About Queenie

Queenie Sataro (1836-1873)

a.k.a. Sato Kazuko, later Amabel Laudner

The few photographs that survive of Amabel Laudner reveal a most atypical member of the demi-monde. Little information has ever surfaced about Madame Laudner, born Sato Kazuko, a bizarre, tragic courtesan born to an equally bizarre,tragic courtesan. Patrice Beautier, the wealthy coal industrialist who claimed to have launched Queenie in his 1887 Mémoires, claimed that Kazuko-san only once revealed the circumstances of her childhood in Japan, where she lived until the age of five.

" . . . She seldom related to me any account of her fractured past, but on one night when Kotone-san was feeling particularly harmonious, she told the story of a young maiko of the Kyoto prefecture who fell into disgrace when she became with child, the father a local missionary and the only white among Celestials. Naturally, the Lady was immediately burdened with utter ostracism, yet Kotone-san was born somewhere behind the closed walls of the teahouse, among the company of those secret women . . ."

Perhaps it was due to the exotic circumstances of Kazuko-san's birth that she overall seemed to favor the company of women over men; historians can only speculate.

Possible likeness of Kazuko-san's mother, courtesy of the estate of Mildred Silverman.

Kazuko-san was spirited away to France shortly after her infancy. Her mother, whose name has vanished from history, died of scurvy aboard the Cinquantaine, leaving young Kazuko-san at the mercy of Augustus Shelby Merriwether III, the sea captain who would become her adoptive father and benefactor. Swept by the winds of fate, the captain's young charge was hastily shipped off to a convent school in Chantilly, where she was to spend the rest of her youth as Queenie Sataro.

Left without a mother or father and in essence abandoned by her only supporter, Queenie's youth was lonely and desolate.

"Few children felt more alone than I, left to fend for myself among other lonely girls in the convent. On Holidays, my father never arrived to sweep me away for a joyful excursion. Even his letters were rare, perhaps twice a year I received a parcel or a letter stamped with his peculiar seal. His letters always carried the scent of the ocean upon them, and reading them over and over, I would imagine my mother at the bottom of the sea, her shroud slowly unwinding."

Queenie Sataro, artist unknown

Upon the moment that she turned seventeen, by some accounts Queenie went to work as a laundress, by others as a dressmaker's apprentice on the Avenue Messine. Like so many other young women of lowly status, Queenie was drawn into the demi-monde by a single affair. For Queenie, the destined amour was Édouard-Eugene Capillons, a trader of salt who installed Queenie as his mistress on the Rue de Saint Germain.

Queenie's convent upbringing left her with a careful disdain for her new lifestyle, which account for the contradictory statements attributed to her.

"For even the wealthiest king is just a man, perhaps I have revealed the architecture of my secret but it is just as well told. As women we are washed upon the shore by the desires and whims of men; we wait for the days when we will no longer languish at their feet, begging for scraps."

In the shadowy world of the Grandes Horizontales, Queenie was not particularly well known. There were rumored involvements with the Comte de Perregaux and Prince Napoleon III, among others. There was the infamous Beautier lliason, and the entanglement with his nephew Richard that ended in a tragic duel . . . Richard lost. In 1861, Queenie fled the arms of Édouard-Eugene Capillons and the apartment at 27 Rue de St. Germain to buy her own hôtel upon the Rue de Faubourg.

Queenie's hôtel was minimalist by the standards of the day; neither did she entertain extravagantly nor did she flaunt her excesses in the way of her fellow demi-mondaines. Unfortunately, Queenie's reclusive minimalism is one of the primary reasons we know so little about her. Charles Breckhammer, a lover from her Rue de Faubourg days, describes performances where Queenie would dance "in her mother's kimono, her hair undone in a way that purposefully clashed with the tradition of her homeland."

As she became wealthier and her suitors more numerous, Queenie withdrew further into her own private world.

"I am not fond of the Bois. I am admonished for my own health that I should take the airs of a daily ride, but some days I cannot bear to be seen."

Accounts of Queenie were both tender and merciless, whose increasingly rare appearances portrayed her as

"A breathtaking and exquisite Japanese beauty, with all the best European features; slim of build, perfect of bosom, blameless in her delicate lunar countenance!"

--Histoire de Belle Epoque

"No member of her profession could be more haughty than that coarse-haired, large-nosed circus girl that masquerades as an angel of the Orient. Her appeal is as questionable as her ancestry; when she is visible at the Opera or as she exploits her wares at various restaurants upon the Seine we are forced to ask why we allow her to fascinate us at all. ."

--Gazette de Melvilles, January 1866

Queenie's mixed-race exoticism was admired by some, despised by others, and tolerated by most, save some of the more xenophobic denizens of Paris. To the Victorian society that had adopted her, Queenie represented living Chinoserie, thus she headlined in semi-private stage plays like "The Chinese Flower" and "Tea Lantern Girl". The Chinoserie effect, if nothing else, inspired opulence.

Dauphin Harold van Nedhofe, upon inheriting his father's estate, wasted no time in outfitting Queenie with jewellery alone worth an estimated sum of £56,000. He was not the first to have spent lavish sums in an effort to keep Queenie's affections, and he would not be the last.

As in the case of many fabled members of the half-world, love conquered (or ruined) all. Queenie became Queenie Amabel Laudner in 1868 after she fell in love with a poor Wisconsin farm boy who, via a streak of great fortune, had found himself landed and wealthy.

Henry "Hank" Laudner carried Queenie to America, and it is from this point she herself begins to disappear from history like her geisha mother before her. Little did Laudner realize that his wife would die within five years of her first and only legal marriage. Amabel Laudner nee Queenie Sataro nee Sato Kazuko would not live to see the legacy of old womanhood--she died of Scarlet Fever two weeks before her thirty-seventh birthday. Laudner was heartbroken; he never remarried.

Lithograph of Queenie from Mémoires of Patrice Beautier

Queenie was survived by her husband and young daughter, Anna.