French courtesan, singer and actress whose fame today rests chiefly on the fact that Émile Zola used her as the principal model for his novel Nana.
Her father, Jean Antigny, was the sacristan at a local church. At age 14 she ran off to Bucharest with a lover whom she then abandoned for some gypsies. On her return to Paris she worked in the circus and in various dance halls. She also posed for Paul Baudry for his painting The penitent Madeleine (see picture on the right). She became the mistress of the Russian police chief Mesentzov who took her to St. Petersburg and, when she was forced to leave Russia by special order of the Tsarina, to Wiesbaden. When she set it into her head to become a star on the operetta stage, everything happened exactly as Zola would later describe it in Nana: She was an immediate success on the stage and attracted scores of wealthy lovers.
Her lovers showered her with gifts and spent enormous sums of money on her, but she was unable to hold on to any of it. After a scandal caused by the financial ruin of one of her lovers, she thought it better to leave Paris for a while. She went to Egypt where she appeared on the stage in Cairo and also had an affair with the Khedive. She returned from this tour infected with typhoid fever and died a slow, painful death, penniless and deserted by all her friends.

Link to Wikipedia biography