It was not unknown for a demimondaine to establish a distinguished salon. The Second Empire courtesan known as La Païva, also a mistress of Agénor de Guiche, had married into the aristocracy despite being born in a Moscow ghetto and held court in the most opulent private house in Paris. Guests at the Hôtel Païva included Gautier and Delacroix, who, though disturbed by its overwhelming luxury, rarely refused an invitation. A combination of money and willpower had allowed La Païva to surround herself with some of the great men of her time, although, to her chagrin, she never gained recognition in French society. Marie, too, had no opportunity to learn the art of entertaining from the celebrated salonnières of the day, but her presence at dinners given by friends like Roger de Beauvoir and Nestor Roqueplan would have taught her everything she needed to know. An intimate gathering at Roqueplan’s sumptuous apartment on the rue Le Peletier was a blueprint of how to receive. His guests—five or six like-minded men and a cluster of decorative women—would move from the crimson, damask-lined drawing room, where they had been surrounded by Louis XIII furniture, paintings, and sculptures, to the oblong dining room hung with antique Gobelin tapestries. A discreet, white-haired butler served each course—a menu that rarely changed: consommé, fish, roast meat, salad, cheese, and dessert. Roqueplan detested the “abominable inventions and falsifications of modern cuisine” and would tolerate only simple, provincial cooking. But if the cuisine hardly varied, the ingredients were sourced from the best merchants in Les Halles, just as the single wine on offer was “such that old vignerons would drink at the wedding of their only daughter.” Two years earlier Marie’s dinners had been frivolous, decadent occasions, but now, by assembling brilliant performers at her table and serving choice dishes from La Maison d’Or, she had achieved the renown she coveted. “The Lady of the Camellias had her own salon where others of her kind had no more than a dressing room,” wrote an admiring Arsène Houssaye.
Liszt was certainly satisfied. “All the best people of Paris were there,” he told Janka Wohl, who mentions the presence of writers and artists and singles out the Duke of Ossuna, a member of one of the oldest and richest families in Spain. “Liszt went there often after this.” Drawn to strong-willed, independent women, he had been unfazed by Marie’s making the first move (Marie d’Agoult had also been the instigator of their affair). Nor was he under any illusions about the origin of her wealth and position. “I am not partial as a rule to Marions de Lorme or Manons Lescaut,” he told Wohl, “but Marie Duplessis was an exception.… I maintain that she was unique of her kind.” He knew that she was ill, because Koreff had confided poignant details about her suffering, and Marie herself could not have been more frank. “I shall not live,” she told Liszt, an avowal that affected him greatly (he had lost a brother to consumption). He found himself forming “a somber and elegiac attachment” for “Mariette,” as he called her, while at the same time being enchanted by her joie de vivre and childish abandon. “[She] was certainly the most perfect incarnation of Woman who has ever existed.”
Apart from Koreff, whom Liszt acknowledged as the one who helped him to appreciate her in a more profound way, his liaison with Marie was known to few. He met the young Dumas at one of her soirées and would later admire his fictional depiction of Marie, telling Wohl that Dumas completely understood her and could create her again with great ease. Nestor Roqueplan was aware of the situation, as he includes “the illustrious pianist L.” among Marie’s lovers. The fact that Liszt was still alive in 1887, when Vienne’s memoir was published, may explain why he gives no hint of a romance, saying only that Liszt went twice to Marie’s salon. Very probably, this was a relationship that Marie kept to herself, though Liszt could not help confiding his feelings to Marie d’Agoult. “I have never told you how strangely attached to this delightful creature I became during my last visit to Paris,” he wrote. “Hers was a truly delightful nature in which practices commonly held to be corrupting (and rightly so, perhaps) never touched her soul.”
In late January 1846 he was to embark on the most arduous tour of his life, traveling for eighteen months through northern France, Austria, Romania, Hungary, Transylvania, Russia, and Turkey. After that, he planned to abandon the concert platform altogether and settle in Weimar, where he had been appointed director of court music. The current duke, Carl Alexander, emulating the Renaissance-style patronage of his grandfather, wanted to reestablish the city as a haven for artists and intellectuals, and Liszt had ambitions of his own for Weimar. While concentrating on composing and conducting, he intended to create a workshop environment to convert audiences to “difficult” music. He had felt engulfed recently, not only by his impossibly demanding performing schedules but also by his spiraling dissipation—what he called “excitements … leading to disgust and remorse.”
Marie, too, had reached a point of satiety. “I shan’t be able to hold on to this life which I don’t know how not to lead and which I can equally no longer endure,” she told Liszt, seeing him as someone who could deliver her from this vortex of her own. “Take me, take me anywhere you like,” she pleaded. “I shan’t bother you. I sleep all day. In the evening you can let me go to the theater, and at night you can do with me what you will.” Weimar was where she wanted to be, but Liszt pointed out that there would be certain inconveniences. What he must have thought, but did not say, was that in this anachronistic little duchy, a woman with Marie’s past would be an embarrassment to him—almost certainly not received at court, perhaps even shunned by the townspeople. Nor was he willing to consider marriage an option. As he remarked to novelist Fanny Lewald, “I know I am easiest to get on with when I keep my freedom, and that it’s risky to tie me down, to a person or a place.”
The reason he gave Marie, however, was that Weimar would be dull and provincial after Paris and that she would soon regret her decision. Marie made clear that she did not agree, but she was given no choice. Liszt suggested that they meet the following summer in Pest and then travel together to Constantinople, where he was to spend most of June 1847. The site of Byzantium, source of spiritual philosophy, saturated with fable and mystery, was a place of wonder to Liszt. “I want to breathe in perfume, exchange coal smoke for the gentle whiff of the narghile. In short, I long for the East,” he had exclaimed to Marie d’Agoult. It was somewhere he had planned to take her, too, at the height of their romance, and she can only have felt a stab of regret in learning of Liszt’s arrangement with Marie Duplessis. “That was the only reasonably possible journey I could get her to undertake,” he told her, “the prospect of which delighted her.”
As a farewell to Paris, Liszt had arranged for his cantata to be premiered—not at the Opéra or Conservatoire, as might be expected, but at Jules Janin’s house on the rue de Vaugirard. For Marie, this was a cruel blow. The guests were a mix of Parisian elite—musicians, Chopin among them, writers, lawyers, artists, and actors. Rose-Chérie, soon to be cast as the eponymous heroine of Janin’s stage adaptation Clarisse Harlow, was there engulfed by admirers, but Marie, who was the same age, much prettier, and an intimate friend of Liszt, had not been invited. “You would have looked in vain in the very highest circles for a woman who was more beautiful and in more complete harmony with her jewelry, her dress, and her conversation” are Janin’s words. He was one of Marie’s greatest champions, but not when it came to having her in his home. In two published volumes, 735 Letters to His Wife, Janin never once mentions Marie’s name, and in his preface to the 1850 edition of La dame aux camélias, recounting the Ambigu meeting, she is not “Madame Duplessis,” the femme fatale he described to Liszt, but “the unknown lady.”
Liszt left Paris immediately after Janin’s soirée and would not see his children for another eight years. If he stayed in touch with Marie on tour, no letters have been discovered. However, in the archives of Pleyel et Cie, a vertical piano costing 1,400 francs was billed to a “M[onsieur] Duplessis” in July 1846. Was this a memento from Liszt? It would have been a characteristic gesture (he made a gif
t of a Streicher piano to his friend Prince Lichnowsky), and one befitting a lover considered by Roqueplan to be “as generous with Marie as a Russian prince en passage.”
The second time Jules Janin saw Marie was at a grand benefit at the Opéra. The door of one of the boxes was pulled open, and he glimpsed her inside with a bouquet in her hand. “Her beautiful hair was delightfully intermingled with flowers and diamonds … her arms and bosom were bare, though she wore a necklace and bracelets of emeralds.” Janin remembered this as the autumn of 1846, but it was more likely to have been the gala held in honor of the opera singer Paul Barroilhet on Sunday, 10 February 1846, in which the performers he mentions (actors Rachel, Virginie Déjazet, and Bouffé and ballerina Carlotta Grisi) all appeared. Later in the evening, the Opéra’s first tenor, Gilbert Duprez, took the stage, and Janin looked across the auditorium at Marie to see her reaction. Duprez was famous for his high C delivered from the chest, but the physical strain required to produce this sound (variously described as the shriek of a capon being strangled or a cry of the soul) had hardened his voice. The deterioration, which was first noticed as early as 1838, had increased over the following decade and would force the singer into early retirement in 1849. On this particular evening, it was clear to the cognescenti, though not yet to the public, Janin says, that Duprez was well past his prime. “Only a few amateurs amongst the most attentive part of the audience noticed the artist’s fatigue and his exhaustion. This was in spite of his skill—because he still made great efforts to deceive himself.” Marie appeared to be one of Duprez’s shrewder critics. After listening for the first few minutes she was obviously unimpressed and picked up her opera glasses to turn them on the audience instead.
Indiscriminately, she looked here and there, without bestowing more attention on one than on another, as if indifferent to all, while everyone repaid her attention by a smile, a rapid gesture, or a sharp and quick glance. Lastly, as if by chance, she directed her opera-glasses on the most renowned female members of the Parisian upper classes, and there was suddenly in her attitude an indescribable air of resignation and humility, which was painful to behold. But if, on the other hand, her glance happened to alight on any of those women of doubtful reputation and charming face, who occupy the best stalls of the theatre on grand occasions, she turned her head away with bitterness.
The gentleman who accompanied her this time was a handsome young man … proud of this beauty, and not sorry to increase his own importance by showing that she was really his. But he seemed to be irritating her with those signs of attention so dear to a young creature when they come from the man she loves, and so disagreeable when they are addressed to a mind otherwise occupied. She listened to him without hearing him; she looked at him without seeing him. What did he say? The lady had not heard him; but she endeavoured to answer, and the few words she uttered, and which contained no meaning, fatigued her.… At the conclusion of the opera the beautiful creature left: the performance was scarcely half over; she wanted to leave at once and return home, when many people still had three hours of pleasure before them, amidst the sound of music and underneath the flaming chandeliers.
I saw her leave her box and wrap herself up in a cloak lined with costly ermine. Her companion appeared out of temper, and, as he could no longer show her off, did not care whether she felt cold or not. I even recollect I helped lift her cloak on her shoulders, which were very white, and then she looked at me, without recognizing me, with a gentle mournful smile, which she transferred to the tall young man, who at that moment was engaged in paying the box-keeper, and in making her change a five-franc piece. “Keep it all, Madame,” she said to the woman, bowing to her politely. I saw her come down the grand staircase, her white dress standing out against the red cloak, with a handkerchief over her head and fastened under her chin; the lace fell slightly over her eyes, but what did that matter? The lady had played her part, her day’s work was finished, and she no longer thought of appearing attractive. No doubt that evening she left the young man at her door.
If this was in February, then Marie’s escort was almost certainly Ned Perregaux. She had not undergone a sudden change of heart (Janin’s observation of her inattentiveness rings true), but she had good reason to seek his company. Now that she had reached the age of consent, she was more determined than ever to marry him. Toward the end of January she had applied for a passport, having convinced Ned that they should have the ceremony in England, where the Perregauxs’ consent would not be required. Incapable of refusing Marie anything, he had agreed, while reminding her that the marriage would be invalid in France. What he did not know—but Marie did, according to Vienne—was that annulling it would require the intervention of a French tribunal. Vienne felt that she was sure Ned’s family would not go that far for fear of scandal, and he was convinced that the sale of their Bougival house for forty thousand francs provided the funds for the journey to London.
They were married at Kensington registry office on 21 February 1846 in the presence of two witnesses, F. Ferry and H. Blackwell. The certificate, written in English, confirms the groom to be “Edward de Perregaux, 29 years, bachelor; son of Alphonse de Perregaux. Rank or profession of father: Count.” The bride is “Alphonsine Plessis, 22 years. Father’s name: Jean Plessis. Rank: Gentleman.” Their residence is given as 37 Brompton Row, Kensington.
Apart from this document there is no information about their trip. There was a program of French plays at the St. James’s Theatre and a new opera of Don Quixote at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, but if Ned and Marie were in the audience or at any fashionable London event that week, their names do not appear in the society columns, and there is no announcement of their marriage in The Times. Méjannes, who knew about the secret Kensington ceremony, claimed that after their wedding Perregaux did not see his wife again, although a chilly, formal note from Marie suggests otherwise.
My dear Edouard,
In everything that you wrote to me I see only one thing to which you wish me to respond, here it is: you want me to tell you in writing that you are free to do whatever seems fitting. I told you that myself yesterday, I’m repeating this to you and signing,
Marie Duplessis
What had caused their acrimonious falling-out can only be guessed. The most obvious motive for Marie’s determination to become a countess was to make herself respectable for a life in Weimar with Liszt. Could Ned have discovered this? Vienne sheds no light on the cause of the rupture, saying only that the couple continued to see each other after returning to Paris, but their marriage had made them no closer. “Marie did not receive or hope for more from [Ned]…. It was not the status of having a husband that was important to her, it was the title. This astute young girl attached no importance of her own to such trifles, but she knew, from what she had observed, that it is with pomp and finery that one dazzles in this world.”
In the case of Marie d’Agoult, a countess in her own right, with a husband she had not divorced, there had been no need for subterfuge. She and Liszt had lived openly together with a romantic disdain for bourgeois conventions. Of humble birth—Liszt’s mother had been a chambermaid—he was impressed by nobility and eager to aggrandize himself. When it was mistakenly suggested that he might have been of aristocratic descent, Liszt went out of his way to search for documents to prove it and wrote to Marie d’Agoult for advice on the design of a coat of arms. Marie was unlikely to have been aware of this, but as she wanted so badly to be with Liszt in Weimar, her manipulation of Ned seems as logical as it was callous. On the other hand, her ambition to be a countess had long predated her meeting with Liszt. In 1844 she had described herself to a trader as “Mme la Comtesse Deperegaud” [sic] and in the well-known miniature painted around this time by society portraitist Edouard Vienot, she wears the diadem of a countess. “Having noble pretensions,” as Johannes Gros remarked, “was the great vanity of her life.”
Within weeks of her return to Paris, Marie was flaunting her new status. She was not brazen en
ough to use the Perregaux name, but there were bills made out to “Madame la Comtesse du Plessis,” and a heraldic crest, which she had designed herself, was printed on a panel of her carriage and on her linen, silver, and china. She had copied the central motif of the Perregaux arms (three chevrons of sand on a badge with a crown above it) but replaced the supports of two bears with a lion and a unicorn. She seems to have known the tapestry La dame à la licorne, in which a tame unicorn gazes at its reflection in a mirror, because she borrowed the idea, substituting a lizard. This was Marie’s private joke. It was inspired by the stuffed green lizard given to her by Gypsies en route to Paris, which she kept in a shagreen box. If the unicorn represents purity and the lizard temptation, then the pairing of the two aptly symbolizes her own dual nature.
The Ornais historian Robert du Mesnil du Buisson, who made the Dame à la licorne link, also discovered a portrait he believed to be of Marie in a local château. It shows a pensive young girl sitting at a table. Her cheek is inclining on her left hand, where her wedding ring is ostentatiously displayed, and her other hand rests on a folded letter, next to which is a stamp of a coat of arms and an ink block. The painting is unsigned, and research by the current owners of Château Le Logis in Fels revealed that the dates do not correspond, so it could not be a painting of the real Lady of the Camellias. Nevertheless, it can still be seen as a potent image of Marie at this time, and the likeness to her is striking: the same oval face, parted black hair, straight nose, black eyes, heavy brows, and curly, Leonardo mouth. As if sensitive to the cold, she wears a heavily padded silk gown over her lacy top—a solitary and melancholy young bride.
The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis Page 18