The Mistress of Paris Quotes

“This was no ordinary countess or art connoisseur. She had usurped the noble name, invented the men in the paintings, and then bequeathed them to the museum to cement a false association with local nobility. And more: this woman, though born into poverty and destitution, had risen to become one of the most powerful courtesans of 19th-century Paris. Her tale begins with another young woman and a flight from Normandy to Paris in the tumultuous years of the 1840s.”
― Catherine Hewitt, The Mistress of Paris