elysée one day when he saw a great commotion. The opulent building at No. 61 rue de Ponthieu, which was shared by two wealthy demimondaines, had caught fire. Rushing into the courtyard to see if he could help, he saw the infamous courtesan Cora Pearl leaning out of her window in her chemise and shouting at her stable hands: “I’ll sack the first person who takes a bucket of water to that cow upstairs!”

The “cow upstairs” was Caroline Hassé.

They called her Caro, or “the living statue,” and said she smelled of truffles, lobster, and Veuve Clicquot champagne. She was fat, with an impressive chest that never failed to make an entrance, and a “violently” Alsatian accent. Born in Strasbourg, she came to Paris with nothing, and learned to dance at the Cellarius and Laborde dance school in the Passage d'Opèra, near the Grand Boulevards. In the daytime, proper young ladies would study there, but in the evenings, classes were made up of aspiring demimondaines and the young officers who came in civilian clothes to meet them. Once a girl like this had learned the popular steps, she could try to catch the attention of a rich gentleman under the lanterns at the public dance venues, like the Elysée-Montmartre or the Bal Mabille.

Caroline dressed simply at first, and looked almost poor, but she soon stood out for her charm and beauty. One man, a pseudonymous chronicler of Paris’s social underworld known as Zed, remembered encountering her at the dance school.

“One evening,” he wrote, “I noticed a splendid creature with thick golden hair and a buxom form; tall, beautiful, laughing, attractive, resplendent with freshness, youth and lust. She was dressed in a dark dress, rather crude, fitting her badly and contrasting singularly with the irreproachable elegance of her neighbors.”

He noticed that she was missing a button on her cuff, a detail that stayed with him, suggesting that she was “not swimming in opulence.” Still, he found her “lovely and desirable,” and predicted that she would be a success.

Indeed, she was. Before long she could be seen in the Bois de Boulogne, riding in her distinctive yellow carriage drawn by two half-breed horses, and attended by a pair of immaculately coiffed footmen.

“Caroline's elegant appearance suggested that she was doing extremely well and living in abundance,” wrote the historian Gertrude Aretz.

One of her first protectors was Daniel Wilson, the future politician and heir to a British gaslighting fortune. Orphaned from childhood and raised by an uncle along with his sister, he was given full control of his inherited millions on his twenty-first birthday, and seemed to be in a great rush to spend as much of it as he could on Caroline. Gossip columnists joked that she called him her “betit Tanial,” her little Daniel, as mangled by her accent.

The twenty-one-year-old Wilson quickly blew a million francs on his buxom Alsatian mistress. She wore expensive dresses from the House of Worth, her bed sheets and pillows were made with black silk, and her lavish multi-floor apartment near the Champs-Elysée was stocked with “a hundred dozen” fine linens. They dined regularly at the costly Café Anglais. With her best friend, the Spanish-French actress Pepita Sanchez—who has her own entry in the Book of the Courtesans—she threw lavish dinner parties for thirty people at a time that went on for days, sparing no expense. She and Pepita could often be found in their own box at the opera, surrounded by roses and bouquets of Parma violets.

Wilson’s sister, dismayed at his extravagance, managed to wrest control of the family fortune away from her brother, who then went into politics. When he lost reelection some years later, he declared himself to be “morally dead” and threw a funeral for himself, complete with a hearse and can-can dancers. He later retired to the country to cultivate violets.

Caroline’s next conquest was Adrien Delahante, a rich financier who became the first director of the French bank Société Générale. He was also the head of Delahante et Cie, a manufacturer of sugar and alcohol. Whether their relationship continued after Caroline refused to return her diamonds and give him back his money—she had almost certainly pocketed the balance, for this was how courtesans made a living and saved for retirement—is anyone’s guess.

Next came Captain Pierre Émile Édouard Colbert (of whom I could find no photo), whose entire life was nearly derailed by their love affair. Having survived his suicide attempt, he went on to become a brigadier general and married well; all of his children either became counts or married them.

Whoever her protector of the moment may have been, the curvaceous Caroline continued to live lavishly. She is said to have modeled for the renown painter Alfred Stevens, a close friend of Édouard Manet, but no paintings of her have been identified. She spent summer days in the country houses of friends, where the guests “ate, drank, and made love night and day,” according to one account.

In her memoirs, the writer Marie Colombier recalled seeing Caroline at a raucous party in the early 1860s. A circle had formed around a tall man “with the face of Falstaff illuminated by an orgy,” who was performing a drunken pantomime in front of Caroline. He had the tails of his untucked shirt in his hands, pretending to ride a horse. It was none other than Otto von Bismark, the future founder of the Germanic Empire, “made cheerful by the good wines of France.”

Despite her undeniable success, Caroline’s beauty and grace were sometimes disputed by her detractors. They said she had “rather heavy manners” and “features without delicacy.”

“Only the face left something to be desired,” wrote the social chronicler Frédéric Loliée. “Someone we know makes her feel it a little cruelly on occasion.”

Some of her conquests may have experienced a touch of buyer’s remorse, but Caroline was good-humored and took it in stride. For one such interaction, she was seated next to a young and handsome gentleman at a feast.

“The enthusiasm he never ceased to display throughout the meal, and the spice of his conversation, had charmed Caroline. She invited him to drive her home,” Loliée wrote.

The young man stayed the night, and awoke in bright daylight to find Caroline still asleep with her hair loose about her. Alas, “on the pillow did not rest the pretty head that he would have liked to see there,” Loliée said. Disappointed, he jumped out of bed and was getting dressed when Caroline opened her eyes.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “Are you still drunk?”

“Don’t mind me,” he replied. “Staying any longer is impossible, since I’m the son of an Orleanist, and you look too much like [former king] Louis-Philippe!”

After being named in the rue de Suresnes pimping case of 1873, when Caroline was thirty-three, she appeared more seldomly in the press, but was still active in the demimonde. In July of 1874, she attended the funeral of her fellow courtesan, the actress and singer Blanche d’Antigny. In April of 1880, at the age of forty, she held a large sale of her art collection and jewelry at the famous auction house Hôtel Drouot. She also sold her grand apartment, perhaps in preparation for retirement. A journalist toured the property and reported that her dining room was immense and stocked to feed exquisite dinners to an army of guests. Her salon was packed with artistic wonders. Her bedroom, like that of a princess from the time of Louis XVI, was festooned with satin in cream and pale blue, complemented by ornate gilded molding. On the mantelpiece there rested a famous statue that had been the toast of the Paris Salon in 1874, The Golden Belt, by Prosper D’Epinay. Her boudoir was lined with “superb crimson silk,” and equipped with books both modern and antique, Oriental-style seating, and a piano.

“If only these walls could talk,” he said.

Later in June of that year, Caroline was embroiled in a lawsuit over an outstanding lingerie bill. The case made its way into the papers due to the sensational nature of the debt, with headlines like Mademoiselle Hassé’s Underwear. The seamstress claimed that Caroline had stiffed her on the bill, while Caroline contended that she had simply refused to pay because the quality was not worth the price. In the end, she was ordered to give the seamstress a sum of 11,546 francs and 40 centimes—over €50,000 today. She was not entirely out of money, however, for she was seen once again at Hôtel Drouot for a massive sale of Sarah Bernhartd’s jewelry in 1883, this time as a buyer.

Sometime before 1886, when she was still in her mid forties, she packed up whatever worldly luxuries remained to her and retired to the South of France. There she stayed under the southern sun, according to Zed, “very happy, very cheerful, very active, and surprisingly well preserved.”

***

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REFERENCES & LINKS:

Archives de la préfecture de police, BB1

Les Livre des Courtisanes, by Gabrielle Houbre. Editions Tallandier, 2006

Grandes Horizontales, by Virginia Rounding. Bloomsbury, 2003.

The Elegant Woman, by Gertrude Aretz. Grethlein & Co, 1929 (link)

Cezanne, ou la lutte avec l’ange de la peinture, by Leo Larguier. René Julliard, 1947 (link)

Les Lionnes du Second Empire, by Auriant. Gallimard, 1935 (link)

Sarah Bernhardt, by Jules Huret. Felix Juven 1899 (link)

Mes souvenirs: les boulevards de 1840-1870, by Gustave Claudin. Calmann Lévy, 1884 (link)

La Fête Imperiale, Les Femmes du Second Empire, by Frédéric Loliée. Felix Juven, 1907 (link)

Paris-galant, by Charles Virmaitre. L. Genonceux, 1890 (link)

Mémoires: Fin d'Empire by Marie Colombier. Flammarion, 1898 (link)

The Nocturnal Pleasures of Paris: a Guide to the Gay City, by Sylvester Wray. The Byron Library, 1889 (link)

La Vie à Paris, by Jules Claretie. Victor Havard, 1883 (link)

“La Marxomanie,” Le Tintamarre, 13 December 1868 (link)

“Les Premières,” Le Figaro, 5 March 1872 (link)

“Chronique de Paris,” La Voleur illustrée, 14 June 1872 (link)

“Faits divers,” Le Pays, 1 July 1874 (link)

“Les Tribunaux,” La Liberté, 14 Jan 1876 (link)

“Art et Bibelot,” L’Evénement, 29 April 1880 (link)

“Au Palais,” La France, 10 June 1880 (link)

“Tribunaux: Lingère et cliente,” Les Temps, 11 June 1880 (link)

“Le Linge de Corps de Mlle Hassé,” La Justice, 12 June 1880 (link)

“Courrier de Paris,” Gil Blas, 9 October 1886 (link)

“Le Demi-Monde sous Le Second Empire,” by Zed, La Vie parisienne : moeurs élégantes, choses du jour, fantaisies, voyages, théâtres, musique, modes, 3 Januart 1891 (link)

“La Calaverie Parisienne,” Le Figaro, 10 June 1893 (link)

“Chronique des Livres,” Le Matin, 12 Dec 1898 (link)

“La Vitrine Magique,” Excelsior, journal illustré, 12 January 1924 (link)

“Alfred Stevens by François Boucher,” La Renaissance, 1 January 1931 (link)