King Leopold's Ghostwriter by Andrew Fitzmaurice;

Author:Andrew Fitzmaurice;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

Pharaïlde van Lynseele

In 1859, Twiss met Pharaïlde van Lynseele. Her own version of her early life, when in court in 1872, was that she was the daughter of a Dutch nobleman who had performed military service in Poland and had then travelled to Java, where he subsequently died. Her mother, she said, had also died shortly after her birth. This story was a fabrication. She was born on October 9, 1834, in Kortrijk, in the Flemish northwest of Belgium. Her parents were Pierre Denis van Lynseele, an illiterate carpenter, aged 28, and Barbe Thérèse Vanderschoore, a peasant farmer’s daughter.306 Her birth certificate was witnessed by her maternal grandfather, Augustin Vanderschoore, and a cattle dealer, Jean Barbe, but because Jean Barbe was also illiterate, the certificate was signed by Augustin Vandershoore and the magistrate who issued the certificate, Reynaert Beernaert. No details of her early life survive, in contrast to Agnes Willoughby.

By the late 1850s, Pharaïlde van Lynseele was working as a prostitute in London. The city attracted large numbers of French and Belgian prostitutes, many of whom were drawn into rapidly growing urban areas from rural poverty, just as women such as Agnes Willoughby had been.307 In London, Lynseele adopted a new name, Marie Gelas, and a new persona, as was customary for women in the sex trade. She worked in Regent Street, where, in its lower half, according to Acton’s contemporary account, the Belgian prostitutes congregated, and it is likely that there she met Twiss.308 Acton complained that, whereas English prostitutes “of any grade” believed that it was “bad taste” to solicit, the “foreign” prostitutes of lower Regent street “proclaimed” their “craft” “à haute voix,” such that the street was full of “noisy, soliciting, gesticulating prostitutes.” This was not the purpose for which Regent Street had been intended. It was designed and constructed by John Nash, earlier in the century, to demarcate the upper classes of Mayfair from the working classes of Soho, and it was intended that the street should be a space for fashionable and tasteful commerce, with grocers and butchers’ shops excluded.309 The classes, however, could not be kept apart. Acton cited a case that came before the Marlborough Street Magistrate in 1855 and was reported in the Globe. The newspaper recounted that “several of the inhabitants of Regent Street” complained to the magistrate that “the lower part of Regent-street, in particular, was infested all day long by throngs of French and Belgian prostitutes, whose immodest and audacious behaviour had a serious effect on the business of the street.”310 The magistrate sympathised but stated that he must discharge the five prostitutes brought before him because they had only been charged with “walking about publicly.” It was necessary, he argued, not to “bring up a few for judgement” but to take a more systemic approach to the problem. It was precisely in the lower of half of Regent Street, right at the bottom of the street, where the Athenaeum was and still is located. The case reported

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