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

  It was there one evening that a passing roofer heard a child’s terrified screams and stopped to investigate. While Marie was in the cellar, Marin, furious with one of the girls, had flung her to the back of the room. She had fallen unharmed on the bed, but nevertheless the twenty-year-old Gouet was shocked enough to report Plessis to his landlord. Weary of yet another brutal scene, the landlord evicted the family, who moved into a dilapidated cottage near the church. By the following year they had moved again, to an even shabbier place in the nearby village of La Porte, but then a charitable landlord offered them a three-year lease on a more suitable dwelling less than a kilometer away in the village of Le Castel. The abuse continued. On the night of 6 January 1825, coming home drunker than ever after celebrating the Feast of Three Kings, Marin flew into a psychotic rage and tried to set fire to the house, dragging his wife toward the flaming hearth. Vienne continues:

  As strong as she was courageous, and understanding the terrible danger threatening her life, Marie managed not to lose her head and for ten minutes was able to resist by hanging on to a table and the legs of the bed. Her cries went unheard, her strength was giving out, and she was about to succumb when the door was flung open and a saviour entered who grabbed Plessis with a grip that almost pulverised his bones.

  It was the Nonant-Rouen messenger, Henry Aubert, a young colossus “as sweet as a lamb,” who insisted that Marie should take the girls and leave the house immediately. Stopping a neighbor returning from the Gacé fair, Aubert offered to lend him his horse and trap to drive the victim and her children to a friend who would protect them.

  Marie knew she had no choice. The next morning, learning that Marin would be absent all day, she went back to La Castel to fetch some belongings, and then, walking with the children to her aunt in the next village of La Trouillère, she covered them with kisses and bade them goodbye. At first she hid herself away in a neighboring barn belonging to a couple named Dupont, but she was spotted by a local gossip and forced to find another refuge. Mme du Hays took charge, offering to send Marie to one of their tenant farmers, and at midnight Monsieur Dupont drove her to her hiding place. Charles du Hays remembered going as a child with their maid several times to visit Marie. “She seemed to me as beautiful as a saint and all the stories I’d heard made me shudder with fear. ‘It’s the wife of Pluto,’ this servant told me. ‘Her husband intends to kill her and if ever he finds her he will kill all those who helped to hide her. If ever you talk of this he will burn down your house and poison your cattle.’ And so I scrupulously kept my secret.”

  About a week later, through the intervention of a retired English jockey who had worked at the family’s stables, Mme du Hays found Marie employment as a lady’s maid to a well-born Englishwoman, who lived in Paris in the winter and on the shore of Lake Geneva in summer. “As we had remained on terms of affection with her,” wrote Charles du Hays, “my mother wrote telling her of the misery which we had before our eyes and asked her to help.” One morning, escorted by two loyal farmhands, Marie was driven to the grande route to take the stagecoach to Paris, where her new employer was waiting.

  It was Marie’s aunt and uncle, Marie-Françoise and Louis Mesnil, who for the next two years looked after the Plessis girls in La Trouillère, a hamlet a few kilometers north of Nonant. Marin reappeared from time to time, promising to send a monthly allowance for his daughters’ upbringing, but no money ever arrived. As Mesnil earned very little as a laborer, the couple made the decision to keep Delphine and send Alphonsine to their cousin in La Corbette. Marin promised to provide eight francs a month as upkeep, but he never sent a sou. And yet, although money was tight, this was a relatively happy period for Alphonsine. The cousins, Agathe Boisard and her husband, Jean-François, who was a roadsman as well as clogmaker, were welcoming, kindhearted people, and their son, Roch, who was exactly Alphonsine’s age, became the brother she never had. And if separating from Delphine had been a wrench at first, the sisters found they were only a short walk away from each other, La Corbette no more than a kilometer away from La Trouillère.

  These Merlerault hamlets, linked by dirt tracks shaded by ivy-clad oaks and made up of no more than three or four cottages, remain virtually unchanged to this day. In the nineteenth century, the heart of almost every house was a large earthen-floored space serving as both kitchen and family bedroom, with hocks of salted pork suspended from the beams and a curtained partition for the husband and wife. With food cooked on the fire and the windows rarely opened, the interior was as snug and murky as a Normandy proverb suggests—“Warm smoke is better than cold wind.” A meal consisted of several galettes per person made with sarrasin flour and milk, or vegetable soup flavored with beef or pork fat. Poultry was reserved for Sundays and holidays, and once or twice a year there was a special occasion when a family killed a pig and summoned parents and friends to eat fricot de cochon. The day that the sarrasin was harvested was another excuse for a celebration. The workers who had taken part were invited with their families to a dinner lasting through the night, sitting at a long table strewn with bread, jugs of cider, and baronial platters of meat.

  For six-year-old Alphonsine, the high point of the year was the Saint-Mathieu fair, which brought a horde of strangers to Nonant—strolling players, puppeteers, fire-eaters, and merchants selling everything from bonnets, ribbons, and frippery to tinware, fruit, and charcuterie. “Locals waited for Saint-Mathieu to buy their umbrellas, soap, crockery and fabrics.… Young girls waited for the fair to have their ears pierced and adorned with pendants of silver or gold; fiancés bought rings to fulfill their promises, and farmers found all the tools and objects necessary to cultivate their land.” The sense of anticipation was always justified by the festive atmosphere of the day itself, September 22, when inhabitants of neighboring villages joined the Nonantais picnicking on the grass and strolling between the stalls and café tents.

  Nothing, however, would equal the excitement of the historic summer day that not only affected every inhabitant of the region but forged a link to Alphonsine’s future. This was 7 August 1830, when the dethroned Charles X and his cortège arrived in Le Merlerault en route to the Normandy coast. A week earlier, on July 31, following the republican insurrection in Paris, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans had been named “lieutenant general of the kingdom” and on August 2 ordered that Charles and his family be chaperoned with the greatest respect to Cherbourg. “The immense convoy was watched by a double row of people who had hastened there from ten leagues away to contemplate this unique spectacle: the exodus of a king and his court.” Following the king’s coach, drawn by eight splendid horses, its gold facing and glass windows sparkling in the blazing August sun, were carriages containing the dauphin, the dauphine, and their children; other members of the king’s entourage with their respective households and servants; escorting bodyguards, commissaires, and policemen; plus wagons and carts loaded with furniture, silver, luggage, and bales of hay serving as fodder. For the crowd, gaping at the procession through clouds of dust raised by the horses’ hooves, the effect was as poignant as it was thrilling.

  In Le Merlerault, the fifth stop on the long, slow route into exile, a modest town house on the main street had been offered to Charles X by an ex-member of his guard. The bodyguards had set up a bivouac on the lawn by the side of the house, and curious locals could spot the old monarch strolling around after dinner, while the domestics cleared away the meal. Earlier in the day the elegant Duchess de Berry had spent several hours sitting sewing on the grass with her daughter and the two princesses. There was more excitement that night when a rider from Paris came thundering into Le Merlerault bringing a note to Charles from Louis-Philippe suggesting that the royal family leave the young Duke of Bordeaux behind in France. The crowning of King Charles’s grandson as Henry V was the old monarch’s greatest wish, but there was no question that his daughter-in-law, the Duchess de Berry, would ever leave the country without her ten-year-old son. On the morning of Sunday the 8th, the royal part
y moved on to Argentan, and on August 16 arrived at their destination of Cherbourg, where two paquebots were waiting to transport them to England. Had Alphonsine but known it, in one carriage, bearing the royal arms of the dauphin, was the father of the young duke who was to become her first love.

  In September news came that Marie Plessis had died. She was thirty-three years old. Marie had written the du Hays family sometime earlier from Paris, where she lived on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, saying that she was being treated with great affection and care by her English employer. She gave as an example the privilege of attending a special mass in the presence of the royal family, claiming that during the service the king had eyes for her alone. Nothing, though, could assuage Marie’s memory of her suffering or the loss of her children. While spending the summer of 1830 in Châtelard, Montreux, she fell ill and made no effort to recover.

  Alphonsine was then twelve years old and attending a small girls’ school in Saint-Germain-de-Clairefeuille run by a nun from La Providence order in Sées. Sister Françoise Huzet taught her charges to read and write, but her main role was to prepare them for their First Communion. For Alphonsine, this took place in Saint-Germain’s pretty church dating from the twelfth century, where one of the stained-glass windows has an image of a soulful-eyed Virgin, believed locally to have been modeled on Marie Plessis. After this, Alphonsine’s school days were over.

  In her role as surrogate mother, Agathe Boisard continued to be kind and supportive, though having given birth to two more boys, she had little time to devote to Alphonsine. With the arrival of a girl in 1836, the situation became impossible, and Agathe pleaded with Marin to take his daughter back. He refused, as did other relatives and friends to whom she appealed. Alphonsine became one of 965 Ornaise children to be abandoned that year; she still spent nights with the Boisards but was left to her own devices to feed herself, scavenging meals from relatives or from neighboring farmers. When she begged the harvesters for bread or soup, some took advantage, indulging their fantasies by making lewd advances in return. “She had understood, she had seen,” writes Vienne. “Her education in vice had begun.”

  Hearing what was going on, Agathe took Alphonsine to visit her father and insisted that he take responsibility for his daughter by finding her a job. Delphine, set up by her great-uncle Louis Mesnil, was already working locally as a laundress, and, at Agathe’s suggestion, Marin went the next day to a laundry in Nonant asking the owner to employ Alphonsine as an apprentice. But his reputation had preceded him, and the woman was too intimidated by the Sorcerer to consider employing his daughter. “He made everyone tremble,” wrote one local historian. “People were more afraid of him than of the King’s attorney or the police.” However, another laundry mistress agreed to take Alphonsine on for ten francs a month. All went well to begin with. Mme Toutain was pleased with her adroit, eager assistant, while Alphonsine appeared to enjoy making herself useful. Having reached the age at which girls become aware of fashionable clothes, she found herself coveting the prettier items she handled and loved to spend time with her dressmaker aunt and godmother, Julie Deshayes. In September, as a reward for her hard work, Aunt Julie asked her what she would like as a present from Saint-Mathieu fair. “My wonderful aunt,” she exclaimed, “please buy me a ring!” The two went round the stalls together and chose a simple silver band encrusted with a few blue stones. It was worth only forty sous, but it meant far more to Alphonsine than all the diamonds and emeralds she would later acquire.

  In the evenings after work she reveled in her freedom from family contraints, choosing the company of young farmhands who sang smutty songs and swilled pitchers of beire, the most lethal Normandy cider. Still only twelve or thirteen but discovering an appetite for sex, Alphonsine was impatient to lose her virginity, and it was at this time that she propositioned Marcel, whose initial reluctance challenged the child’s seductive powers for the first time. Coquettishly suggesting, “You play Alfred and I’ll be Josephine,” she led him into the shade of a hedge bordering one of du Hays’s fields and committed what Vienne calls her first polissonnerie—or sexy escapade.

  Every Sunday Alphonsine would walk to Saint-Germain-de-Clairefeuille to spend time with her father. One day he took her to the hill town of Exmes, to a gloomy house at the end of an alley belonging to a man Vienne names as Plantier—a septuagenarian with “a detestable reputation” as a debaucher. That night, after the three had dined together, Marin returned home, leaving his daughter behind. It was not until Monday evening that Alphonsine went back to work, and, to compensate for her absence, she handed over twenty francs to her employer—the equivalent of two months’ salary—saying, as the old bachelor had suggested, that it was from her father. As the weeks went by she regularly spent long weekends with Plantier, who sent her away each time with a five-franc coin. The pittance she earned working in the laundry was making her careless about the hours she kept, and one week she failed to appear until the Tuesday evening, defiantly brandishing the ten francs she had been given. Perplexed, Mme Toutain interrogated her:

  —Where have you been these past few days?

  —With Monsieur Plantier.

  —Who gave you the ten francs?

  —Monsieur Plantier.

  —What do you do there?

  —He plays with me and I play with him.

  —I’m going to tell your father.

  —You won’t be telling him anything he doesn’t know. He’s the one who sent me there.

  Mme Toutain instructed her husband to go to Exmes to find out more.

  “The information was deplorable,” Vienne reports. “It was, in effect, Plessis who had taken his fourteen-year-old daughter to Plantier. It was evident that the two scoundrels were in perfect accord, and that they had made an infamous pact.” Worried about the possibility of scandal, Mme Toutin decided to get rid of Alphonsine, who had anyway become capricious and slapdash. Not only that, but there had been complaints from the parents of other apprentices whom the girl was corrupting by teaching them about what she had learned, in shockingly indelicate language. Alphonsine was given no alternative but to return to Exmes.

  “What went on during the next months in this isolated house, sheltered from curiosity, between the child and the hideous satyr?” writes Vienne. “One can guess without any trouble.” The ménage of la petite Plessis and Plantier had become a topic of such concern that the police were informed and began to make inquiries. Had the old man employed Alphonsine as a maid, or had she been “sold”? No one knew, but the fact was that she was living alone with an old man, and most people imagined the worst. When they were together a few years later, Vienne pressed Alphonsine about what had taken place, but was met with bitter silence. “This only confirmed my suspicion that there were passages in the story that would make even a grande horizontale blush.”

  The 1981 film Lady of the Camelias shows Alphonsine complicit in the arrangement. A dirty urchin begging in the rain, she first encounters the Plantier figure when he gives her a coin, which she delightedly hands over to her father, who is watching from a café window. She willingly moves in with the old man and becomes sullen and resentful only with the onset of puberty. Her father is there in the bedroom with Plantier when Alphonsine first sees menstrual blood on the sheets, a moment Bolognini uses to dramatize the origin of one of the best-known aspects of the Dame aux Camélias myth. Wiping away her tears, Marin mawkishly whispers, “Don’t let that upset you. It’s quite natural at your age.… When it happened to your mother she wore a flower on her dress. A red flower. It was her way of letting me know not to bother her. There was a time when she didn’t wear any flower and you came into the world nine months later.” The truth, however, which Vienne claims that Alphonsine confided to him, was chillingly different. Completely ignorant about female matters, she was panic-stricken by the flow of blood and, seized by a primal terror of mutilation and defilement, fled from the house.

  A couple named Denis, who ran a reputable inn on the Grand-R
ue, took pity on the child and engaged her as a servant. Marin dared not object, as the mayor of Exmes had summoned him and questioned him at length. Earning a salary of sixty francs a year, Alphonsine remained for about eight months in this honest, tranquil house where Mme Denis kept a motherly watch over her charge—even having her sleep in a box room next to the couple’s bedroom. But one evening in October 1838, Marin arrived and announced that he had found employment for his daughter in an umbrella shop in Gacé. It was an opportunity too exciting to resist. Compared with the sedate Ornaise villages Alphonsine had known, Gacé was a city of light, a vibrant center with forty cafés, a dozen dress shops, and regular fairs and markets. Maison Fremin, the umbrella shop where she began work as a maid and apprentice, was one of eleven in the town. Women in modish bonnets and shawls wandered among the lime trees of Place du Château (its thirteenth-century tower now houses the Musée de la Dame aux Camélias), and, admiring them, Alphonsine felt as if she had been given a new life. There was also a louche element to Gacé; the livestock market drew farmers from all around—men spending nights away from their families, who were only too glad to pay for the company of local girls. But after only two months, Marin arrived to take Alphonsine away.

  This was another period that triggered a barrage of rumors. There was the possibility of incest, something Bolognini’s Lady of the Camelias makes much of. In the film, Alphonsine’s father is a swarthy male whom she nuzzles with adoration and kisses like a mistress. Theirs is the forbidden bond depicted by Edith Wharton in her semipornographic fragment “Beatrice Palmato”—the sexual collusion between a father and his consenting, highly aroused daughter. Beatrice’s father is an adept lover, his silver-sprinkled head between her parted knees, conjuring in her “the old swooning sweetness,” “the lightnings of heat” that her new husband, with his rough advances, can never achieve. And in Wharton’s fantasy, the sexual expertise is reciprocal, with the father expectantly pressing into his daughter’s palm “that strong fiery muscle that they used in their old joke to call his third hand.” Was this also the case with Marin—was he deliberately grooming his daughter in preparation for her future career? Twice Vienne broached the subject with Alphonsine but obtained first denials and tears and then an order to cease his questions.