“fired with proselytizing,” Edmund Gosse, introduction to The Lady of the Camellias (London: William Heinemann, 1902).
“One morning I left at eight”: Gros, Une courtisane romantique.
Marie Duplessis’s new amant de cœur: The cause of an acrimonious end to Rachel’s relationship with Count Alexandre in March 1845.
“He was famous among our generation”: Letter to Calmann Lévy, printed in the 1886 edition of La dame aux camélias (Paris: Maison Quantin).
“As soon as a woman takes my arm”: Quoted in Saunders, The Prodigal Father.
“Everyone turned to look”: Villemessant, Mémoires d’un journaliste: deuxième série: Les hommes de mon temps (Paris: E. Dentu, 1872).
“He benefited from the myth”: F. W. J. Hemmings, The King of Romance.
“causing problems”: Dumas fils, letter to Joseph Méry, 18 October 1844, quoted in Saunders, The Prodigal Father.
“or else an effect of her state of health”: Dumas fils (preface by André Maurois), La dame aux camélias.
“He was not bound to let the public know”: Vandam, An Englishman in Paris, vol. 1.
“So it’s you, is it?”: Le Mousquetaire, 1 April 1855.
“I hope you weren’t in love”: Ibid.
“more closely bound to the other”: Hemmings, The King of Romance.
She had an Englishman: This may well have been Beau Brummel’s friend Lord Alvanley (1798–1849), a keen rider to hounds, who was equally at home in French and English society. A witty bachelor and host, he was known to be recklessly extravagant, with a wide acquaintance of the world and proficiency in several languages.
“Dear Adet”: Quoted in Choulet, Promenades à Paris et en Normandie avec la dame aux camélias.
“He always had” and “One often hears”: Quoted in Marietta Martin, Le Docteur Koreff (1783–1851): Un aventurier intellectuel sous la Restauration et la Monarchie de Juillet (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1925).
“He is no longer received”: Ibid.
“It always improves the appetite”: Admiralty surgeon J. H. Whelan, MD, RN, cites half a dozen case histories, one being a twenty-five-year-old sailor who suffered night sweats, coughing, and anorexia until tuberculin and strychnine injections cured him “in three weeks.” “Strychnine-Tuberculin Treatment in Tuberculosis,” The British Medical Journal, 16 May 1914.
Seeing how ill she was: “He was a curious character, this lord A.,” Méjannes continues. “He came to Paris and bought half a dozen horses from Tony, telling him to keep them for a month or two as he was going to Brighton and would return for them. He left, made two or three world trips, and when he came back to Paris after several years in Japan, he had completely forgotten about the thoroughbreds that were awaiting collection.
a magnificent pair of thoroughbreds: Roqueplan, Parisine.
“In the woods”: Michael Gustave du Puynode, “Marie Duplessis,” L’Artiste, 1 novembre 1849.
“My very dear Marie”: Quoted in Choulet, Promenades à Paris et en Normandie avec la dame aux camélias. The opening chimes almost exactly with the first lines of Armand’s letter: ‘Adieu, my dear Marguerite; I am neither rich enough to love you as I would like to, nor poor enough for you to love as you would like. Let’s then forget, you a name to which you must be virtually indifferent, me, a happiness which appears to me impossible.’ ”
“What makes this one unique”: Gros, Une courtisane romantique.
“It was 7 October 1845”: Quoted in Henri Blaze de Bury, Mes études et mes souvenirs: Alexandre Dumas, sa vie, son temps, ses œuvres (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1885).
“She walked on the muddy floor” … “very much astonished”: Jules Janin, Preface to Dumas, La dame aux camélias (Paris: A. Sadot, 1851).
“for a week at the most”: Liszt to his mother, Anna, 18 October 1845. Liszt, Selected Letters, trans. and ed. Adrian Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
PART FIVE: THE COUNTESS
“a delirium unparalleled” and subsequent quotes on d’Agoult and Liszt: Eleanor Perényi, Liszt.
“If she tries to take Cosima”: Ibid.
“People were hoping his work would fail”: Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt by Himself and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
“Very happy to see me”: Letter of 25 October 1845. Janin, 735 lettres à sa femme.
“Pompous nonsense”: Letter of 10 August 1845. Ibid.
“There were more caps” … “It seemed”: Janin, preface to La dame aux camélias.
“a very conspicuous” … “She has taken a fancy to you”: François Liszt: Recollections of a Compatriot (London: Ward & Downey, 1887).
“as if the air were peopled with spirits”: Amy Fay, quoted in Perényi, Liszt.
“set [her] dreaming” … “We were very much surprised”: Janin, preface to La dame aux camélias.
“I am convinced that the lady”: Ibid.
“We embarked at once upon elevated subjects”: Quoted in Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, vol. 1: The Virtuoso Years 1811–1847 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
“listening with uninterrupted attention”: Janin, preface to La dame aux camélias.
“If a salonnière”: Martin, Le Docteur Koreff.
“Koreff said the other day”: 17 January 1840. Liszt and d’Agoult, Correspondance.
“abominable inventions” … “such that old vignerons”: Banville, Mes souvenirs.
“The Lady of the Camellias had her own salon”: Houssaye, Man about Paris.
“I shall not live” and following quotes: 2 May or 2 June 1847. Liszt and d’Agoult, Correspondance.
“the illustrious pianist L.”: Roqueplan, Parisine.
“I have never told you”: 1 May 1847. Liszt and d’Agoult, Correspondance.
“excitements … leading to disgust”: 8 December 1842. Ibid.
“I shan’t be able”: 1 May 1847. Ibid.
“it’s risky to tie me down”: Quoted in Perényi, Liszt.
“I want to breathe”: Ibid.
“the only reasonably possible journey”: 1 May 1847. Liszt and d’Agoult, Correspondance.
at Jules Janin’s house: Marie d’Agoult had mocked his “ridiculous patronage of Janin,” but Liszt defended his decision as “an affectionate courtesy on my part, in recognition of his past and present kindnesses.”
“You would have looked in vain”: Janin, preface to La dame aux camélias.
“as generous with Marie”: Roqueplan, Parisine.
“Her beautiful hair” … “Only a few amateurs”: Janin, preface to La dame aux camélias.
“Indiscriminately, she looked here and there”: Ibid.
“Edward de Perregaux, 29 years: Choulet, Promenades à Paris et en Normandie avec la dame aux camélias.
“not the status … it was the title”: In fact, Edouard de Perregaux was not entitled to call himself count until the death of his elder brother in 1857.
“Mme la Comtesse Deperegaud”: Lucien-Graux, Les factures de la dame aux camélias.
“Mme la Comtesse du Plessis”: Henry Lyonnet, La dame aux camélias d’Alexandre Dumas fils (Paris: Société Française d’Editions Littéraires et Techniques, 1930).
inspired by the stuffed green lizard: “Marie loved this lizard with tenderness, and kept it with her always,” writes Charles du Hays in his article “The Ring and the Lizard,” in Récits du coin du feu: Autour du Merlerault (Alençon, 1886). Wondering what became of it, he says, “It has slipped without doubt, like all the rest into the pits of misery which swallowed up everything.” Far from it: Marie’s wizened little lizard is now on display in its original case in Gacé’s Musée de la Dame aux Camélias.
“I can see her now”: Hays, L’ancien Merlerault.
mistress for ten years of … the author of Carmen: Mérimée’s novella (more famous in Bizet’s opera adaptation) had been published the previous year.
“A delicious young man”: Ambroise Colin in Gros, Une courtisane romantique.
“O
ver there is the Ocean”: Jules Janin, Journal des Débats, undated, in the collection of Jean-Marie Choulet.
“She had gained admission”: Janin, preface to La dame aux camélias.
Vienne describes him as being very close to Liszt: “It may be impossible to identify with certainty Liszt’s ‘Teutonic’ friend, though several individuals could fit the bill,” says his biographer Alan Walker. The archives of the Hôtel Meurice in Paris, where Vienne says “Prince Paul” kept a suite, might have provided a name, but documents from that period no longer exist. One possible contender is the Austro-Hungarian Count Ladislaus Koszielsky, an acquaintance of Liszt and (according to Janka Wohl) a lover of Marie. In his castle of Bertholdstein near Vienna, he showed Wohl a number of paintings, which he said were portraits of Marie, but none has been made public. Koszielsky, though, does not match Vienne’s description of the young man as a member of a royal family. The details he gives are tantalizingly exact. Beneath the off-putting exterior, he was endearing and extremely generous—“a dream protector,” Vienne says. “The sweetest, and least jealous suitor of any she knew.” He claims that it was Prince Paul, an excellent musician himself, who had bought Marie her valuable piano. “He got Liszt to agree to try it out, after first having given her a lesson.” This, however, is refuted by the date recorded in the Pleyel inventory: in July 1846, when the piano was purchased, Liszt had been gone from Paris for six months.
“Dear friend,”: Lucien-Graux, Les factures de la dame aux camélias.
“In Spa no other fever” … “Our fair friend”: Janin, preface to La dame aux camélias.
“When the night was pitch black”: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
“Mon cher Monsieur”: In a boxed set of 3 volumes of Dame aux Camélia Miscellany, Bibliothèque de la Comédie-Française.
“The undersigned doctors are of the opinion”: Davaine/Chomel prescriptions printed in Gros, Une courtisane romantique.
“Although everything there is luxurious” … “in a fine, anglicised hand” … “Monsieur”: Henry Lumière, “La Dame aux Camélias: Une lettre inédite de Marie Duplessis,” La Revue Normande, 1900.
“nest of pink silk” … “so deliciously pretty”: Ibid.
“such a noble person”: Claude Vento, Les peintres de la femme (Paris: E. Dentu, 1888).
“Ask for 200 francs”: Vento, Les peintres de la femme. Marie had already made a gift to Tony of the Olivier aquarelle of herself. (In the 1872 edition of La dames aux camélias, the portrait is described as “Given by Mlle MD herself to M. T.” However, he may not have commissioned the Chaplin painting. An article published in Le Livre by the Count G. de Contades (December 10, no. 72, 1885) claims that this was paid for by Count Pierre de Castellane. “A lost wager, according to one source, a votive offering of love, according to another.” In Contades’s version, Chaplin is taken to visit Marie, who is in bed but delighted to see him, and Marie immediately suggests several poses. A simple sketch that allowed him to work on the portrait in his studio was lent to Contades by Chaplin to reproduce in his article.
the discovery that year of the explosive: Three different chemists, working independently, had all made the discovery in 1846. The German-Swiss Christian Schönbein had spilled a bottle of nitric acid on his kitchen table and mopped it up with a cotton apron, which he then hung on a stove to dry. Soon afterward it exploded.
“Two lackeys … set her down”: Alfred Delvau, Les lions du jour (Paris: E. Dentu, 1867).
“the halo of a saint”: Quoted in Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease.
“Her faded” … “She was already mortally ill”: Saint-Victor, Le théâtre contemporain.
“His mother listened to him”: L’Epoque, 9 February 1847.
“All the poor of Paris and Spain”: Villemessant, Mémoires d’un journaliste: Scènes intimes.
“Celebrated for more than a title”: L’Epoque, 9 February 1847.
“Why, Madame?”: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
“Go quickly to her”: Revue Encyclopédique, 15 February 1896.
“If I had happened to be in Paris”: 2 May or 2 June. Liszt and d’Agoult, Correspondance.
“banned from the bedroom”: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
“Forty-eight hours before”: Amédée Achard (Grimm) in L’Epoque, 9 February 1847.
“Oh, I’m dying!” and following descriptions of Marie’s final moments: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
That evening Clotilde answered the door to Romain: Vienne says that he returned to Paris on Tuesday, 20 February, but, writing forty years later, he has forgotten the exact date. He must have meant Tuesday, 2 February (the 20th, a Saturday, is the date of Marguerite’s death in the novel).
“The tenderness and touching taste”: Roqueplan, Parisine.
The church was still hung with black draperies: In the announcement of Marie’s death in Les Petites Affiches, Le Constitutionnel et Le Moniteur des Ventes, she is plain “Mlle Plessis.”
“Olympe A.”: “Méjannes,” column in Gil Blas, 18 October 1887.
thoroughbred “of superb genealogy”: Gros, Une courtisane romantique.
Clotilde was “hunted down”: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
In the novel: Could Dumas fils himself have been there observing Ned? He had learned of Marie’s death when he was in Marseille, but had returned to Paris by February 12 or 13. The exhumation took place on the 16th. In the first two editions of the novel the cemetery is described as Père Lachaise, not Montmartre, but this may just be another of Dumas fils’s amendments of the facts. There is no written evidence of his presence at the exhumation (undisclosed to all but Ned Perregaux, the grave diggers, and the prefect of police). But how else was he able to describe the procedure in such grim detail?
“delivered up to sepulchral worms”: 1 May 1847. Liszt and d’Agoult, Correspondance.
“I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life”: Matharel de Fiennes, L’Entr’acte, 10 and 11 February 1852.
POSTSCRIPT
“a rich and elegant property” … “After the death”: Gros, Une courtisane romantique.
“The greatest medical practitioner”: Letter (in French) from Dickens to Comte d’Orsay, Paris, March 1847, in Pontavice de Heussey, L’inimitable Boz.
“For my part”: Ibid.
“the gaudy and ghastly”: Dickens, letter to the Rev. Edward Tagart, 28 January 1847. Pilgrim edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 5: 1847–1849, ed. Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
“with a dreadful insatiability”: John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928).
“Everyone whom”: Letter to d’Orsay, in Pontarice du Heussey, L’inimitable Boz.
“each object speak”: Dumas fils, “M.D.,” in Péchés de jeunesse.
“This one was dead”: Dumas fils, La dame aux camélias.
“For it is there, in the past”: Dumas fils, “M.D.,” in Péchés de jeunesse.
Delphine had held back: In an unpublished letter dated 28 October 1869, Gustave Le Vavasseur describes an encounter with Delphine that took place at a notary’s office in Vimontier (Frederick R. Koch Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University). “The unhappy Plessis girl” admitted being in miserable circumstances, he says, having sold every item she had inherited and lost twenty thousand francs through speculation. She was trying to negotiate a loan and was considering selling the last remaining thing of value, which was Vidal’s portrait Marie Duplessis aux bains des Pyrénées. The fact that it was found in an attic a century later by her descendents suggests that Delphine either changed her mind or did not find a buyer.
“Did he intend to give the courtesan’s”: Boudet, La fleur du mal.
But the explanation: Letter to Calmann Lévy, printed in the 1886 edition of La dame aux
camélias (Paris: Quantin).
Count de G. who “launched” … “no more than”: Dumas fils, La dame aux camélias.
“It’s a history”: Saint-Victor, Le théâtre contemporain.
“The habitués”: Vandam, An Englishman in Paris, vol. 1.
“Acting on impulse”: Gustave Le Vavasseur, in L’almanach de l’Orne, 1895.
“The Faubourg St Germain” … “Haughty with men”: Elisabeth de Gramont, Pomp and Circumstance, trans. Brian W. Downs (New York: Jonathan Cape’s Harrison Smith, 1979).
“My dear count”: Alice Ozy to Théophile Gautier, Letter 960, 14? March 1847. Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre, ed., Théophile Gautier, correspondance générale 1846–1848, vol. 3 (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1988).
“an amiable and witty”: Alice Ozy to Théophile Gautier, Letter 162, Gautier correspondence, Lovenjoul Collection, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France.
“And he has kept”: Mané, Le Paris viveur.
“very extraordinary and distinguished”: Quoted in Perényi, Liszt.
“It was the last”: Iassy, May or June 1847.
“He loved to lay stress”: Wohl, François Liszt.
“with his inventive intelligence”: Le Vavasseur, in l’Almanach de l’Orne, 1895.
“the phantom who had haunted”: Ibid.
Bibliography
FREQUENTLY CITED SOURCES
Choulet, Jean-Marie. Promenades à Paris et en Normandie avec la dame aux camélias. Paris: Editions Charles Corlet, 1998.
Dumas fils, Alexandre. La dame aux camélias. Preface by André Maurois. Paris: Collection Folio Classique, Gallimard, 1975.
———. Théâtre complet. Vol. 3, Notes. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1898.
Gros, Johannes. Une courtisane romantique, Marie Duplessis. Paris: Au Cabinet du Livre, 1929.
Hays, Charles du. L’ancien Merlerault: Récits chevalins d’un vieil éleveur. Paris: Morris Père et Fils, 1885.
Janin, Jules. Preface to La dame aux camélias. Paris: A. Cadot, 1851.
Judith, Julie Bernat. La vie d’une grande comédienne: Mémoires de Madame Judith de la Comédie-Française et souvenirs sur ses contemporains. Edited by Paul Gsell. Paris: J. Tallandier, 1911.
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