by Roland Perry
He was buried in the chapel he had funded at Le Vésinet.
Naurois’s death left Céleste feeling isolated. Close friends, family, dependants and benefactors were dying or disappearing with such alacrity that she had a sense of being alone. It began with Dumas, and was followed by Solange, Anne-Victoire, Bizet and now Naurois. Her relationship with Desmarest, who had retired, had fallen away. She could no longer use the apartment in which he had set her up. Nor could she live at Le Vésinet, which was now incorporated into Naurois’s estate. She had grown to enjoy the secluded life and thought she would miss Le Vésinet, but she still preferred Paris, if she had to make a choice. She took a small room in the Passage de l’Opéra.
Céleste’s method of getting over the losses and loneliness was to write. She laboured over the play M’ame Nicole. She still had the energy but was not flavour of the decade anymore. Young playwrights who had not experienced the period from 1830 to 1870, and who had been influenced mainly by the morbid impact of the Franco-Prussian War, were preferred. Nevertheless, she broke through yet again when this play was produced by the Folies-Dramatiques in 1880, the year she turned fifty-six. Céleste’s run seemed almost over and it had been a good one of twenty-six years—a generation—since her memoirs had burst onto the literary scene in 1854.
During the two years since leaving Le Vésinet, she often made the short train ride to see the nuns and the orphan children. Once more her whimsical, spontaneous nature took over and she decided to buy another home there but found herself cash-strapped. She consulted her long-term friend Alexandre Dumas Jr.
‘Why don’t you think about selling the copyright to your ten novels to Michel Lévy, the publisher at Calmann-Lévy? I’ve done it. We struggling authors need all the help we can get.’
‘I must consider it,’ Céleste said, more than interested.
‘Mind you, it hurts. You’ll never again receive royalties.’
‘I’m not worried about that. Most of them aren’t generating funds.’
‘Don’t forget, you can’t pass on the copyright to any dependants in your estate, or anyone you have bequeathed.’
‘I’m not concerned. I have no children, siblings or family.’
‘What about Solange?’
‘I haven’t heard from her in nearly a decade. I heard rumours that a German soldier had taken her away. I hope she’s happy.’
‘You realise that books can generate royalties for seventy-five years after your death?’
‘They’re not creating royalties now. How could they that far into the future?!’
‘You wouldn’t consider keeping the copyright for The Gold Thieves? It’s done so well as a book and play.’
‘It’s lost its appeal,’ Céleste said despondently. ‘There’s no momentum.’ She thought for a moment and laughed. ‘The only one copyright I really don’t care about losing is for the memoirs.’
Céleste sold all the copyright to the publisher and in the deal it bought another book from her, Marie Baud. The payment allowed her to buy the property at Le Vésinet, which she called Chalet des Fleurs. She found it difficult to maintain and ended up subletting two rooms to a young, struggling photographer. Céleste believed in him and the potential for this new and fast-growing creative area. When his operation flopped, she recognised the usual inability of artists to run a business, and took it over. She told him to produce the photos and organised a Paris company to do the development and printing.
Soon afterwards, Céleste fell ill again, this time from accidental coal poisoning. Dumas Jr rushed to see her at Le Vésinet and suggested strongly that she again enter the Maison Dubois nursing home. When she demurred he understood it was because she was, as ever, short of funds. The upkeep of the Chalet des Fleurs and her Paris pied-à-terre had drained her finances. Dumas paid for the sojourn and said she should always see him if she needed help. Céleste wrote to thank him for his generosity and kindness.
He then sent her a huge bunch of red roses and white lilacs.
Dumas Sr and Dumas Jr had always seen the inner beauty and soul of this unusually tenacious, spirited and gifted woman, who had often fought against the odds.
CHAPTER 52
Battling On
Céleste’s illness gained unwanted press attention. Newspaper jackals swarmed with the thought that she might be dying since coal-gas mishaps had taken many lives. She was pestered by inquisitive visitors and the odd journalist, who wanted to see Mogador or check if she would survive. Yet in this case any publicity was good publicity. It revived interest in a celebrity author, who had slipped from view over recent years. But it did not help her sell another play. Her finances were running low and now at sixty, she did not have the contacts or benefactors of previous decades, which had helped her to somehow find the resources to keep doing what she wanted. After leaving the nursing home she sold Chalet des Fleurs and retreated to the bedsit in Passage de l’Opéra. Illness on illness had worn down her physical and mental resilience and she thought it might be time to enter a retirement home. On the advice of Dumas Jr, she applied for admission to the home run by the Society of Dramatic Authors. Dumas Jr, French poet and playwright Camille Doucet and Michel Lévy at Calmann-Lévy sponsored her. The society’s secretary invited her to a meeting.
‘There’s no doubt, Madame, you have had a verifiable career of some distinction,’ he said.
‘And there have been no complaints or legal proceedings against me.’
‘This is true. For most this would be sufficient accreditation. Nevertheless, there is your past.’
The dead hand of the Chabrillans was evident as ever. But this time not due to pressure from a lawyer’s visit. For a secretary who had never written anything, and who would never understand the writer’s life, Céleste’s past would just not do for the elite society. It was not about to dispense largesse to Mogador, despite her literary output.
‘Monsieur,’ Céleste said to him, ‘I thought that even murderers condemned in penal servitude were sometimes reprieved after thirty years.’
‘Insolence does not aid your cause, Madame.’
‘Insolence? Your probes have been both insolent and insulting!’
Céleste would wait for the society’s verdict. Predictably, she was turned down. Dumas Jr was surprised and irritated. He wrote telling her how brave and worthy she was. But he observed that people like the secretary and the society’s board were blind to everything she had achieved and done except what she had written in her memoirs.
‘It appears that today, lying and hypocrisy are small faults,’ he said, ‘but that frankness is a crime.’
Céleste struggled on and managed in 1885 to put on her play Pierre Pascal at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu. She was now a curio for journalists a generation younger who had only read about the risqué period during the mid-nineteenth century. One was the talented critic, essayist and satirist Charles Chincholle, a noted contributor to the newspaper Le Figaro.
He wrote a biographical colour piece. It was balanced but predictably dwelt on her background.
‘This evening towards midnight at the Ambigu,’ he wrote, ‘an actor will stand in front of the prompter’s box to announce: “Ladies and gentlemen, the play that we have had the honour of presenting to you was by Madame La Countess Lionel de Chabrillan.”
‘Who bears this name? All Parisians know this is the former dancer of Bal Mabille. It is Mogador. What has become of Mogador? How does she live? This is less well known . . . her hair is now white and she is always simply dressed.’
The journalist noted that her marriage in England would not have had much validity if the Count de Chabrillan, ‘in his passion’, had not had it registered at the Chancellery of France.
‘There is no need to speak here of her errors between her girlhood and marriage. They can be read in the Memoirs of Mogador. It’s more important to remember that the young countess resolved to bear her husband’s name with dignity. In order to insult her today, one must go back to her past. She
does not conceal it . . . For more than thirty years the countess has been trying to kill Mogador. She never succeeded.’
Michel Lévy, who’d shown great loyalty as publisher and friend to Céleste throughout her career, consoled her for being rejected by the society, saying she was far too vibrant and productive to fade away in the old writers’ home. Lévy said that he would publish her in the future if she kept working. He encouraged her to do another volume of her Mémoires. She took up the offer and went to the offices of Calmann-Lévy to borrow all her manuscripts to help with research for the new volume. She noted in her diary that it was 12 July 1895 when she bumped into Dumas Jr at the counter in the foyer. He was fifteen days short of his seventy-first birthday, and she was seventy. Céleste was shocked. His appearance had deteriorated. Noticing her reaction, he said, ‘I have changed a great deal.’
‘Oh no!’ she replied.
‘You’ve become short-sighted,’ Dumas Jr said.
He remarked that he had heard Calmann-Lévy might be publishing the last volume of her memoirs. Was it true?
‘It’s not certain,’ Céleste responded. ‘I’m going to read my books and diaries and then reflect before I commit.’
‘You’re not overly enthused?’
‘I don’t wish to go through the long battles again, like the ones I had over the earlier volumes. On the other hand, a fresh volume would give me the chance to right all the wrongs; to put the record straight once and for all.’ She paused and added ruefully, ‘And I could do with the advance.’
‘I advise against it,’ Dumas Jr said. ‘Guy de Maupassant regretted doing his final memoirs.’
‘But if I’m compelled to write them . . .?’
‘By all means put them on paper, then destroy the manuscript.’
‘Why?’
‘For the sake of those that you name.’
‘Most of them are dead.’
‘I’m here, too, to collect all my manuscripts, books and plays so I can research it all and write a final manuscript. I’ll call it La Route de Thebes. I’m doing it only for my own personal pleasure. Then I’ll destroy it.’1
‘I don’t think I could put such effort into a book and then throw it away. But now you’ve told me what you’ll do . . .’
‘We shall not have the courage,’ he said with a laugh. ‘You won’t burn the manuscript of your Mémoires; nor will I that of my La Route de Thebes.’
They collected their weighty parcels and left together by carriage, chatting.
‘You’ve taken good care not to be forgotten,’ he said. ‘I’ve never known another woman who has been talked about as much as you.’
‘Mostly badly,’ Céleste said drily.
‘Not always. Your devilish willpower is still quite amazing, but I have none left anymore.’
‘Take a rest before you write the last one.’
‘I can’t. Even in my sleep I’m haunted by the thought of the work I cannot finish.’
The carriage clattered on for a few minutes before he spoke, ‘I don’t believe in the afterlife. Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But surely with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution . . .’
‘Oh, please! You’re going with the chatter of the intellectual classes. Atheism is popular at the moment. Just a theory.’
‘You believe in heaven?’ he asked sceptically.
‘I believe in a better world and that kind of distraction prevents it. Belief is a consolation for all human beings, since we’re all condemned to die.’
‘So thought of the afterlife is a comfort for you?’
‘It is.’
‘But it’s not necessarily reality.’
‘I prefer to avoid it.’
Dumas died four months later, on 27 November 1895, and never finished his final book. Céleste was devastated. She went to his home to pay her respects, placing in front of the coffin a bunch of red roses and white lilacs, the same flowers he had sent her when she came out of the nursing home. After praying for Dumas Jr, she was about to leave when she had a shock. Facing her was a man who was the image of Dumas Sr. She wondered if she was seeing a ghost, but soon learned that the man was one of Dumas Sr’s several illegitimate children.
‘My heart,’ she told her diary when she returned to her bedsit, ‘is like a cemetery in which there is no longer room to erect anymore crosses.’
CHAPTER 53
The Extended Goodbye
Perhaps through boredom, Céleste, at seventy-three in 1898, became involved on the fringe of the so-called Dreyfus political/espionage affair which divided France (and to an extent still does). In December 1894, the month Céleste turned seventy, a young artillery officer, Alfred Dreyfus, of Alsatian and Jewish descent, was convicted of treason for allegedly passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was sentenced to life in prison. Evidence came to light in 1896 that someone else—Ferdinand Esterhazy—was the real culprit. But high-ranking military authorities tried to suppress the new evidence and succeeded in exonerating Esterhazy in a military court, in a trial lasting just two days. Dreyfus then faced further trumped-up charges.
In 1898, famed writer Émile Zola wrote an open letter headed ‘J’Accuse’ to a Paris newspaper in support of Dreyfus, and this put pressure on the government to reopen the case. In effect, from then on the public either lined up for or against Dreyfus. He was attacked by mainly anti-Jewish, anti-German, right-wing, pro-military Catholics, and supported by left-wing radical republicans. Céleste backed Édouard Drumont, who ran an anti-Semitic newspaper/propaganda sheet, La Libre Parole. It is not clear if she truly supported his position, although she had expressed the odd ignorant anti-Jewish stereotype, prevalent at the time, in her memoirs. Her main reason for supporting Drumont was to extract from him the 300 francs he had pocketed after promising to publish the biography of her nearly thirty years earlier. Drumont, desperate for high-profile names in his corner, agreed to pay her back the money when he could, starting with 100 francs. This put Céleste in the anti-Dreyfus camp, but when Drumont had paid back the 300 francs with interest, they had a falling out and she branded him untrustworthy. She also condemned his dirty tactics and false commentary concerning Dreyfus.1 But she later resumed an acquaintanceship with him.
In 1899, Dreyfus faced a new trial which ended in another conviction and a ten-year sentence. But then he was given a pardon and set free. Eventually, all the accusations against him, including Drumont’s specious diatribes, were found to be baseless.2
Céleste kept writing well into her seventies, despite some severe drawbacks such as poor eyesight and less mobility. She was surviving, though not with the zest for life that had propelled her through her turbulent existence. She could no longer afford a secretary or maid. Her friends were dying off with depressing regularity. When Michel Lévy died, she lost her biggest professional supporter and felt her writing career was finished. She kept writing her memoirs but with no enthusiasm to see them published, partly because of the negative remarks from Dumas Jr. Nevertheless, she created several more manuscripts for plays, even though theatres rejected them. Producers felt she was out of touch with the new theatre’s needs and audiences.
Céleste was becoming a living apparition of the past and she knew it. One journalist in 1899 even portrayed her that way in an article he wrote in the journal entitled Une Revenante (a ghost), which regurgitated all the romance and the sordid details of her glory days at Mabille and the Hippodrome. Journalists were now harking back with nostalgia to a raunchier, more exciting era, and Mogador was a key symbol of it. Much to her chagrin, this was overriding her five decades of creative output. Sex and sensuality were winning out over sense and substance. Only her memoirs were being mentioned in the press and she considered them her least substantial work.
The press’s attitude to Céleste, was exemplified on 1 December 1902, a few weeks before her seventy-eighth birthday when she fell down the stairs and injured her knees. This put her in hospital and once more the newspaper h
yenas circled. There was a moment of pathos when she pleaded tearfully with a journalist to refer to her books and plays, her real-life profession, rather than to Mogador. She showed him her range of books. The journalist demonstrated some respect and obliged, although he could not resist dwelling on her days as a courtesan.
At eighty years of age in late 1904, she was frightened to live alone in her bedsit in an area that was becoming increasingly violent with robbery and murder. With guidance from Drumont, who seemed to have kept their link going despite their disputes over the Dreyfus affair, she applied for a room in an old people’s home in Montmartre, La Providence. It was not a place for the poor or for invalids. Céleste knew and loved the lively Montmartre area, with its elevation and sloping streets that afforded wonderful views of Paris. She liked the preponderance of cafés and theatres that reminded her of her very early life in the Boulevard du Temple. She did not fancy walking up the hills, which were more like climbs for her now, especially where La Providence was situated. But this was a minor drawback. Céleste wanted to be a member of this comfortable retreat, which she knew would be her last home.3
She had to prove she had the income to pay the 1800 francs a year demanded for her lodging. The annual gift from the Count de Naurois, a stipend from the Society of Dramatic Authors, another annual payment from the society of composers for her many operettas and songs, some assistance from a French heiress friend Husna de Crepeney, and a final payment from Calmann-Lévy in addition to some cash in the bank got her over the line. She had enough left over for the occasional café meal out in the Paris she loved so much.
Céleste spent her final years wishing she could die rather than fade away and referred to life in general as ‘this absurdity between the cradle and the grave’. But she never seriously considered committing suicide again. She had no passion for it. Nor were there the stressful circumstances which had driven her to try it earlier. She didn’t even care if she was buried in the family vault with her mother and Vincent.4