Over the next few months, Marie’s most frequent visitors were her doctors, although they could only helplessly watch her die. Dr. Manec of La Salpêtrière saw her thirty-nine times between mid-September and November, while Dr. Davaine, who had become her main consultant, went eighty-four times during the same period. One of her notes to him has survived—a couple of lines scribbled on her white writing paper with its blue coat of arms:
Monday 10 o’clock
Mon cher Monsieur,
Be kind enough to come and see me today 28 September at 3 o’clock. Mille amitiés. Marie Duplessis.
With his kind, pinkish face, white curly hair, and steel-rimmed spectacles on a chain, Davaine was a comforting presence. Marie gave him her miniature by Edouard Vienot, the portrait that best captures her demure appeal, showing her long black anglaises and signature corsage of a white camellia. In the opera, Violetta gives Alfredo one such medallion to pass on to his future wife. It is a gesture heavy with sentiment and self-abnegation (“Tell her it’s the gift of one who from heaven, amongst the angels, prays always for her and for you”). The gift to Davaine, on the other hand, was characteristic of Marie—gracious and practical. It was to show gratitude for the fact that he would accept only a token fee.
Davaine must have decided to seek advice on Marie’s treatment from King Louis-Philippe’s personal consultant Auguste-François Chomel (a descendant of Jean-Baptiste Chomel, Louis XIV’s doctor). She had four consultations with Chomel, who is cosignatory with Davaine on three elaborate prescriptions:
THE UNDERSIGNED DOCTORS ARE OF THE OPINION THAT MADAME DUPLESSIS SHOULD:
Every evening massage her armpits with a pomade of potassium iodide one part to ten, the size of a hazel-nut.
Continue with the same alternating liquids with a solution of Fucus crispus.
She should return to the asses’ milk sweetened with syrup of fern.
As an aid to sleep, she should take in the evening a mixture of equal parts of sweet milk of almonds and bitter milk of almonds, each of sixty grams. To this milk of almonds should be added 2–5 grams of extract of opium.
To moderate her sweating every day in the first spoonful of soup she should put 1 or 2 grams of soft extract of cinchona wrapped in a piece of wafer.
The diet consists of soup or bouillon of rice, fresh eggs à la coque or boiled, white fish grilled or steamed, poultry, vegetables lightly boiled, bread containing very little wheat, a compote of fruits, of jams, hot chocolate for lunch. To be drunk with meals, eau de Bussang mixed with a 6th of wine.
She should go out whenever the mildness of the weather permits, between noon and three o’clock. She should not go out at all in the morning or evening until further notice.
She should lie on horsehair in preference to wool.
She should speak little, and never in a loud voice.
THE UNDERSIGNED PHYSICIANS ARE OF THE OPINION THAT MME DUPLESSIS SHOULD:
Take in the morning of every day an enema prepared with a solution of starch in which is dissolved a little vinegar, 30 grams of sulfate of quinine and she should hold this in for as long as possible.
She should replace the decoction of Fucus crispus with Tussilage sweetened with syrup of marshmallow.
To ease her cough at night she should take 10 grams of syrup de Karabé and repeat when needed.
At times when the cough is most persistent she should also try inhaling the steam of an infusion of poppy flowers.
Build up her strength with good, substantial food.
Continue to drink the same amount of asses’ milk sweetened with syrup of Tolu.
Continue to drink eau de Bussang.
9 NOVEMBER 1846. DAVAINE; CHOMEL
THE UNDERSIGNED PHYSICIANS MAKE THE FOLLOWING SUGGESTIONS:
Use as a tisane the Swiss Vulnéraire, continue the enemas of quinine and syrup of Karabé.
Try using Icelandic lichen.
Continue the same diet and the same hygienic precautions.
19 NOVEMBER 1846. DAVAINE; CHOMEL
“How distressing it is to read the prescriptions made in 1846 by Davaine and Chomel to the unfortunate Lady of the Camellias,” said Georges Daremberg in his 1905 study of tuberculosis. “The care of consumptives by the grand physicians who practiced their art in the middle of this century was ridiculous. The two celebrities have the good idea of prescribing asses’ milk for their beautiful patient, but they cannot resist recommending that she sweeten the precious nourishment with syrup of tolu [an aromatic balsam obtained from a South American tree] or of maidenhair: an excellent way of suppressing the appetite and inciting disgust.” Daremberg also ridicules Chomel’s mentor, the eminent specialist Réne Laënnec. Believing that sea air had a therapeutic effect on tubercular patients, Laënnec had advocated the use of seaweed inhalers in hospital wards. Daremberg called this artificial atmosphere disastrous, as only fresh air can help consumptives to get well. Marie was in the hands of the greatest practitioners of nineteenth-century French medicine, but, working in the dark, they were powerless to cure her.
The morphine was making her act bizarrely. Romain Vienne had not seen her for two months, as he had been in Nonant in the late summer of 1846 following his mother’s death, and when he went to boulevard de la Madeleine in October, he was deeply disturbed by her deterioration. Marie was in bed and very frail, leaning back on her pillow, although some color came into her cheeks as she chattered away. She insisted that she was well enough to get up and go out somewhere, but Romain made her stay in bed by promising to spend a couple of hours with her. Her mood darkened when she started to complain about the lovers and friends who had abandoned her, embarrassing him by her revelations and recriminations. “I had never seen Marie like this—she who was so sweet and good, who never had a bad word for anyone.” Understanding that she was overwrought, even delirious, he did all he could to calm her, telling her that her grievances were no more than hallucinations produced by the drugs she was taking. “This had the opposite effect to what I’d hoped. She ranted more and more.”
Stranger still was the hostility Marie was showing toward Ned Perregaux, whom she said she hated more than she had ever loved. “I don’t want him ever to set foot here; if [Clotilde] opens my door to him I will chase him away.” The writer Charles Matharel de Fiennes confirms this. “She developed a great aversion toward the count P. whom she did not wish to see again.” Matharel de Fiennes tries to explain it as “a caprice of the dying,” and Vienne is no wiser, convinced only that the rupture was final. On 30 July 1846 Ned had asked once again to be admitted to the Foreign Legion, but when the ministry tried to contact him a fortnight later, he was not to be found at his address, number 25, rue de la Ville-l’Evêque. “He is said to have gone to the countryside.” This suggests that Marie’s note begging his forgiveness had not reached him, though by early September he was back in Paris. On the other hand, Ned may simply not have felt ready or inclined to pardon her.
Distressed by what he was hearing, Romain rose from his seat as if to leave, which had the effect of forcing Marie to regain her composure. They moved on to mundane topics, discussing a field that she and her sister had inherited from their grandfather: Delphine wanted to sell it, Marie to buy her out. Romain would be able to act as go-between, as he was returning to Nonant to put his mother’s affairs in order, but he promised to be back in Paris within a few months’ time.
Marie’s devoted staff were doing all they could to care for her; Clotilde was with her day and night. The concierge, Pierre Privé, had taken charge of the domestic finances (his wife cleaned the apartment every day for sixty francs a month). Unable to face another glass of asses’ milk or eau de Bussang, Marie sent him out one night to buy a two-franc bottle of champagne and on another occasion a cigare camphré. Debts were mounting alarmingly, and, like Clotilde and Etienne, Marie’s coachman, Privé had paid several hundred francs of his own money to keep the bailiffs at bay. This was proving a losing battle.
A young advocate named Henry
Lumière, a recent graduate from law school, was visited by a locksmith one day who sought his help in recovering an unpaid sum for work on an apartment on the boulevard de la Madeleine. “Although everything there is luxurious, indicating great wealth and opulence, my repeated requests have been ignored,” he complained to Lumière, who then wrote to the débitrice, asking her to come to his office to discuss a matter that concerned her. After some time had passed he received a brief note written “in a fine, anglicised hand” on lightly perfumed paper:
Monsieur,
You should be aware that the sick have sad privileges: suffering greatly at the moment, allow me to invoke them, in asking you to take the trouble to come and see me about the affair in question.
MD
The following day he went to Marie’s apartment and was shown by Clotilde into her bedroom. The sight of the lovely invalid in her sumptuously draped bed—a “nest of pink silk”—disarmed Lumière, who found himself stammering out his reason for coming, while emphasizing that he was only executing his client’s request. Marie, dressed in a peignoir of white cashmere edged with blue silk, explained that because of her illness she was without funds for the moment and asked if it might be possible to delay the payment. “She was so deliciously pretty, her plea so touching, that I was seduced and fascinated into agreeing.… I was rewarded with a gentle, gracious smile of thanks, and the offer of a little hand, practically diaphanous, which seemed to me to be burning with fever.” Other creditors, he discovered, had been less indulgent and had called in bailiffs to intervene.
Another young man was equally charmed. Charles Chaplin was an art student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts when he received word that a beautiful woman living in a splendid apartment on boulevard de la Madeleine wanted him to paint her. Although the name Marie Duplessis meant nothing to the unworldly twenty-one-year-old, who still lodged with his mother and siblings in rooms on the rue d’Enfer, he was delighted to have a commission. He had been asked to bring an example of his work, and, trying to think of something that would impress “such a noble person,” he chose one of his religious paintings. When Marie saw it she burst out laughing, and she was still laughing when the humiliated young man got up to leave. Calling him back, she said that she would like him to go ahead with her portrait, and also asked him if he would copy a painting in the Louvre for her.
Preliminary sketches were done at Marie’s apartment as she lay under covers on a chaise longue, attempting to smile between coughing fits. Sometimes she lacked the strength to receive Chaplin, but he would return the following day without complaint. “He worshipped this dying woman as much as one of those saints pictured in the old mass-books,” writes Claude Vento in Les peintres de la femme. One unseasonably sunny day, Chaplin’s subject, feeling better than usual, suggested that they go for a promenade in the Bois. The carriage was already waiting on the boulevard, and Marie, wearing blue velvet, her waist svelte in a tight-fitting coat, looked ravishing as she walked along holding her young escort’s arm. She was soon recognized and beset by admirers who gathered round to greet her. Chaplin knew then that the woman who had sat for him was someone famous and suddenly felt intimidated, although it did not prevent him from finishing the painting.
The result is a truthful and not particularly flattering portrait of Marie. She wears no jewels and a plain, governessy dress, and yet the somber effect is softened by her almost beatific expression of serenity. It is not known what she thought of the painting, but she made sure that Chaplin, of whom she had grown fond, was amply rewarded. When the time came to be paid, and he blushingly hesitated about naming a price, Marie cut him short by saying, “Ask for 200 francs.… M de T. [Marie’s horse dealer, Tony] is rich enough to pay you.” Chaplin was overwhelmed and could hardly believe that he was taking home ten louis that he had earned himself. As he was leaving, Marie called out, telling him not to forget the painting she wanted him to copy at the Louvre. Sadly, however, death was swifter than he was.
On December 11, Marie had her hair styled at home by the hairdresser Dezoutter, who fitted the crown of six white camellias delivered that day from her florist. (To complete the effect, she had also ordered a large bouquet à la main of white camellias, costing twenty francs.) She wanted to go one last time to the theater. Marguerite, too, had insisted on seeing a final performance. “Despite the burning fever which devoured me, I made them dress me.… Julie put on some rouge for me, without which I should have looked like a corpse.” Marguerite goes to the Vaudeville, but Marie went to the Palais-Royal, to see the revue La poudre de coton. Taking its title from the discovery that year of the explosive known in English as guncotton, it was a satirical roundup of the year’s inventions, fashions, new novels, plays both good and bad, and eccentric personalities (Le Bal Mabille’s Céleste Mogador among them). For Marie the evening was a way of suspending reality and turning back the clock. The two-and-a-half-hour show was like gaining twelve months as she revisited the excitements and absurdities of Parisian life in 1846.
Act 1 had already started when she made her entrance, carried in the arms of Etienne and his son, Marie’s stable lad, who had both dressed up to make an impact. “Two lackeys gold-laced in braided uniform from head to foot set her down in a stage box,” wrote the young journalist Alfred Delvau. “She was no more than a shadow of a woman—white and diaphanous, with consumptive pallor and a large bouquet of white camellias.” The account by Charles Matharel de Fiennes is more emotive still.
One believed on seeing this beautiful specter with inflamed eyes, covered with diamonds and enveloped in a flood of white satin and lace that Marie had risen from the grave to come and reproach this brilliant society of young fools and Ninons of the day for their abandon and their unfeeling forgetfulness. Then at the end of the performance when she left her box, supported by her maid, and followed by these people, a path was cleared for her, and more than two hundred young people, their eyes lowered, bowed in front of this Madeleine, who very soon would appear before God.
For centuries the Catholic ideology had associated the wasting away of youth and beauty with spiritual innocence—the redemptive suffering later embodied by the patron saint of tuberculosis, Thérèse Martin of Lisieux. In recent months Marie, too, had acquired a tragic, quasi-religious aura. Seeing her looking so pure and dignified in her carriage, Charles du Hays described her as a saint being transported up to heaven. (It was this sense of transfiguration captured by Sarah Bernhardt’s Marguerite with “the halo of a saint” upon her forehead.) Marie was expecting to be forgiven for her past. “My heart lifts up toward heaven from where I trust will come truth and salvation,” du Hays quotes her as saying. “I have remained pure amidst affections which have only inspired sadness in me.” In the play, too, Marguerite’s friend Nichette believes that even the erotic liaisons will somehow transmute and augment her deliverance. “Rest in peace,” she whispers, kneeling by the bed. “You will be much pardoned because you have much loved.”
Eros was giving way to Agape—but not just yet. There was to be one more outing. January was Carnival time in Paris, and Marie was determined to attend her last Opéra ball. “Her faded, still voluptuous grace” made the writer Paul de Saint-Victor think of a fallen flower trampled underfoot, and as he watched her throughout the evening, his feelings of pity were mixed with admiration.
She was already mortally ill. The pure whiteness of her skin had been melted like snow by the fire of her fever; the flush of exhaustion wasted her thin cheek, the light had extinguished in the huge black eyes, and there were circles beneath them.… [And yet] she had dressed herself that evening with a wild brilliance. She was wearing all the necklaces and diamonds from her jewel box, like the Roman empresses who envelop themselves in purple robes before they die. Sitting drowsily on a small sofa she fixed on the crowd her eyes opaque with disgrace and boredom, until a waltz tune brusquely revived her from this dismal slumber. It was one of those Viennese airs of a sentimental gaiety whose ethereal, distant melody strikes you as
supernatural—like music from the spheres commanding you to follow it in the whirling intoxication of an embrace.
This stirring sound raised her from her seat and, as regal as a princess, she went over and put her hand on the arm of a young man, who was overwhelmed by this good fortune. She danced for a long time, with passion, with rapture, with a giddy and vertiginous ardor which caused a shudder in anyone who knew how little breath she had left.
Marie’s pallor and the melancholic delirium of her dancing reminded Saint-Victor of “one of those dead bacchantes who, in Northern fables, waltz in moonlight on the grass of their tombs.” They are the Wilis of the second act of Giselle—the ballet Gautier created from a Heinrich Heine story set in the Rhine Valley—vengeful spirits who dance the men who betrayed them to their death. But Marie was not seeking retribution: this was her swan song, her last waltz, and a farewell to the Paris she loved.
Then she went home to die. Her curtains were drawn day and night, with only lamps and candles casting a wan light in the rooms. Her doctors tried to get her to open the windows to let in fresh air and sunlight, but their pleas were in vain. It was a foreshadowing of the tomb.
On Marie’s twenty-third birthday, January 15, the bailiffs forced their way into the apartment, citing the name of the law. As she lay in bed she could hear a monotonous voice making an inventory of contents and the sound of furniture being moved. Describing the scene in a letter to Armand, Marguerite’s maid told of her despair:
I wanted to use my last resources to put a stop to it, but the bailiff told me that there would be other seizures to follow. Since she must die, it is better to let everything go than to save it for her family, whom she has never cared to see, and who have never cared for her.… Yesterday we had absolutely no money. Plate, jewels, shawls, everything is in pawn; the rest is sold or seized.
In the novel it is the Count de G. who settles Marguerite’s debts and gets the creditors to leave her in peace. Marie’s benefactor, however, was not the Count de Guiche but Olympe Aguado. Writing under the pseudonym Grimm, Amédée Achard says that the count, whom he does not identify, still being a minor, could do nothing himself but rushed home to beg his mother’s help. “His mother listened to him, and every other thought disappeared in the face of death. She told her lawyers to take care of the debts of Marie Duplessis. How many other virtuous grandes dames of the world would have accomplished such a noble action which she made appear so simple?” Hippolyte de Villemessant tells the same story in his memoirs, also paying tribute to the humane generosity of the marchioness. While not revealing the Aguado name, he calls them a family with a soul. “All the poor of Paris and of Spain knew that they would never find the door closed.… When the marchioness heard what her young son had to say, she blushed perhaps in thinking of the French aristocracy’s reaction but without reproach or thought of her immorality, she paid the dying girl’s debts.”
The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis Page 20