Suivez-Moi, Jeune Homme

In the golden days of La Belle Epoque at the turn of the century, the courtesans of France were famed for their elegance, the dazzle of their jewels, and the high cost of their favors. None more so than La Belle Otero, with her jet-black hair, hourglass figure and enameled complexion. One night at the Cafe de Paris, five rulers of Europe offered homage at her table--Russia's Nicholas II, Britain's Edward VII, Prussia's Wilhelm II, Belgium's Leopold II and Spain's Alfonso XIII. Otero boasted, "I have been a slave to my passions, but never to a man."

Caroline Otero was born in Spain, the daughter of an Andalusian gypsy and a Greek naval officer. At 13, she ran away from an orphanage to dance in the cabarets. At 14, she married an Italian who abandoned her in Monte Carlo after losing the key to her bedroom in a dice game. At 18, she was the mistress of a Russian prince and two years later made it to Paris, where she became a Spanish dancer in a four-star restaurant in the Palais Royal. Sighed one admirer: "All the Orient was in her hips."

Velvet Vest. Her statuesque beauty was set off with enormous hats from which dangled a ribbon that the French then called "Suivez-moi, jeune homme" (Follow me, young man). Soon she was wearing a velvet vest embroidered with 240 diamonds. Admirers gave her gilded carriages and chateaux, buckets of jewels, and a mansion on the Champs-Elysees. A U.S. millionaire invited Otero to a simple supper of caviar and oysters--in each oyster lay a pearl. By 1894 she was so rich that she spurned an offer of 10,000 francs for one night, and the luckless man killed himself in humiliation. Young Prince Peter of Russia begged Otero, "Ruin me, but don't leave me." Premier Aristide Briand traveled to the Riviera for Otero's birthday, and once she told him, "It is fortunate you are so ugly. Otherwise, you could have induced me to folly."

The great age ended in the drums of World War I. Otero, who had reigned in Paris for 25 years, finally retired to Nice in 1922 with a fortune estimated at $1,000,000, not counting her jewelry and chateaux. A movie about her life brought in more revenue. But the money gradually was lost at the casinos, and La Belle Otero grew old and wizened, reduced to living in a cramped room in the second-class Hotel Novelty. Mornings she marketed and fed the pigeons; on pleasant afternoons she strolled along the Promenade des Anglais. She said, "Women have one mission in life: to be beautiful. When one gets old, one must learn how to break mirrors. I am very gently expecting to die."

Smoldering Stew. Last week a chambermaid in the Hotel Novelty smelled something burning. Opening the door to a small room with yellowing photographs tacked to the walls, she saw an unmade bed and an overdone rabbit stew smoldering on a gas cooking ring. Slumped in a chair and dead of a heart attack lay 97-year-old La Belle Otero, her jet hair now grey, her teeth false, her wrinkled skin still highly rouged. A neighbor who had come in each afternoon to tidy up gave Caroline Otero's epitaph: "She was constantly talking about her past, and I was not listening any more. It was always the same: feasts, princes, champagne."

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