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

  In the audience at the Vaudeville one night during the winter of ’52 was the composer Giuseppe Verdi with his mistress, Giuseppina Strepponi, a retired soprano. The novel had already inspired him to begin composing an opera, and the play provided even more of an incentive. The vitality of the demimonde offered rich theatrical opportunities, and he had been deeply moved by Marguerite’s selfless courage. Verdi saw how music could intensify her spiritual journey, expressing secret doubts and psychological nuances untapped by the play. In Francesco Piave’s libretto for La Traviata (The Wayward Girl in English), the original story would be further distilled into three acts—Love; The Sacrifice; Death—and the heroine and her lover renamed Violetta and Alfredo. The controversial nature of their unmarried love had resonated with Verdi, who had been forced at that time to defend his own relationship with Strepponi. The play’s immediacy had impressed him, too, and he was determined to make Violetta a contemporary figure. But with opera implacably bound by convention, the modern setting that he “desired, demanded and begged” was refused. Obliged not only to accept the period of Louis XIII, Verdi failed in his insistence that the soprano must be young and graceful and sing with passion. The first Violetta, thirty-eight-year-old Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, was a prim-lipped, portly matron with a huge bosom, and every time she coughed consumptively, the audience burst out laughing.

  If the premiere at Teatro La Fenice, Venice, on 6 March 1853, was not exactly the fiasco its creator described, then neither was it the work he had intended. Just over a year later, the role of Violetta was sung by Maria Spezia, who, though young, was no beauty, and it took the piquant little prima donna, twenty-year-old Marietta Piccolomini, to make a sensation of La Traviata and to launch it in London and Paris in 1856. Verdi’s insight into the characters had amplified the play’s atmosphere of forgiveness, and the emotional core was now the tremendous confrontation between Violetta and Alfredo’s father—itself a drama within a drama. At first ruthlessly self-righteous, Germont finds an inner sensitivity that grows into true compassion (made audible in the soaringly beautiful “Piangi, piangi, o misera”). Marie Duplessis’s short life had evolved into a masterpiece—a rapturous parable of human redemption through love. And it was this metamorphosis that so impressed Proust on first seeing La Traviata. “It’s a work which goes straight to my heart,” he remarked. “Verdi has given to La Dame aux Camélias the style it lacked. I say that not because Alexandre Dumas fils’s play is without merit, but because for a dramatic work to touch popular sentiment the addition of music is essential.”

  Eclipsing its source, La Traviata went on to become one of the most popular operas of all time. For many, the definitive portrayal remains that of Maria Callas, who identified with Violetta to the point of obsession. The hefty diva in a ballooning gown of the 1951 Mexican production transformed herself four years later into a slender beauty for Visconti’s belle époque version at La Scala in Milan. Not only resembling the raven-haired Marie with her ballerina shoulders, tiny waist, and lack of décolletage, Callas shared her passion for fine clothes, furs, and jewelry as well as a weakness for wealthy men and marrons glacés. She never again put so much of herself into the creation of a character and went so far in the interest of psychological truth as to allow her voice to suffer. “How could Violetta be in her condition and sing in big, high, round tones? It would be ridiculous,” she said, and proved her point in the last act by creating a reedy, gasping sound of a consumptive fighting for breath. Callas was able to combine her phenomenal technique with exceptional glamour, but this vital combination has eluded other interpetators, who sing with seraphic purity but do not look the part. In 1994 an unknown Romanian, the lovely Angela Georghiu, was Violetta in a Covent Garden Traviata, her mesmerizing, full-blooded performance making her a star overnight. The great contemporary Violetta is Anna Netrebko, a playful minx who stole the famous Callas detail of kicking off her stilettos after the party scene. Netrebko has completely redefined the character, giving her a stark veracity and sexual audacity that the twenty-first century demands.

  Although hardly a night goes by that La Traviata is not performed somewhere in the world, the impact of the play has diminished drastically with time. This was something Dumas fils had foreseen when he remarked in the preface to the 1867 edition that The Lady of the Camellias was “already ancient history” and owed its survival to its reputation alone. His view was shared by the novelist and critic Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, who a year later saw “a revival which hasn’t revived.”

  What is immensely striking … is the obsolescence, the sadness, the end of something which seemed for a moment to live so intensely.… Compared with the courtesan of today and her monstrous corruption, squalor, language, slang and stupidity, the Marguerite Gautier of M. Dumas fils, who first interested everyone in courtesans, seems nothing but a faded engraving of some vague design.

  It was not until the great Sarah Bernhardt first played the heroine during her United States tour of 1880 that The Lady of the Camellias, renamed Camille for the American public, came triumphantly back to life. A beautiful, worldly Parisian, Bernhardt went on to play Marguerite around three thousand times, inhabiting the role so entirely that audiences believed she was the consumptive courtesan. As her febrile gaiety in the opening scenes deepened into idealistic passion for Armand, the high romance was all the more transporting for its underlying trace of cynicism. Using her knowledge of the pathological details of tuberculosis, she made Marguerite’s suffering so harrowing in its authenticity that no other actress succeeded in challenging the supremacy of Bernhardt’s interpretation. Until, that is, the Italian actress Eleonora Duse made her Paris debut in 1897.

  Watching her rival from a central box was Sarah Bernhardt, bejeweled and exquisitely dressed, like a reincarnation of Marie Duplessis. There in the audience, too, was the first Marguerite, Eugénie Doche, who was now an old lady. Duse’s nerves showed, and she made little effect that night. With her plain, melancholy face devoid of makeup and her ascetic personality, she had none of the gregarious sophistication necessary for the first act and so did little with the heroine’s transition. But whereas Bernhardt, the star diva, imposed her own personality at every moment, la Duse soon came to discover what she called an inexplicable reciprocity of feeling for women like Marguerite and in this way conveyed far subtler shades of mood. In fact, as Verdi himself recognized, her internal, reflective technique, which could register shifts of conflicting emotion in eloquent pauses and modulations, more closely resembled the vocal coloring of a singer. “If only I had seen her Marguerite before composing La Traviata. What a splendid finale I might have put together if I had heard that crescendo invoking Armand that Duse has created simply by allowing her soul to overflow.”

  For the rest of the century, and well into the next, Marguerite Gautier became a favorite vehicle for the world’s actresses—not all of whom were legends. Henry James recalled seeing a fat Marguerite and a coy production in Boston in which the lovers were represented as engaged. Nevertheless, he never lost his regard for the play, which he felt withstood any amount of mediocrity in the performance. “Nothing makes any difference. It carries with it an April air: some tender young man and some coughing young woman have only to speak the lines to give it a great place among the love-stories of the world.” For Coco Chanel, even the dismaying sight of Bernhardt as “an old clown” performing Marguerite at the end of her career could not dim her lifelong passion for The Lady of the Camellias. In homage to its heroine, Chanel adopted the white camellia as her own emblem, printing it on fabrics, embossing buttons with it, and fashioning it into rings and necklaces.

  With the arrival of silent movies, The Lady of the Camellias underwent a fourth incarnation. A Danish film of 1907 was followed by a 1911 version in which Bernhardt herself appeared, and a decade later came Alla Nazimova giving a high-camp performance opposite Rudolph Valentino’s sloe-eyed Armand. The advent of sound brought Abel Gance’s 1934 adaptation, with the sparkling Parisian cha
nteuse Yvonne Printemps, and then the great classic: George Cukor’s 1936 film Camille starring Greta Garbo. Of all the legendary interpreters, Garbo may have come closest to embodying the real Marie, bringing an ironical intelligence to the role, ridding it of sentiment, and changing the notion of the heroine as a victim of men. She believed that Marie, whose story she researched, had loved her work and the lifestyle it allowed her, and to Cukor’s delight, she took the initiative in her scenes with Armand (Robert Taylor). “She never touches but kisses her lover all over the face. Often she is the aggressor in lovemaking. Very original.” Since Garbo’s Camille there have been movie versions in numerous foreign languages, including Egyptian (the 1942 Leila, ghadet el camelia). In Mauro Bolognini’s heavy-handed Lady of the Camelias (1981), Isabelle Huppert gives a biographical portrait of Marie Duplessis herself. This was followed three years later by an English film in which Greta Scacchi’s Camille starred opposite a baby-faced Colin Firth. The list of film spin-offs includes Antonioni’s 1953 La signora senza camelie and Baz Lurhmann’s Moulin Rouge of 2001, in which Nicole Kidman stars as a consumptive courtesan in love with an impoverished young writer (Ewan McGregor).

  Of the dozen or so ballets based on The Lady of the Camellias, the first was the quaintly named Rita Gauthier [sic], created in 1857 by Filippo Termanini, which ends happily with the lovers’ marriage. John Taras made Camille for the Ballets Russes in 1946, and Antony Tudor choreographed his own Lady of the Camellias for New York City Ballet in 1951. There were Gsovsky’s intolerably long Die Kameliendame, staged in Berlin in 1957, and Maurice Béjart’s 1959 pas de deux Violetta, danced by Violette Verdy to music from La Traviata. But the only two versions in current repertories are Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, made in 1963 as a showcase for Fonteyn and Nureyev, and John Neumeier’s 1978 Lady of the Camellias, created for Stuttgart’s dramatic ballerina Marcia Haydée. When Ashton choreographed his ballet, the Dumas fils source was considered such an “old hack story” that he avoided a conventional narrative by distilling it into headlines—Prologue, The Meeting, The Country, The Insult, The Death of the Lady of the Camellias—which must be bafflingly elliptical to people unfamiliar with the plot. In today’s audiences they are the majority. The play still resurfaces from time to time (in 2002 it was staged as a West End musical, Marguerite, set in German-occupied Paris with a TV soap star in the title role), but the name Marguerite Gautier has barely survived the twentieth century. As for Marie Duplessis, it was her love of camellias and romantically early death that provided the springboard for all these reinterpretations, yet she is unknown now to anyone apart from the (mainly French) cognoscenti.

  I first discovered her while researching the life of Ashton and learned more when working on my biography of Nureyev. Wanting to say something new about Marguerite and Armand, I began casting around for background material on Marie Duplessis. There wasn’t much. She appeared in English anthologies of courtesans or in syrupy fictionalized versions of her life, and as her hold on me grew, I had no choice but to improve my O-Level French. A year or two later, with Marie becoming more and more seductive as a subject in her own right, I had begun working my way through just about every book, article, obituary, and tribute ever written about her. Most of these were stored in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s intimidatingly vast repository in the concrete wasteland of Quai François Mauriac, a ten-minute TGV ride from Paris’s Saint-Michel station. I’d been warned of the challenge of locating BnF material, but I hadn’t anticipated that this search would require cryptanalysis skills to crack its codes, as well as the patience and nimble fingers of a lace maker to prevent the microfilm machines from wildly unraveling their spools of archival treasures.

  In the notes to a French paperback edition of La dame aux camélias, I had been intrigued by the mention of “a mysterious friend” from her native village who was one of the few mourners at her funeral. I remember wishing at the time that Marie had lived a century and a half later so that I could track down this man as the key source for her Normandy background. And then I found him. It was her first biographer, Romain Vienne, the son of Nonant innkeepers, who knew everything about her upbringing—and a great deal more. Before this discovery I couldn’t see how it was possible even to attempt a rounded portrait of Marie: no diaries existed and almost all her letters had been destroyed. But in Vienne’s The Truth about the Real Lady of the Camellias, her voice could be heard as vividly as if it had been tape-recorded, and her character—witty, skeptical, modest, sophisticated, merry, subdued—emerged on page after page. Like countless others before me, I fell in love.

  I think a large part of Marie’s appeal was the fact that, as Nureyev would have said, she made her own luck. The mythical versions begin with the courtesan at the height of her success, giving no idea of her trajectory—of what she overcame. Abandoned by her mother and abused, degraded, and sexually exploited by her father, she used her burgeoning beauty to make a new start for herself. From the moment of her arrival in Paris Marie took charge of her destiny: she was a survivor—she knew what she wanted and how to get it. The money she earned from selling her body did not make her a victim; it bought her independence, a privilege generally available only to women who were aristocrats. But Marie was freer than they were. As she was not required to conform to the ethics of the age, conversations in her presence could be as lewd as they were enlightening, which was the reason why a particular coterie of Parisian wits and intellectuals preferred demimondaines to grandes dames at their dinners. Often two or three of the Opéra’s most beautiful ballerinas would be there, magnificently dressed and bedecked with diamonds, but rarely did they speak a word. As the poet and essayist Théodore de Banville explained, “No one had told them to remain silent. But they instinctively guessed that the sparkle of their eyes and their scarlet lips had more value than anything they could say.” Marie, by contrast, was too clever and observant to remain appealingly mute in such company. An autodidact, avid reader, and regular theatergoer, she was determined to profit from Parisian culture and sample the same hedonistic pleasures available to men.

  As Marie’s story mutated into different genres, her own personality became overshadowed by the dominant themes of sickness, sacrifice, and death. Dumas fils and Verdi softened her, capitulating to the romantic ideal that sought to exonerate and desexualize the fallen woman. Psychologically, Marie had less in common with Violetta than with two other operatic heroines: Carmen, the sultry rebel, whose grave danger is that she acts like a man; and the remorselessly materialistic Manon Lescaut. Like Manon, whom she recognized as an alter ego, Marie was practical, willful, grasping, and manipulative. But these are human flaws, whereas Violetta, who renounces her own happiness, can seem infuriatingly and unconvincingly saintly to modern feminists. “What rankles in me is that male composers and writers create women who are such gleaming ideals,” remarks Rebecca Meitles in Violetta and Her Sisters. “So few women have been able to be true to themselves.” Sophie Fuller agrees. “Why on earth didn’t Violetta simply ignore the self-righteous Germont?” she asks—a point that also troubled the singer Helen Field: “She wouldn’t actually have done that—at least I wouldn’t have done that! You find yourself asking who would.” And yet, Dumas fils was perfectly aware that he was stretching credibility. “One looks around in vain for a young woman who could justify the novel’s progression from love, through repentance to sacrifice. It would be a paradox,” he wrote in his 1867 preface. “Young people in their twenties who read it will say to themselves: ‘Were there ever girls like that?’ And young women will exclaim: ‘What a fool she was!’; It is not a play, it’s a legend.”

  La Traviata has survived for the reason recognized by Proust. It is Verdi’s music, with its transfiguration of the human voice, that reconciles an audience to the heroine’s conversion, signaling her capitulation by a key change and expressing pure, altruistic virtue in a surge of beatific sound. But for those moved by Violetta’s noble nature, the prosaic reality of the model
may come as a shock. “You’re actually demolishing the myth,” the writer Peter Conrad, a friend of mine, remarked in an e‑mail after reading my manuscript. “I regard Violetta as one of the great characters in drama. She acquires a true tragic grandeur, and Marie can’t help but be morally dwarfed by her. She’s the sow’s ear.”

  Marie is a different woman to different people. To Garbo she was strong and controlling, to Fonteyn she had “something of that vulnerability of the feminine woman, like Marilyn Monroe.” Duality was part of her nature; like Violetta, she was addicted to pleasure but beset by misgivings. And if their circumstances had been the same, who knows whether Marie would have made Violetta’s selfless choice? She believed herself capable of an infinite capacity to give—“Oh how I could have loved!” she once exclaimed—and she, too, underwent a spiritual journey, begging forgiveness and wanting to atone for her moral irresponsibility. Performance history has made this a love story between an older woman and a possessive youth, but it should be remembered that Marie was only twenty-three when she died. To the men whose sexual needs she served she brought beauty, grace, and distinction, and at the same time she elevated every aspect of her own life with the sensibility of an artist. This is what Dumas fils meant when he described Marie to his father as “far superior to the profession she practises.” It was something also recognised by Liszt, whose attachment to Marie may have had consequences far more profound than their brief liaison. “Without her knowing it,” he wrote, “she put me into the vein of poetry and music.” Marie Duplessis was one of the great romantic muses, and that, to me, is reason enough to tell her own, unsung story.