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Esther Lachmann Esther Lachmann was born in Moscow in 1819 into a Polish Jewish family. She fled Russia after marrying a modest French tailor, Antoine Villoing, and settled in Paris. Under the name Thérèse, she devotes herself to prostitution. On this occasion, she met Henri Hertz, a society pia- nist, who introduced her to prominent artists of the time such as Franz Liszt, Emile de Girardin and Théophile Gautier. She quickly became a fashionable courtesan.
Separated from her husband, she moved to London and turned the heads of British aristocrats like Lord Edward Stanley.
In 1848, she returned to Paris on the arm of a penniless Portuguese aristocrat, the Marquis Aranjo de la Païva, who married her in 1851. Finally noble by her union and very rich thanks to her talents as a seductress, she offered herself a beautiful residence at n°28 place Saint-George, the “first” hotel in La Païva. She quickly abandons her marquis, an inveterate gambler who ends up com- mitting suicide.
But the ambitious courtesan sees bigger and becomes infatuated with a weal- thy Prussian aristocrat, a cousin of Bismark, Count Guido von Donnersmarck. Crazy about her, the count offered her a real palace on the most prominent promenade of the time, the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. The architect Pierre Manguin (1815-1869) imagined a true debauchery of luxury in a pastiche of the most expensive Italian Renaissance to house the loves of the famous casserole dish. Ten million francs of the time were spent on this Palace which caused a great stir. For the sultry redhead nothing was too grandiose. She also served as a model for several sculptures and for the painting of the ceiling in the large living room “Le Jour Chassant la Nuit”.
The grand main staircase in yellow onyx allowed it to make remarkable en- trances and exits to the rhythm of its contoured forms under its monumental bronze lamppost and under the impassive gaze of the life-size statues of Dante, Petrarch and Virgil. All the interior decorations are dazzling with their profu- sion of sculpted elements and their marble inlays.