One hundred and fifty years ago, as France passed from monarchy to republic to empire, the courtesan known as La Païva set out to conquer Parisian society – and pulled it off so grandly that even she was surprised. From a nearly penniless sex worker, she rose to massive fortune and major political influence, with Emperor Napoléon III himself among her many, many admirers.

La Païva, as her contemporaries understood, was more than just a courtesan, but an archetypical figure of the European 19th Century – when tectonic shifts in social organisation saw the old order give way, and a new class of capitalists and empire-builders set about remaking the world. Her waist was large, and her face was described by writers of the time as mannish. Yet La Païva had a virtue greater than beauty, and more enduring too: steely, total ambition.

The only way is up

She was born in Russia in 1819, the child of Polish and German Jews in a land not hospitable to her religion. We know little about her youth: Esther Pauline Lachmann was her given name, though she soon adopted the name Thérèse, the first of many French affectations, and later called herself Blanche. By 17 she was married, to a tailor with tuberculosis. She dutifully bore him a son, but less than a year later she was off to Paris – without her child, without even divorce papers, but with an iron determination to make it to the top of European society.