—Oh, how chaste you are! she smiles taking his hand.
—It’s not for me, it’s for you.
She waves her hand as if to say, “Oh, it’s a long time since I was concerned about chastity.”
With each glass of champagne Marguerite’s cheeks get more flushed, and a cough, light at first, becomes troublesome enough to force her head against the back of her chair and make her support her chest with both hands. Toward the end of supper she is seized by an even more violent coughing fit, turns purple, shuts her eyes in pain, and brings a handkerchief to her lips. Seeing it stained with blood, she gets up and runs into her dressing room. Ignoring Prudence, who says that this happened every day and that she would soon be back, Armand goes after her.
In just this way, Alexandre followed Marie. It was, he wrote, “the same supper, the same animation, the same sudden indisposition of Marie Duplessis.… Of those who were at supper I was the only one to be concerned when she left the table.” In a room lit by a single candle, he saw her lying on a sofa, deathly pale, her dress undone and one hand resting on her heart. She was struggling to get her breath back, and beside her was a silver bowl half full of water, which she had used as a spittoon. It was marbled with strands of blood. Alexandre sat down next to her. “I was not able to hide my emotion. I cried on kissing her hand.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, when Sarah Bernhardt played this scene onstage, anyone in the audience with medical knowledge was appalled. The tuberculosis germ was now known to be transmitted by sputum droplets expelled through coughing, and the saliva was considered life-threatening. Invalids using spittoons were told never to leave them uncovered, and an article in Le Monde warned that spitting into handkerchiefs and letting them dry on beds or pillows “is likely to coat these (as well as the room’s occupants) with bacilli.” In 1898 the physician Joseph Grancher delivered a lengthy report singling out contagious spittle for his attack. “We know … that the tuberculeux is dangerous and that we must be protected from him.”
Marie’s era, however, was a time of “romantic medicine,” when the profession still used a patient’s individual temperament to explain the cause of the illness. In fact, René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec, who invented the stethoscope, attributed the cause of pulmonary consumption to “sorrowful passions.” Romantic literature and art exploited this notion with images of the frail, consumptive heroine whose beauty was enhanced by the disease’s wasting effect on the body. Marguerite Gautier, with her slender frame, pallid face, and eyes half circled by bluish shadows, became one of many idealized stereotypes. Dumas fils was partially responsible, but the responsive youth in Marie’s boudoir did not have his literary future in mind and was genuinely overcome by her condition.
An early experience of intense misery had left Alexandre with a great capacity for compassion. When he was a small child, his mother had said, “You don’t have a father … that doesn’t mean that your father is dead: it means that a lot of people will despise and insult you.” At the Pension Saint-Victor, the most renowned and least disciplined private boarding school in Paris, he had been persecuted by his peers, who called him “bastard,” interrupted his sleep with surprise nocturnal attacks, and covered his exercise books with obscene drawings labeled with his mother’s name. He said nothing but began to suffer from heart palpitations and nervous crises that went on for several years. The opening of his autobiographical novel L’affaire Clemenceau (1867) helped him to exorcise memories of this torment, but he never lost his conviction that on a basic level, human beings were cruel. Feeling he had a mission, Dumas fils became a writer “fired with proselytizing,” in the words of English writer Edmund Gosse. “His great father, le père prodigue, had been all for self. Alexandre would be all for others.”
His dissipated life, first in Paris with his father and then in Marseille with Méry, had fortified his sympathy for fallen women. In an 1872 pamphlet, Homme-Femme, he uses the term feminist, its earliest recorded use. It could describe his younger self. In a long diatribe in The Lady of the Camellias, he recalls seeing a girl being arrested in the street, still clasping the baby from which she was about to be separated, an image that filled him with as much dismay as the discovery of another victim, who had been led into a life of vice by her own mother. By the time Alexandre met Marie he was consumed by sympathy for courtesans. He was only twenty years old but had an intuitive knowledge of female psychology, and unlike most men, was indulgent about a woman’s frailties. In Marie he saw great sadness behind the veil of feverish ebullience, and he sensed that the wanton behavior he had witnessed was her way of forgetting who she was. The dialogue that follows between Armand and Marguerite replicates almost word for word their own exchange.
—You are killing yourself, Madame. I would like to be your friend, your guardian, so that I could prevent you from doing such harm to yourself.
—Ah it’s not worth you alarming yourself, she said bitterly. Look how the others aren’t bothering. It’s because they know there’s nothing that can be done about my illness.… If I took care of myself as I should I would die. What keeps me going is the pace of this life that I lead.… Love me like a friend and nothing more. Come and see me. We will laugh, we will chat. You have a good heart, you have a need to be loved. You are too young and too sensitive to live in our world. Get yourself a married woman.
But the tall, broad-shouldered young poet exuding kindness and sympathy was too engaging to turn away. “Adet,” as Marie called him (from the French pronunciation of his initials), found himself being favored more and more in the coming weeks. He was sometimes invited into her box at the theater, and eventually allowed to spend the whole night. “One morning I left at eight, and a day came when I was permitted to leave at midday.” He became known as Marie Duplessis’s new amant de cœur—a situation that posed no threat to Agénor de Guiche, then in the midst of an affair with Rachel, but that devastated Ned Perregaux. In a letter dated March 1845, Ned reapplied to join the Foreign Legion. Thanks to three endorsements from well-connected friends of his family, his application was accepted this time, but the authorities could find no trace of him. Vienne says he vanished from Paris for four months.
Alexandre was exactly the same age as Marie. Like two children, they seized the chance to have fun together, roaming the dark alleys of the Champs-Elysées and making excursions outside Paris. A favorite outing was to stables owned by a man named Ravelet, who bought horses from the garrison of Saint-Germain—cast-off horses that kicked, reared, and bolted—and charged thirty sous an hour for vertiginous rides. “He was famous among our generation,” Dumas fils wrote to his publisher, recounting how the nags were soon corrected of the vices that had expelled them from the regiment.
It did not matter if they were saddled for women or for men. Provided with their cavaliers they were whipped into action … helped by youth and laughter.… Happy times! This maison Ravelet was, you can imagine, a place for rendezvous.… Ravelet saw his jades ridden by all the pretty girls of the Parisian world of gallantry, including Marie Duplessis … whose impetuous nature reveled in these rides at top speed.
They often went walking together by the Rond-point des Roses and the terrace beyond Ravelet’s property in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. This was close to Villa Médicis, the house that Dumas père was renting, but Alexandre did not take Marie to visit his father. “As soon as a woman takes my arm,” he once told him, “the first thing she does is to lift her skirt to stop it getting dirty, and the second is to ask me when she can meet you.”
Alexandre Dumas père was in his heyday and one of the best known and most affectionately regarded public figures in Paris. The moment he appeared in a theater or concert hall, the entire audience would rise to its feet. Journalist Hippolyte de Villemessant recalled, “Everyone turned to look at the illustrious novelist, whose tall figure dominated the crowd and who, smiling right and left at his friends and even at strangers, progressed only slowly towards his seat in the stalls, detained as he wa
s by all the hands held out for him to shake on the way.” This fascination was due as much to Dumas’s charisma and notoriety as a womanizer as to his fame as a writer. His Caribbean ancestry also intrigued both men and women, “He benefited from the myth, already current, of the superior sexual prowess of men of African extraction,” as one biographer put it.
Across the Channel, another national treasure, Charles Dickens, would, at forty-five, inspire the love of an eighteen-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan, the secret of his final years. For Marie, the idea of becoming the mistress of the forty-three-year-old French literary titan had equal appeal, and she had already made the first approach. Unattached and fabulously wealthy, Dumas père was an irresistible life force whose joie de vivre infected everyone around him. “It was absolutely impossible to be dull in his society,” remarked Albert Vandam. He also had the power to make things happen. Another reason Alexandre fils’s Marseille actress gave for ending their affair was that it might jeopardize her career by “causing problems” with his father. Perhaps suspecting that he was once again being used as a link and knowing of Marie’s own ambition to go on the stage, Alexandre went out of his way to keep her to himself.
A section of his poem collected in his book Sins of Youth is addressed to “M.D.” and describes the spring evenings they spent together. Marie was swaddled in winter clothes, sitting close to the fire, staring dreamily at the flames, or playing the piano while Alexandre listened. She was, he wrote, “always ready for love” and seemed to find a release through sex for her incessant insomnia.
Do you remember the nights when burning with desire,
Your frantic body writhing beneath kisses,
You found the sleep you longed for
In the warm afterglow …
Like Marguerite, whose eyes Dumas fils describes as flickering intermittently with flashes of desire, Marie could not hide her innate sensuality. But while the young writer championed a woman’s right to feel unbridled passions, the moralistic, mature Dumas fils was implacably censorious. The narrator of L’affaire Clemenceau, published nineteen years after The Lady of the Camellias, is shocked when he discovers his lovely young wife, Iza, swimming naked in an icy river. She had asked him to bring her a large sheet and some hot milk in a silver basin, and when he prudishly rushes to cover her, she insists on drinking the milk first, swallowing it in long, slow gulps. “Then she threw herself into his arms, offering her red lips tinted with milk.”
Iza’s craving for new experiences is regarded in the novel as dangerous, the first sign of nymphomania. “Such is the woman you married,” the husband is told. “You have naively developed her natural sensuality.” Unable to remember the names of the men she has slept with, she admits that she is ill—a response that was standard at the time. Sexual appetite in a woman was seen as a symptom of disease or insanity, and tuberculosis was believed to set into motion a biochemical process that heightened a patient’s libido. A Dr. C. Cabanes, writing about famous victims of the virus, including Marie and Rachel, entitles his book Poitrinaires et grandes amoureuses (Consumptives and Great Lovers). Alexandre was unsure whether Marie’s love of sex was intrinsic to her nature “or else an effect of her state of health”—whatever the case, Dumas père was convinced that his son had toned down his portrayal.
He was not bound to let the public know that the frequent recurrence of these erotic episodes, always with a different partner, constitutes a disease which is as well known to specialists as the disease of drunkenness, and for which it is impossible to find a cure. Messalina, Catherine II, and thousands of women have suffered from it. When they happen to be born in such exalted stations as these two, they buy men; when they happen to be born in a lowly station and are attractive, they sell themselves; when they are ugly and repulsive they sink to the lowest depths of degradation, or end in the padded cells of a madhouse, where no man dares come near them. Nine times out of ten the malady is hereditary, and I am certain that if we could trace the genealogy of Alphonsine Plessis, we should find the taint either on the father’s side or on the mother’s—probably on the former’s, but more probably still on both.
Dumas may have formed this opinion from boulevard gossip, from what his son had told him, or from an incident he described in his newspaper, Le Mousquetaire. He recalled walking along one of the passages at the Théâtre-Français when the door of a box opened and someone caught hold of his coattails. It was Alexandre.
—So it’s you, is it? Good evening, dear boy.
—Come in here, Father.
—You’re not alone?
—All the more reason. Shut your eyes, put your head through the door. Don’t be afraid, nothing unpleasant will happen to you.
—True enough. I had hardly shut my eyes, hardly put my head through the door, than I felt upon my mouth the pressure of a pair of trembling, feverish, burning lips. I opened my eyes. An adorable young woman of twenty or twenty-two, was alone there with Alexandre, and had just bestowed on me that far from daughterly caress. I recognized her from having seen her more than once.…
—So it’s you, dear child, I said, gently releasing myself from her arms.
—Yes, it appears that I have to take you by force.
—Why do you think that?
—Oh! I know that it is not your reputation, but why are you being so cruel to me? I have written twice suggesting a meeting at the Opera Ball.
—In front of the clock at two in the morning.
—So you did receive my letters.
—Certainly I received them.
—So why did you not come then?
—Because I thought your letters were addressed to Alexandre.
—To Alexandre Dumas, yes.
—But to Alexandre Dumas fils.
—Oh come now! Alexandre is Dumas fils; but you are most certainly not Dumas père, and you will never be.
—Thank you for the compliment, my lovely lady.
—So why didn’t you come?
—Because at one or two in the morning in front of the clock there are only energetic twenty- or thirty-year-olds, or imbeciles of forty or fifty. As I have turned forty I would naturally be classed in the second category by observers, and that would be humiliating.
—I don’t see why.
—Let me explain. A beautiful girl like you does not suggest lovers’ meetings to men of my age unless she has need of them. What can I do for you? I offer you my protection without any question of love in return.…
—Well then, said Marie with a charming smile, her long black lashes veiling her eyes. We will come and see you, won’t we, Monsieur.
—Whenever you wish, Mademoiselle.
And I bowed to her as I might have bowed to a duchess. The door closed behind me and I was back again in the passage. That was the only time I ever kissed Marie Duplessis: it was the last time I ever saw her. I waited for Alexandre and the lovely courtesan to visit me. A few days later Alexandre came alone.
—Well? I said to him.
—Ah, yes, you mean Marie?
—Why haven’t you brought her?
The flirtatious exchange at the theater was reason enough, but Alexandre admitted that their fling was over. They had parted, he writes in Sins of Youth, as a result of a quarrel. “Why? I don’t know: Over nothing! The suspicion of an unknown lover.” It was an Englishman, he told his father.
—I hope you weren’t in love.
—No. What I feel for her is compassion.
They discussed Marie’s tuberculosis, Alexandre saying the fatal outcome was still not certain but would soon be confirmed. “With the life she leads things will move fast from probability to certainty.” After that, Dumas claimed, they never spoke about her again, although years later, after a particularly moving performance of the play, Alexandre felt obliged to confess to his father that Armand had loved Marguerite that night with a passion he never felt for Marie.
Father and son began living together in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, “more closely bound to the ot
her by ties of affection than to any other soul, his mother excepted in the young man’s case.” Marie, meanwhile, was missing the company of her bel ami. She had an Englishman, a generous, horse-mad aristocrat whom Méjannes calls “Lord A.,” but he was of no consequence. She valued friendships with passion and wanted to keep Alexandre in her life.
Dear Adet,
Why have you not let me know how you are? And why are you not talking frankly to me? I believe that you should regard me as a friend, so I’m hoping for a word from you, and I kiss you tenderly as a mistress, or as a friend. It’s your choice.… Whatever the case I will always be your devoted … Marie.
Only Romain, among her male friends, was consistently loyal and reliable. Like Alexandre, he was convinced that her wild lifestyle was hastening her end and asked which doctor was taking care of her. “I have three,” she told him, “two French and a Prussian. You’d approve of the first two as they prescribe rest, country air, nutritious diet, Bordeaux wine and meals at regular intervals all of which is perfect, but impossible for me. As for the Prussian, I believe, quite frankly, that he’s poisoning me. He’s saturating me with a drug to which he gives some diabolic name, probably so that I won’t know what it really is.”
One of the French doctors Marie first consulted was Pierre Louis, a specialist in consumption who was researching the difference in occurrence in the two sexes. Another was Pierre Manec, who had also written a study of the disease and is regarded by anesthetists today as a pioneer, having performed major operations using the first ether inhalers. The German, David Ferdinand Koreff, was a controversial character. He had been personal physician to the king of Prussia and was a practitioner of magnetism (a belief in the existence of an indefinable, fluctuating current of energy in the human body with healing powers). The French medical community branded him as a mountebank, but his lively mind made him a valuable guest in Parisian salons, where he recruited most of his patients. Women in particular were drawn to Koreff, whose conversational ease and understanding of their foibles inspired confidence. “He always had a number of little remedies, anodynes and secrets on conserving beauty and youth,” remarked the romantic novelist Countess Dash. And there was something about Koreff’s physical charisma—his all-black clothes, combined with his unconventional doctrines—that gave him an air of necromancy, of being able to work miracles. “One often hears it said that he has saved the life of such and such a person,” Madame de Bawr reported to the Duchess de Dino (both well-known women of letters), voicing the general view that Koreff was optimistic against all odds. The physician’s popularity collapsed as a result of a lawsuit in which he demanded an absurdly high back payment of fees from one of his aristocratic clients. The beau monde’s doors closed, and Koreff was denounced for his obsession with money and celebrity. “He is no longer received,” Balzac wrote to a friend. “I no longer greet him, and hardly respond when he speaks to me.”
The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis Page 16