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

by Julie Kavanagh

  Died 3 February 1847.

  De Profundis

  On one side the initials A and P are entwined in an exact replica of the Perregaux script—a token consolation for Ned. Her destiny had come full circle, but this was not the end. “I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life,” she told Clotilde, as if foreseeing the last words of Marguerite (“I am going to live!”) and of Violetta (“Ah! ma io ritorno a viver!”). Her final wish could not have been more specific. “I want you to put a very weak bolt on my coffin,” Marie implored. “This is the most important thing of all.”

  Postscript

  ON 18 FEBRUARY 1847, an advertisement in several leading Parisian journals gave notice of an auction the following week of “a rich and elegant property.” Its entire contents were to come under the hammer, from kitchen utensils to objets d’art—even the horses, bridles, and saddles from its stables. Two hundred posters were erected around the city and eight hundred catalogues distributed, but what caught everyone’s eye were the words in small print: “After the death of Mme Plessis boulevart [sic] de la Madeleine, no 11.” It was this that caused such excitement. The public preview and four-day sale would provide the chance to explore a celebrated courtesan’s domain; to examine not only Marie’s furniture, ornaments, paintings, and books but her dresses, furs, jewels, cosmetic pots, and all the other glamorous accessories of her profession. Grandes dames, dandies, and demimondaines could talk of little else, and among others determined to attend were genuine collectors, enthralled by the rarity of certain items, as well as more unexpected figures. One of these was Charles Dickens.

  Dickens had been in Paris at the time of Marie’s death, renting number 48, rue de Courcelles, in the elegant Eighth Arrondissement. His incredulity at the public’s response was compounded by a fascination of his own. Fallen women of all types intrigued him, and, according to his friend and biographer John Forster, it had crossed his mind to make Marie the subject of a book, feeling that her short life contained a powerfully moralistic story. He was aware of legends starting to circulate about her, from the romantic to the absurd, and he himself had already fictionalized her end. “The greatest medical practitioner in Paris was called to her bedside. ‘What are your wishes?’ he asked when he saw that she was lost. She replied, ‘To see my mother,’ and her mother came running, a simple Breton peasant, wearing the picturesque costume of her province; she knelt at the bed of her daughter, stayed there praying until Marie was dead.” Dickens had heard it said that a broken heart had killed the young courtesan, but he was not convinced. “For my part, as a genteel Englishman, I am inclined to believe that she died of ennui and satiety. Satiety can kill just as effectively as hunger.”

  He and Forster had spent a fortnight together sightseeing, their itinerary taking in the usual attractions—the Louvre, Versailles, opera, theaters, and concerts—interspersed with “the gaudy and ghastly.” Of far more interest to Dickens were their visits to the women’s penitentiary of Saint-Lazare, to hospitals, prisons, cemeteries, and the morgue, all of which he observed “with a dreadful insatiability.” The sale of Marie Duplessis’s possessions would be another such excursion. Although not in Paris for the day of the preview, he was back in time for the sale itself, and in a letter to Count d’Orsay (who, as Agénor de Guiche’s uncle, already knew all about Marie Duplessis), Dickens expressed his astonishment.

  Everyone whom the capital of France counts as illustrious was there. The women of the very grandest circles found themselves in the crowd, and this social elite was waiting, curious, moved, full of sympathy and tender emotions for a simple girl.… To see the admiration and the general tristesse, one could believe that it was some kind of heroine like a Jeanne of Arc.

  Théophile Gautier also wrote of his amazement at the turnout of le tout Paris. As he joined the jostling crowd, he noticed Marie’s yellow-and-blue parrot looking for a few seeds in its empty container and stopped for a minute, touched by the sight. Another writer edging his way through each room, and even more affected by the poignancy of the experience, was Alexandre Dumas fils.

  It had been more than a year since Alexandre had visited boulevard de la Madeleine, and as he sat at the table at which they had often dined together, he looked around, imagining that he could hear “each object speak.” Marie’s piano was silent, the flowers in the grand Chinese vases were dying, and yet her presence was palpable, her clocks still ticking. Following behind the inquisitive women, he found himself cynically noting their mixed expressions of awe and shame at being inside a courtesan’s apartment. “This one was dead, so even the most virtuous among them could enter her bedroom. And if more excuses were needed, they could say they did not know whose sale it was.” For Alexandre, it was seeing Marie’s bed, enveloped in pink satin, that brought back the tenderest memories.

  For it is there, in the past, O my dear departed

  That we lay together when midnight came

  And, awake from then till dawn,

  We listened to the night hours pass

  I re-opened the pink satin curtains

  which shaded the morning sun

  and allowed in a single ray which hesitantly set

  its waking light upon your sleeping brow

  At home that night, still shaken by the emotions of the day, Alexandre wrote his sentimental elegy “M.D.” from which these lines are taken. “I cried when I wrote them and I cried on reading them,” he told his father, admitting that they had given him the idea of writing a book about Marie.

  —Well then, do it, replied Dumas père.

  —Perhaps I will try.

  There was much speculation that week about who would benefit from the proceeds of the sale. One account claimed that Marie Duplessis had made a will in which she bequeathed the profits to her niece, on condition that the young girl never let herself be corrupted by Paris. This, though, was another fable. Marie’s niece, Zoë Adèle Paquet, had not yet been conceived. Delphine, Marie’s sister, and her husband were the only inheritors, and were also responsible for settling her debts. These now amounted to nearly 21,000 francs, a sum easily covered by the sale’s profit of 89,017 francs. Delphine had held back Marie’s rosewood couch, her prayer book, the stuffed lizard, and the miniature of their mother, but virtually everything else was auctioned. At noon on Wednesday, February 24, Constant Paquet made the opening bid, on Delphine’s behalf, paying sixty-five francs for eight cotton petticoats. He went on to buy a cash-mere nightshirt and flannel vests and also secured some of Marie’s most valuable possessions, including her chandelier and the bronze and porcelain candelabras given to her by Stackelberg.

  Romain Vienne appeared to be equipping an apartment with his choice of lots: a stove, four firedogs, thirty-four pieces of glassware, cooking utensils, twenty-one pillowcases, a tablecloth and dish cloths. More curious was his purchase of six dresses, a set of perfume bottles, and a feather boa. “Did he intend to give the courtesan’s gowns to his wife?” ventured a recent biographer, but Romain had no wife. What he knew was that Marie’s dresses and boa would still be scented with her light l’Eau du Harem cologne—and that, for him, was reason enough to want to own them.

  Thursday’s sale of jewels was the bounty of Marie’s admirers, but apart from Tony, none of their names appears on the list of successful bidders. (Ned’s aunt the Duchess de Raguse, on the other hand, spent a total of 1,740 francs, presumably claiming back the Perregaux diamonds.) Tony bought a jardinière, small table, rosewood desk, expensive water glass (forty francs), figurine of Diane and Endymion, and Marie’s prie-dieu. At Saturday’s auction of paintings and drawings he was the main bidder, buying costume designs and seven other drawings, including a Vidal for 860 francs. Marie’s concierge, Pierre Privé, bought one portrait as a keepsake for three francs. On the fourth day, when the library of more than two hundred bound classics was auctioned, Eugène Sue was reported by Dickens to have acquired Marie’s prayer book, but again, this is fiction. The final lots were an odd miscellany—oil container
s, bottle racks, candlesticks, sconces, and—surely a grotesque oversight—Marie’s enema-injecting apparatus. These clysopompes were bought by Gautier for twelve francs.

  Gautier had written a long and effusive tribute to Marie in La Presse, and Romain Vienne, hoping that he could be persuaded to expand the article into a book, decided to pay him a visit. Vienne had been appointed by the Paquets as Marie’s executor, and despite being responsible for destroying most of her private correspondence, he had taken it upon himself to find a biographer. At nine in the morning he arrived at the house once inhabited by Byron on the Champs-Elysées. “Théo,” Vienne reports, was still in bed, but eventually appeared wearing pantaloons and sandals. Surrounded by cats of every color, he sat cross-legged on Oriental rugs “disguised as chairs, the Chinese way” (Gautier had bought two more rugs at Marie’s sale). After talking for an hour, they went out for lunch, during which time Vienne provided “all the information he would need to write either the history of Marie Duplessis, or a novel drawing on the important episodes of her life.” Gautier declined. He had been compromised enough, he said, by Mademoiselle de Maupin, his 1835 novel that borrowed the name and bisexuality of a notorious eighteenth-century cross-dressing adventuress.

  By the early summer, Alexandre Dumas fils’s book was well under way. He and an unnamed male companion had each taken a room at Le Cheval Blanc, an inn near his father’s house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The next morning they decided to extend their stay in the country and go riding, and the friend volunteered to return to Paris to fetch suitable clothes and clean linen. When he was alone, Alexandre began thinking again of Marie and decided that the time had come to attempt his novel. On his return, the friend found him hard at work and became involved himself, making copies of the sheets as Alexandre completed them, on condition that he be given the original manuscript to keep.

  Could this have been Ned Perregaux? In The Lady of the Camellias, Armand is complicit in the writing of the novel. “I feel obliged to recount this story to you,” he tells the narrator. “You will be able to make a book from it which no-one will believe, but which will perhaps be interesting for you to do.” No evidence exists of a collaboration between Ned and Alexandre—nor, in fact, a link of any kind, although they probably met at Marie’s apartment and certainly frequented the same boulevard restaurants. But the explanation Dumas fils gives as to why the manuscript of his novel was not written in his own hand is so far-fetched that one can’t help wondering if he had inherited his father’s habit of appropriating other people’s stories as his own. The friend, he says, took the original with him when he went on a trip to India. “Somewhere about the Cape of Good Hope there was such a hurricane that everything that could be spared was thrown into the sea to lighten the ship. The manuscript of La dame aux camélias was in one of the trunks tossed overboard.”

  If Ned Perregaux was a key source for the novel, then he was among several. Alexandre’s eyewitness account of the sale had given him his opening; he had his own chapter of autobiography to incorporate, and his acquaintance with members of Marie’s intimate circle, such as Agénor de Guiche, had provided him with other characters. It is the novel’s Count de G. who “launched” Marguerite, whose photograph she keeps long after their affair is over, and whose commitment to her, like Agénor’s to Marie, was “no more than an agreeable past-time.” Alexandre was also well aware of the name of Agénor’s famous ancestor, as Dumas père had cast Armand, Count de Guiche, in The Man in the Iron Mask. Brazenly factual, brilliantly observed, La dame aux camélias was completed in three or four weeks at Le Cheval Blanc. It was a remarkable achievement, but more than one contemporary has noted that it is more biography than novel. “It’s a history,” remarked Paul de Saint-Victor. “The intimate and secret history of Marie Duplessis.”

  The following February, exactly a year after Marie’s death, revolution broke out in the streets of the city, and the government of Louis-Philippe fell. In these early days of the Second Republic of France, Marie’s Paris became unrecognizable. “The habitués of the boulevard cafés were mostly National Guards,” wrote Albert Vandam. “Our fillet of beef was brought to us by a corporal, and our coffee poured out by a sergeant. The patrons were no longer ‘messieurs’ but had already become ‘citoyenes’ [sic].” Pasted across billboards outside the Comédie-Francaise were strips of paper with the word RELACHE [NO PERFORMANCE] in large black letters. Déjazet and Bouffé were appearing in a mixed program at the Variétés, but the house, like the Gymnase, was almost empty. At Tortoni, the café au lait and hot chocolate had to be made with water because the delivery carts of milk could not pass through the barricades.

  By the end of 1848, most of the activities had been crushed, but Bloody February had paralyzed commerce and industry, leaving France in economic crisis. At precisely this moment came news of the discovery of gold in California. The press published essays about the California climate, products, and history; companies were formed with alluring names such as La Fortune and L’Eldorado; a state lottery was organized with the aim of raising seven million francs to transport, free of charge, five thousand French emigrants to the New World. The writer chosen for the publicity brochure, La loterie des lingots d’or, was Alexandre Dumas fils. His father, now bankrupt and living in Brussels, had also cashed in on gold fever, with Un Gil Blas en Californie, a book plagiarized from an actual traveler’s journal. From September 1849, and over the next few years, thousands of French émigrés poured in through the Golden Gate. The majority of these were bachelors of the intelligentsia—lawyers, doctors, bankers, architects, scholars, and journalists. “Acting on impulse,” Romain Vienne, leaving on a frigate from Le Havre, was among them.

  And what of the other men who had been close to Marie? Agénor de Guiche, as a lieutenant in the National Guard, had taken up arms to defend Paris against the insurgents. His gallantry earned him a Legion of Honor nomination, but he was struck off the list when he changed allegiance and became a partisan of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. By now, at twenty-nine, Agénor had decided that he was ready to settle down and make a good marriage. This, however, proved harder than he had anticipated. “The Faubourg St Germain withheld its daughters from such a weathercock,” Elisabeth de Gramont wrote in a memoir of her grandfather. “He had to look for a wife in the mists of Scotland.” Agénor brought back Emma MacKinnon, the daughter of a Tory MP, and married her later in 1848. A country girl with a passion for horses, she was strong and hardy, and never took to her bed except to bear their four children. One son was named Agénor and another Armand. In 1852, when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte became emperor, he helped to advance his friend Agénor’s political career by making him French ambassador in the increasingly influential posts of Cassel, Stuttgart, Turin, and Vienna. He succeeded as the tenth Duke de Gramont in 1855 and was appointed foreign minster in 1870. “Haughty with men and delightful with women,” cultured and handsome, Agénor was the ideal diplomat but far less accomplished as a politician, and was held largely responsible for the disastrous 1870–71 war with Prussia. At the fall of the Empire, three-quarters ruined having spent his wife’s fortune maintaining the splendor of his embassies, Agénor bought a modest house on the rue La Pérouse, in the center of Paris, where he lived until his death in 1880.

  There is little trace of Ned Perregaux after Marie died. In March 1847, in a letter to Gautier, the actress Alice Ozy writes, “My dear count honoured me with his presence all day [but] I was very anxious that he had consumed a lot of hashish on leaving me: he wrote to me that evening saying that he had a horrible headache and was staying in bed.” A footnote by the editor of the Gautier correspondence names the count as Edouard Perregaux. It seems perfectly reasonable that a bereft Ned would seek consolation in the company of his former mistress, and might want to escape reality with a mind-altering drug. His presence in Ozy’s apartment, however, turns out to be a case of misidentification: the visitor with a penchant for hashish was Count Rostopchine, “an amiable and witty Russian.” In Dece
mber 1848 Ned renewed his request to join the Foreign Legion and a fortnight later received official permission—on condition that “Citoyen Perregaux” pay off all his debts. Yet again, he failed to take up the offer. After resigning from the Jockey Club in 1850, Ned moved to Chantilly, outside Paris, where he rented a furnished villa on the Grande-Rue and became an active participant in the town’s prestigious races. According to Henri de Pené, he knew that he had been made a theatrical hero but refused ever to see a performance of La dame aux camélias. “And he has kept his word.”

  By February 1847, Liszt was in Kiev, where he met twenty-eight-year-old Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, a small, dark, reclusive woman with whom he settled in Weimar the following year. He had been immediately smitten by the “very extraordinary and distinguished” Carolyne, his companion until his death, but nevertheless, news of Marie’s death had shaken him badly. “It was the last and only shock I have felt in years,” he confessed to Marie d’Agoult in the spring of 1847. “It is useless to try to find an explanation for these contradictions of the human heart.” Janka Wohl wrote of how, especially during the last years of Liszt’s life, a melancholy note infiltrated his reminiscences. “He loved to lay stress on the chances he had missed, on the grand opportunities which he had spoilt for himself. He accentuated this idea with wonderful frankness and candour one evening when he was speaking of Madame Duplessis.” Remembering how excited Marie had been by the prospect of a trip to Constantinople, Liszt told Wohl that not having taken her there was something he had always regretted.

  Olympe Aguado had remained with his married mistress, Mrs. Adrian Hope, until her scandalous divorce in 1855, when their affair was made public. Five years later he married Bertha de Freystedt, former demoiselle of honor to Stéphanie de Beauharnais, Grand Duchess of Baden. They had two children, Louis and ravishing, cat-eyed Carmen, named after his mother, who lived with them in the sumptuous Hôtel Milon d’Inval at 18, place Vendôme. This was also where Olympe had his photographic studio. By the 1850s, having learned the daguerrotype technique from Gustave Le Gray, Olympe had become a founding member of the Société Française de Photographie. In 1854, he and his young friend Edouard Delessert invented the photographic visiting card, which caught on with the verve of an early Facebook. Later, Olympe became known for the tableaux vivants he staged with family and friends, dressing them up as fishermen in foul-weather oilcloths; poking fun at the pastimes of his grand milieu (The Reader, one of many Aguado photographs in the collection of Musée d’Orsay, shows him irreverently dozing off during one of the reading sessions that were a regular practice at court). Madame Aguado was always a game subject, whether disguised as a lace maker or as a duenna with keys hanging from her belt. Small and rotund, she has a plain, mannish face with several chins, but her warmth is visible as she sits playing cards and gazing mischievously at her son. With Emperor Napoléon III and Princess Eugénie among Olympe’s regular sitters, he moved in a sphere that never could have included Marie. All the same, given his affection and loyalty, it is not fanciful to presume that had she lived just two more years, there would be photographs of Marie Duplessis among the Aguado archive.