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

by Julie Kavanagh

  Why had Marie not appealed to her “pseudo-father” for money, as Marguerite does in the novel? She had deeply offended Stackelberg, but, according to Roqueplan, he did return to Paris to see her before she died. In Marguerite’s description of the encounter, two large tears rolled from the old man’s eyes when he saw how pale she was, and he remained with her for several hours, hardly saying a word. “Since she got so ill the old duke has not returned,” Marguerite’s maid told Armand. “He said that the sight was too much for him.” Stackelberg, who had now witnessed the dying of four young women he had loved, had far more reason to stay away. But for Marie’s Etienne, his desertion was unforgivable. “He’s a miserable old screw,” he remarked to Vienne. “When you’re eighty years old, what’s the point of economizing? As soon as he realized that she was dying, he completely abandoned her.”

  Amédée Achard suggests another reason why Stackelberg might have stayed away. That summer in Dieppe when a steamer arrived from Brighton and the passengers alighted, a Russian called Gustave noticed an elegant young beauty promenading along the jetty. “Celebrated for more than a title,” she had not been introduced to the Russian, but by that evening the pair were walking together by the sea.

  Marie was vacillating between despair and the belief that she might recover. She had told Clotilde that she was leaving everything to her in gratitude for her loyalty, and she asked for a notary to be summoned so that she could make a will. “Why, Madame?” Clotilde said, humoring her. “You’re going to get better.… If it was the end, and if you were really dying I would obey you … [but] I’m going to stay by your side. Then I will hear you say that you made a mistake and that in a few days you will be saved.” Convinced of this herself, Marie got Clotilde to pawn some jewels (for 1,500 francs) to provide the rent for a depot where she could hide her most precious things. “Because they’ll return in a few days to seize more, and this time they’ll succeed.… I can’t be allowed to die hungry, and I want to keep something for starting again, when I will be healed.”

  Ned Perregaux, still forbidden to enter the apartment, was so desperate to know how much time Marie had left that he begged Clotilde to smuggle out one of her flannel vests for a psychic to interpret. He took it to the twenty-year-old phenomenon Alexis Didier, who, given an object charged with personal association, could recount an individual’s history, make a medical diagnosis from a distance, or predict events to come. Blindfolded, in a hypnotic trance, he could read messages in a sealed envelope or the pages of a closed book. His paranormal gift for “remote viewing” had enabled him to detail the contents of the French emperor’s study; and when Céleste Mogador consulted him to identify the thief who robbed her lover, he described exactly where the woman lived. But Alexis’s clairvoyance was more precise about the past and present than about the future. “Go quickly to her,” he urged Ned. “She has no more than a few hours to live.” In effect, this was inaccurate: Marie had two more days left.

  It is this moment in the play and opera that provides a soaring coup de théâtre. As soon as Armand/Alfredo appears on her threshold, Marguerite/Violetta runs to the door and flings herself into his arms. They ask each other’s forgiveness, and she tells him that she wants to live. Liszt had imagined himself in this role, confiding to Marie d’Agoult, “If I had happened to be in Paris when la Duplessis was ill, I would have had my quarter of an hour as Des Grieux and tried to save her at any price.” But he was thousands of miles away, and of all those who had loved Marie, only Ned, “banned from the bedroom of her for whom he wept”—and Olympe—were faithful to the end. “Forty-eight hours before her death she still recognized one, the younger [Olympe], and she took his hand. ‘You’ve come to see me,’ she whispered. ‘Adieu, I’m going away now.’ ”

  Like the novel’s Marguerite, Marie was alone with her maid and a priest during her last hours—and she was very frightened. “Oh, I’m dying!” she cried, grabbing Clotilde’s hand. “I want you to bury me yourself. Do not declare my death straight away so that I can stay here longer in my house.” Fighting the inevitable, Marguerite utters a series of tortuous cries and sits upright in bed two or three times, “as if she would hold on to her life.” Marie’s behavior was even more disturbing. “When the death-rattle began she made the strangest exclamations,” claims Charles Matharel de Fiennes. “This woman, who had never spoken of affairs of state, cried out three times, an hour before her death, a pronouncement baffling for this era, a prophetic cry which we will not reproduce because it is improbable even if certified as true.” Armand had struggled to pry his hand out of Marguerite’s when all was over, but it was Clotilde’s hand that Marie squeezed so tightly “that it was almost impossible to disengage the hand of the living from that of the dead.” Clotilde closed her eyes and kissed her on the forehead. It was a little before 3 a.m. on February 3. “Then I dressed her as she had asked me to do … and put her in her shroud.”

  That evening Clotilde answered the door to Romain Vienne, who had sent a note to Marie saying that he was back in Paris and would be calling around eight o’clock to see her. The creditors’ representative, Nicolas Ridel, who was holding Marie’s papers, had told Clotilde to expect him, saying, “It’s likely that this monsieur will want to see the body, so do not close the coffin.” Clotilde disliked Romain, who she felt should have visited more often and who, because he was just a friend, had never tipped her as a courtesan’s lovers were expected to do. She had made no attempt to contact him in time to see Marie alive, nor to prepare him for the shock in store. He had hardly stepped into the apartment when she coldly announced, “Monsieur, Madame is dead.”

  —Come now, [Clotilde,] why this morbid joke?

  —Unfortunately Monsieur, it’s the sad truth. Follow me.

  Stunned, Romain walked behind her, through the dining room and into Marie’s candlelit bedroom, hung with black drapes, where a young priest was praying. To his right, under the window, was the coffin, raised on trestles. As Clotilde removed the cloth and lifted the lid, Romain felt a jolt of terror. “I’m not superstitious … but there is nothing more hideous than the sight of death.”

  Marie was swathed in lace—Alençon lace made in her native Normandy. “The tenderness and touching taste of her friend had adorned her so well!” Roqueplan writes. “Her hands held a bouquet of camellias, her favorite flower, in the midst of which was a crucifix.… Her coffin was filled with camellias.… The beauty of the dead girl was a new marvel.” But not to Romain, who says nothing about camellias, only that Marie’s body was already rigid when he removed the winding sheet.

  With both hands I gently lifted her head, and after stroking her forehead and temples, I opened her lips and her half-closed eyelids. Her hair was loose and uncombed; I divided the long tresses into two and placed one on each side of her body, under her extended arms. Then I took her two icy hands in mine, which were burning, and examined them with such minute attention that [Clotilde] could not stop herself from shuddering; none of my actions escaped her. The priest, moved by an instinctive curiosity, got up to see what I was doing. Both of them, motionless and silent, looked at me with bewildered surprise. I asked [Clotilde] to fetch me a pair of scissors and continued my examination. While I was waiting a cloud suddenly passed in front of my eyes; a cold sweat broke out on my forehead; a terrifying emotion strangled me, and I felt I was going to faint.

  He staggered into the dining room and collapsed into an armchair. When he came around Clotilde was standing in front of him with a pair of scissors, and he asked her to cut a lock of Marie’s hair as he did not have the strength to do it himself. Romain then left the apartment as soon as he could, only to find Etienne waiting for him on the pavement. “I knew you were coming and I’ve been here since seven o clock,” he said. “I am deeply sorry that I was not given your address: you could have consoled the dear lady in her last moments, and she could have confided her last wishes to you. But [Clotilde] did not want this. I believe I will not be telling you something you don’t kn
ow if I say that she does not like you.”

  They went to a nearby café together, and Etienne described Marie’s last months—“an impossible life of theatre, balls, la Maison d’Or, the Café Anglais. At the end she drank nothing but champagne.” By December most of her close friends, Agénor de Guiche among them, had stopped coming to see her, but not a day went by, Etienne said, without Olympe visiting Marie. He told the story about her “birthday present” from the bailiffs and how the young count had prevented the seizure with a check for a thousand francs. But they returned a few days later, and this time Marie said, “There’s no point, my friend. I am crushed by debts and my creditors are pursuing me relentlessly, which means that my end is near.… Let them ruin me to the point of destitution. If I don’t die then I will learn from this lesson.” Olympe had left in tears. Etienne then spoke of Stackelberg’s desertion, and how Ned Perregaux had not been received for several months. “I don’t understood why.… He loved her, despite everything, as much as in the beginning.… This morning, an hour after the death three men came into her bedroom. One of them—I don’t have to name him—knelt by her bed, praying and sobbing. The two others [presumably Ned’s guardian and lawyer] searched through all the drawers in all the chests; [Clotilde] helped them. They took letters and papers, but they did not find the important one they were looking for.” It was a document “written in English”—Marie and Ned’s marriage certificate.

  Two days later, on the afternoon of February 5, Marie’s funeral took place at La Madeleine. Parish archives record that the cosignatories on the death certificate were Frédéric Romain Vienne and Marie’s concierge, Pierre Privé, who paid the ceremony cost of 1,354 francs. The church was still hung with black draperies from two earlier requiems that day, the decoration of a crown and silver initial D (the insignia of the deceased Count Ducamp de Bussy) assumed by Le Siècle’s obiturist to be Marie’s own coat of arms.

  In Sins of Youth, Dumas fils maintains that only two men followed Marie’s coffin. He identifies them in his novel as the “Count de G., who came from London on purpose, and the old duke, who was supported by two footmen.” Méjannes, however, who claimed to have attended Marie’s funeral himself, says that there were four other men present—but not Guiche or Stackelberg. These were: “Olympe A. Edouard D[elessert]…. Tony and Edouard P.” Vienne provides yet another version. He noticed Guiche there as well as “a grand old man,” who he did not think could be Stackelberg, as he had not been invited. In his account the congregation at La Madeleine comprised “a sympathetic, welcoming crowd”—a fact that can be documented, because chairs for a special mass at La Madeleine had to be paid for, and a receipt exists listing twenty of them.

  The same people followed the hearse to Montmartre cemetery, Romain walking beside Ned, who was trying in vain to hold back his tears. Behind them, at a slight distance, came Olympe, also visibly moved, and then the other friends. “I saw several women crying on the tomb,” said Romain. “They had come to say goodbye to the one who had been so good to them.” He also saw the relative with whom Marie had first stayed in Paris, Mme Vital, who had not spoken to her distant cousin since throwing her out of her house, now loftily declaring that she had come to pardon her. Standing at the graveside, Ned Perregaux was growing even more distraught, oblivious to everything around him, his gait unstable, his features distorted. He seemed about to faint when he was handed the holy water sprinkler that the priest was passing around, and when the service was over, out of respect for his grief, the rest of the group left him alone by the grave.

  Some days later, Delphine, wearing her usual rough serge clothes and clogs, arrived in Paris with her husband, Constant Paquet. They were there to claim their inheritance but were immediately faced with a barrage of unpaid bills and lawsuits. Dr. Koreff would be suing them, alleging (falsely) to have made 280 visits to Marie, and Ned Perregaux had already started legal proceedings. He was claiming back diamonds he had given Marie and a thoroughbred “of superb genealogy,” which he said had only been loaned to the deceased. A vet had testified that the horse was the viscount’s property, and jewelers had produced bills in his name, as well as receipts for the rental of her apartment, but Ned, capricious as ever, abandoned the suit after the court’s first sitting.

  When an emerald necklace and other jewels were reported missing, Clotilde was “hunted down” by the beneficiaries. Charles Matharel de Fiennes defended her in print, declaring that the dead girl had been buried with the rings and “a magnificent rosary” that her maid was accused of stealing. It was Romain who was most convinced of her guilt, and he went as far as reporting her to the police. He had taken on the role of adviser to the Paquets, suggesting that they go together to a marble cutter to arrange a headstone and escorting them to Montmartre cemetery. But when they reached the place where Marie had been buried a fortnight earlier, they discovered the earth leveled off: her grave had disappeared.

  This was Ned Perregaux’s doing. Distressed to find that Marie had been allocated a space for only five years, he had immediately arranged to buy a vault and two meters of ground with a concession for perpetuity. Moving a body from one grave to another required the permission of the deceased’s family as well as the presence of the police. Dumas fils, who records this in the novel, has Armand leave Paris for a few days to seek the permission of Marguerite’s sister. But as Marie’s husband, albeit in English law, Ned was not obliged to contact Delphine and instead had acquired the consent of the prefect of police—Edouard Delessert’s father.

  In the novel, the gardener at Montmartre—who has been paid by Armand to keep Marguerite’s grave covered with fresh white camellias—is convinced that the young man’s motive for exhuming her body is more emotional than practical. “I would wager that he wants to change her grave simply in order to have one more look at her,” he tells the narrator. “The first word he said to me when he came to the cemetery was: ‘How can I see her again?’ ” This was Heathcliff’s response after Cathy’s burial in Wuthering Heights (coincidentally published at the end of that year). “I’ll have her in my arms again!” he vows, casting aside his spade when it hits the coffin and scraping away the earth with his hands. He never sees her body but hears a sigh, and then another, close to his ear, which convinces him that Cathy’s presence is still with him. “I relinquished my labour of agony, and felt consoled at once: unspeakably consoled.” Armand, on the other hand, needs the horrible reality of the corpse itself to persuade him that Marguerite is lost to him forever. Taking pity on him, the narrator volunteers to accompany him to the cemetery.

  The police inspector was there already. We walked slowly in the direction of Marguerite’s grave; the inspector in front. From time to time I felt my companion’s arm tremble convulsively, as he shivered from head to feet.… When we reached the grave … two men were turning up the soil. Armand leaned against a tree and watched. All his life seemed to pass from his eyes. Suddenly one of the two pickaxes struck against a stone. At the sound Armand recoiled, as at an electric shock, and seized my hand with such force as to give me pain. As the grave-diggers began emptying out the earth Armand watched, his eyes fixed and wide open, like the eyes of a madman, and a slight trembling of the cheeks and lips were the only signs of the violent nervous crisis he was suffering from. When the coffin was uncovered the inspector said to the grave-diggers: “Open it.” They obeyed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The coffin was of oak and they began to unscrew the lid. The humidity of the earth had rusted the screws, and it was not without some difficulty that the lid was opened. A foul stench rose up.… “Oh my God, my God!” murmured Armand, turning paler than before. Even the grave-diggers drew back.

  A great white shroud covered the corpse, closely outlined some of its contours. This shroud was almost completely eaten away at one end, and left one of the feet visible … “Quick,” said the inspector. Thereupon one of the men put out his hand, began to unwrap the shroud, and taking hold of it by one end suddenly laid bar
e the face of Marguerite. It was terrible to see; it is horrible to relate. The eyes were nothing but two holes, the lips had disappeared, vanished and the white teeth were tightly set. The black hair, long and dry, was pressed tightly about the forehead, and half veiled the green hollows of the cheeks; and yet I recognised in this face the joyous white and rose face that I had seen so often. Armand, unable to turn away his eyes, had put the handkerchief to his mouth and bit it.… I heard the inspector say to Duval, “Do you identify”? Yes,” replied the young man in a dull voice. Then fasten it up and take it away, said the inspector.… Armand allows himself to be led away, guided like a child, only from time to time murmuring, “Did you see her eyes?”

  Marie was now, as Liszt put it, “delivered up to sepulchral worms,” lying beneath a tomb of white marble engraved with the words

  Alphonsine Plessis

  Born 15 January 1824