Rising from modest circumstances in her native Russia to becoming one of the more infamous women in mid-19th-century France to marrying one of Europe's richest men, Lachmann maintained a noted literary salon out of Hôtel de la Païva, her luxurious mansion at 25 avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris.

Lachmann also inspired the character of the promiscuous, traitorous spy Césarine ("a strange, morbid, monstrous creature")[2] in Alexandre Dumas, fils's 1873 play La Femme de Claude.

[5] Lachmann left Villoing shortly after her son's birth, and after traveling to Berlin, Vienna, and Istanbul,[5] she settled in Paris, near the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis and assuming the name Thérèse.

[7] Lachmann's avariciousness took a toll on Herz's finances, and in 1848,[8] after their affair began, he traveled to America to pursue business opportunities, including playing concerts, where his performances were characterized by "tameness and torpidity.

She took Lachmann to a fashionable milliner named Camille, who advised the Russian émigré to seek her fortune in London, where she could take advantage of that "fairy-land in which noble strangers present beautiful women with £40,000 or £50,000 a year in pin-money.

[6] Cornelia Otis Skinner wrote that one of La Païva's conquests was Adolphe Gaiffe, a banker of whom she demanded 20 banknotes of 1,000 francs each—which, she stipulated, he must burn one by one during a scheduled 30 minutes of lovemaking.

La Paiva, as Lachmann became known after her second marriage, crossed paths in 1852 with the 22-year-old Prussian industrialist and mining magnate Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck.

They met at a party given by the Prussian consul in Paris,[22] and according to Count Viel-Castel, she pursued him across Europe, pretending not to be interested in him but always managing to be in the same city at the same time and at the same social events.

[29] The house was completed in 1866 by architect Henri Lefeul, and among the artisans who participated in its creation was the young Auguste Rodin, then working for the sculptor Albert Carrier-Belleuse.

La Païva reigned for years as a popular hostess known for her lavish open houses, teas, and dinners and salon frequented largely by well-known male writers, such as Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Paul de Saint-Victor, Arsène Houssaye, and others, including the painter Eugène Delacroix.

"[25] The Henckel von Donnersmarcks also commissioned, in the 1870s, a country house known as Schloss Neudeck; the architect was Hector Lefeul, who worked on Hôtel de Paiva in Paris.

By the middle of the 19th century, age had eroded La Païva's physical charms, with Count Viel-Castel noting in 1857 that "she is at least forty years old, she is painted and powdered like an old tightrope walker, [and] she has slept with everyone."

Wrinkles which, under the light, look black in the white face; and down from each side of the mouth a crease in the shape of a horseshoe meeting beneath the chin and cutting across it in a great fold bespeaking age.