" 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