“The immense convoy was watched”: Imbert de Saint-Amand, The Duchess of Berry and the Revolution of 1830 (London: Hutchinson, 1893).
“He made everyone tremble”: Charles Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
Maison Fremin, the umbrella shop where she began work: Vienne misspells the owner Louis Fremin’s name as Firmin.
a louche element to Gacé: Vienne claims that it was in Gacé that Alphonsine met the procuress whom Alexandre Dumas fils names Prudence in La dame aux camélias. But, as Vienne also calls her Prudence, rather than her real name, Clémence Prat, this may just be supposition on his part.
“the old swooning sweetness”: Appendix to R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper Collins, 1975).
Vienne, however, insists that it was Marin: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852. Fiennes wrote with such insider knowledge about Alphonsine’s early life that he must have been fed information by someone close to her—very probably her maid.
Alphonsine was given a stuffed green lizard: In a letter to the firm making an inventory of her dead sister’s belongings, Delphine wrote, “Look carefully in my sister’s peignoir, and, unless it’s been stolen, you will find there a little box containing a green lizard.” Charles du Hays, “The Ring and the Lizard,” in Récits du coin du feu: Autour du Merlerault (Alençon, 1886).
“What do you expect?”: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
“child full of fear”: Ibid.
“pay for her promiscuity”: Paris Elégant, 1 March 1847.
“the most suspect places”: Gustave Claudin, Mes souvenirs: Les boulevards de 1840–1870 (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1884).
“She was nibbling a green apple”: Nestor Roqueplan, Parisine (Paris: J. Hetzel et Cie, 1868).
“Not only delicious, but sacred” Théodore de Banville, Petites études, Paris vécu (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1883).
“like a peasant” … “This made her”: Roqueplan, Parisine.
GRISETTE
“Most of those without cavaliers left better accompanied”: Anon., Paris dansant; ou, Les filles d’Hérodiade (Paris: J. Bréauté, 1845).
“Louise was one”: Henri Murger, Scénes de la vie de bohème (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1886).
“Jumps, fluttering”: Anon., Paris dansant.
“A helter-skelter of bewildering dash”: Quoted in David Price, Cancan! (London: Cygnus Arts, 1998).
“would recount”: Murger, Scénes de la vie de bohéme.
“Since when have we eaten”: Ibid.
“explosion of joy”: “Un Inconnu,” in Paris Elégant, 1 March 1847.
“one of those girls of the Latin Quarter”: Roqueplan, Parisine.
“A dinner tempts her”: Anon., Paris dansant.
“on anatomy, physiology”: Anon., La grisette à Paris et en province. Sa vie, ses moeurs, son caractère, ses joies, ses espérances, ses tribulations (Paris: Renault, 1843).
“sparked a revolution”: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
“welcomed by two students”: “Quivis” in L’Intermédiaire des Cher-cheurs et Curieux, 10 September 1890.
“Tired of this miserable life”: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
“lulling the dark city”: Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris, trans. and ed. Brian Nelson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
“They’re virtuous”: Quoted by Joëlle Guillais-Maury in Michèle Bordeaux et al., Madame ou mademoiselle? Itinéraires de la solitude feminine, 19–20me siècle (Paris: Montalban, 1984).
“the prettiest working girls”: Roqueplan, Parisine.
“frisked about like fish”: Quoted in Guillais-Maury in Bordeaux, Madame ou mademoiselle?
“It’s the intimate hour of the Bois”: Edmond Texier, Tableau de Paris (Paris: Paulin et Le Chevalier, 1852–53).
“Her hat is not much more”: Ibid.
“ugly, improper”: Nestor Roqueplan, Regain: La vie parisienne (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1853).
As well as returning the money she owed: Charles du Hays gives a completely contrary account. It was when Alphonsine fell on hard times, he says, that she gave away her ring. “One of her companions, moved by pity, offered the poor Alphonsine nine francs—everything she possessed. Then poor Alphonsine, in a surge of gratitude, gave her friend this ring.… These nine francs bought bread for a few days.” Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
LORETTE
“The lorette is a grisette”: Bordeaux et al., Madame ou mademoiselle?
“The lorette sleeps in an acacia gondola”: Anon., Paris dansant.
“The grisette gives, the lorette receives”: Bordeaux et al., Madame ou Mademoiselle?
“to this aim one sacrifices everything”: Anon., Paris dansant.
“At Chaumière the woman dances for pleasure” … “From these aquaintances”: Ibid.
When she realized that Valory had abandoned her: This is presumably “le petit vicomte de L.,” whom Prudence describes to Armand Duval in the novel of La dame aux camélias. He is forced to leave, she says, “because Marguerite almost ruined him.” She cried when he left, and although she went as usual to the theater as if nothing had happened, she still kept a miniature of him.
“a true friend” … “I lack nothing”: Letter quoted in Emile Henriot, Portraits des femmes d’Héloïse à Katherine Mansfield (Paris: Albin Michel, 1951).
There, a midwife was employed: Doubting the veracity of Vienne’s account, a subsequent biographer, Georges Soreau, wrote to the mayor of Versailles asking if one Alphonsine Plessis had given birth to a child around 1841. The mayor, replying on 21 February 1898, claimed that there was no record of any such birth on the Etat Civil lists from 1833 to 1853—as indeed is the case. These lists and parish registers are now numerized and available online. Document, code 5MI131BIS-Commune ancienne paroisse Versailles Acte: TD-Dates: 1833–1842, pp. 92–467. We can see that eight Plessis children were born over this period, but none to a single mother named Alphonsine. It could well be that Vienne was mistaken and the child was born in a different parish or in Paris itself. But this is impossible to confirm as the city’s registry acts before 1859 were among the Hôtel de Ville’s eight million documents destroyed in the great fire of May 1871. However, even the skeptical Soreau came to conclude that Alphonsine had “very probably been a mother.” He was assured of this by Mme Henriette Alexandre Dumas, the author’s widow, who said that her husband had alluded more than once to the fact that the Lady of the Camellias had borne a child. And there are other endorsements: L’Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et Curieux of 10 September 1890, claims, “She had a child who was recognised by his father, who favoured him in his will.” While the most convincing evidence of all is a remark in a letter from Charles du Hays to Gérard de Contades. Helping with background research for the count’s seminal article “Les quartiers de la dame aux camélias,” du Hays urges, “I beg you to not talk of her son.” This was written in January 1885—two years before the publication of Romain Vienne’s memoir.
“moderately pretty”: L’Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et Curieux, 10 September 1890.
But the viscount’s letters and payments had then stopped: Unconvinced by the viscount’s claim, Vienne asked Alphonsine if she had requested the proof of a death certificate. She had not. But, once again, there are different accounts of what became of her son. L’Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et Curieux (10 September 1890) reports: “The child died, and la dame aux camélias inherited from her son.” Charles du Hays told Count Gérard de Contades that a stranger, renowned in equestrian circles, arrived one day in his office who was not only “the image of Mlle Plessis” but also the right age to have been her son. Delphine also believed that she had seen Alphonsine’s son as an adult. In 1869, she told Vienne, a young man in his late twenties had turned up at her home near Gacé. With exquisite politeness, he asked if he
could see the portrait of her sister painted by Vidal. “He looked at it for a long time in silence, with visible emotion, not managing to hide the tears.… He then thanked her and greeted her graciously, leaving his card with the words: ‘Judelet, employee of a business in Tours.’ ” “Good God—how like my sister he was!” Delphine exclaimed to her children, and the next morning she sent her eldest daughter to all the hotels of Gacé in an attempt to find him. To no avail. She also wrote to the mayor of Tours, sending him the business card and asking him for information, only to be told a week later that no person or business existed bearing this name.
“plush white hat”: Docteur Lucien-Graux, Les factures de la dame aux camélias (Clichy: Paul Dupout, 1934).
“Our cousin Marie”: In Charles A. Dolph, The Real “Lady of the Camellias” and Other Women of Quality (London: T. W. Laurie, 1927).
“Rare lorettes”: Roqueplan, Regain.
“I felt myself tapped on the shoulder”: Roqueplan, Parisine.
PART TWO: MARIE
“The Gs have retired”: Benjamin Disraeli, Letters (University of Toronto Press, 1982).
A portrait of him as a student: Puzzlingly, both Nestor Roqueplan and Agénor’s biographer, Constantin de Grunwald, describe the young duke as blond.
“absolutely without fortune”: Dorothée Dino, Chronique de 1831 à 1862 par la princesse Radziwill (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1909).
“The Duke de G.”: Column signed “Méjannes,” Gil Blas, 18 October 1887.
“beautiful lion” … “On a day of mourning”: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
Barely disguised in his memoir: There are several inaccuracies in Vienne’s account of “Tiche,” who was twenty-two at the time, not “about thirty,” but the description of him as a “beautiful man with an impressive moustache and superb black side whiskers” exactly mirrors the handsome figure in Count d’Orsay’s portrait.
Aware that a sense of shame prevented Lili: In the 1921 silent film Camille, the bisexual movie star Alla Nazimova introduced a charged encounter with a trusting ingenue played by a pretty actress whom she was pursuing offscreen.
If their intimacy was a sapphic interlude: The practice of lesbianism by “tribades” was defined by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, author of the renowned 1836 survey Prostitution in 19th-Century Paris, as “the basest degree of vice of which a human being is capable.” Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, La prostitution à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981).
“Her presence produced”: Courrier de la Ville, 20 May 1842.
“another person” … “the delirium of transformation”: Stefan Zweig, Post Office Girl, trans. Joel Rotenberg. (London: Sort of Books, 2009).
“an oracle of fashion”: Lady Blessington—whose lover was Ida de Gramont’s brother the Count d’Orsay—gives an amusing account in her memoirs of the duchess taking her shopping. Her dress and bonnet, which she had always considered perfectly wearable, drew a contemptuous look from the couturier at Herbault, “the Temple” of Parisian fashion. “The Duchess, too quick-sighted not to observe his surprise, explained that I had been six years absent from Paris, and only arrived the night before from Italy.” After proceeding to another boutique to order lace jackets and morning dresses, the pair returned to Lady Blessington’s hotel, “my head filled with notions of the importance of dressing à la mode … and my purse considerably lightened.” Countess of Blessington, The Idler in France (London: Henry Colburn, 1841).
“Who can explain”: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
“Someone you don’t know”: Letter dated 24 July 1842. Original copy in the Frederick R. Koch Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
“What should I do?”: Quoted in Baron de Plancy, Souvenirs et indiscretions d’un disparu (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1892).
“History of His Own Times”: Quoted in R. R. Madden, The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessingham (London: T. C. Newby, 1855), vol. 1.
“a modern Raoul de Courcy”: Letter of 3 January 1845, in ibid., vol. 2.
“My dear Agénor”: Frederick R. Koch Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
“Adieu my darling angel, don’t forget me too much, and think sometimes of her”: Instead of “celle” Marie writes “sel” [salt]—the only conspicuous slip in her otherwise polished, if poorly punctuated, French.
Like the two single Englishwomen: If Vienne is correct in saying that Marie still lived in the rue d’Antin, then the address she gave in Badeblatt of “St Germain” was false (perhaps explained by a remark in a book of Parisian mores that an “Honest Young Girl” would live only in the faubourg Saint-Germain). More confusing is the address in her passport, which is given as 28, rue Mont du Thabor: the Archives de Paris provide no name of owner or lessee of the property but details this only as “a boutique and other residences.” It may, however, have been Guiche’s address—as claimed by the Count de Contades in an article published in Le Livre (10 December 1885, no. 72).
But while she was in her element: On July 25, Badeblatt records that the Marquis de Rodes was still at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, but General Duke v. Skarzynsky had left Baden-Baden.
“Do not fear”: Judith, La vie d’une grande comédienne.
“He has just rented” Letter of 21 December 1802, in Comte de Nesselrode, Lettres et papiers, 1760–1850 (Paris: A. Lehure, 1904), vol. 2.
As special envoy for the czar: With his customary “tetchy” expression, Stackelberg is seated on the extreme right of Isabey’s sepia drawing, seen remonstrating with a German confederate who is taking notes. The count’s main aim was to unite Poland with Russia—which was successfully achieved.
“He’s a unique character”: Grande-Duchesse Hélène to Countess Charles de Nesselrode, 26 December 1828. Nesselrode, Lettres et papiers, vol. 7.
“The feelings of this father”: La dame aux camélias (Paris: Collection Folio Classique, Gallimard, 1975).
“The count, in spite of his great age”: Alexandre Dumas fils, Théâtre complet, vol. 3: Notes (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1898).
“The essential fact”: Francis Gribble, Dumas Father and Son (London: Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, 1930).
“they were taught not only to dance”: Maria Czapska, Une famille d’Europe centrale 1772–1914 (Paris: Plon, 1972).
“From this moment”: Judith, La vie d’une grande comédienne.
Sporting chain-mail breastplates: From Lucien-Graux, Les factures de la dame aux camélias.
Still renting cheap lodgings: The platonic friendship that the novel’s narrator forms with Sally Bowles, a bohemian English cabaret singer, is founded on the same blend of fondness, trust, and exasperation. She too openly confesses her noctural adventures until he protests, “If you go to bed with every single man in Berlin and come and tell me about it each time, you still won’t convince me that you’re la Dame aux Camélias—because, really and truly, you know, you aren’t.” Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Hogarth Press, 1939).
Still addressing her as Alphonsine: A change of name was not unusual among women of the demimonde as a way of protecting the honor of their families, but Alphonsine’s choice was a tribute to her late mother, Marie Plessis. Duplessis—or du Plessis—is a common name in Normandy, though the addition of a prefix may have been Agénor’s idea (the mother of Armand de Guiche was a du Plessis—Françoise-Marguerite). It seems fitting in Marie’s case that the original definition came from the language of courtly love and meant a “park of pleasure.”
“Call it a project, a fantasy”: Situated just outside the village of Nonant-le-Pin, “Le Plessis” is now a working farm whose owners, M. and Mme Ruault, offer bed-and-breakfast accommodation.
could never confess his feelings: The English journalist Albert Vandam was someone else whose company she welcomed because he avoided flattering her. Albert Vandam, An Englishman in Paris, vol. 1 (
New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1892).
“For some time”: Judith, La vie d’une grande comédienne.
“like fits of madness”: January 1821. Nesselrode, Lettres et papiers, vol. 6.
“a duchess could not have smiled differently”: Dumas fils, La dame aux camélias.
“retired existence”: Vandam, An Englishman in Paris, vol. 1.
“Mixing only with men of wealth and education”: Parent-Duchâtelet, La prostitution à Paris.
PART THREE: THE LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS
“In novels”: Arsène Houssaye, Man about Paris, trans. Henry Kepler (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972).
“the poem of Paris”: Quoted in Philip Mansel, Paris Between Empires: Monarchy and Revolution 1814–1852 (London: John Murray, 2001).
“culinary glory”: Jacques Castelnau, En remontant les grands boulevards (Paris: Le Livre Contemporain, 1960).
“Nobody was tolerated”: Claudin, Mes souvenirs.
“I gave in”: Quoted in Joanna Richardson, Rachel (London: Max Reinhardt, 1956).
“Le tout Paris”: Jules Bertaut, Le Boulevard (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1957).
“Alphonsine Plessis interests me very much”: Quoted in Vandam, An Englishman in Paris.
“I wanted to know the refinements”: Judith, La vie d’une grande comédienne.
“Whoever dares”: Quoted in Arsène Houssaye, La pécheresse (Paris: M. Lévy Frères, 1863).
“friend of the Café de Paris band”: Bertaut, Le Boulevard.
“without intellect, but with a rich instinct”: Roqueplan, Parisine.
“but she talked nothing but nonsense”: Houssaye, Man about Paris.
His main talent was as an observer: Vandam’s anecdotal “Notes and Recollections,” entitled An Englishman in Paris, was first published anonymously in 1892 and then reprinted several times under his own name.
The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis Page 24