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

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Julie Kavanagh

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada, by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kavanagh, Julie, [date]

  The girl who loved camellias : the life and legend of Marie Duplessis / by Julie Kavanagh.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96224-9

  1. Duplessis, Marie, 1824–1847. 2. Courtesans—France—Paris—Biography. 3. Paris (France)—Social life and customs—19th century. 4. Dumas, Alexandre, 1824–1895 Dame aux camélias. 5. Courtesans in literature. I. Title.

  DC705.D87K38 2013

  944.06′3092—dc23

  [B] 2012051103

  Front-of-jacket images: Marie Duplessis, The Granger Collection, New York;

  Camellia © amanaimages / Corbis

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1

  To Ross, Joe, and Alfie

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  PART ONE Alphonsine

  Waif

  Grisette

  Lorette

  PART TWO Marie

  PART THREE The Lady of the Camellias

  PART FOUR Marguerite

  PART FIVE The Countess

  Postscript

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Acknowledgments

  My first thanks must go to Jean-Marie Choulet, curator of the Musée de la Dame aux Camélias in the pretty Normandy town of Gacé. A historian and author of the enlightening Promenades à Paris et en Normandie avec la dame aux camélias, Jean-Marie entrusted me on our first meeting with his own source material for his book. I came away with a milk crate full of journals, handwritten notes, books, and pamphlets that would save me several months of work. Most valuable of all was an unpublished bibliography of Marie Duplessis compiled as a labor of love by Alain Orgerit. Over the five years that it took to research and write the book, Jean-Marie was always there for me, sending e-mailed replies to my questions, acting as a go-between with other experts, and allowing me privileged access to exhibits in the museum, several of which are included among my illustrations. Jean-Marie’s wife, Colette, was also enormously encouraging and hospitable, and my friendship with the Choulets will long outlast the publication of this book.

  Also of incalculable importance was my researcher Kristine Baril. We met at the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Accueil Général desk, where she still works, and forged an immediate bond. With her impeccable English and passion for all forms of art, Kristine was as much an ideal companion as a heaven-sent collaborator. Her boundless curiosity about Marie Duplessis drove indefatigable online quests that led to several break-throughs in our research. She was doggedly good-natured about helping me to master the Bnf’s impenetrable code system, and her elation at any new discovery was just as intense as my own. I consider Kristine to have been a true partner in this project, and owe her more than I can ever repay.

  I am indebted to Jean-Luc Combe and his former colleague Isabelle Rambaud, Conservatrice générale du patrimoine, for their guidance about French archival procedures; to Jean Hournon for his expertise on nineteenth-century Bougival, and for the Dumas archive he put at my disposal. Rudiger Beermann was a splendidly informed authority on Baden-Baden, while Dagmar Kicherer greatly facilitated my archival research there. Academician Gonzagues St. Bris was responsible for my gaining access to the venerable Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France; William Bortrick of Burke’s Peerage kindly provided me with the genealogical information that an official archivist failed to supply; Eva Guggemos’s assistance at Yale’s Beinecke Library went beyond the call of duty; Guy Peeters generously consulted Spa’s liste des Etrangers on my behalf. I owe thanks to Elfgardt and Otmar Wintersteller for their German translations of source material and for their hospitality. Mme Ruault, the owner of the chambres d’hôtes “le Plessis” (a small château that Marie had once coveted herself), provided me with a welcoming, inspirational, and comfortable base in Nonant. At Tricase’s Caffé Cappuccini, Vito, Massimo, and Rocco created the simpatico surroundings in which much of this book was written.

  I owe profound thanks for the information and kindnesses I received at different stages of my research from: Claude Broux, Jean Darnel, Simone Drouin, Elisabeth Leonetti, Annick Tillier, Pierrette Bodin, Atty Lennox, Arnaud Marion, Joy Moorehead, Jasper Rees, Jonathan Keates, Pascale Lafeber, Isabel Lloyd, Michael Saffle, Michael Shipster, Tariana Shor, Nicola Shulmann, Guy Thibault, Anne-Marie de Ponton d’Amécourt, and Alan Walker.

  I would like to record my thanks to the following insti-tutions:

  Alençon’s Archives Départementales de l’Orne

  Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, Marseille

  Archives Départementales des Yvelines

  Archives Départementales d’Indre-et-Loire

  Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

  Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Frederick R. Koch Collection), Yale University

  Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arts du spectacle

  Bibliothèque Nationale de France, François-Mitterrand

  Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française

  Manuscript Library Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Bibiliothèque de l’Institut de France

  Ministère de la Défense, section des archives historiques

  Mulgrave Castle Archives

  National Archives of Estonia

  Pleyel Pianos Archives

  Stadtarchiv, Baden-Baden

  The Girl Who Loved Camellias would not exist without the belief and enthusiasm of my agent Lynn Nesbit, and my two Knopf editors Shelley Wanger and Bob Gottlieb. All three encouraged me to pursue what can only have seemed a dismayingly uncommercial venture in today’s uncompromising publishing world. I can’t thank Shelley enough for her skillful, sensitive shaping of my book, or Bob for his continuing support and generosity in letting me use his rue Jacob apartment as my Paris base.

  At Janklow & Nesbit UK, I am immensely grateful to Claire Conrad for her tireless championing of The Girl Who Loved Camellias. I also owe thanks to Janklow’s Stephanie Koven for her efforts to launch the book into a global market. At Knopf, Shelley’s assistant, Juhea Kim, was tremendously helpful in securing images, and unfailingly kind and obliging. I owe sincere thanks to Andrew Dorko for his meticulous care and patience, and to Anne Cherry for her scrupulous copyediting, specialist knowledge, and zeal.

  I am indebted to the friends who encouraged me throughout the writing of this book: Lola Bubbosh, Rupert Christiansen, Peter Eyre, and Gaby Tana. The late Patrick O’Connor was its earliest supporter; Julian Barnes cast an aficionado’s eye over the manuscript, as did Peter Conrad, who played devil’s advocate and urged me to write an introduction placing Marie Duplessis in a wider context. Selina Hastings has been, as ever, my first reader, dearest fri
end, and lodestar: I can’t imagine writing a book without her.

  I have dedicated The Girl Who Loved Camellias to my family, who will always get my most heartfelt thanks of all.

  Introduction

  MARIE DUPLESSIS WAS the most admired young courtesan of 1840s Paris. A peasant girl from Normandy, she had reinvented herself in a matter of months, changing her name and learning how to dress, speak, and act like a duchess. But this was far more than a Pygmalion or Pretty Woman transformation. The country waif, scarcely able to read or write when she arrived in the capital at the age of thirteen, was presiding over her own salon seven years later, regularly receiving aristocrats, politicians, artists, and many of the celebrated writers of the day. These were, of course, all men, because no virtuous woman would have anything to do with a courtesan, but Marie’s profession had bought her proximity to the most brilliant minds in Paris. Her close circle included Nestor Roqueplan, editor of Le Figaro, Dr. Veron, director of the Opéra, and bon viveur Roger de Beauvoir, whom Alexandre Dumas père called the wittiest man he had ever known. Dumas himself was intrigued by the childlike Marie, and his son Alexandre fell in love with her. Franz Liszt came to Paris for a week but was so bewitched by Marie that he stayed for three months and remained romantically attached to her memory for the rest of his life. Such was her fascination that her early death from consumption in 1847 was regarded as an event of national importance. “For several days all questions political, artistic, commercial have been abandoned by the papers,” a bemused Charles Dickens wrote to a friend from Paris. “Everything is erased in the face of an incident which is far more important, the romantic death of one of the glories of the demi-monde, the beautiful, the famous Marie Duplessis.”

  A year later, with the publication of The Lady of the Camellias, the novel Dumas fils had based on her life, the beau monde was abuzz again. Dumas père was a national institution in France, and people were curious to see whether the twenty-four-year-old was to follow his father’s lead. He certainly had the elder Dumas’s lively style and flair for natural dialogue, as well as a freshness and sincerity of his own. But of even greater interest was the subject of the book itself. Alexandre’s affair with Marie Duplessis was well known on the Boulevard, and so was the identity of the heroine he renamed Marguerite Gautier. His descriptions of her are pure reportage. Whether sitting in her box at the theater with her signature bouquet of camellias or stepping into her pretty blue carriage, wrapped in a long cashmere shawl, Marguerite was instantly recognizable as Marie: the same tall, thin physique, the same chaste oval face, black eyes, and dark arched brows. As intrigued then as now with the private lives of celebrities, the public read the fiction as fact, thrilled to be taken inside the demimondaine’s apartment, allowed to eavesdrop on scurrilous conversations at her dinner table, and be shown her rosewood furniture, Saxe figurines, Sèvres china—even her boudoir with its costly array of gold and silver bottles. Marguerite’s friends and suitors also had their counterparts in real life, the passionate young hero Armand Duval being a composite of two of Marie’s lovers with elements of Alexandre himself.

  In addition to his contemporary setting and characters, the young author drew on French literary tradition. He borrowed the plot device from Abbé Prévost’s eighteenth-century novel Manon Lescaut, which has a narrator who learns the details of the young courtesan’s plight from her grieving lover, and he also made Marguerite a descendant of Victor Hugo’s redeemed courtesan Marion Delorme, who gives up her wealthy protectors for an impoverished young man. During an idyllic country interlude, Marguerite devotes herself entirely to Armand, but Dumas fils had a more dramatic transformation in mind for her. In his only significant departure from the circumstances of Marie Duplessis’s life, he invented a scene in which Armand’s father, the personification of bourgeois morality, begs Marguerite to set his son free. It is a sacrifice she must make in order to save the reputation of the man she adores, but also for the sake of his pure young sister, whose marriage would be jeopardized by the scandal of Armand’s relationship. This is the turning point of the story, and it makes a saint and martyr of the wanton heroine, crucially allowing her to be accepted, even pitied, by respectable nineteenth-century society.

  Part social document, part romantic melodrama, both ahead of its time and rigidly conventional, The Lady of the Camellias was an instant success. Dumas fils had sold only fourteen copies of his first book, Sins of Youth, a collection of long poems, including one entitled “M.D.,” which intimately details what it was like to make love to Marie Duplessis. Printed at his father’s expense in 1847, it had passed unnoticed, whereas his novel received an advance of a thousand francs from the reputable firm of Cadot, whose first edition of 1,200 copies was quickly followed by a sell-out printing of another 1,500. Having grown up in the shadow of his illustrious father, Dumas fils was overjoyed by this first taste of literary fame, confessing, “I should have died of shame and jealousy if I had not contrived to acquire a little glory of my own.”

  The impact of the novel, though, was nothing compared with the sensation caused by the play. It had been a three-year struggle to persuade a theater to take on The Lady of the Camellias, which Dumas fils adapted in 1849. His father’s response had been ecstatic—“It’s original! It’s touching! It’s audacious! It’s new!,” he exclaimed as he tearfully embraced Alexandre, while also warning him that his work was too authentic to be allowed onstage. Nepotism counted for nothing—“I was the son of the greatest dramatic author of his time, no-one could have a more powerful protector, but I might as well have arrived from the provinces with an unknown name.” Dumas père’s Théâtre Historique had closed by 1850, and The Lady of the Camellias was turned down by the Gaîté, the Ambigu-Comique, and the Gymnase, which had just mounted Manon Lescaut. Eventually, the new director of the Vaudeville accepted it, but it was immediately banned by the censors. When Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte became president of the Second Republic in December 1851, the author’s friendship with his half brother, the Duke de Morny, helped force a cancellation of the veto, but he was told that it would make no difference; the audience would stop the play. The actress cast as Marguerite, the Vaudeville’s diva, thirty-three-year-old Anaïs Fargueil, withdrew after the first reading, and the part was offered to the more suitable Eugénie Doche, a young beauty with something of a louche reputation. Armand, twenty-three-year-old Charles Fechter, was three years her junior, with all the bullish surliness of a conceited young star. When Dumas fils suggested that in Act 4, Armand, overcome by jealousy and anger, should fling Marguerite to the floor, Fechter refused. “It’s impossible,” he said. “The public will never allow it.” Convinced of its effect, the author persisted until finally Fechter shrugged. “As the play will not get to that point, I might as well agree.”

  Courtesans, romanticized by legend, had regularly been represented onstage, but only in a historical setting. Hugo’s Marion Delorme took place in the time of Louis XIII, and Scribe’s Adrienne Lecouvreur was set in the eighteenth century, the actress-courtesan’s own time. French theater, with its comedies in couplets and costume dramas portraying kings and cavaliers, was itself embalmed in the past and had never featured characters or situations taken from life. Then suddenly, here was Dumas fils, “a young scamp,” transporting the audience directly into the demimonde, using actual dialogue and the spicy expressions of Left Bank cafés and dance halls. Establishment figures, such as the Louvre’s director, Horace de Viel-Castel, recoiled in horror. “This play is shameful.… During five acts The Lady of the Camellias unfolds before civilised people the sordid details of the life of a prostitute. Nothing is left out.… The police, the government tolerate these scandals, and seem to ignore the fact that this will result in the demoralisation of the public.”

  In fact, the public was enchanted. At its premiere on 2 February 1852, the play received a thunderous ovation, and twenty thousand printed copies were sold almost overnight. During the Vaudeville’s first run of two hundred performances, Plac
e de la Bourse was blocked by the carriages of grandes dames who found themselves weeping over the fate of a fallen woman, plucking flowers from their corsages and throwing them onstage. Even innocent young girls, chaperoned by their nannies, went again and again, sitting in the upper boxes in floods of tears. “It was the first time I had heard of pocket-handkerchiefs as a provision for a play,” wrote Henry James, who remembered as a small boy walking in the Palais-Royal with his cousins, American girls who lived in Paris, and envying them as they recounted how often they had sobbed while watching Mme Doche as Marguerite. Neither he nor they had any idea of the profession of the lady of the expensive flowers, “but her title had a strange beauty and her story a strange meaning.”

  The fascination endured, and James wrote two essays on Dumas fils, praising his naturalness as a dramatist and the brilliance of his dialogue. French contemporaries were just as admiring. “It’s the new theatre—human, true and strange,” wrote Arsène Houssaye in his poem “Memories of Youth”:

  This is no longer Dumas I; this is no longer ancient drama …

  Dumas II, another life, another love, another source …

  And even more tragic in its reality.

  Making art out of what he saw and being true to his own time, Dumas fils had anticipated by more than a decade the momentousness of Manet’s painting Olympia, which provoked an uproar when it was shown in the Salon of 1865. While also drawing on traditional precedents, this brazen portrait of an odalisque and her black maid updates the idealized nude in a classical setting to a grande horizontale’s bedroom in Second Empire Paris. With her immodest, confrontational stare, Olympia is a modern woman (supposedly the courtesan Marguerite Bellanger impersonated by Manet’s model Victorine Meurent). And, like Marguerite Gautier, she is not only an uncompromising embodiment of the present but a harbinger of the future. Dumas fils had perfectly judged the appetite and readiness of his audience; as James observed, “He could see the end of one era and the beginning of another and join hands luxuriously with each.” The Lady of the Camellias became a theatrical phenomenon, bringing its young author the wealth and renown he craved.