MERY LAURENT: HIGH-CLASS PROSTITUTE TO PARISIAN ARTISTS

French officers obsessively tracked and charted the kept women of 19th-century Paris, from the city's elite sex workers to madames who procured girls for money, with the records stored in The Book of the Courtesans (pictured, Mery Laurent, whose story is among those in the ledger)

Méry Laurent was born Anne Rose Suzanne Louviot in Nancy, France, on April 29, 1849. Her mother worked as a laundress at Marshal Francois Certain De Canrobert's home while her father was unknown.

In her youth, she was briefly married to Jean-Claude Laurent, a shopkeeper in Nancy, but the marriage didn't last. She was 15 years old when her mother sold her virginity to Canrobert so that she could become his mistress and receive an annuity for life of 500 francs per month.

Around the age of 16, she changed her name from Anne Rose to Méry and moved to Paris, where she became an actress and played light comedies at The Théâtre des Variétés.

During her time as an actress, she took on the role of Venus in La Belle Hélène and appeared nude on stage, posing naked in a shell. Her portrayal of the Greek goddess was considered the role of her lifetime.

Méry went on to become a high-class prostitute, and in 1847, she met Thomas W. Evans, an extremely wealthy American dental surgeon with high-profile clients, including royal families.

As his mistress, she was taken care of and given an income of 50,000 francs as well as an apartment in the Rue de Rome, where she opened her 'salon'.

The courtesan hosted a number of French artists in her home and served as muse to several of them. She was the mistress to Francois Coppée, poet Stéphane Mallarmé, journalist Antonin Proust, and painter Edouard Manet, whom she modeled for.

Others to visit the salon included painter Henri Gervex, novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans composer Reynaldo Hahn, and Émile Zola, who based his 1880 novel Nana on Méry.

Hahn became Méry's testamentary executor when she died on November 26, 1900 in Paris. She left everything to novelist Victor Margueritte except Autumn, one of Manet's paintings of her, which was donated to the Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy.

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