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

by Julie Kavanagh

  “something provoking and voluptuous”: Claudin, Mes souvenirs.

  “The Irish woman”: Ibid.

  Lola’s phony Spanish look: The painter is likely to have been either Jean-Charles Olivier, a pupil of Delaroche, who exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1840 to 1848, or Louis-Camille d’Olivier, who specialized in portraits and whose work was shown at the Salon between 1848 and 1870.

  “Only the large black eyes”: Paul de Saint-Victor, Le théâtre contemporain (Paris: C. Lévy, 1889).

  “a woman of unnerving contrasts”: Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (London: Granta, 2010).

  “the devotion of the erotic Boulevard”: Claudin, Mes souvenirs.

  “Disciples of Eros”: Roger de Beauvoir, Voluptueux souvenirs; ou, Le Souper des Douze (Paris: Romainville, no date).

  “the most audacious”: Castelnau, En remontant les grands boulevards.

  “thrice rich”: Preface to Roger de Beauvoir, Les soupers de mon temps (collection of Jean-Marie Choulet).

  “not one had the verve of Roger de Beauvoir”: Ibid.

  “My dear Arvers”: Quoted in Léon Séché, Alfred de Musset: L’homme et l’oeuvre—Les camarades (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1907).

  “At first glance”: Houssaye, Man about Paris.

  “the consecration of Marie Duplessis”: Johannes Gros, Alexandre Dumas et Marie Duplessis (Paris: Louis Conard, 1923).

  “From the stage”: The Goncourt Journals, 1851–1870, ed. Lewis Galantière (London: Cassell, 1937).

  “All these girls wanted to be actresses”: Houssaye, Man about Paris.

  Marie studied for a short time: I’m indebted to Kristine Baril for finding the reference to Marie’s link with Ricourt in Henry Morel, Le pilori des communeux (Paris: E. Lachaud, 1871). Ricourt studied painting with Géricault and Delacroix and founded the journal L’Artiste before concentrating on teaching drama.

  “Mademoiselle, you”: Charles Monselet. Le musée secret de Paris (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1870).

  “The theatre, you understand”: Le Mousquetaire, 1 April 1855.

  “It’s there above all”: Saint-Victor, Le théâtre contemporain.

  It was sent to the distributeur des faveurs: Marie addresses the recipient as “My little monsieur Amant,” which may be her misspelling of the Christian name “Amand” (she even misspells her own name at the end), or it may be a deliberate play on the word amant, French for “lover.”

  “Once again I’m asking”: Quoted in Lucien-Graux, Les factures de la dame aux camélias.

  “Vendu a Madame Dupleci”: Gros, Une courtisane romantique.

  It is her way of alluding: In Frederick Ashton’s ballet Marguerite and Armand, Margot Fonteyn, “for reasons of modesty connected with the novel,” insisted on wearing only white flowers. The designer Cecil Beaton, however, appears not to have known about the tradition linked to the display of red blooms, as he intended, says his biographer Hugo Vickers, “to put red camellias on most of Margot Fonteyn’s gowns.”

  And with several friends and acquaintances in common: George Sand makes no mention of Marie in her journals and letters—not even during the course of her long correspondence with Alexandre Dumas fils. Dumas, though, must have read Isidora, as he answered the scholars who had criticized him for spelling camellia with a single ‘l’ with the comment “It’s because Madame Sand used this word as I did, and I would rather write badly with her example than write well with that of others.” Marie, however, may also have been guilty of plagiarism. One of the habitués of the Café de Paris was one M. Lautour-Mezeray, known as “l’homme au camélia” because of his habit of never appearing in public without a single white bloom in his buttonhole (as in Lami’s Le foyer de la danse, where he is pictured leaning against a pillar, languidly eyeing a ballerina). She would undoubtedly have known Lautour-Mezeray, who belonged to her set, and they might even have discovered that they came from the same Orne district of Normandy. Albert Vandam implies, however, that he would not have approved of Marie’s “usurpation” of his signature camellia, on which he must have spent no less than fifty thousand francs. “It was more than an ornament to him … he looked upon it as a talisman.” When Dumas fils’s novel appeared, l’homme au camélia voiced his resentment of its title: “It injures my own.”

  “one immense Belshazzar’s hall”: Lord Beaconsfield, Correspondence with His Sister, 1832–1852 (London: John Murray, 1886). Letter of 16 January 1843.

  “Your conversation tonight interested me”: Quoted in Gros, Une courtisane romantique. First printed in L’amateur d’autographes, no. 18 (April 1865) as the only letter of MD to have been sold at auction, first in the collection of Trémont (1852) and then in that of Laverdet (1861).

  “When we were installed”: Mané, Le Paris viveur (Paris: E. Dentu, 1862).

  The beautiful grace which he brought: This all sounds entirely plausible, except for the fact that Henri de Pené would have been only fourteen years old at the time. It could be argued, though, that he was an exceptionally precocious student, as he had established himself as a political columnist by the age of nineteen. Also, if Marie had been approached by teenagers, it would explain her initial hesitation about accepting their invitation. “You know, don’t you, that an Opera ball is every schoolboy’s dream,” remarks the narrator of Alexandre Dumas fils’s La vie à vingt ans (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1854). “I sold my dictionaries in order to go,” replies his friend.

  —And did you have fun?

  —Well, every time a woman approached, I trembled for fear that she might speak to me.

  —Why did you go then?

  —So that the next day I could tell my friends I’d been, and because I wanted to give myself the air of a debauched rake.

  Vienne’s far less persuasive version has Perregaux falling in love at first sight with Marie seated in her box at the Opéra.

  Count Edouard de Perregaux: Vienne disguises him as “Robert de Saint-Yves,” a name he may have taken from the original French translation of Verdi’s La Traviata, in which the surname of the heroine, Violetta, Marie’s operatic counterpart, is de Saint-Ys.

  “Mlle A.O.”: Edition of 8 May 1843.

  The tone of a formal, impatient note: No trace of evidence exists for this voyage, but her most reliable biographer, the scholarly Johannes Gros, was convinced that a large medallion called Tête d’étude avec fleurs, which appeared at the Salon of 1849, was a portrait of Marie painted in Rome. Its subsequent disappearance makes his claim impossible to verify.

  “After her death a copy of the novel”: Claudin, Mes souvenirs. Charles Matharel de Fiennes claimed to have seen a portrait, “painted by a master,” which was a version of Greuze’s famous work Jeune fille à la cruche cassée; instead of the broken vase, a symbol of lost virginity, “Marie holds in her hand the immortal book of Abbé Prévost” (L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852).

  their passion was a source of misery: In Dumas’s novel, it is Armand who sends Marguerite a copy of the book, wanting to draw her attention to their resemblance to Prévost’s lovers. (It is inscribed “Manon to Marguerite. Humility” and signed “Armand Duval.”) Realizing that he cannot change his mistress’s life, Armand resolves to change his own; he starts gambling in order to meet their expenditure and discovers this to be an effective distraction. “Jealousy would have kept me awake … while gambling gave a new turn to the fever which would otherwise have preyed upon my heart.” Ned, however, could not bring himself to be complicit.

  Ned Perregaux had acquired: There is no entry of a sale in the name of Perregaux—or anyone else associated with Marie—in the listings of the region’s notary at the time, Léon Armand Gaucheron, whose records are held in Montigny Archives. According to Vienne, though, the Perregaux family had their own notary in Paris, but with no knowledge of a name, it is impossible to trace a confirmation of the property sale. An article in La Gazette de Bougival (undated clipping in the collection of Jean-Marie Choulet) i
s illustrated with a photograph of the house—now a suburban villa—believed to have been Marie’s. No source of evidence is given for this, nor for the following claim: “Marie Duplessis lived on the Ile de la Chaussée, the eastern tip of which is known as Ile Gautier (Marguerite’s surname).”

  is said to have been frequented by Marie: Called La Camélia in response to local lore, the restaurant still exists today and has one Michelin star.

  As a laureate of Chantilly: With thoroughbreds costing fabulous prices there were only nine of the Jockey Club’s three hundred members wealthy enough to faire courir—to own and raise racehorses. Edouard de Perregaux was one of them.

  “enormous debts and terrifying losses”: Le Siècle, 8 May 1843.

  “It’s a very agreeable surprise”: Quoted in Choulet, Promenades à Paris et en Normandie avec la dame aux camélias.

  “But he kept Alphonsine out of sight”: Quoted in Nicholas John, Violetta and Her Sisters.

  “I adore you”: This is the passage read aloud by Armand in the play, after which he remarks, “She’s right, but she does not love, because love knows no reason.”

  “lady companion”: Faculté de droit de Toulouse (Toulouse: Caillol et Baylac, 1869).

  “a free, blissful society”: Quoted in Prasteau, The Lady of the Camellias: A Story of Marie Duplessis.

  But even a century earlier: In John Neumeier’s 1978 ballet version, the heroine is shadowed by a second ballerina in the role of Manon, who becomes the amoral, materialistic doppelgänger of loving, tender Marguerite.

  “At the beginning of the third act”: Quoted in Vandam, An Englishman in Paris, vol. 1.

  “Mme la Comtesse Deperegaud”: Lucien-Graux, Les factures de la dame aux camélias.

  PART FOUR: MARGUERITE

  “a great similarity with her own”: Hays, L’Ancien Merlerault.

  “as a work of charity”: Quoted in Georges Soreau La Vie de la dame aux camélias (Paris: Editions de la Revue de France, 1898).

  “She was discovered twelve years later”: Parent-Duchâtelet, La prostitution à Paris au XIXe siècle.

  Count von Stackelberg had come back: Baden-Baden’s Liste des Etrangers records that “Stackelberg, baron de, Russe” was staying in the town (without his wife, who went earlier that summer) between 21 August and 22 September—a period coinciding exactly with the dates that Ned Perregaux had been alone in Spa. But if Marie was reunited with Stackelberg in Baden-Baden she left no evidence to confirm it.

  “Have you given it”: “Méjannes,” column in Gil Blas, 18 October 1887.

  it was back in rue d’Antin: Joséphine Bloch, aka Marix, posed for two Ary Scheffer paintings in 1837 when she was fifteen. A Scheffer oil painting given the title Marie Duplessis, la dame aux camélias, was sold at an auction in Fontainebleau in November 1996, but the pensive girl sitting in an armchair bears little resemblance to Marie. Catalogue from the collection of Jean Hournon.

  “an arsenal of the most elegant coquetterie”: Henry Lumière, “La dame aux camélias: Une lettre inédite de Marie Duplessis,” La Revue Normande, 1900.

  “She particularly owed her fortune”: Le Corsaire, 8 March 1852.

  “a thousand plots”: Vandam, An Englishman in Paris, vol. 1.

  “interested her far less”: Gros, Une courtisane romantique.

  The cause of tuberculosis would not be discovered: Evading the medical profession for centuries, the means of transmission was not known until the German bacteriologist Robert Koch identified the bacillus, subsequently given his name. R.T.H. Laënnec, one of the most revered figures in the history of French medicine, regarded the question of contagion as “highly dubious …

  In France, at least, it does not seem to be,” he wrote in 1818, his opinion still virtually unquestioned by physicians forty years later.

  “elixir of long life”: Catalogue for Hôtel Drouot sale, 28 June 2004, from the collection of Jean Darnel.

  “with perfect mediocrity”: Le Corsaire, 4 April 1852.

  “the coming of old age”: Dumas fils, La dame aux camélias.

  “You’re wasting your time, Marquis”: There is a very similar exchange in the novel between Marguerite and the Count de N.

  —How are you this evening?

  —Bad, Marguerite replies dryly.

  —Is it because I’m inconveniencing you?

  —Perhaps.

  —What a way to receive me! What have I done, dear Marguerite?

  —My dear friend, you haven’t done anything. I am ill, and I need to rest, so you will oblige me by leaving. What bores me is not being able to return in the evening without you appearing five minutes later. What exactly do you want? That I become your mistress? Well, I’ve already told you a hundred times no. That you annoy me horribly, and that you should fix your attention on someone else.… Look, Nanine [her maid] is back; she will show you to the door. Goodnight.

  Some chroniclers of Marie’s: According to Johannes Gros, Ned “certainly provided Dumas with several character traits for the suitor,” while the historian R. du Mesnil du Buisson cites evidence for this in the scene where the Count de N. pulls out a splendid pocket watch and announces that it is time for him to go to his club. The Swiss Perregauxs were famous watchmakers, and Ned himself owned a magnificent example encased in gold and engraved with his entwined initials and the family coat of arms.

  The veteran actor Marie Bouffé: Le dîner de Madelon was a one-act vaudeville by Désaugiers. Davesne’s Le père Turlututu had Bouffé as the lead, and the program included Racine’s Phèdre with Jacques-Charles Odry, La Basquaise by Fusch and Mlle Bertin, and Premières armes de Richelieu, starring Virginie Déjazet. The performance concluded with the two-act Le gamin de Paris, by Bayard and Van den Bruck; a polka, Le pas de la sylphide; followed by a quadrille in which various artists appeared. “Then M. Cavallo, the pianist, played several pieces of his own composition,” wrote Paul d’Ariste. “A rather overloaded programme, as one can see.” La vie et le monde du boulevard (1830–1870) (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1930).

  “Her name on the posters”: Eugène Pierron, Virginie Déjazet (Paris: Bolle-Lasalle, 1856).

  “Every member of the press” and “She spoke in all the jargons”: Eugène de Mirecourt, Déjazet (Paris: Gustave Havard, 1855).

  “She was alone there”: If this was the same gala night, then it must have been Stackelberg, not Ned Perregaux, who provided the box for Marie—not surprisingly, as the price for a stage box at a special benefit performance such as this was “enough to keep a family for six months.” Jules Janin, L’Artiste, 1 December 1851; Dumas fils, Théâtre complet, vol. 3: Notes.

  Alexandre was eyeing but Marie: Marie could have been collecting the bronze frame itemized on her Susse account as paid for by Ned and engraved with the Perregaux arms. Susse was also the dealer of sculptures by James Pradier, whose wife, Louise, had seduced Dumas fils in 1843 and was the model for the nymphomaniac heroine of his novel L’affaire Clemenceau.

  “She wore a muslin dress”: Dumas fils (preface by André Maurois), La dame aux camélias. Years later, Dumas fils bought Marie’s chain from an antiquarian—“links of two centimetres separated by a tarnished little pearl”—which he gave to his daughter Jeanine d’Hauterive-Dumas, who wore it as a necklace.

  Forced to pay his creditors: Alexandre Dumas fils is listed among the contributors to Sylphide from June–November 1843, and has a poem, “À une jeune fille,” in its July issue. In Paris Elégant (1 Octobre 1844) is a piece published under his own name, a tribute to the writer Joseph Méry.

  “I know of no two characters”: Quoted in F.W.J Hemmings, The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979).

  “We went together”: Quoted in Gros, Une courtisane romantique.

  “What are you complaining about?”: Quoted in Viel-Castel, Mémoires.

  “If you have spent a little too much time”: Paris Elégant, 1 October 1844.

  “She gave me to understand”: Quoted in Edith Saunder
s, The Prodigal Father: Dumas Père et Fils and The Lady of the Camellias (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951).

  On one such day: In the notes he gave to prepare the actors for a new production of his play, Dumas fils declared this to have been “a fine day in September ’44”—the date every biographer and Dumas scholar, from André Maurois to Claude Schopp, has used to mark the beginning of his liaison with Marie. But not only was Alexandre involved with his actress in September 1844—their breakup, which caused him to “shed hot tears,” was at the beginning of October—Marie had not yet moved in to boulevard de la Madeleine, where the events Dumas fils describes took place. Their first meeting must have been after January 1845, when she left rue d’Antin, and as both Marie and Eugène were present at the Variétés gala of February 25, it seems likely that Alexandre was there too. His reason for predating his first encounter with Marie by six or seven months—and presumably also for using her previous address in the novel—can only have been to make their affair appear more significant: she was, after all, the most profound influence on his career. Albert Vandam was right in saying that Dumas fils “had not seen half as much of Alphonsine Duplessis during her life as is commonly supposed.”

  “[He] went over”: Dumas fils, Théâtre complet, vol. 3: Notes.

  “I remember exactly”: Ibid.

  with Dumas’s assurance: “At this point the narrative of the novel, Chapter X,” he told his actors, “is even more faithful to the truth than the play. The whole novel conforms, more than the play, to actual events in this little drama of love.”

  “the same supper”: Ibid.

  “is likely to coat these” and “We know”: Quoted in David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

  “You don’t have a father”: Dumas fils, introduction to L’affaire Clemenceau: Mémoire de l’accusé (Paris: Michael Lévy Frères, 1869).