A summer night at La Grand Chaumière, the favorite haunt of students and their grisette girlfriends on boulevard du Montparnasse. A couple head off through the hornbeams for a romantic tryst while at the rotunda in the background other youngsters dance wild versions of the polka, quadrille, and cancan. (illustration credit bm.5)
Eugène Lami’s painting A Box at the Opera—a larger version of the box Marie ordered for most first nights, when she attracted almost as much attention as the artists on stage. (illustration credit bm.6)
An imagined rendering of Marie and an admirer in her opera box—the frontispiece to a memoir by her Normandy confidant Romain Vienne. (illustration credit bm.7)
Lola Montez, the famous courtesan and acquaintance of Marie’s, who was also part of the inner circle of the Café de Paris set, here in her favorite Spanish guise, c. 1847. Lithograph by J. G. Middleton. (illustration credit bm.8)
Die Allee der Bereiche der Klosterwiese, one of the fashionable promenades in Baden-Baden, where Marie met Count Gustav von Stackelberg and discovered her passion for horseriding. (illustration credit bm.9)
Marie’s first love, Duke Agénor de Guiche, the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess de Gramont, who helped to mold the country girl into a model of Parisian style and manners. The portrait is by Agénor’s uncle Count d’Orsay, the celebrated dandy and friend of Dickens’s. (illustration credit bm.10)
The doting Ned Perregaux, model for Dumas’s Armand, who defied his family by marrying Marie in an English registry office in 1846. (illustration credit bm.11)
Marie’s most indulgent protector, Count von Stackelberg, seated far right, as Russia’s special envoy at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15. Engraving by Jean Godefroy. (illustration credit bm.12)
Alexandre Dumas fils, whose 1848 novel La dame aux camélias and sensational play of the same name immortalized Marie. Exactly the same age, they were lovers for a short time in 1845. (illustration credit bm.13)
A self-portrait by Count Olympe Aguado, a pioneer of French photography. He was only eighteen when he became Marie’s lover, and he remained a loyal friend until the end. (illustration credit bm.14)
The most famous pianist of his time, Franz Liszt was thirty-four and a romantic icon when he met Marie in 1845. He always said he was inspired by her enigmatic quality. (illustration credit bm.15)
A painting of Marie by the twenty-one-year-old artist Charles Chaplin in 1846, just months before her death. (illustration credit bm.16)
A miniature of Alphonsine’s mother, the melancholy Marie Plessis, painted by an unknown artist in the style of Vigée Lebrun, shortly before her early death in 1830. The pendant is on display in the Musée de la Dame aux Camélias, in the Normandy town of Gacé. (illustration credit bm.17)
Found among Marie’s things at her death: the skeleton of the once-stuffed green lizard given by Gypsies to Alphonsine on her way to Paris. Believing it would bring her luck, she kept it with her always. (illustration credit bm.18)
Marie’s tomb at Cimitière de Montmartre (illustration credit bm.19)
Pretty young Marietta Piccolomini (1834–1899) was the first Violetta to make a triumph of La Traviata, and to launch it in Paris and London. (illustration credit bm.20)
The original Marguerite Gautier, Eugénie Doche, a young Irish actress with something of a louche reputation herself. She made her debut in the role at the Théâtre des Variétés on February 2, 1852. (illustration credit bm.21)
Sarah Bernhardt as Marguerite in 1884. It was a role she inhabited with complete authenticity and is said to have played a total of three thousand times. (illustration credit bm.22)
The Italian actress Eleonora Duse, the only one to rival Bernhardt’s interpretation of Marguerite. Pictured here at the Théâtre des Variétés in 1898. (illustration credit bm.23)
Greta Garbo playing opposite Robert Taylor in the 1936 film Camille, directed by George Cukor. Giving not only the definitive screen performance, Garbo also comes closest to embodying the real Marie. (illustration credit bm.24)
Maria Callas, considered the greatest Violetta, who identified with the heroine to the point of obsession. Photographed by Houston Rogers in the famous 1955 Visconti production at La Scala, Milan. (illustration credit bm.25)
Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev rehearsing one of the rapturous duets from Marguerite and Armand, the 1963 ballet created by Frederick Ashton as a showpiece for the two stars. (illustration credit bm.26)
Isabelle Huppert as Alphonsine in Mauro Bolognini’s 1981 movie Lady of the Camelias. (illustration credit bm.27)
Sultry Anna Netrebko, the superb Violetta of our time, in Willy Decker’s production first staged in Salzburg in 2005. (illustration credit bm.28)
Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin as Marguerite and Armand—the most exciting and affecting interpreters of Ashton’s ballet since Fonteyn and Nureyev. Their performance at the Royal Opera House in February 2013 was Rojo’s farewell to the Covent Garden stage. (illustration credit bm.29)
ALSO BY JULIE KAVANAGH
Nureyev
Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton
The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis Page 29