hedonism. Intelligent demimondaines, like the fictional Gigi's grandmother, would invest their wealth for the day when their beauty faded. Others ended up penniless and starving when age took its toll on their beauty, unless they managed to marry. A famous beauty was Virginia Oldoini, Countess di Castiglione, who came to Paris in the 1850s with very little money of her own and soon became mistress of Napoleon III; after that relationship ended she moved on to other wealthy men in government, finance and European royalty. She was one of the most aristocratic and exclusive of the demimondaines—reputed to have charged a member of the British aristocracy one million francs for 12 hours in her company. Another woman who doubtless influenced later images of the demimondaine was the dancer and adventuress Lola Montez, though she died before the term came into general use. The actress Sarah Bernhardt was the illegitimate child of a courtesan; in her day all actresses were generally considered demimondaines. Her many lovers and extravagant lifestyle fit the type, though her genuine successes as an artist and innovator eventually gained her a kind of public esteem most demimondaines never achieved. Fictional Descriptions of the can be found in Vanity Fair (1848), a novel which satirizes nineteenth century society, written by William Makepeace Thackeray. Although it does not mention the terms and (they were coined later), the terms were later used by reviewers and other authors in reference to three characters in it. Lady Crackenbury and Mrs. Washington White are characters, both of whom Captain Rawdon Crawley lusts after in his younger days. Becky Sharp is perceived as a before she is presented at court, and then becomes one when she travels through Europe after her husband abandons her. Possibly the most famous portrayal of the , albeit from before the word was coined, is in Giuseppe Verdi's opera (1853). The opera, in turn, was inspired by Alexandre Dumas 's ; Marguerite Gautier, the heroine of the book and subsequent play, was based on Marie Duplessis, 1840s Paris courtesan and mistress to a number of prominent men, including Dumas. She would famously be portrayed on stage by the aforementioned Sarah Bernhardt. In writing his 1924 play Easy Virtue, Noël Coward stated his object was to present a comedy in the structure of a tragedy "to compare the woman of to-day with the more flamboyant of the 1890s." Colette's Gigi