[5] She moved to Paris when she was 15, where under the name of Jeanne de Tourbey[1] she was discovered in a brothel by Alexandre Dumas fils.

[7] Napoleon installed her in a beautiful flat in rue de l'Arcade,[6] close to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.

[7] She would host an exclusively male assembly of the Parisian men of letters: Ernest Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Prévost-Paradol and Emile de Girardin.

Through her best friend, actress Josephine Clemence Ennery, nicknamed "Gisette"(fr), she met Gustave Flaubert[2] and Khalil-Bey,[10] who fell in love with her.

I heard your voice through the sound of the waves and your charming face flutters around me, on the hedges of nopals, in the shade of the palm trees and in the horizon of the mountains.

Ernest himself had been made another Minister of Napoleon III, Master of Petitions at the State Council and Director of Foreign Trade at the Ministry of Agriculture.

They would have become engaged but, as Commander of the 12th mobile battalion of the Seine, he was killed in action at the Battle of Le Bourget on 30 October 1870[7] and left her a fortune of 800,000 gold francs (about 2.5 million Euros) and a sugar factory.

Although the marriage was only nominal, because her husband's family had opposed their union,[12] she carried and kept the use of the name and title of Countess de Loynes.

Encouraging nationalism, they put their political hopes, like other personalities such as the Duchess of Uzès, in General Boulanger and became passionately anti-Dreyfusards.