That Beauvoir liked Marie enough to see her outside the confines of the Café de Paris is confirmed in a letter written to poet Félix Arvers, another member of the Twelve.
My dear Arvers,
d’Anthoine has just told me that M. Roger de Beauvoir is bringing Mlle Marie Duplessis this evening. Without being prudish, the women there may not wish to meet Mlle Duplessis, so it falls to me to ask you to explain to Roger why she cannot come.…
In fact, Marie got much closer than others in her position to gaining access to le monde. Vienne claims she was received at balls where young women of her kind were never admitted, and even the most meticulous observers of form would greet her while pretending not to know her name. The social rigidity of the ancien régime had relaxed under Louis-Philippe, and dowagers and titled women of fashion had begun to mix with the demimonde at charity balls and the races. “At first glance they were the same women, dressed by the same dressmakers, the only difference being that the demimonde seemed a little more chic,” writes Houssaye. This, of course, was especially true of Marie, whose elegance and dignity had made her indistinguishable from the grandees. Lola Montez also had the comportment of a duchess, but, Vandam claims, the moment she spoke the illusion vanished.
Montez was also incapable of humility—a concept Marie had discovered to be an effective way of breaking down social barriers. It was certainly how she had endeared herself to Mme Judith, who would one day find herself impersonating the courtesan in the role of Marguerite Gautier.
Marie was at the Variétés the night the actress collapsed onstage from a cerebral fever. Finding out her address (Nestor Roqueplan was the theater’s director), Marie went every day to her home while she was convalescing, leaving a bouquet of flowers but not revealing her name. Told by her maid that the young woman was beautiful and aristocratic-looking, Mme Judith left a note, urging the mysterious visitor to disclose her identity. Signing her reply “Your devoted and unworthy admirer, Marie Duplessis,” Marie admitted the reason for her anonymity: “I feared that if you had known my identity you would refuse my flowers. And I am afraid that in learning it today you will regret having received them.”
This may seem overly self-abasing, but Marie knew what she was doing. It was precisely Mme Judith’s reaction when she discovered that another “fervente admiratrice” was a celebrated figure in the demimonde. Every day at the theater a bouquet had arrived with a note from a woman signing herself Céleste and expressing concern about the actress’s ill health. Mme Judith was in her dressing room one evening, entertaining a group of writers and artists, when the latest missive was delivered. She passed it around to her friends, one of whom recognized the signature and exclaimed, “Don’t you know who this woman is? It’s Céleste Mogador!”
An exact contemporary of Marie, Mogador, whose real name was Elisabeth Vénard, had spent part of her youth in a Parisian brothel until Alfred de Musset took her under his wing. She was now a star dancer at Le Bal Mabille, her brilliance at performing the polka and cancan having challenged the fame of la reine Pomaré. Shocked by this, Mme Judith was then informed about Mogador’s reputation as a lesbian, which shocked her even more. Taking out one of her cards for her maid to deliver to the young woman waiting expectantly at the stage door, she wrote, “Good for a strong shower at La Salpêtrière” (the prison for prostitutes). The flowers were thrown in the rubbish.
Mme Judith’s response on learning that Marie was “the famous marchande d’amour” surprised even herself. “I don’t know why her letter pleased me so much. The modesty it revealed was so unexpected in a courtesan, and I resolved to bury my prejudice. I invited Marie Duplessis to come and see me.” Marie returned the invitation, and they met several times, once in the Bois de Boulogne, where Mme Judith was on foot and Marie promenading in her carriage. They spotted each other, but Marie made only an imperceptible sign of recognition so as not to compromise her new friend. When Mme Judith went up to the carriage and suggested they walk together, Marie hesitated for an instant before springing down and strolling beside her. “The Bois was crowded that day and we were noticed,” writes Mme Judith, who years later still remembered Marie’s outfit of a magnificent blue velvet coat lined with pink satin over a pale green dress braided with black velvet. On her head she wore a plumed black velvet cap, its feather secured with diamonds. Some people, said Mme Judith, were critical of this public display of friendship, but others, who could not help admiring the beautiful young courtesan, showed approval. Marie, she claimed, felt touched and indebted to her.
Daughter of a lace vendor and earning her living in a flamboyant profession still regarded as morally suspect, Mme Judith’s attitude defines the meaning of folie de grandeur. It was not rash for an actress—many of whom had similar lowly backgrounds—to form an attachment to Marie Duplessis. There was, however, no possibility of friendship with a woman of society—even though, as Vienne puts it, “their curiosity was constantly put on alert by men’s conversations about this marvelous sinner who was the talk of Paris.”
But if Marie could not belong to the world of these women, she already belonged to the world of their men. She was an invisible presence in the Jockey Club, an exclusive male bastion, to which the grandest salonnière would have been forbidden entry. Also known as Le Club des Lions, the Jockey had introduced to Paris the concept of gentlemen riders, and was such a closed environment that even Alfred de Musset had been blackballed. “Some of the most fashionable habitués of the Café de Paris, though not knowing a fetlock from a pastern, were all too pleased to join an institution which, with the mania for everything English … then conferred upon its members a kind of patent of ‘good form,’ ” wrote Vandam. The members’ hedonistic routine, in which it was considered proper never to get up before noon, was Marie’s own. She frequented the same restaurants, cafés, parks, boulevards, and theaters, and, had she been permitted, she would have lingered on at the Jockey Club until four or five in the morning. On a page of the Register of Requests, someone had added her name in a feminine hand to the signatures—“evidence of the consecration of Marie Duplessis in this grand milieu.”
One of her ex-lovers was Fernand de Montguyon, whose reputation was largely responsible for the Jockey Club’s being seen as a place of depraved behavior. It was in Montguyon’s name that the infamous Loge Infernale was rented for first nights at the Opéra. Virtually onstage, between the curtain and the orchestra pit, this was a special box whose access bestowed great cachet. With the Jockey Club then situated on rue de la Grange-Batelière, a few minutes’ walk from the Opéra on rue Le Peletier, the route to the stage door entrance could not have been simpler—an alleyway led directly there. A dandy’s destination was either a ballerina’s dressing room or the foyer de la danse, which Dr. Véron had opened to privileged outsiders so that the performers could arrange assignations with their wealthy admirers. There is a painting by Eugène Lami of this grand salon, ornately decorated with pillars, mirrors, and sculptures, a marble bust in one alcove of the eighteenth-century ballerina assoluta Mlle Guimard. Le foyer de la danse is a busy portrayal of half a dozen costumed dancers, a couple of whom are in off-duty, Degas poses, with the great Fanny Elssler (Taglioni’s rival), taking center place. Seated or standing among them is a scattering of formally dressed men—the key figures from Marie’s own circle: Dr. Véron, Alfred de Musset, Fernand de Montguyon, and Nestor Roqueplan.
By the early 1840s, the Opéra had lost its two stars (Taglioni to Russia and Elssler to America), but French ballet had by no means lost its luster, due largely to the appointment of the remarkable Italian ballerina Carlotta Grisi. The first Giselle in Gautier’s 1841 ballet, Grisi had became the poet’s muse, creating the title role in La Péri in 1843—another personal triumph. For romantic writers such as Musset the idealized, supernatural world of ballet blanc fired the imagination, its dancers representing in visible form their evanescent ideas. As in Tannhäuser’s Venusberg, however, spirituality was inseparable from sexual excess—an
antithesis captured in the illustrations to Voluptueux souvenirs; ou, Le Souper des Douze. These were drawn by the celebrated Achille Devéria, whom Roger de Beauvoir claimed was a member of their group. In one, a dreamy, top-hatted, baby-faced youth sits alone in his box, a manicured hand resting on its velvet ledge, the other clasping an impressive erection. In a second, a Taglioni-pure sylph, with roses in her hair, kneels while performing fellatio on a good-looking dandy. No wonder the Goncourts viewed the ballet as a debauched stock exchange of women:
From the stage to the auditorium, from the wings to the stage … invisible threads criss-cross between dancers’ legs, actresses’ smiles and spectators’ opera glasses, presenting an overall picture of Pleasure, Orgy and Intrigue. It would be impossible to gather together in a smaller space a greater number of sexual stimulants, of invitations to copulation.
Alexandre Dumas fils suggests that Marie, too, did not go to the theater for intellectual stimulation. Sitting in her box, sniffing at a bouquet and nibbling sweets from a bag, she paid very little attention to what was happening onstage: “hardly listening, making eyes in every direction, exchanging looks and smiles with her neighbors.” Vienne, however, insists that she was a cultivated judge of the arts, and that the actors and actresses, whom she received in her box, profited from the notes she gave them on their interpretations. She loved the company of performers and took an equal, if different, kind of pleasure in the atmosphere backstage: “The directors knew her and would provide her with a behind-the-scenes pass without her even having to ask,” says Vienne. She even considered going on the stage herself, an ambition that, as Houssaye remarks, was not unusual among her kind. “All these girls wanted to be actresses. The theater provided the baptism which saved them from original sin.”
Acting was one of the few lucrative options open to women, and it was also virtually the only profession in which independence was possible. A grand actress could, and often did, flout sexual norms, and society was prepared to accept behavior that they would denounce in a demimondaine. (Rachel’s reputation for loose living had not prevented her from being sought out by Parisian salonnières, including the venerable Mme Récamier.) Marie was already a practiced role-player in life, whether mimicking aristocratic ways or acting out passions she did not feel, and she was clearly confident about her talent. In the middle of recounting her life story to Mme Judith, she suddenly broke off and exclaimed, “Everything I’ve told you about my unhappiness is to make myself more interesting—and you’ve been taken in! I act well, don’t I! Almost as well as you!”
Marie studied for a short time with the well-known drama teacher Achille Ricourt, who vowed he had spotted Rachel’s genius when she was a street urchin and who was constantly on the lookout for exceptional pupils. His public classes at the Ecole des Jeunes Artistes on the rue de la Tour-d’Auvergne were made up mostly of respectable young girls watched by their mothers, but Marie would not have felt out of place as Ricourt did not exclude the occasional demimondaine among his pupils. Charles Monselet provides a lively picture of Ricourt at work. He rarely remembered anyone’s name, and he would catch a girl’s attention by calling out things like “Mademoiselle, you, the little blonde … over there … yes, you!” After some initial warm‑up euphonic exercises, his favorite pupil, Agrippine, demonstrates his method, an eccentric distillation of the three facets of theater—comedy, drama, and tragedy—into three words. The first, “elegant,” enunciated by Agrippine as “Eé-liéé-gan-tiéé,” delights the teacher. “There you have the tone of comedy, there is the spirit, the brio, the piquancy!” Agrippine then inflates her cheeks as if about to play trombone and prepares to tackle the second, “montagne,” a challenge which Ricourt warns requires “biceps in the throat.” But only the maestro himself can demonstrate the essence of tragedy, the invented word “superbatandor”: “You must emphasise the ‘r,’ everything rests on the ‘r’—it’s the great secret: Superrrbatandorrr!”
It could have been a dislike of the passionately febrile Ricourt, dropping names of prominent literary friends, reciting alexandrines, and intoning “in the manner of Diderot,” or it could have been the strain of arriving at the school by 10:15 in the morning, but Marie’s enthusiasm for the stage did not last long. Dumas père, who had learned of her ambition, was not surprised.
The theatre, you understand, demands study, rehearsal, performance, it is a great challenge to undertake, a great determination which disallows common pleasures. It is much easier to rise at two in the afternoon, to dress, to promenade in the Bois, to return for dinner at the Café de Paris or Frères Provençaux, to go from there to spend an evening in a stage-box at the Palais-Royal, or Vaudeville or Gymnase; to have supper after the theatre, to return at three in the morning to one’s home or to someone else’s—than to pursue the metier of a Mlle Mars.… The débutante forgot her vocation.
Instead, Marie used the proscenium of her theater box as her stage. “It’s there above all that she gave to the mute, disdainful audience, the impact of her beauty,” remarked Paul de Saint-Victor, whose portrayal of Marie confirms that she already possessed the inner radiance of a star—the ability to be a cynosure while remaining stationary and silent. “Her presence never failed to cause a sensation; every eye avidly took in this fresh, Raphaelite face.” Aware that the positioning of her box was of key importance, Marie went out of her way to compete for a choice one—as this flirtatious note indicates. It was sent to the distributeur des faveurs of the Théâtre de Vaudeville.
Once again I’m asking for your help with a box. I dare not ask you for one of the best. You would only send me to the devils. On the other hand, if you want to be one of these devils yourself, then fair enough, you will do me great pleasure. Otherwise a good box on the second tier.… I will be very grateful to you [although] you really do owe me a favour. I visited you and you weren’t there.
With my best wishes and thanks. M. Duplessy. [sic]
In a painting believed to be by Eugène Lami, Marie, wearing a sylphlike white dress, reclines languorously in her box with two admirers by her side. One man scans the upper tier opposite; the other is very attentive, but Marie is ignoring him, reading from a large, single-page program. On the ledge are the props with which she came to be identified: a pretty pair of opera glasses, a small bouquet à la main, and a flower pinned to her corsage, which appears to be her namesake camellia.
This was a flower much in vogue. With an out-of-season stem of hothouse blooms costing up to twenty francs, camellias were also a symbol of status. And not only in Paris. An anonymous 1841 portrait of Verdi’s mistress, Giuseppina Strepponi, shows her with a single white camellia pinned to her décolletage and a cluster worn in her hair—an effect even more striking now as an uncanny prefiguration of her lover’s most famous heroine. Camellias have no scent, which is why the consumptive Marie is said to have favored them, but in fact she loved all flowers—even those as heavily scented as hyacinths. A bill from the florist Ragonot, dated 9 November 1843, confirms this:
F
Vendu à Madame Dupleci [sic] d’une part 3
9 pots de fleurs 15
16 2 grappe de fleurs 6
23 4 Camellia monté 12
30 2 grappe de Camellia 6
23 décembre 2 Camellia blancs monté 5
2 janvier 1844 1 Bouquet à la mains 15
1 fleur de Camellia impérialiste 3
5 février 2 fleurs de Camellia monté 4
8 1 Bouquet à la main et
4 fleurs de Camellia monté 20
11 5 azaleas 15
12 2 Rose du Roy 16
1 Bruere [Bruyère-heather] 3
1 pot de yacinthe de Hollande 2
14 1 Bouquet à la main 20
2 grappes de Camellia 8
9 pot de yacinthe de Hollande 16
Total 184 f.
Sur le quele [sic] J’ai Reçu 20 Reste du 164 f.
Worth noting is the red “camellia impérialiste” bought on January 2. In the novel, Marguer
ite takes a single bloom from a bouquet of red camellias and places it in Armand’s buttonhole, telling him that he may see her again when her camellias are white again. It is her way of alluding to the fact that she will be indisposed for the next five days of the month.
La dame aux camélias may have been a title given to Marie by one of the Opéra’s usherettes, by her florist, or by Dumas fils himself. He always insisted that any portraits painted during Marie’s lifetime that showed her wearing a camellia were apocryphal or retouched, since the whole idea of associating her with the flower belonged to him alone. Mme Judith echoed this: “It was Dumas’ invention to give her a taste exclusively for camellias.” In fact, this was not the case. An earlier Lady of the Camellias, almost certainly using Marie as a model, had appeared two years before the novel came out. George Sand’s Isidora was serialized in La Revue Indépendante in the spring of 1845 and published in book form in 1846. A woman of simple elegance and aristocratic manners describes herself as “la dame aux camélias.” She reveals that she is consumptive, has known poverty and misery, but now that she is wealthy finds herself filled with self-reproach. George Sand never refers to Marie by name, but in a 1853 preface, as if describing a Mme Judith–type encounter, she gives a brief, enigmatic depiction of “a very beautiful person, extraordinarily intelligent, who came several times to pour forth her heart at my feet.” This, she says, took place in Paris in 1845. And with several friends and acquaintances in common, it is more than likely that the two women had met.
No camellias were ordered for the night Marie appeared incognito at one of the season’s Opéra balls, but a bill from Geslin, dated 21 January 1844, details the hire of a velvet mask with satin fringe for four francs. This formed part of a domino outfit—a half-mask and hooded black cloak—which was required dress for women at these balls. That Saturday night, Marie would have been among a black flood of people surging into the brilliantly lit grand salon of the Opéra. It was “one immense Belshazzar’s hall,” in the words of Lord Beaconsfield, who had been in Paris at Carnival time the year before and witnessed a sight that amazed him:
The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis Page 11