The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis

by Julie Kavanagh

  This was no deterrent. Stirred by the prospect of a chase, the fervent suitor redoubled his attentions—as Prudence put it, “He thinks he can get somewhere with her by visiting at eleven at night and sending her all the jewels she could ever want.” In desperation, Marie arranged that her maid, Rose, would act one night as her replacement. All went according to plan, Vienne says, but then the joke rebounded: Ponval lured Rose away, “promising to make her a provisional baroness,” yet gave no sign of giving up his pursuit of Marie.

  In a version by Méjannes in Gil Blas, Ponval becomes the “marquis de G.” (A possible model, if only because of the chime of his name, is the marquis de Grandval, who was also a Jockey Club member). “Marie Duplessis really did cast him aside, as Dumas wrote—even on the occasion when he brought her a tenth diamond ring.” Méjannes then gives the following passage as an example of Marie’s derision:

  —You’re wasting your time, Marquis, take that away: I have forbidden you to return, and here you are again!

  —But I saw the carriage of [Agénor de Guiche] downstairs. Can’t mine just as well be in front of your door?

  —Marquis, you imagine that giving me presents to the value of fifteen thousand francs allows you the right to become one of my intimate friends. And yet I know that you have an unhappy little mistress to whom you refuse five hundred francs a month.… Clotilde [Marie’s new maid], show Monsieur the marquis to the door.

  Some chroniclers of Marie’s story have assumed that Dumas’s doting young count is a caricature of Ned Perregaux. Now reduced to spending his money on necessities, Ned, according to Vienne, had become an encumbrance to Marie, but he certainly was not the Count de N. The fictional count, bombarding Marguerite with jewels, is an “imbecile” who infuriates her, whereas Marie was still fond of Ned. As Vienne says, “She had too big a heart to forget what he had thrown at her feet—everything that was left of his lavish inheritance.” Her continuing affection is evident in the note she wrote on 25 February 1845. Although the favor she was asking could account for her endearments, she clearly preferred Ned’s company to that of his profligate young rival, who had exasperated her in her box at the theater by his trivial remarks and braying laugh.

  In great haste.

  My dearest Ned,

  This evening at the Variétés there will be an extraordinary performance in honor of Bouffé. It will start with le Diner de Madelon, le Père Turlututu, Phèdre by [sic—see notes] Audry [sic], le Gamin de Paris, a bit of Sylphide, a quadrille of artists,—in all, a charming evening. You will give me great pleasure if you arrange a box for me. Let me know, my dear friend. I kiss your eyes a thousand million times, if you will allow me. Marie.

  The veteran actor Marie Bouffé had recently been taken on at the Variétés by Nestor Roqueplan—a significant coup, as Bouffé had made the fortune of the Théâtre du Gymnase. But as the actor’s health was poor, and he did not think he could carry the repertory alone, he had suggested that Roqueplan engage as a second star the celebrated Virginie Déjazet. The gala that Marie was so keen to attend was as much a tribute to Déjazet as to Bouffé, an opportunity for the public to welcome her back to Paris after an absence of several years. “Her name on the posters was enough to attract the finest flowers of Parisian society,” wrote one of her biographers.

  By early evening on February 25, the Variétés was full to bursting, its auditorium ablaze with light from gas jets and the huge central chandelier, the buzz of anticipation exactly like that which Zola describes at the start of his novel Nana:

  Women were languidly fanning themselves, casting glances over the hustle and bustle; smart young men in low-cut waistcoats and with a gardenia in their button holes had stationed themselves beside the orchestra, peering through opera-glasses poised in their gloved fingertips.… In this first-night audience, always full of the same people, there were little private groups smilingly acknowledging each other, while the regular theatre-goers, still with their hats on, were exchanging waves and nods.… This was Paris: the Paris of literature, finance and pleasure; lots of journalists, a few authors, stockbrokers and more courtesans than respectable women; a strangely mixed bunch, comprising every kind of genius, tainted with every kind of vice.

  It was much the same mix at Déjazet’s debut. “Every member of the press, artists, theatre-lovers, gens du monde, students, schoolchildren … everyone scrambling through the Variétés’ doors to pay homage to her.” Renowned for roles en travestie, Déjazet had a nondescript face but was adored by the public for her sparkling personality and exceptional range, which spanned from grande dame to grisette, king to timid schoolboy. “She spoke in all the jargons and dazzled with a thousand metamorphoses!” That night at the Variétés, appearing in her signature role in the vaudeville Premières armes de Richelieu, Déjazet exceeded expectation.

  In the audience was the actress’s twenty-four-year-old son, Eugène, who had grown up in an exceptionally free milieu (Virginie Déjazet’s lovers included two members of the Café de Paris’s infamous Souper des Douze—the wealthy man-about-town Alfred Tattet and his poet friend Félix Arvers). But, though spoiled by his mother and avid for any kind of pleasure, Eugène was a charming young man who had recently formed a close friendship with an intelligent twenty-year-old whose upbringing had been just as unconventional. This was Alexandre Dumas, the illegitimate son of the great writer, who was himself embarking on a literary career and had been launched by his father into the easy morality of the times—what Dumas fils called the paganism of modern life.

  He and Eugène had spent the day riding together in the forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and returned to the city in time for an early supper and the theater. Sitting beside each other in the stalls of the Variétés, they had a clear view of Marie, framed in her box on the right of the stage. Alexandre could hardly take his eyes off her.

  She was alone there, or rather, she was the only person one could see … exchanging smiles and glances with three or four of our neighbours, leaning back, from time to time, to chat with an invisible occupant of her box, who was no other than the aged Russian Count S—. Marie Duplessis was flashing signals to a fat woman with a freckled face and a flashy costume who was in one of the boxes of the higher tier opposite to her. This good lady, sitting beside a pale young girl who seemed restless and ill at ease, and whom she had presumably undertaken to “launch” in the world of gallantry, was a certain Clémence Pr—t, a milliner, whose establishment was in an apartment on the boulevard de la Madeleine, in the house adjoining that in which Marie Duplessis occupied the mezzanine floor. Eugène Déjazet knew Mme Pr—t, Mme Pr—t knew Marie Duplessis whom I was anxious to know.

  It would not have been the first time that Alexandre had seen Marie. He was a familiar figure in the cafés and theaters of Paris and would have encountered Marie in her usual haunts. He had watched her arrive for her daily promenade on the Champs-Elysées in her small blue carriage drawn by two magnificent bays, noting how she maintained a mysterious discretion, unlike other kept women, whose aim was to be noticed. “She was almost always alone, and hid herself as much as she could.” Like his narrator describing a sighting of Marguerite, he may have discovered her name after seeing her at the entrance of Susse on the place de la Bourse. Officially a stationery and art supply shop, it also sold knickknacks, silverware, bronzes, and paintings by contemporary artists—often at bargain prices. (Dumas père acquired a Delacroix at Susse for six hundred francs.) Fashionable Parisians rarely passed by without stopping to peer through the windows of Susse, although that day it was not the artworks Alexandre was eyeing but Marie.

  She wore a muslin dress with full panels, a cashmere shawl embroidered at the corner with gold thread and silk flowers, a Leghorn straw hat and a single bracelet, one of those thick gold chains which were then just beginning to be fashionable. She got into her carriage and drove off. One of the shop assistants remained in the doorway with his eyes following the carriage of his elegant customer. I went up to him and asked hi
m who she was.

  Alexandre himself cut a striking figure. Swinging a cane with a golden knob, he was a quintessential dandy, swathed in a dark cashmere shawl and wearing a white cravat, black trousers hemmed with silk, and a quilted London waistcoat of impeccable cut. Such chic came at a cost, and by the age of twenty he owed debts tens of thousands of francs. Forced to pay his creditors himself, Alexandre turned to journalism, writing articles at ten centimes a line in voguish magazines, including Sylphide and Paris Elégant. He may, in fact, have been the new correspondent for Paris Elégant’s “Chronique de la mode,” a fashion column published in serial form. The narrative in the issues of 10 February to 20 March 1845 is a spoof portrait of a lovely young courtesan named Sylphide, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Marie Duplessis. She is “as discreet as a woman of good family,” and she wears a ravishing garland on her head of violets and pink camellias. She first appears at an Opéra ball accompanied by a young lion and a Russian diplomat, her box having been obtained that morning from the director of the Opéra himself. Her passion for shopping takes her to modish boutiques like the couturière Camille, and Mayer, where elegant Parisians, Marie among them, bought their gloves. En route, she encounters various well-dressed women, one wearing a white cashmere shawl “embroidered with white braid and threads of gold; its fringes long and thick in gold and white silk.” The columns are signed “Marie,” but when Sylphide arrives at an atelier on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, the author plants a clue. The shop, which sold musical instruments, was Chez Alexandre, but its full title was MM. Alexandre Père et Fils—“a name which my readers will no doubt already have guessed.”

  In recent weeks, Dumas father and son had become closer than ever before. Their tropical ancestry (Alexandre fils’s great-grandmother was a Haitian slave girl) had produced the same swarthy complexion and striking features, Dumas père taking great pride in his handsome son, with his curly hair and melting creole eyes. He saw himself as a friend and accomplice of his son, whose company he relished. “I know of no two characters more diametrically opposed … which yet harmonize better. To be sure, each of us finds plenty of enjoyment away from the other; but I think the best times are those we spend together.… He uses all his wit to make fun of me and loves me with all his heart.”

  This had not always been the case. Until he was eight, when his father finally acknowledged him, Alexandre’s family had been his mother. At the age of thirty, Catherine Labay, a blond, pale-skinned seamstress, had begun an affair with Dumas, then a twenty-two-year-old bureaucrat with literary ambitions, who lived in rooms across the landing. When she gave birth to their son in 1824, Dumas installed them both in a little apartment in Passy but visited only rarely. Alexandre’s earliest memories were of playing under the table while his mother sewed to scrape out a living. In 1831, after his first theatrical success, Dumas decided to take on material responsibility for his son and allowed him to use his name. He wanted Alexandre to benefit from the kind of education he himself had never had and sent the seven-year-old to an expensive boarding school—but still he kept away, absorbed by his writing and numerous female conquests.

  Alexandre’s attitude to his father’s mistresses had always been hostile, but Dumas’s marriage to the portly actress Ida Ferrier in 1840 caused a serious breach between them. The couple had settled in Florence, and a brief respite came three years later when Dumas returned alone to Paris. Father and son established a rapport for the first time, and the eighteen-year-old discovered his eminent father to be a big child, exuberantly identifying with his own youth and curiosity. “We went together into the pleasures of the world—of all worlds.” At a masked ball in Montparnasse, they danced all night with such abandon that when they got home Alexandre had to split the seams of his father’s tight, sweat-drenched breeches to get them off. Encouraging the rumor that they passed on their women to each other, he would jokingly rebuke Dumas père in front of friends for giving him cast-off mistresses to sleep with and new boots to break in. “What are you complaining about?” retorted the other. “It proves you have a narrow foot and a thick prick!”

  Their complicity was destroyed by Mme Dumas rejoining her husband, and when relations reached crisis point, Alexandre fled, spending several months in Marseille, staying with one of his father’s friends, poet and librettist Joseph Méry. With his passion for gambling and patronage of the sleazy cafés of the port, Méry was a wayward influence yet inspirational at the same time. He was the city’s librarian and more cultured than anyone Alexandre had ever known, capable of singing his way through Rossini’s Otello or Guillaume Tell from beginning to end (Méry did not believe he had the right to admire something he did not know by heart). Directing his protégé to the museum’s paintings by Ingres, Puget, and Rubens, Méry also took him to the ancient town of Pomponiana and encouraged him to act on his dreams. While reclining in the shade of a palm tree in Hyères, the two recited their poems to each other. Méry responded to Alexandre’s first attempts at verse with enthusiasm and astonished his young friend with his own rich creativity. Méry’s literary renown had earned him such respect locally that he was virtually invincible—as Alexandre had been relieved to discover. “If you have spent a little too much time by the side of one of these charming Marseillaise grisettes with their little bonnet and little feet whose brother or fiancé waits for you at the corner of the rue du Vieux-Quartier you have nothing to fear if you are with Méry—because Joseph Méry is the viceroy of Marseille.”

  Under Méry’s guidance Alexandre became involved with an actress, a relationship he hoped would continue when they both returned to Paris, but she wrote to end it, saying that he was too poor to keep her. When he took this to heart and stayed away, his seeming indifference reignited her interest, as he reported to Méry in a letter dated 18 October 1844: “She gave me to understand that although she was living with another, whom she regarded in the light of a husband, serving him only for money, she would be only too delighted to continue going to bed with her Marseille friends.… Now I am no longer very sad. I am working.” What cheered him up even further was the news of his father’s estrangement from Ida Ferrier, who had run off with an Italian nobleman. With his stepmother off the premises, Alexandre spent as much time as he could at his father’s rented house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where Dumas, feeling isolated in the countryside, was always delighted to see him.

  On one such day, Alexandre encountered Eugène Déjazet and accompanied him to the Variétés. Observing that his friend was inflamed with infatuation at the sight of Marie, Eugène arranged an introduction. “[He] went over to talk to Mme Pr—t, who was a born go-between for such purposes, and it was agreed that we should go round to her flat after the play was over, and that if the count said good-bye to Marie Duplessis at the door, instead of going in with her, she would allow us to pay her a short visit.”

  The rest of the evening, as related in the novel, was exactly what happened. Marguerite and her companion leave the theater early, disappearing in a phaeton drawn by two superb horses, which the old duke drives himself. Meanwhile, Armand and “Gaston R.” have joined Prudence in her box, and the three also leave before the performance is over, taking a hackney cab to her apartment. As Prudence shows them around her shop she chatters away answering Armand’s questions about Marguerite’s lovers. “I never see anyone stay when I go, but I couldn’t say no one comes after I’ve left,” she says, mentioning the Count de N., who is often there, and the old duke, who will not leave her alone. When she hears Marguerite’s voice, she goes into her cabinet de toilette and opens the window. “I’ve been calling you for ten minutes,” Marguerite says imperiously, ordering Prudence to come right away because the Count de N. has not left and is boring her to death. The two young men follow Prudence to Marie’s front door, lurking behind, as she tells Marguerite that she has two visitors who would like to meet her.

  On hearing the famous names of Déjazet and Dumas, Marie would certainly have welcomed the pair, but Marguer
ite’s eagerness to see Gaston and Armand, who were just another couple of handsome young lions, is due solely to her hope that they would drive away the besotted Count de N. “Try to be more amusing than him,” Prudence whispers, “or else—I know Marguerite—she’ll take it out on me.” When they go into the drawing room, they see Marguerite sitting at the piano, struggling to master a piece by Weber, while the young man leans on the mantelpiece watching her. “I remember exactly his features and eminent name,” Dumas fils later wrote. “He was someone I had met several times in le monde, who put up with the whims of Marie Duplessis with the most amiable and elegant cour-tesy.” Count de N., as Marguerite had planned, announces he is leaving.

  —Goodbye, my dear Count, must you go so soon?

  —Yes, I fear I bore you.

  —You do not bore me today more than any other day.

  Armand flinches at Marguerite’s cruelty but can’t help admiring her behavior. “This proof of disinterest in not accepting an elegant, rich young man ready to ruin himself for her excused, in my eyes, all the faults of her past.”

  With Dumas’s assurance that his account of that night was absolutely exact, we are given a fascinatingly impartial picture of Marie. In this scene Marguerite is a pitiless, petulant diva, who flings a piano score across the room in a tantrum of frustration and reveals harsh peasant roots beneath her discreet, aristocratic veneer. By l a.m., when the atmosphere and conversation have disintegrated into debauchery, she is tipsy and as raucous as a street porter. Gaston is amused by her bawdiness, but Armand is saddened to hear profanities coming from the lips of “this beautiful creature of twenty.” When she starts to sing a squalid song, he is embarrassed and asks her to stop.