of the Directoire, the Empire and even the Restoration… and from each of these personalities, as a skillful courtesan, she had known how to extract things which should have died with the man and gone with him to his tomb." The French writer Jehan d'Ivray recounts that Versfelt told the story of how the great French diplomat and Minister of finance Talleyrand used thousand franc bills to roll locks of her hair into curls one night, while she pointed out to him the ones he had missed. The book was an instant bestseller in France. In 1831 Versfelt published her second book, La Contemporaine en Egypte, an account of her travels through France, Egypt, and the Mediterranean. "Give me the great highway, the pleasures and dangers of the road!" she says. Her trip is remarkable when we realize that she was more than 50 years old, and travel to Egypt in the 1820s was not easy. She is graciously thankful to the people who are nice to her and those she finds admirable, but she roasts with exquisite sarcasm those whom she finds ungracious, sanctimonious bigoted or unkind. She tempts her audience with veiled descriptions of the sexual attraction she feels for a traveling companion who is twenty years younger. Although Versfelt is clearly a French nationalist and a Bonapartist, this book often seems to go against the colonialist consensus: It presents very sympathetic portraits of Egyptians and Turks, appalling descriptions of the misery of the Egyptian people, and bitter criticism of the European community in Egypt and the flood of Europeans whom she sees arriving, "adventurers, swindlers and people with no talent whatsoever." After further travels around the Mediterranean, Versfelt managed to get onto an official French government ship on which she returned in triumph to Marseille, where her editor was waiting. Versfelt tried to repeat her success again in London with "possibly the earliest satirical magazine written, illustrated and published by a woman," according to an entry in the Princeton University graphic arts acquisitions catalogue it was called La Caricature francaise. Journal sans abonnees et sans collaborateurs (French caricature. A journal without subscribers and without collaborators). It was published in London to avoid censorship in France. However, when Versfelt published embarrassing letters supposedly written by King Louis Philippe of France, she was prosecuted for libel. She was not convicted because "the court could not prove that the published