Marie, however, liked Koreff and often invited him to her soirées, although she was far less appreciative of his professional skills. “I am continually agitated, I have heart palpitations, headaches and my cough gets worse instead of better,” she complained to Romain, who, deeply suspicious of Koreff’s infamous reputation, had the contents of Marie’s vial of medicine analyzed by a chemist. The solution contained strychnine, of which Koreff had instructed Marie to take a centigram a day. This, in Romain’s view, branded him unequivocally as an “abominable charlatan,” although in fact poison was an accepted form of treatment. Eight decades later, an article in The British Medical Journal confirmed the efficacy of strychnine in tubercular patients—“It always improves the appetite and general condition … and acts as a general tonic and nervine stimulant”—while Marie’s own Dr. Manec administered arsenic in the treatment of cancer—a rudimentary form of chemotherapy. Manec also prescribed a paste of arsenous acid mixed with black mercury sulfide to relieve coughs and mucus irritability in consumptives.
By June 1845, Koreff, who was traveling in Germany, had stopped treating Marie, and bills confirm that her summer was spent in Paris. In July, her account at Kuher, a saddler on rue Tronchet, reached a staggering 2,390 francs—the result of a splurge on new buckles, halters, stirrups, snaffle bridles, girths, a chain-mail breastpiece, and an embossed leather crown. As reimbursement for a dinner she had hosted for Lord A., he had promised to import a saddle horse for her from London, but it never arrived. Seeing how ill she was, he abandoned the idea of a horse and instead sent her an enormous rosewood trunk, one meter high by two meters long, full of chocolates, each wrapped in a hundred-franc note. Lord A.’s dealer, however, Tony Montel, who doted on Marie, is said to have made a gift to her of a magnificent pair of thoroughbreds. Catching sight of her galloping en amazone (sidesaddle) in the Bois de Boulogne, Gustave du Puynode, author of a long homage to her in verse, suggested that a pawing, prancing thoroughbred excited her far more than any lover.
In the woods, in early morning, see how it arches its back,
When, on its sensitive flank, her grey boot spurs it on.
Fearless amazon, ah! How beautiful she was when she rode in the Bois!
The dust flew up to the sky! Every stone became a jewel …
O Marie! Where are you heading as you trample the wild thyme?
Marie might have been spending rapturous days on horseback, but her nights seem to have been relatively tranquil. Receipts from Chez Voisin and La Maison d’Or show that a number of meals were delivered to boulevard de la Madeleine, the dishes themselves revealing a healthy appetite. One night she dined alone on a pigeon with peas, mashed potatoes, a salad, and a bottle of eau de Seltz; on another she ordered supper for two—trout with prawns, partridges, a dessert of vanilla bavaroises, a bottle of Bordeaux, and a bottle of champagne. She indulged her sweet tooth with cakes from Rollet the pâtissier, glacéed fruit from Boissier, and on one occasion sent for twelve biscuits, macaroons, and maraschino liqueur.
This last bill is dated 30 August 1845, the very night on which Alexandre is supposed to have written his famous lettre de rupture:
My very dear Marie.
I am neither rich enough to love you as I would like, nor poor enough to be loved as you would like. So let’s both forget, you a name which must be a little indifferent to you, me a happiness which has become impossible. It is useless to tell you how sad this makes me, because you already know how much I love you. So farewell. You have too much heart not to understand the motive of my letter and too much spirit to not pardon me for it. A thousand memories.
A. D.
30 August midnight
Forty years later, intending to make an extravagant gesture of thanks to Marguerite Gautier’s most eloquent interpreter, Dumas fils sent a rare illustrated edition of his novel to Sarah Bernhardt. “What makes this one unique,” he told her, “is the signed letter which you will find on the 212[th] page, and which slightly resembles the letter printed there.
“[It] was written by the real Armand Duval … the only palpable thing remaining of this story. It seems to me to be yours by right, because it is you who have given youth and life to the deceased.”
Dumas fils always maintained that he had bought the letter back from a Parisian dealer of autographs, but this is highly suspect. Marie’s private correspondence was not put up for sale (no letter from any other friend or lover has ever come to light), and papers that were included in a posthumous auction of her belongings, such as the bills she kept in a Moroccan leather box, were all marked with a notary’s squiggled initials. The letter from “AD” has no such distinctive squiggle. Was it written by Alexandre and never sent to Marie, or was it replicated later by the author with posterity in mind? Whatever the case, there was no novelistic symmetry to the end of their affair. By September, Alexandre had taken up with a Vaudeville actress, Anaïs Liévenne, for whom he rented an apartment in his name, but Marie still kept in touch. Dumas père’s new play, Mousquetaires, was soon to open at Théâtre L’Ambigu-Comique, and she asked Alexandre to use his influence to get her a good seat. “It was 7 October 1845,” he wrote. “I remember the date exactly because that was the day which I broke up with Marie Duplessis … and I broke up with her because of not being able to procure a box in the gallery.”
In fact, the premiere was on October 27, and Marie must have managed to secure herself a ticket, as she was spotted in the foyer by the critic Jules Janin. “She walked on the muddy floor as if she was traversing the boulevards on a rainy day, raising her dress intuitively … The whole of her appearance was in keeping with her young and lithesome form; and her face, of a beautiful oval shape, rather pale, corresponded with the charm she diffused around her, like an indescribable perfume.” Alexandre was there himself in a box with his father, but neither he nor Dumas père was on Marie’s mind. Among the noisy crowd in the second interval she had seen a man with a beautiful, noble face and mane of long hair whom she recognized instantly as Franz Liszt. He had been a little surprised when she approached him, although he had noticed her too, “very much astonished at seeing such a marvel in such a place.” When the three solemn knocks of the prompter resounded through the theater, calling the spectators and critics back into the auditorium, Marie and Liszt remained behind. Sitting in front of the greenroom fire, they talked throughout the whole of the third act, each equally captivated by the other. The pianist’s plan to stay in Paris “for a week at the most” was about to be dramatically extended.
Part Five
The Countess
AT THIRTY-FOUR, FRANZ LISZT was a European sensation, a romantic icon with the long hair and charisma of a 1960s rock star. His genius as a pianist produced what Heinrich Heine called “a delirium unparalleled in the annals of furore,” and when he dropped his gloves after a concert that year, they were seized by women in the audience, torn into fragments, and shared among them. Not that Lisztomania was a female passion only. “We were like men in love, men obsessed,” exclaimed one young Russian. “We’d never heard anything like it.” But if Liszt had reached the apogee of his career as a performer, his private life was bleak.
A decade earlier, he had fallen in love with thirty-year-old Countess Marie d’Agoult, author, intellectual, and rebellious wife of a French nobleman. Her affair with Liszt was as volatile as it was intense, their exchange of lofty ideas regarded as a blueprint for the grand passion. Mother of his three illegitimate children, d’Agoult sacrificed wealth and respectability for her younger lover—something she never let him forget. She was a joyless, brooding personality who became increasingly resentful and critical of Liszt’s success. Dismissing his astonishing virtuosity as mere tricks, she accused him of seeking publicity and invitations to grand salons and never ceased regarding him as an incorrigible philanderer. Her “Don Juan parvenu” did his best to be conciliatory. “I have always been susceptible to physical temptations, you to those of the heart and intellect,” Liszt admitted in one
letter, while pointing out in another that his merciless touring schedules scarcely gave him time to lead the “orgiastic” life of which he was accused. In the spring of 1845, things finally came to an end. There had been newspaper reports about Liszt’s liaison in Dresden with the scandalous Lola Montez, and Marie d’Agoult, after years of alternating threats and pleas, decided that this was the ultimate insult. She would be his mistress, but not one of his mistresses, she famously declared. As hostilities spiraled, their children (aged ten, eight, and six) became weapons of war. “If she tries to take Cosima by force,” Liszt remarked, “I will retaliate in full by taking the three children to Germany where she will have no hold over them.” Fortunately, his mother—an unassuming, warmhearted woman—gave her grandchildren a home in Paris, where they found the love and stability that had been missing from their lives.
As for Liszt himself, the breakup with Marie d’Agoult, compounded by the strain he incurred during a disastrous music festival in August, had led him to the point of collapse. To celebrate the unveiling of the Beethoven monument in Bonn for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the composer’s birth, the event had been arranged almost single-handedly by Liszt. But instead of being credited as its moving spirit, he found himself criticized for using it as an opportunity for self-promotion. He had written a new cantata for the festival, and so strong were the currents against him that, as a German student observed, “People were hoping his work would fail.” He did, however, have one staunch advocate. Jules Janin, drama critic of the Journal des Débats, was almost alone among journalists in recognizing Liszt as a great artist rather than an “acrobat of the piano”—or, as the Lisztophobes would have it, a “pretentious strummer.” On August 10, Janin wrote a letter to his wife, describing the pressures Liszt was facing.
You can imagine that it is impossible for him to be more businesslike, more occupied, preoccupied, captured, taken, recaptured, pulled this way and that. He has built the concert hall [seating an audience of 3,000], filled it with musicians, organized the program, housed the visitors. No one addresses anyone but him, he is agitated beyond belief. No sleep, too much coffee, tobacco …
When Liszt first saw Janin, quietly reading Horace’s Odes, he fell into his arms. Liszt may have been a demigod for several days, but he badly needed moral support. “One can see that he is perturbed,” continued Janin, who was right to be concerned: soon after the festival ended, Liszt was confined to bed with jaundice and complete exhaustion.
He arrived in Paris on the morning of October 25, staying with his mother and children on the rue Louis-le-Grand, and by midday he was at Jules Janin’s house. “Very happy to see me.… His complexion still a touch yellow.” Liszt was counting on Janin’s help with a French translation of his cantata, and they shut themselves up to start work immediately. Janin had disliked the original German text—“Pompous nonsense,” he told his wife. But having felt that he was being asked the impossible, Janin managed to come up with a libretto in two days that pleased both men. By way of celebration, he invited Liszt to accompany him to the premiere of the new Dumas play.
The Ambigu-Comique was filled to capacity that night, not with the usual elegant first-night audience but with the kind of crowd attracted by popular spectacles like The Three Musketeers, a melodrama lasting six hours. “There were more caps than hats with feathers, and more threadbare overcoats than new suits,” wrote Janin. Marie’s appearance created an extraordinary effect. “It seemed as if she illumined all these burlesque, uncultivated beings with a glance of her lovely eyes. She came into the room and moved, her head erect, through the astonished rabble.”
Liszt’s own version, told to his Hungarian compatriot the journalist Janka Wohl, was that “a very conspicuous young woman” had walked past them during an interval and stared intently at him.
—She has taken a fancy to you, Janin said.
—What an idea! exclaimed Liszt, who was disarmed, all the same, by the young woman’s attention.
—Do you know her?
—No. Who is she? Liszt asked.
—That is Madame Duplessis. She’ll take possession of you—mark my words.
Marie knew Liszt by sight because she had been at one of the concerts he gave in Paris, in either the spring or early summer of 1844. Intrigued to see if this passionate, demonic genius lived up to his rapturous acclaim, she had found herself so moved by his performance that she was inspired to start learning the instrument herself. She rented a piano and began buying increasingly challenging scores of popular tunes like “The Blue Danube” and Weber’s “Invitation to the Waltz,” the piece that Dumas fils’s novel describes Marguerite trying and failing to master. One passage in particular always defeated her—“the third part with all the sharps”—and sometimes she would practice it until the early hours of the morning. Instructing Armand’s friend Gaston to play it for her, Marguerite intently follows each note on the page, softly humming along and silently moving her fingers on the top of the piano. “Re, mi, re, do, re, fa, mi, re. That’s what I can never do,” she sighs. “Invitation to the Waltz” was a favorite in Liszt’s repertory, and if Marie had heard his version, the memory would have made mockery of her own workaday attempts. His music transcended the piano, which seemed to vanish before people’s eyes, giving the audience the sensation that he was calling up mysterious living forms—“as if the air were peopled with spirits,” as one spectator put it. This was Marie’s experience too. The first words she spoke to Liszt was that his playing had “set [her] dreaming.”
He had been at a table by the fire with Janin when she came over and sat beside them. “We were very much surprised for neither he nor I had ever spoken to her,” Janin writes, noting how her familiarity soon gave way to an element of hauteur “as if [Liszt] had been presented to her at a levee in London, or at a party given by the Duchess of Sutherland.” Visibly shivering, Marie had drawn near the flames, her feet almost touching the logs, allowing a glimpse of the embroidered folds of her petticoat. As she and Liszt fell into conversation, Janin observed her closely, admiring everything he saw.
The curls of her black hair; her gloved hand, which made you think you were looking at a picture; her handkerchief marvelously trimmed with costly lace; whilst in her ears shone two pearls from the East which a queen would envy. All these beautiful objects were as natural to her as if she had been born amidst silks and velvet, beneath some gilded ceiling of the grand faubourgs with a crown upon her head, and a crowd of flatterers at her feet.
He was supposed to be reviewing the play for the Journal des Débats but, sitting with Liszt in the foyer, was reduced to listening to the cries of bravo and stomping of feet heard throughout the six hours. Guilt may have been the cause of Janin’s bad temper—“I am convinced that the lady thought me grumpy and perfectly absurd”—or else the fact that Marie hardly addressed a word to him, except once or twice out of politeness. But it was hardly surprising that the enormously rotund, white-haired, whiskery Janin held no allure for her. It was Liszt who had captivated her, and they talked as if they were alone together throughout the whole of the third act.
On first hearing Liszt’s vibrant, original conversation, Marie d’Agoult had felt a new world opening up. It was an impression Marie Duplessis must have shared. The pianist’s itinerant life had led him to all of Europe’s landmarks and museums, giving him an exotic air of having knowledge in reserve, of horizons far beyond the narrow Parisian beau monde. His initial exchange with Marie d’Agoult had been serious, she said. “We embarked at once upon elevated subjects … talked of the destiny of mankind, of its sadness and incertitude, of the soul and of God.… Nothing of coquetry or of gallantry was blended with our intimacy.” In the Ambigu foyer with Marie, on the other hand, Liszt ran through the usual gossip and fashionable small talk, almost certainly laughing about their mutual acquaintance Lola Montez, who had ambushed him in Bonn. Claiming to be there as his guest and undaunted by the fact she was completely ignored by Liszt, Lola had then gate-cra
shed the international banquet and created an uproar by springing up onto a table strewn with bottles and glasses—a performance that almost eclipsed everything that had gone before it.
Liszt was adept at talking to women, moving from topic to topic, frivolous at one moment, erudite the next. And he clearly drew the best out of Marie, as both men were struck by her intelligence, tact, and common sense. Liszt, Janin says, totally abandoned himself to her, “listening with uninterrupted attention to her beautiful language, so full of ideas, and, at the same time, so eloquent and pensive.” He kept asking questions, trying to discover more about this exceptional young woman, who lacked all protocol yet was full of dignity.
The next day a mutual friend offered to take Liszt to Marie’s house. This was her Prussian doctor, David Koreff, whose patients also included Marie d’Agoult and Liszt’s mother. Koreff was often used as a go-between, according to Flaubert’s friend Maxime du Camp: “If a salonnière wanted to invite an artist or writer of renown she turned to Koreff to make the introduction.” A highly sought after guest in his own right, Koreff would far rather have been celebrated as a poet, translator, and librettist than as a physician. Marie had not been treated by Koreff for several months, but she continued to invite him to boulevard de la Madeleine, knowing that few grand soirées were given without him. She was no doubt also aware that Marie d’Agoult had set a high precedent for Liszt. In her salon in the Hôtel de France, George Sand had been introduced to Chopin, an encounter that marked the start of their ten-year affair, and the countess prided herself on her skillful mix of guests, telling Liszt, “Koreff said the other day that I will soon have a circle such as Paris has never seen.”
The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis Page 17