Josie outlasts them all. She remains in Europe for several years, marrying an American lawyer in London in 1891. He seems to love her, not least because, as he tells a visitor, she is the only woman who can save him from drinking himself to death. But she can’t save him from drinking himself insane, and she divorces him for mental incapacity. She returns to Boston, and then Philadelphia. At least one news story puts her in South Dakota. She is said to be an invalid, or in a convent. Several papers report her death.

Yet she carries on. She crosses the ocean again to Europe, eventually settling in Paris. How she supports herself none can say; her charms are less obvious than they were when she drove Jim Fisk to distraction and Ned Stokes to murder. But something persists, and when her end finally comes, almost sixty years after that fatal meeting on the staircase of the Grand Central Hotel, one devoted acquaintance—the heir to Fisk, or is it to Stokes?—follows her casket to the burial site on Montparnasse and bids Josie Mansfield earthly farewell.

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