The Lady of the Camellias

by Alexandre Dumas fils

  Then came the change of regime on December 2, 1851, when Louis-Napoléon was made President of the Second Republic. Prior to that, Dumas fils had tried in vain to get a theater to stage his play. Finally the Vaudeville accepted it, but the censor immediately imposed a ban. This was lifted three days after the new president’s appointment, and from its first night on February 2, 1852, The Lady of the Camellias was a theatrical sensation. Until then no dramatist had dared to put on stage a courtesan whose life had not been either distanced by history or poetized by legend. Young Dumas had not only brought the public into the world of Duplessis; he had also portrayed it exactly as he had known it, using the clothes, decor, and dialogue of modern life. “A drama of facile love has been turned into a literary event,” exclaimed Jules Janin.

  It was to turn into very much more than that. The pathos of the story and immediacy of its setting inspired Giuseppe Verdi to create his opera La Traviata in 1853 (the year the play, retitled Camille for an American audience, became a Broadway hit). In Verdi’s hands the work is transfigured, acquiring a rapturousness, psychological subtlety, and tragic grandeur that music can convey far more powerfully than words. The opera’s premiere in Venice on March 3 was a failure, but it soon became the popular hit it has remained for 160 years, the role of the heroine, Violetta, sung by every great international diva. The story of the Lady of the Camellias became a cultural phenomenon throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Marguerite Gautier has been pictured by artists and photographers from Aubrey Beardsley to Cecil Beaton, and portrayed on stage by Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Isabelle Adjani, in ballets by Margot Fonteyn and Sylvie Guillem, and in films by Greta Garbo and Isabelle Huppert.

  Dumas fils would have been astounded by the longevity of the play he had dashed off in eight days. When he wrote the preface to a new edition in 1868, he declared that the story was already “ancient history.” No courtesan existed with the heart and selfless nature of Marguerite, and the profession had become a business exchange: “I’m beautiful, you’re rich, give me what you have and I’ll give you what I have. You don’t have money? Well, good-bye.” But the real reason for Dumas fils’s disillusion and cynicism was personal. A destructive two-year affair with a bored young married woman, a beautiful Russian countess he named the Lady of the Pearls, had annihilated his belief in romantic love. Lydia Nesselrode was the inspiration for another long, anguished, but much superior poem, “Saint Cloud”; for the excellent novella Diana de Lys; for an overlong, self-pitying novel, The Lady of the Pearls; and for the dismayingly melodramatic reworking of Diana de Lys as a play. But unlike Duplessis, this lady was a toxic muse, her duplicity, lies, and callous abandonment of Dumas fils resulting in an embittered edge to his writing and a misogynistic attitude toward women.

  There was also the fact that Dumas fils felt out of tune with his age. The sparkling Belle Hélène spirit of the Second Empire was anathema to him; a fierce moralist, he had decided to use his plays to pillory the license and laxity of the era. His 1855 play Le Demi-Monde (his own coinage) hardly seems the work of the same writer. A bitter satire, it is a portrait not of the bohemian world the term has come to define, but of a spurious society halfway between respectability and immorality. For Henry James, its grim realism and barbed dialogue made it a model for the drama of the time, “a singularly perfect and interesting work.” Now, though, with its layers of lies, infamies, and deceit, its unconvincing plot twists, and a protagonist who is Dumas fils at his most priggish and cynical, Le Demi-Monde is as tiresomely pessimistic as it is outdated.

  Dumas fils’s uncompromising ethics had made him sternly censorious of his father, whom he had come to blame for the dissipation of his youth: “I naturally did what I saw you do, and lived as you had taught me to live.” Determined to distance himself from his father’s excesses—the profligate spending, the affairs with actresses scarcely out of their teens, the births of two more “natural” children—he vented his anger about the stigma of illegitimacy in prefaces to his plays. (In one particularly extreme polemic he calls for new legislative measures on paternity, which would mean a five- to ten-year prison sentence for a young man who abandons the mother of his child.) And yet his own conduct was hardly exemplary. His daughter Colette was born four years before his marriage to Nadejda (Nadine) Naryschkine, another bored, beautiful Russian child bride, a friend and confidante of Lydia Nesselrode’s. With her “tigress claws” and pathologically jealous nature, Nadine did not have the submissive nature that Dumas fils demanded in a wife, and their marriage was far from tranquil. This, combined with self-doubts and despair about human conduct, brought him close to suicide in the early 1860s. “I am completely worn out in body and in mind, heart and spirit,” he wrote to George Sand, who would introduce him to her physician, Henri Favre, a mystic and a pioneer of psychoanalysis.

  Although Favre was able to fortify Dumas fils’s wavering spirits, he had a disastrous influence on his work, fanning his moral fervor and encouraging him to write tediously verbose prefaces and pamphlets. Throughout the 1870s the plays became no more than homilies, their characters either voice pieces for the author or hallucinatory abstractions of vice and virtue. “His terrible knowledge suggested a kind of uniform,” remarked Henry James. “It was almost like an irruption of the police.” Dumas fils had lost touch with his public, and he knew it. In an 1879 preface to the ill-received L’Étrangère, he writes: “As a dramatist grows older he loses in clarity and suppleness, in the power to bring his stage alive, what he gains in his knowledge of the human heart. . . . A moment comes when he finds himself pushing the study of character and the analysis of feeling too far. He frequently becomes heavy, obscure, solemn, portentous, and, not to beat about the bush, a bore.”

  Two plays staged at the Comédie-Française, Denise (1885) and Francillon (1887), signaled a return to form and a reengagement with people, not symbolist types. But despite the barren years, Dumas fils remained his country’s most successful dramatist, who won, by his 1875 election to the Académie Française, the official recognition and public respect denied his father. In today’s France, however, this is no longer the case. It is Dumas père who is the literary giant, while his son has become the one-book author that he has always been elsewhere. His best novel, the compelling L’Affaire Clemenceau, whose sultry, scandalous heroine is modeled on his first infatuation, Louise Pradier, remains out of print. Only The Lady of the Camellias is to be found on the shelves of most bookshops and lending libraries, the other novels and plays available as badly scanned Internet editions in French.

  Just as Flaubert, maddened by what Henry James called “the boom of the particular hit,” expressed a wish to buy up all the existing copies of Madame Bovary and burn them, Dumas fils came to resent the public’s unquenchable appetite for his best-loved work. In a preface he was asked to write in 1886 for a lavish, illustrated quarto edition of the novel, his exasperation is evident. In earlier prefaces, and in the notes he wrote as background for actors, he had recounted everything he knew of Duplessis, but now he insisted, “I have nothing more to say.” And yet the youthful memories this grand old man retained were the ones he cherished most. He admitted as much in an unpublished letter of April 1887 to Duplessis’s first biographer, Romain Vienne. “If anyone had told me when I galloped in the forest of Saint-Germain with Marie that I would one day write a scholarly homage to Victor Hugo I would have been astonished. But between you and me, I would happily surrender this glory to anyone who could give me back that day, my twenties, and the Lady!”

  JULIE KAVANAGH

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Ariste, Paul d’. La Vie et le Monde du Boulevard (1830–1870) (Un Dandy: Nestor Roqueplan). Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1930.

  Barnes, David S. The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

  Boudet, Micheline. La Fleur du Mal: la Veritable Histoire de la Dame
aux Camélias. Paris: Albin Michel, 1993.

  Choulet, Jean-Marie. Promenades à Paris et en Normandie avec la Dame aux Camélias: D’Alphonsine Plessis à La Traviata. Paris: Editions Charles Corlet, 1998.

  Claudin, Gustave. Mes Souvenirs: Les Boulevards de 1840–1870. Paris: Calmann Levy, 1884.

  Corbin, Alain. Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1990.

  Gros, Johannes. Une Courtisane Romantique, Marie Duplessis. Paris: au Cabinet du Livre, 1929.

  Issartel, Christiane. Les Dames aux Camélias: De l’Histoire à la Légende. Paris: Chene Hachette, 1981.

  James, Henry. The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama 1872–1901. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949.

  John, Nicholas. Ed. Violetta and Her Sisters: The Lady of the Camellias: Responses to the Myth. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

  Kavanagh, Julie. The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

  Maurois, Andre. Three Musketeers: A Study of the Dumas Family. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. London: Jonathan Cape, 1957.

  Saunders, Edith. The Prodigal Father. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951.

  Vandam, Albert. An Englishman in Paris. Vol 1. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1892.

  Vienne, Romain. La Dame aux Camélias (Maris Duplessis). Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1888.

  A Note on the Translation

  Do you remember that luscious young celebrity—Daisy something—who was such a big deal when she was twenty? She didn’t act, or sing, or dance, she wasn’t an heiress, but she managed to get herself known, envied, and talked about by everyone who mattered. She was, you know . . . famous for being famous. Daisy always wore expensive clothes and jewelry made by the most in-demand designers; she showed up at every opening and velvet-rope party, usually on the arm of some phenomenally rich man she was dating who had brought her there in a flashy car. You don’t remember? What a pity. Apparently, her fifteen minutes of fame are over.

  But really, once, nearly everyone knew all about Daisy. She was dangerously pretty, dangerously thin, lived a little too fast, and by the time she was twenty-three, she’d been in and out of rehab several times, and . . . well, things ended badly . . . and quickly. You still don’t remember? Maybe this will help: She lived in Paris; Marguerite was her name in French, and though marguerite means “daisy,” she was better known for another flower—the camellia, white or red. She carried a bouquet of them with her wherever she went, which is why people liked to call her the Lady of the Camellias. That is, Alexandre Dumas fils did, in the novel he wrote about her, La Dame aux Camélias. It is about a woman he fell passionately in love with in 1842, when he was eighteen; a famous Parisian courtesan of the 1840s named Marie Duplessis. When Marie died in 1847, her grave was strewn thickly with camellias. But when young Dumas first caught sight of her, she was a vision of youthful beauty, dressed in a white muslin summer dress and a straw hat. In the novel, he resurrected her in that outfit for a romantic country scene between Marguerite (Marie) and her besotted, obsessive lover, a naive young lawyer named Armand, who of course is cast in the image of Dumas fils himself.

  • • •

  You hold in your hands my translation of their tumultuous, doomed love affair. In my translation, I have endeavored to dust off the language of the excellent but antiquated previous English translations I have read, which make this timeless, relatable, and fiery story seem quainter, more distant, and more marmoreal than it is. It is important, while reading this novel, to understand that Marguerite and Armand are the kind of bright, self-destructive young things we still read about in magazines, watch on-screen, or brush up against today. Dumas fils had what we would call a “modern” sensibility, in the sense that he was unafraid to write quite baldly about behavior that would still be shocking today. While not explicit in a pornographic sense, his writing was not euphemistic, either. In a bedroom scene toward the end, when Marguerite and Armand briefly reconcile, Dumas fils writes with white-hot urgency that is searing to read even a century and a half after the author recorded it. Anyone who has read an outdated English translation of this novel, seen the opera it inspired (La Traviata, by Verdi), or watched the film it inspired (Camille, starring Greta Garbo) might have missed the audacity, obstinacy, sensuality, and recklessness of its characters.

  In my translation, I have sought to preserve the immediacy and the frankness of the narration, as Armand relates it and as Dumas fils recorded it, so that its passion may come alive, while its author’s idiom and settings are faithfully preserved and relayed. My goal was for twenty-first-century readers who encounter this tragic story of all-consuming love for the first time in these pages to receive the story’s impact in all its dimensions, picturing it in the fully realized world of Dumas’s nineteenth-century Paris, but feeling it as if it were happening in Paris, New York, or anywhere; and not centuries ago, but today . . . or even tomorrow.

  LIESL SCHILLINGER

  CHAPTER I

  It is my opinion that you cannot create a convincing character until you have made a broad study of human nature, just as you cannot speak a foreign language until you have studied it thoroughly.

  Not having reached an age at which I consider myself qualified to invent a character, I content myself with simply describing one.

  I therefore ask the reader to accept the truth of this story—all of whose characters, except for its heroine, are still living.

  I should add that, in Paris, there are eyewitnesses to most of the facts I gather here, who would be able to confirm them should my own testimony be deemed insufficient. By a particular circumstance, I am the only one who can relate them all, as it was only I who was acquainted with the final details without which it would have been impossible to write an account that was both interesting and complete.

  To return to my subject, let me tell you how these details came to my attention. On the twelfth day of the month of March, 1847, I saw in the rue Laffitte a large yellow sign announcing a sale of furniture and valuable curios. This sale was taking place after a death. The poster did not give the name of the deceased, but the sale was to take place on the rue d’Antin, No. 9, on the sixteenth, from noon to five o’clock.

  Additionally, the sign specified, the apartment and its furnishings could be visited on the thirteenth and fourteenth.

  I have always been fond of curios. I vowed not to miss this occasion, if only to look, not to buy.

  The next day I presented myself at the rue d’Antin, No. 9.

  It was early, but a good number of visitors were already in the apartment, even female visitors, who, though they were dressed in velvet and wrapped in cashmere shawls, and though they were awaited outside the doors by elegant coupés, gazed with astonishment and even admiration at the luxury that met their eyes.

  Later I understood this admiration and astonishment, as, having myself begun to examine the offerings as well, I easily recognized that I was in the apartment of a kept woman. And if there is one thing society women long to see—and society women were on the premises—it is the private life of those Parisian women whose carriages splash theirs every day, who sit, like them and alongside them, in their boxes at the opera and at the Théâtre des Italiens, flaunting the insolent opulence of their beauty, their jewels, and their scandals.

  The one in whose apartment I found myself was dead, so now even the most virtuous women could penetrate her bedroom. Death had purified the air surrounding this resplendent cloaca, and besides, the ladies could make excuse, if they needed to, that they had come to the sale without knowing whose home it was. They had seen some posters, and had wanted to check out the promised goods and make their selections ahead of time; nothing could be simpler. But that did not prevent them from seeking, in the midst of these marvels, traces of the life of this courtesan, about which they had, no doubt, heard so many str
ange accounts.

  Unfortunately the mysteries had died with the goddess, and despite their best intentions these ladies were unable to find anything amid the objects on display after her death that hinted at what had been on offer while its tenant still breathed.

  Nonetheless, of what remained, plenty was covetable. The furnishings were superb. Furniture of rosewood and marquetry, Sèvres vases and Chinese porcelain, Meissen statuettes, satin, velvet, and lace; nothing was lacking.

  As I wandered the apartment I followed the curious noblewomen who had preceded me. They entered a room decorated with Persian wall hangings, and I, too, was about to enter, when the ladies left the room almost as quickly as they had entered it, smiling as if they were ashamed of this new wonder. This only increased my desire to enter. It was the dressing room, decked out with a multitude of toiletry articles, in which the breathtaking prodigality of the dead woman received its fullest expression.

  Upon a large table that backed against the wall, its surface three feet wide and six feet long, glittered all the golden treasures of Aucoc and Odiot. It was a magnificent collection; not one of those thousand implements—so necessary to the beauty of a woman such as the one whose rooms we were visiting—was made of any metal other than gold or silver. However, it was clear that this collection could not have been obtained all at once; it had accumulated little by little, and the lover who had begun it was not the lover who had completed it.