The Lady of the Camellias

by Alexandre Dumas fils

  “In its entirety.”

  “What did you think of the two lines I wrote?”

  “I instantly perceived that in your eyes the poor girl to whom you had given this volume was outside the common order, because I could not see these lines as empty compliment.”

  “And you were right, sir. This girl was an angel. Hold on,” he said. “Read this letter.”

  And he handed me a document that seemed to have been read many times.

  I opened it; here is what it contained:

  My dear Armand, I received your letter. You remain in good health, and I thank God for that. Yes, my friend, I am ill, and with one of those illnesses that are merciless; but the interest that you are kind enough to take in me greatly reduces my suffering. I will not live long enough to have the happiness of clasping the hand that wrote the fine letter I just received, and whose words would heal me, if anything could. I will not see you again, as I am near death, and hundreds of leagues separate you from me. My poor friend! Your Marguerite of other days is much changed, and it is perhaps better that you not see her again than that you see her as she is now. You ask me if I forgive you; oh! With all my heart, my friend, because the pain you caused me was nothing but a proof of the love you had for me. It has been a month since I have kept to my bed, and I care so much for your esteem that every day I write down the diary of my life, from the moment we left each other to the moment I will no longer have the strength to write.

  If the interest that you take in me is genuine, Armand, on your return go visit Julie Duprat. She will give you this journal. You will find in it the explanation and the excuse for what has come between us. Julie is very good to me; we speak of you often. She was there when your letter arrived; we wept as we read it.

  In the event you had not sent me news of yourself, she was supposed to see to it that these papers reached you upon your arrival in France. Don’t be grateful to me for them. This daily return to the only happy moments of my life has done me enormous good, and if you find in reading them an excuse for the past, I find in them a continual solace.

  I would like to leave you something that always reminded me of your spirit, but everything has been taken from me, and nothing belongs to me.

  Do you understand, my friend? I am going to die, and from my bedroom I can hear the guard that my creditors have appointed, walking in the living room, making sure that nobody carries anything off, and that nothing will be left me in the event that I do not die. I can hope only that they will wait until the end to begin selling.

  Oh! Men are pitiless! Or perhaps I am wrong, and God is just and unyielding.

  Well, dearly beloved, you will have to come to my sale, and buy something, because if I put aside the tiniest object for you and they learn of it, they would be able to charge you with possession of stolen goods.

  What a sad life it is that I leave behind!

  How good God would be if he would permit me to see you before I die! But in all probability, adieu, my friend; forgive me for not writing you at greater length, but those who say they are healing me wear me out with bloodlettings, and my hand refuses to write anymore.

  MARGUERITE GAUTIER

  In truth, the last words were barely legible.

  I gave this letter back to Armand, who doubtless had reread it in his mind while I read it on paper, because he said to me as he took it, “Who would ever believe that a kept woman wrote that!” And, moved by his memories, he contemplated for some time the handwriting of this letter, and eventually brought it to his lips.

  “When I think,” he resumed, “that she died without my being able to see her and that I will never see her again; when I think that she made sacrifices for me that a sister would not have made, I cannot forgive myself for having let her die like this.

  “Dead! Dead! And while thinking of me, while writing and speaking my name, poor, dear Marguerite!”

  Armand, letting his thoughts and his tears flow freely, gave me his hand and continued, “Anyone who saw me here mourning a death like this one in this way would think I was a child; but it is because nobody knows how I made this woman suffer, how cruel I was, how good she was and how submissive. I had thought that it was for me to forgive her, but today I consider myself unworthy of the forgiveness she granted me. Oh! I would give ten years of my life to weep one hour at her feet.”

  It is always difficult to console someone for a pain one does not oneself know, but I felt such an active sympathy for this young man who so openly made me the confidant of his sorrows that I believed my words would not be indifferent to him, and I said, “Do you not have relatives, or friends? Take heart; go to them and they will console you. As for me, all I can do is pity you.”

  “It’s true,” he said, as he got up and began pacing around my room. “I am boring you. Excuse me, I had forgotten that my pain could mean but little to you, and that I am importuning you about something that couldn’t and shouldn’t interest you at all.”

  “You mistake my meaning. I am entirely at your service; it is just that I regret my inability to ease your heartache. If my company and the company of my friends can distract you, if, in short, there is anything at all you need from me, I want you to know the great pleasure I will take in being helpful to you.”

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” he said. “Pain intensifies the emotions. Let me stay here a few minutes more; I need time to dry my eyes so people on the street won’t stare at me like I’m an oddity, a grown man crying like a baby. You have made me very happy by giving me this book; I will never know how to repay you.”

  “By according me a little of your friendship,” I told Armand, “and by telling me the cause of your heartache. It’s consoling to talk about what one suffers.”

  “You are right; but today I am overcome by the need to cry, and if I spoke with you, it would be nothing but words without end. One day I will share this story with you, and you will see if I am right to feel sorry for the poor girl. And now,” he added, rubbing his eyes one last time and looking at himself in the mirror, “tell me that you don’t find me too inane, and permit me to come back and see you another time.”

  The man’s expression was so good and mild; I nearly hugged him.

  As for him, his eyes began again to cloud over with tears; he saw that I noticed, and averted his gaze.

  “Well then,” I said to him. “Courage.”

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  And making an extraordinary effort to keep from crying, he left my home, not so much leaving as fleeing.

  I raised the curtain by my window and watched him board the carriage that awaited him at the door; he was scarcely inside before he dissolved into tears and hid his face in his handkerchief.

  CHAPTER V

  A fairly long time passed before I heard talk of Armand, but the subject of Marguerite, on the other hand, came up quite often.

  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but once the name of someone who is supposed to be unknown to you, or at least indifferent to you, is spoken before you, details begin to cluster around this name, little by little, and you begin to hear your friends speak of things they had never before discussed with you. It is then you discover that this person was practically connected to you, that she had passed unobserved through your life many times; you find coincidences in events people relate that seem to have an actual connection with events in your own life. I had positively never known Marguerite, though I had seen her, bumped into her, and knew her face and her habits; and yet, after that sale, her name came frequently to my ears, and, given the circumstances I related in the previous chapter, this name was blended with a heartache so profound that my astonishment grew, magnifying my curiosity.

  The result of this was that every time I ran into friends with whom I had never before spoken of Marguerite, I would say, “Did you ever know someone named Marguerite Gautier?”

  “The Lady of the Camel
lias?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Very well!”

  These Very wells! were sometimes accompanied by smirks that left no doubt as to their meaning.

  “Ah, and what was she like?” I’d continue.

  “A grand girl.”

  “That’s all?”

  “My God! Yes, more spirit and maybe a little more heart than the rest.”

  “And you know nothing in particular about her?”

  “She ruined the Baron de G . . . .”

  “Only him?”

  “She was the mistress of the old Duc de . . . .”

  “Was she really his mistress?”

  “So they say. In any case, he gave her a lot of money.”

  Always the same generalities.

  However, I would have been curious to learn something about the liaison between Marguerite and Armand.

  One day I ran into one of those men who continually associate with courtesans. I asked him:

  “Did you know Marguerite Gautier?”

  The same very well was his answer.

  “What kind of girl was she?”

  “A fine, pretty girl. I was saddened to learn of her death.”

  “Didn’t she have a lover named Armand Duval?”

  “A tall, blond man?”

  “That’s true. What’s Armand’s story?”

  “He was a guy who squandered what little resources he had on her, I believe, and was forced to leave her. They say he was crazy about her.”

  “And she?”

  “She loved him very much, too, everyone always says, but only in the way women like that can. You shouldn’t expect more from them than they’re capable of giving.”

  “What’s become of Armand?”

  “I don’t know. We knew him very little. He spent five or six months with Marguerite, but in the countryside. When she came back, he left.”

  “And you haven’t seen him since?”

  “Never.”

  Me neither. I had begun to ask myself if, at the time he presented himself at my home, the recent news of Marguerite’s death had exaggerated his old love and, as a consequence, his grief, and I told myself that perhaps he had already forgotten, along with her death, the promise he had made to come back and see me.

  This suspicion would have been reasonable enough had it been somebody else, but there had been a sincere tenor to Armand’s despair, and, passing from one extreme to the other, I wondered if his heartache had turned into illness, and that if I hadn’t had news from him, it was because he was sick, or maybe even dead.

  I was interested in this young man in spite of myself. Perhaps there was a degree of egotism in this interest; perhaps I had glimpsed a touching love story beneath his pain, and perhaps, in short, it was my desire to know it that was largely responsible for my concern over Armand’s silence.

  Since M. Duval did not return to visit me, I resolved to visit him. It was not hard to find a pretext, but unfortunately I did not know his address, and none of the people I had questioned could tell me it.

  I went to the rue d’Antin. Marguerite’s doorman might know where Armand lived. He was a new doorman. He didn’t know any more than I did. I then obtained the name of the cemetery where Mlle Gautier had been buried. It was the cemetery of Montmartre.

  April had reappeared, the weather was lovely, and the graves no longer had the dolorous, desolate air that winter gives them; at last it was warm enough for the living to remember the dead and to visit them. I went to the cemetery, telling myself, “With one glance at Marguerite’s grave I will see if Armand is still suffering, and maybe I will learn what has become of him.”

  I entered the caretaker’s house and asked if on the twenty-second of the month of February a woman named Marguerite Gautier had been buried in the cemetery of Montmartre.

  The man leafed through a fat book where all those who entered this final resting place were inscribed and enumerated, and responded that yes, on the twenty-second of February, at noon, a woman by that name had been interred.

  I asked the caretaker to lead me to the grave, as this city of the dead has its streets, just like the city of the living, and there would be no way to identify her grave without a guide. The caretaker called over a gardener, to whom he gave the necessary indications, until the gardener interrupted him, saying: “I know, I know . . . Oh! The grave is easy enough to spot,” he continued, turning toward me.

  “Why?” I asked him.

  “Because its flowers are much different than the others.”

  “Is it you who tends it?”

  “Yes, sir, and I could wish all relatives took as good care of their departed as the young man who looks after that one.”

  After a few turns, the gardener stopped and said to me, “Here we are.”

  Before my eyes was an expanse of flowers that no one would ever have taken for a grave, had not a white marble slab bearing a name been proof.

  This marble slab stood upright. An iron trellis demarcated the plot of land that had been bought, and that plot was covered in white camellias.

  “What do you make of that?” asked the gardener.

  “It’s very pretty.”

  “And every time a camellia fades, I’m on orders to replace it.”

  “And who gives you those orders?”

  “A young man who cried a great deal the first time he came—a close friend of the dead woman, no doubt, because she seemed to be a lively sort, that one. They say she was very beautiful. Did the gentleman know her?”

  “Yes.”

  “The way the other man did?” the gardener asked with a wicked smile.

  “No, I never spoke to her.”

  “And you come here to see her; that’s very good of you, because the cemetery’s hardly overrun with visitors to the poor girl.”

  “So nobody comes?”

  “No one except for the young man, who came once.”

  “Just once?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And he hasn’t been back since?”

  “No, but he’ll come back upon his return.”

  “Then he’s traveling?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you know where he is?”

  “He is, I believe, staying with Mlle Gautier’s sister.”

  “And what is he doing there?”

  “He is seeking authorization from her to exhume the dead woman and bury her someplace else.”

  “Why doesn’t he leave her here?”

  “You know, sir, people have ideas about what to do with the dead. People like me see that every day. This plot was purchased for five years only, and this young man wants a permanent resting place for her, and a larger plot; in the new quarter it will be better.”

  “What do you mean by ‘the new quarter’?”

  “The new plots that we’re selling now, on the left. If the cemetery had always been kept up the way it is now, there wouldn’t have been another like it in the world; but there’s still a lot to do before it’s just as it should be. And then again, people are so funny.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there are people who are proud until they come here. And this girl Gautier seems to have lived it up a little, if you’ll pardon the expression. Now, the poor girl, she’s dead; and there are plenty more that there’s nothing to say against and whom we water every day; and, well, when the relatives of the people who are buried beside her heard who she was, didn’t they object to her being here—and didn’t they say plots should be set apart for women like that, like they are for the poor? Have you ever heard such a thing? I told them what I thought of them, I did; wealthy people who don’t even come four times a year to visit their dead, who bring their flowers themselves . . . and just imagine the flowers they bring! They act as if a visit to somebody
they’re supposed to cry over were a business appointment, they carve mournful sentiments on gravestones for people they’ve never shed a tear for, and they make trouble for the neighborhood. Believe me if you like, sir, I did not know this young woman, I don’t know what she did; and all the same, I love her, that poor little mite, and I take care of her, and I choose camellias for her at the fairest price. She’s my favorite of the dead. People like me, sir, are forced to love the dead, because we’re so busy that we hardly have time to love anything else.”

  I looked at this man, and some of my readers will understand without my needing to explain it the emotion I felt upon hearing him speak this way.

  He sensed it, undoubtedly, because he went on, “They say there are people who ruined themselves for that girl, and that she had lovers who adored her; well, when I think that not one of them comes to buy her one solitary flower, that’s what I think is strange and sad. And again, she has nothing to complain about, because she has her grave, and if there’s only one person who remembers her, well, he can stand in for the rest. But we have poor girls here of the same type and the same age that we throw into paupers’ graves, and it breaks my heart when I hear their poor bodies fall to ground. And not one soul thinks of them once they’re dead! It’s not always so cheerful, this trade of ours, if you’ve got a soft heart. What do you want? It’s too much for me sometimes. I’ve got a nice, grown-up daughter who’s twenty, and when someone brings a dead girl her age here, I think of her; and, whether it’s a great lady or a tramp, I can’t help but be moved.

  “But no doubt I’m boring you with my tales, and you did not come here to listen to me talk. I was told to lead you to the grave of Mlle Gautier—here you are. May I be of any further assistance?”

  “Do you know the address of M. Armand Duval?” I asked this man.

  “Yes, he lives on rue —. At least that’s where I went to get the money to buy all the flowers you see here.”

  “Thank you, my friend.”

  I cast one last glance at the flower-strewn grave, and despite myself longed to part the depths to see what the earth had done to the beautiful creature who had been surrendered to it. I walked away filled with sadness.