Skulduggery in the fur trade; John Moritz Oppenheim (1801-1864) & Frederick Schroeter (1809-1876), Nunhead Cemetery

Unless you know where in Nunhead Cemetery to look the impressive memorial to John Moritz Oppenheim and Frederick Schroeter is hard to find; it must once have been clearly visible from the main path but the unchecked growth of trees and shrubs has hidden it in its own secret grove. Although I had never heard of them I assumed Oppenheim and Schroeter must have been artists – the badly eroded, apparently vandalised, panels seem to indicate that. In one a seated man touches a sculpture of a woman’s head (one description I read described him as ‘fondling a female bust’) possibly of the classically draped woman who stands to the side; sculptor and model I assumed. Another panel shows a seated man and a standing female figure holding what may be a canvas, an artist’s palette and brushes on the floor. In the third panel an angel touches the eyes of a man reclining on a day bed. But Oppenheim and Schroeter were in fact fur traders, and the only connection they had with the arts was Oppenheim’s love of painting. He was a collector and patron who ironically went blind for the last twenty years of his – the angel touching the dying man’s eyes perhaps restoring his vision and the man fondling the bust because he can no longer see?

John Moritz Oppenheim

Johann Moritz Oppenheim was born in Hamburg in 1801/02. We don’t know when he came to England but he set himself up in business as a fur trader in the city in 1823, as soon as he was legally old enough to do so. His business which specialised in the Alaska fur trade (the pelts of seals, sea otters, beavers and racoons) prospered and he died a wealthy man. He never married and lived close to his business in Cannon Street.  He was a passionate collector of art and in his will left several paintings to the National Gallery; his blindness robbed him of one of the great pleasures of his life.  The business was inherited by his nephew by marriage and partner, Frederick Schroeter but he left a number of other legacies including a £1000 bequest to the Hungarian president Louis Kossuth “in admiration of his wisdom, and patriotism”, £100 each to five London hospitals, including St Thomas’, £100 each to his chief clerks in London, Moscow and Hamburg and a year’s wages to all of his servants.

One of the works of art Oppenheim left to the National Gallery

Oppenheim was a quiet man who lived away from the public eye. Apart from his death the only mention of him in newspapers are in court cases where he was the victim of fraud or robbery. In 1840 a young man named Jacob Isaac found himself arraigned before the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House, accused of obtaining goods by deception from a number of furriers.  The prosecuting solicitor ushered Oppenheim into the witness box with no prior warning to the defence to tell his story of accepting a bill for £185 and some shillings from Isaacs, presumably in payment for furs. When the bill had become due and was presented at Barclays the cashier told Oppenheim there were ‘no orders’ and it soon emerged that it was a forgery.  The defence objected to the last minute presentation of what amounted to a new and more serious accusation against their client. The Lord Mayor was unimpressed and forgetting about the original charges of obtaining goods by deception remanded Isaacs solely on the charge of forgery.  Perhaps the case never came to court – I have not been able to trace any trial.

WP Lillicrap, receiver of stolen goods

In April 1862 another German born furrier, Gotthard Pohler, went on trial at the Old Bailey accused of receiving stolen goods, namely two sealskins, 26 muskrat skins, and 160 racoon tails to the value of £5.00.  Pohler had received the furs from Leopold Warnecke of Buttesland Street, Hoxton, an employee of Oppenheims who had pilfered them from his employer. Warnecke was soon caught; he only worked for Oppenheim for 8 weeks.   As soon as he was caught, and afterwards in court, he had no hesitation in both confessing and informing on his partners in crime. Pohler had bought the furs from Warnecke and then sold them on to his employer, a supposedly respectable furrier, William Pearce Lillicrap of Davis Street, Berkeley  Square who clearly operated an ’ask no questions’ policy when offered stock at knock down prices by his employees. He was most put out when Oppenheim’s manager and a detective from the City Police paid him a visit. Lillicrap called Pohler and, swearing he knew nothing of the origins of the stolen furs, handed him over to the police. Warnecke was spared prosecution in return for his sworn testimony in court. Lillicrap too walked away scot-free, happily giving evidence to the court about Pohler but earning himself the censure of the jury who clearly thought he was as dodgy as his employee, to which the Recorder added his agreement, saying that his excuses should not be allowed. Poor Pohler, whose wife was about to give birth, got four years hard labour.

The Alaska Factory, Bermondsey

Under Schroeter’s guidance the Oppenheim & Co went from strength to strength. In 1869 he moved south of the river, opening the Alaska Factory in Grange Road, Bermondsey. Only the original gate still stands with its carving of a seal; the famous art deco building behind the gate was designed by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners, the architects of the Hoover building. Schroeter lived in Mottingham in a thirty room mansion set in 38 acres of grounds and died there in 1876. He had erected the memorial to his benefactor in Nunhead Cemetery a couple of years after his death and he also chose to be buried with him.  He left an estate worth more than a quarter of a million pounds which included farms and houses in Surrey as well as the family business.

   

In 1982 the Oppenheim Schroeter memorial was heavily vandalised and the burial vault broken into and desecrated by grave robbers. 



The vandalised relief panels on the memorial

"DEAD - A Celebration of Mortality" Charles Saatchi

The poster on the London Underground (taken at Stockwell station)

Perhaps Charles Saatchi is losing his flair for advertising. Admittedly the poster for “Dead: A Celebration of Mortality” is striking;  a heavy but clever crop of a classic Bart Hardy photograph showing children playing in a Glasgow Cemetery focuses on a single boy leapfrogging a grave stone. It’s a great image, the all too fleeting triumph of life over death perfectly visualised. It made me go out and buy the book but I suspect that demographically speaking, consumers who can’t resist buying a product associated with death form a tiny target group in the general population. Even stranger was to hear an ad for the book on Heart FM sandwiched between Take That and Michael Buble.  Poster campaigns on the London underground and commercial radio stations don’t come cheap – Saatchi must have squandered a small fortune trying to sell his book to jaded commuters and desperate housewives. Perhaps he has taken to advertising after revelations from the Grillo sisters, former aides accused of defrauding him out of £600,000 between them, whose defence in court was that they spent most of the money buying copies of his books in Waterstones and on Amazon to boost their ratings in the best seller lists.

Bert Hardy's classic image "Leapfrog"

“Dead: A Celebration of Mortality” has the unmistakable air of a vanity publication about it. The cover is gimmicky, made up to look like a tombstone, down to the marbling effect on the paper edges. Even though the author is presumably underwriting all the expenses, publishers Booth-Clibborn Editions (run by an ex advertising crony of Saatchi’s) have managed to make the typesetting look amateurish and clumsy. If you want to read a review of the book you will have to go to Amazon, no newspaper or magazine has deigned to even notice the books existence. 5 of the 6 Amazon reviewers give it 5 stars. Barry Osborne says “it is much more amusing than I expected.” Barry has reviewed three books on Amazon (and nothing else), all of them by Charles Saatchi, and is presumably either that very rare creature, a Charles Saatchi fan or that slightly more common one, a Saatchi hireling pretending to be a disinterested consumer. J Kaufman says it is ‘dead good’ and   Benjamin thinks death is “an unlikely subject for a fun book.” Susan Jones who likes Al Jarreau and is perhaps the only Heart FM listener to have actually bought a copy of the book after hearing the advert, says “nothing to say; Mr Saatchi says all.”(?!!?). The only dissenting voice is Mr Harry Potter (not his real name one suspects) who comments “I've never read a book before where I felt I'd just wasted several hours of my life. Personally I'm glad I was given it and didn't waste money on it.” He counsels potential readers to “wait until you’re dead to read this.” 

Goshka Macuga’s Madame Blavatsky

Saatchi’s collection of ‘essays’ (his word, not mine) are only very loosely linked by the theme of death, and consist mainly of material clipped from newspapers or culled from too many hours browsing the net. We are given dubious factoids, (‘there were fewer gunfights in the wild west than in Detroit today’), spurious statistics (‘Greenland possesses the highest recorded suicide rate in the world today, with 1 out of 5 citizens attempting to kill themselves at some point in their lives’), stories of bizarre deaths (the woman who died electrocuting her nipples with a hair dryer), death related lists (most popular funeral songs), last words (James French to the journalists assembled to see him die in the electric chair ‘How about this for a headline for tomorrow’s paper? French Fries?’), and the authors banal musings on his life experiences (‘the thought of becoming a centenarian is not necessarily a pleasant one’). The writing is leaden and humourless, the content a mishmash of poorly organised and undigested material with no plan or purpose. By page 242 Saatchi feels obliged to bring his opus to some sort of a conclusion so we get “Some lives leave a mark, others a stain”, a phrase he clearly feels is imposing because it occupies half a page by itself in 36 point bold type. It is followed by the equally inane ‘almost everybody lives a life of little consequence to mankind but wouldn’t you prefer to have spent your years rather uselessly but entertainingly?’ This is not a book I would recommend. 

 

Dallas Seitz’s Elizabeth Regina and John Hanning Speke 

The Saatchi gallery hosted an exhibition in the summer to tie in with the launch of Charles’s book. Four rooms on the top floor were filled with a random selection of art works retrieved from the Saatchi’s warehouses. Anything that seemed to tie in with the theme of death found a place. On the walls of Room 1 hung Denis Tarasov’s photos of the laser etched gravestones of Russian Mafiosi (also featured in the first of Saatchi’s essays in his book) and the floor was littered with corpses by, amongst others, Andra Ursuta (a grim blackened female covered in what look like squirts of semen), Terence Koh (a cast of the artists own body) and Alina and Jeff Bliumis (man buried under a cascade of books). Room 2 has paintings of car crashes by Dirk Skreber and photos by Vikenti Nilin and the Gao Brothers. Room 3 features Rafael Gomezbarros’ fibreglass ants, hundreds of them blown up to the size of a small dog and swarming over the walls and ceiling – great fun but I couldn’t see the connection with death. Room 4 had some of my favourite works. For example  Francis Upritchard’s ‘Travellers Collection’, a three shelved table with a mummy and funerary urns and mortuary objects made out of junk shop tat. Goshka Macuga’s Madame Blavatsky levitating between two dining chairs is very amusing. Dallas Seitz’s Elizabeth Regina and John Hanning Speke look like companion pieces, Speke being of course the African explorer who travelled with Richard Burton; during the course of their expedition the two men developed a mutual loathing and Speke discovered the source of the Nile. He died mysteriously after shooting himself in the armpit the day before he was due to take part in a public debate with Burton at the British Association in Bath in 1864. Plenty to enjoy then but this was not a carefully curated exhibition, instead it was simply thrown together from whatever was available. In essence it created to serve the same purpose as those adverts on the underground and on the radio, to publicise Saatchi’s tenth rate book.       

The Sealy Memorial, St Mary-at-Lambeth churchyard

The Coade Artificial Stone Factory was set up in Lambeth in 1769 and ceased to trade in 1840. For much of its life time the company was run by two Eleanor Coades, the elder the widow of the founder and the younger, their daughter. From 1799 to 1813 the company became known as Coade & Sealy when John Sealy, a cousin who started as a clay modeler in the factory, rose to become became Eleanor Coade senior’s business partner. When John Sealy died in 1813 he was buried in the churchyard at St-Mary-at-Lambeth beneath a Coade & Sealy monument (of course) where he was later joined by various members of his large and extended family. 

The memorial is not in as good a state of preservation as the other famous Coade stone memorial in the churchyard belonging to Captain William Bligh and his wife Betsy.

Coade stone is a type of stoneware. Mrs Coade's own name for her products was Lithodipyra, a name constructed from ancient Greek words meaning "stone-twice-fire" (λίθος/δίς/πυρά), or "twice fired stone". Its colours varied from light grey to light yellow (or even beige) and its surface is best described as having a matte finish.

The ease with which the product could be moulded into complex shapes made it ideal for large statues, sculptures and sculptural façades. Moulds were often kept for many years, for repeated use. One-offs were clearly much more expensive to produce, as they had to carry the entire cost of creating the mould.

Contrary to popular belief the recipe for Coade stone still exists, and can be produced. Rather than being based on cement (as concrete articles are), it is a ceramic material.

Its manufacture required special skills: extremely careful control and skill in kiln firing, over a period of days. This skill is even more remarkable when the potential variability of kiln temperatures at that time is considered. Mrs Coade's factory was the only really successful manufacturer.

The formula used was:

 10% of grog

 5-10% of crushed flint

 5-10% fine quartz

 10% crushed soda lime glass.

 60-70% Ball clay from Dorset and Devon.

This mixture was also referred to as "fortified clay" which was then inserted after kneading into a kiln which would fire the material at a temperature of 1,100°C for over four days.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coade_stone

The Ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent (or dragon) devouring it's own tail representing eternal return. "The first known appearance of the ouroboros motif is in the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, an ancient Egyptian funerary text in KV62, the tomb of Tutankhamun, in the 14th century BC. The text concerns the actions of the god Ra and his union with Osiris in the underworld. In an illustration from this text, two serpents, holding their tails in their mouths, coil around the head and feet of an enormous god, who may represent the unified Ra-Osiris. Both serpents are manifestations of the deity Mehen, who in other funerary texts protects Ra in his underworld journey. The whole divine figure represents the beginning and the end of time........"

The affair of the diamond necklace: Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Comtesse de la Motte (1756-1791), St Mary-at-Lambeth

Jeanne de la Motte's entry in the St Mary-at-Lambeth burial register

A casual passerby would have seen some odd goings-on at Mount Row in Lambeth on the night of 6 June 1791 when a pair of heavily built men forced their way into one of the lodging houses. A few minutes later a distraught young woman leaves the same house in something of a rush and, despite apparently not being able to speak English, manages to persuade the occupants of a neighbouring house to let her in. She is observed by one of the men from an upstairs window and eventually both of the men follow her into the street and into next door. Noise and confusion follow their entry and then a third storey window of the house opens and the young woman flies out and falls to the pavement, striking a tree on the way down.  It is impossible to say if she fell, jumped, was pushed or even thrown out of the window but it is clear she is badly injured; she seems to have broken more than one limb and she has lost an eye.

In the days that follow the newspapers explain what happened;

 

A female foreigner, who lodged in the neighbourhood of Mount-row, Lambeth, being on Monday night arrested upon an action for a trifling sum of money, was so much affected, that she leaped out of a two pair of stairs window, by which act the broke both her legs, and was otherwise so much bruised, that her life is despaired of. She proves to be the famous Comtesse de !a Mott.  As soon as the Bailiffs arrested her, she asked them to drink a glass of wine,  and, on pretence of getting it, left the room, and immediately locked the door. From the window they saw her go into an adjoining house, and pursued her. She lies terribly mangled; her left eye cut out — one of her arms and both her legs are broken.  Caledonian Mercury 9 June 1791

Jeanne de la Motte

The trifling sum of money was £30 and the young woman was the 35 year old Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Comtesse de la Motte. She and her husband, the shadowy Count de la Motte, were fugitives who had earned the undying rancour of the French Royal family and who were terrified of Royalist retribution even though the Revolution was in full throe and Louis XVI and his Queen Marie Antoinette had far more pressing matters to deal with.  Jeanne took two and a half months to die of her injuries, finally expiring on the 21 August, reportedly after over indulging in mulberries for which she had a particular weakness. She was buried five days later at St Mary-at- Lambeth by William Vyse who as well as  being the rector of St Mary’s was also Chaplain to Archbishop Cornwallis, Lambeth Palace being next door to the church.  In the registry the rector recorded the deceased as Jean St Rymer De Valois, Countess De La Motte.  The Count was not at her funeral; he was in Belgium fighting a duel in which he killed William Grey a Bond Street jeweler, no doubt in a dispute over payment for the diamonds that his wife had stolen and that had led to her public flogging and imprisonment in Paris;

An Affair of Honour, which has been attended I with fatal Consequences, took place at Brussels a few Days ago. A Dispute between the famous Count La Motte and Mr. William Gray, of Bond-Street, London, which originated on some trivial Circumstance, had occasioned a Duel, in which the latter fell. A Brace of pistols being fired by each without Effect, they had Recourse to Swords; and Mr. Gray having a Cast in his Eye, and being less versed in the Management of that Weapon than his Antagonist, yielded an easy Victory.  Oxford Journal 27 August 1791

The churchyard at St Mary-at-Lambeth

Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy was born in July 1756 in the Chateau of Fontette near the town of Barbe-sur-Aube in Champagne. Her father Jacque was an illegitimate grandson of Henri II and a near penniless drunkard who had frittered away what was left of the family fortune by gambling. He had fallen so low as to marry a servant with whom he produced six children, supporting them by poaching off the estates he had once owned.  Poverty drove the family to Paris where a broken Jacque died in the workhouse. Jeanne’s mother promptly married a Sardinian guardsman and the family moved to Boulogne. The Guardsman raped the 8 year old Jeanne and made her earn her keep by begging in the streets of the town.  Jeanne stood on the main carriage route with her baby sister strapped to her back, holding a sign which said “Pity the poor orphan of the blood of Valois.”  The Marquise de Boulainvilliers, driving past in her Phaeton, took pity as instructed and became Jeanne’s patron for a decade. Placing the sisters in a convent didn’t stop the Marquise’s husband debauching the adolescent Jeanne. At the age of 20 she ran away from the convent back to her place of birth in Barbe-sur-Aube where she was taken in by a Madame  Surmont, the wife of the local Prefect. The good woman soon regretted her charity when her husband became smitten by the girl; she however reserved her favors for the Bishop of Langres by whom she became pregnant.  Jeanne deftly side stepped the potential scandal by ensnaring Madame Surmont’s beloved nephew, guardsman Nicolas La Motte, into a hasty marriage.  Jeanne had twins, girls, but they died soon after birth.

Cardinal Rohan

   

Jeanne’s much vaunted Valois blood eventually led to her being granted an annual pension by the Crown but it was not enough for a penniless girl with grand ambitions. Her opportunity to further these came when Madame  Boulainvilliers introduced her to Cardinal Rohan, the Bishop of Strasbourg. The Rohans were an important, powerful and vastly wealthy aristocratic family and Cardinal Rohan was a worldly prelate with a taste for politics. He had been one of the political faction opposed to the Austrian marriage of Louis XVI and had been sent on a special mission to Vienna to try and prevent it. He only succeeded in earning the personal enmity of the Empress Maria Teresa and her daughter Marie Antoinette. Once Marie was Queen Rohan’s political career was over and he was barely tolerated at court.  The Cardinal was enchanted by Jeanne and she soon became his mistress and confidante. The only other person Rohan trusted implicitly was Count Cagliostro; placing himself in the unfortunate position of having two of the 18th century’s greatest swindlers as his personal advisers, a situation that would eventually cost him dearly.

Nicole d'Oliva

With Cardinal Rohan’s backing Jeanne took to haunting Versailles, continually calling on officials and courtiers with petitions and requests for the money, property and titles that she felt she was entitled to on account of her Valois blood. When this didn’t work she tried sleeping with court officials and telling outrageous lies about her close personal relationship with the Queen. She became such a pest that officials eventually increased her pension in an effort to get rid of her but it was not enough for the voracious Jeanne. Cardinal Rohan swallowed the story of Jeanne’s new friendship with Marie Antoinette and humbly accepted her advice that he start a campaign to restore himself into Royal favor by writing a letter to the Queen begging her forgiveness for the errors of his past.  Jeanne recruited a friend, a master forger named Rétaux de Villette, to produce a reply that came ostensibly from the Queen herself. Encouraged by the faked response Rohan wrote more letters to the Queen to which Rétaux wrote increasingly warm, even intimate replies.  Flattered by this apparent interest from the Queen Rohan was soon penning treasonous love letters to her majesty. The worldly prelate seems not to have smelled a rat, even when ‘the Queen’ began asking him for substantial donations towards charity. He seemed not to notice that the penurious Jeanne was suddenly affluent, living in better accommodation and dressing in finer clothes. Rohan’s ardor increased to the point where he was desperate to meet the Queen in private.  Jeanne put off the meeting for as long as possible but when she ran out of excuses she arranged a rendezvous on a moonless night in an overgrown arbor in the gardens at Versailles. Another friend Nicole d'Oliva, a prostitute, was recruited as stand in for Marie Antoinette. The private interview was quick, no more than a few minutes, undertaken in conditions of great secrecy – the excited Rohan was barely able to stutter a few endearments to the heavily disguised Queen and had no time to receive any in return. Instead ‘the Queen’ thrust a single red rose into his hand before rushing away to spend the night writing him a long passionate letter.

The famous necklace

It was not only the Cardinal who believed Jeanne’s story of her friendship with Marie Antoinette; the court jewelers Barsenge and Bohmer hearing false rumors of her intimacy with the Queen approached her to intercede with her majesty on their behalf. They were anxious to sell a colossally expensive diamond necklace, a piece which cost so much that only the King could afford to buy it. Unfortunately the King had declined the purchase and the jewelers were left with a necklace into which they had sunk almost all their capital. They hoped that Jeanne could help them solve their liquidity problem by approaching the Queen on their behalf. She immediately saw the potential to make a fortune from the besotted Cardinal Rohan.  On her instructions Rétaux the forger wrote a charming letter to Rohan, ostensibly from the Queen, explaining that she desperately wanted the necklace but that the King was in temporary financial difficulties and had told her she had to make sacrifices. Could her dearest Cardinal please advance her a loan to buy the trinket? The cost was an eye watering 1,600,000 livres, a sum so vast even the lovelorn prelate started to feel uneasy but the jewelers were prepared to accept payment in installments and by the time the first payment had been made the King could probably be relied on to come up with the rest.  Rohan anxiously decided he needed further help in making such a big decision so he asked Count Cagliostro to consult the spirits for him, they surely would know what to do. The Count did as he was asked and was pleased to tell Rohan that the auguries were all good and he should go ahead. Jeanne soon had the necklace, which she passed on immediately to her husband who wasted no time prising the diamonds from their settings before hot footing it off to Brussels and London to sell them.

Marie Antoinette points the finger at Cardinal Rohan

The plot unraveled when the first installment of the money fell due to Barsenge and Bohmer;  Rohan found himself unable to come up with the cash by the appointed date. The two jewellers panicked and approached the Queen directly to politely remind her that the money was due. She of course claimed to know nothing and so the jewelers produced the contract of sale to which Rétaux the forger had obligingly appended her name on behalf of Jeanne. Soon Cardinal Rohan, Jeanne, the unfortunate Cagliostro, Rétaux the forger and Nicole the prostitute all found themselves under arrest. The King decreed that there should be a public trial, a serious misjudgment given the general unpopularity of the Royal family. Both Jeanne and Cagliostro published spirited (and meretricious) defenses which became best sellers in France and newspapers all over Europe took a keen interest in the progress of the trial itself. Public opinion in France believed Rohan to be an innocent victim of Marie Antoinette, the Queen merely using Jeanne and her disreputable friends to discredit and humiliate the Cardinal. The verdict of the Paris Parlement, where the trial was held, reinforced the popular view; Rohan was acquitted of all charges against him, as was Cagliostro, and the full brunt of blame for the affair fell on Jeanne and her two accomplices. Jeanne was ordered to be whipped and branded and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Jeanne is publicly branded in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice

Early in the morning of 21 June 1786 Jeanne was dragged out of her cell in the Palais de Justice wearing only a petticoat and shawl by 8 men who bodily carried her to the main courtyard. She put up a ferocious struggle as her captors tied a halter rope around her neck and attached her to a cart to be whipped. The courtyard had been set up with benches for the public to see the spectacle and despite the earliness of the hour a crowd of several hundred people quickly gathered. The guards seemed almost sorry for her and the lashing across her shoulders and neck was half hearted according to most accounts. One of the guards then stripped her half naked to allow the executioner to brand a V on her shoulder and breast with a red hot iron. As he scorched her breast the swooning Jeanne rallied momentarily and sank her teeth into his hand, biting off a sizeable chunk of flesh before passing out. Whilst she was unconscious her hair was shorn to the scalp. Later she was given the coarse grey uniform of the Salpêtrière before being taken away to that notorious prison for prostitutes. 

Jeanne's flight from the Salpêtrière 

Her sentence was life imprisonment but in the event she served less than six years, somehow escaping and fleeing to London. We only have her own, highly improbable account of how she managed to escape her Parisian jail. She claims well wishers smuggled writing materials to her with which she produced a sketch of the key to her cell (which she merely managed to snatch glimpses of in the hands of the nuns who served as jailers), the sketch was then smuggled out of the prison and used to make a duplicate key which was smuggled back in along with a suit of men’s clothes. When the opportunity arose Jean donned the suit and wig and let herself out of her cell and a further three locked doors and escaped from the prison by mingling amongst a crowd of sightseers on a visit to see the locked up prostitutes. Once free she made her way to Luxembourg and then to London where she was joined by her husband. In London she wrote her bestselling “Memoires Justificatifs de La Comtesse de Valois de La Motte,” but seemed to make very little money from them if she was forced to live in a common lodging house in Lambeth and died being dunned for a mere £30.

Illa Meery as Jeanne de la Motte, in the silent film "Cagliostro" (1929) By Richard Oswald.

Perhaps we have not heard the last of Jeanne; on ‘Find A Grave’s web page about her, an anonymous poster left the following message in January 2012:

  In another lifetime on earth I was Jeanne De Saint-Remy de Valois. To those kind and beautiful souls who have left flowers THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart, it's been very healing. To those few who have left negative comments, believe me, I have paid for my actions in this lifetime by carrying huge amounts of guilt and shame and suffered, which has impacted on every aspect of my life. Her actions were not 'nice' to say the very least, but unless you walk in another's shoes, I would ask you not to judge, think of the poverty and the abuse. I have met Marie-Antoinette again in this life-time and I felt so guilty and ashamed that I could not bear to be in her company and I sobbed for about an hour aterwards. I'm still trying to work through the energy of that life, but I'm grateful for this opportunity to share with whoever comes across this.
-Anonymous
 Added: Jan. 7, 2012