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Illustrated portrait of Tito’s lovers and female acquaintances

A character in Cocaine

Tito’s lovers and female acquaintances

The women who meet Tito as partners, rivals, and mirrors of the sophisticated world he wants to master.

What they want

To pursue their own security, pleasure, status, or freedom without being reduced to parts of Tito’s self-invention.

The book

Cover of Cocaine by Pitigrilli
CocainePitigrilli, 1921

A cynical journalist moves through sex, scandal, cocaine, and decadent Paris at the beginning of the 1920s.

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At a glance

Connection
Tito’s lovers, acquaintances, and rivals
Settings
Italian cities and Paris
Function
Expose the limits of Tito’s emotional detachment

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Several women enter Tito’s life through romance, sex, money, work, and social competition. Their exact weight varies across the novel’s episodes and translations.

Together they expose the limit of Tito’s detached worldview. They are not one generic decadent woman, and the representative portrait signals the group without claiming to depict every member.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • Distinct social rolesDress and behavior vary with profession, money, and circumstance.
  • Partners and rivalsThey can participate in Tito’s games rather than merely receive his attention.
  • Social mirrorsTheir responses reveal how his charm and detachment affect other people.
  • Grouped profileThe source discusses them collectively, so the page does not invent names or merge their lives.
What happens to Tito’s lovers and female acquaintancesHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

No single fate applies to the group. Relationships begin and break as Tito keeps moving, while individual women experience different consequences.

If you like Cocaine

Four books that share themes, tone, or setting with this one.

If you like Pitigrilli

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

  • Illustrated portrait of Claude McKay

    Claude McKay

    Jamaican-born poet and novelist, and one of the essential writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He arrived in Paris from Moscow in 1923 and stayed in France until 1928, writing Home to Harlem there — and forming a low opinion of the rich, white expatriate scene that dominates most accounts of the period. His Paris is the same years as Hemingway's and almost nothing like it.

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  • Illustrated portrait of Ernest Hemingway

    Ernest Hemingway

    Author of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast; his pared-down style, developed in 1920s Paris, became the most imitated in American prose.

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  • Illustrated portrait of Martha Gellhorn

    Martha Gellhorn

    War correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War, D-Day, and conflicts across five more decades; Hemingway's third wife, 1940–1945.

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