The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis Page 5
There are various stories about Alphonsine’s life at this point, but what is clear is that she was on her way to Paris. Charles du Hays said that she had been only eleven years old when Marin tried to sell her to Gypsies.
She wasn’t old enough to be handed over, and he had to wait another two years. Then when she was thirteen he took her into the forest of Saint-Evroult, and left her in the hands of these new masters. They brought her to Paris, but as she was still found to be too young for the purpose they had in mind, she was employed there as an apprentice.
Delphine told a curious local lawyer who questioned her in later years about Alphonsine’s upbringing that their father had sold her to mountebanks, a claim also made by E. du Mesnil. “Seeing in the sweetness of the child, a source of income in the future,” he writes, “they dressed Marie and taught her how to appear in public.” Vienne, however, insists that it was Marin himself who delivered her to Paris. Weighed down by an enormous pack made from rabbit skins, they left Le Merlerault on foot, traveling in stages, sometimes sleeping in stables. During the journey, Alphonsine was given a stuffed green lizard in a box for good luck—a talisman that had a special meaning for her and which she kept for the rest of her life.
Marin went back to Nonant alone, and to those who demanded to know why he had not brought Alphonsine with him, he replied dismissively, “What do you expect? Paris is so big that I lost her. In this devil of a town, there’s no drum you can beat to find stray objects.” The Sorcerer’s violent character, combined with the sulfurous rumors, had made him an object of such universal contempt that his return sparked what amounted to a witch hunt. He found that all his possessions and furniture had been thrown out, and no one was prepared to offer him lodgings. Eventually, out of pity, the proprietor of a house in Ginai let him stay in an outbuilding used for sheltering animals. Vienne describes him at this time as a filthy, railing alcoholic clad in rags—a picture he would have been given by his brother-in-law, who was the local doctor and treated Marin at the end of his life. He had been afflicted by leprous sores (probably caused by syphilis), which made him even more of a pariah, and only the doctor and Nonant’s curé would visit him. On 7 February 1841, at the age of fifty-one, Marin Plessis died in Ginai. His body was discovered by neighbors.
And Alphonsine? What was to become of this “child full of fear, who spoke of the devil, ghosts and werewolves”? The infamous Saint-Lazare hospital, where prostitutes were treated for venereal diseases, was full of girls from the provinces forced to survive in Paris as filles publiques à vingt sous, soliciting in the streets and sleeping in warehouses or abandoned buildings. One report claims that Alphonsine did in fact “pay for her promiscuity with a visit to Saint-Lazare,” a place whose very name expressed the ultimate in misery and humiliation. There she would have joined the 1,300 other detainees imprisoned in the penitentiary for a minimum of six weeks or until they had been cured. The writer Gustave Claudin heard that she had been seen in “the most suspect places,” and the first recorded sighting of Alphonsine in Paris has it that one of these was the Pont-Neuf.
The bridge crossing the Seine from the Latin Quarter to the Louvre was a place where all classes of the population converged. It was a street theater of teeth extractors, pimps, purse snatchers, quack doctors peddling purgatives and ointments, jugglers, singers, bootblacks calling from their boxes, stalls selling sweets, chickens, delicacies, secondhand clothes, and books. To Alphonsine it was like an urban version of the Saint-Mathieu fair, and she was drawn to one booth in particular, held by the aroma and sight of potatoes turning golden brown in a bubbling cauldron of fat.
Watching her was the distinguished dandy Nestor Roqueplan. A bachelor and flâneur, he had recently given up the editorship of Le Figaro to become director of the popular Théâtre des Variétés. Cane in hand, top hat inclined over one ear, he was considered to be the most Parisian of all Parisians, whose urbane loathing of the countryside was well known. (Pointing to a row of elms on the boulevard des Italiens, he once declared, “Look—they were so bored they had to come here to get away.”) The Boulevard, with its exclusive cafés and restaurants, was Roqueplan’s domain, and it was only his eye for fetching working-class girls that had brought him to the hubbub of the Pont-Neuf.
He spotted Alphonsine straightaway. “She was nibbling a green apple which she seemed to despise,” Roqueplan recalled. “Fried potatoes were her dream.” These were a delicacy with a special significance for the poor, as Théodore de Banville noted in his book on Parisian mores: “Not only delicious, but sacred like everything that costs only one sou.” Alphonsine, however, did not have one sou, and between her and the pommes frites, which she was eyeing “like a peasant craving gold coins,” was an abyss. Reading her mind, Roqueplan went up to the stout friteuse and bought a large cornet, which he handed to the waif. “This made her blush, but she dropped her apple core and devoured the chips in three minutes.” For Alphonsine, it was the defining moment of her arrival in the metropolis—the first time that she had tangible proof of the luxuries her beauty could buy.
Grisette
ALPHONSINE’S FIRST FRIENDS in Paris were students. She may have come across them among the Pont-Neuf crowd or in the Luxembourg Gardens, where young men headed between lectures to have assignations with the girls who strolled along its paths or sat sewing demurely under the willow trees. But the most likely meeting place was at one of the lively public balls. The undergraduates’ favorite was Le Prado, near the Louvre, where women were exempt from paying, and it was not unusual for them to arrive alone. “Most of those without cavaliers left better accompanied,” remarked one contemporary, while another described a typical first encounter. Sitting at a table drinking punch, a student urges his friend to act as go-between by charming a pretty girl in a corner on her own. Ten minutes later, after many peals of laughter, the conquest has been achieved, and she is introduced to her admirer. “Louise was one of those birds of passage who, through fantasy, and often through need, make their nest for a day—or rather a night—in the attics of the Latin Quarter and remain there voluntarily for several days. Provided, that is, one knows how to keep them.”
To be the mistress of a student living in a garret near the Sorbonne was a situation envied by the street girls of the city. Equally at home by the fireplace of a grand salon as at the rough table of a Left Bank café-cabaret, these would-be lawyers, doctors, philosophers, musicians, artists, and writers provided strays like Alphonsine with their first experiences of a worldly, learned society. The Latin Quarter of the mid–nineteenth century had a certain clannish charm, being totally free of the tourists who swarm its sidewalks today. If top-hatted interlopers ventured there from across the Seine, they rarely stayed after nightfall and were never seen inside the smoky student cafés. Here, long-haired youths wearing workingmens’ caps, a pipe between their lips, played cards and billiards or conversed intently over a beer or shot of absinthe. Most were on an allowance of no more than two hundred francs a month, which bought them breakfast of a buttered baguette and bowl of milk at a crémerie and dinner for three francs somewhere like Magny’s, a cheap restaurant on the rue Mazet. Toward the end of the month, when funds ran low, they would move en masse to brasseries such as Viot’s or Bléry’s, where you could eat for twenty-two sous, or survive on a meat pie from one of the charcuteries.
The Bobino theater on the rue de Madame was another student hangout. It was where vaudevilles rather than serious plays were performed, and audiences would join in the choruses of well-known songs or drown out the dialogue with raucous interpolations. On Monday and Thursday nights the grand salon of La Grande Chaumière, a public ball on boulevard du Montparnasse, was packed with young people watching the dance celebrities of the day. Clara Fontaine, a curvy brunette with a pale, round face, had been awarded the title la reine des étudiants (the students’ queen). Her rival was Elise Sergent, a beautiful Gypsy with black hair and olive skin, known as la reine Pomoré, (the queen of Tahiti), because of her exo
tic appearance and copious bangles and beads. Although untrained as a dancer, she was brilliant at improvising and always attracted a cheering crowd with her version of the polka, a craze she is said to have launched. Clara Fontaine is credited with inventing the cancan, which first appeared at the La Grande Chaumière and quickly caught on.
On Sunday nights in the summer, the students and their girls—les biches étudiantes—went dancing themselves in the rotunda of La Chaumière. Determined to challenge the conventions of the time, they adopted wild alternatives to the more formal dancing then in vogue. The quadrille’s square patterns could be embellished with countless variations—“Jumps, fluttering, twisting, foot-stamping, contortions and undulations of the whole body would vary according to the inspiration of each one, becoming more and more animated, expressive and eccentric.” The polka was instantly controversial, with more bodily contact between partners than ever seen before. The cancan—or cachucha, as it was also known—could escalate into a bacchanalian frenzy. The public ball version was nothing like the high-kicking chorus line of the belle époque with its swishing skirts, flashing knickers, and jump splits. It began sedately, a dance for a couple in a quadrille, with the student in an academic position—left foot forward, hand on one side, back curved, right arm around his partner; she rested one hand on his shoulder and held her skirt in the other. Once the music started, according to a contemporary, all propriety was cast aside.
A helter-skelter of bewildering dash, of electrifying enthusiasm, one dancer leans languidly over, straightening himself again with vivacity; another races the length of the ballroom, stamping with pleasure. The girl darts by as if inviting a fall, winding up with a saucy, coquettish skip; that other passes and repasses languidly, as if melancholy and exhausted; but a cunning bound now and then, and a febrile quiver, testify to the keenness of her sensations and the voluptuousness of her movements. They mingle, cross, part, meet again, with a swiftness and fire that must have been felt to be described.… What then shall we call the cancan? It is a total dislocation of the human body, by which the soul expresses an extreme energy of sensation. The French Cachucha is a superhuman language, not of this world, learnt assuredly from angels or from demons.
Every public ball was policed by municipal guards who were there to uphold decency, but La Chaumière’s director, le père Lahire, a gigantically tall, rotund man, had obtained government permission to keep order himself. If one of the students danced in an excessive, disorderly manner, he would take him in his arms like Hercules and carry him to a quiet corner of the boulevard to compose himself. On hot nights he patrolled the garden outside the rotunda, where alleys wound through bowers of hornbeams with benches hidden in the groves. It was the scene of numerous trysts, though morals were strictly maintained by Lahire, who, while brusque with the youngsters, was a good man with a dry wit, and greatly liked.
Between university terms, La Chartreuse, on the rue d’Enfer, became the place to go. It had the advantage of being lively during the dead season, although it was simple to the point of being grubby. The orchestra was third-rate and the atmosphere so riotous that the rickety floorboards trembled under the dancers’ stamping feet, throwing up choking clouds of dust. To Albert Vandam, an Englishman in Paris, the pleasures of high society paled beside the noisy bohemia of student balls, theaters, and restaurants. “I preferred the Théâtre Bobino to the Opera and the Comédie-française; the Grande-Chaumière … to the most brilliantly lighted and decorated ballroom.” There was a special camaraderie among students, who spoke a patois colored with jargon from painters’ studios, theater wings, lecture halls, and newspaper offices. Their high ideals and good humor had such romantic appeal that graduates who went on to lead bourgeois lives, making respectable marriages and establishing themselves as notaries, “would recount their misery as artists with the kind of relish a homecoming traveller might brag about his escapades with tigers.”
This was the world of La Bohème, where every day presented a new challenge to find enough money for food or lodgings. “Since when have we eaten two days in a row?” quips one student to another in Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, the source for Puccini’s opera. In La Bohème, the quartet of jovial young friends is used to dodging debt collectors and living a routine of bed without supper or supper without bed. Murger’s Rodolphe, an aspiring playwright with a daytime job as editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine, first meets his mistress, Mimi, when she timidly knocks on his door. An impoverished seamstress living on the floor below, she has come in search of a light for her candle. For Alphonsine, too, it was hunger that drove her one day to the lodgings of a young man she knew called Henry. When she turned up on his doorstep, she was in great distress, saying that she had not eaten for the last forty-eight hours.
—Well, let’s see … what can I get you? asked Henry.
—If it’s not too extravagant, replied a blushing Alphonsine, I would ask you for some cherries. It’s mid-June now and I haven’t yet tasted any.
They went out together to buy a pound of cherries, and her young benefactor was rewarded by watching Alphonsine’s “explosion of joy” as she received them; the sensuality with which she devoured each cherry—“her lips even more brightly scarlet than the pulp of the fruit”—was an image he still vividly recalled more than a decade later.
Observing the ravenous Alphonsine on the Pont-Neuf, Nestor Roqueplan had immediately identified her as “one of those girls of the Latin Quarter improperly known as grisettes.” Grisette—a term that first appeared in the mid–seventeenth century to describe the gray fabric, grise de serge, worn by young working women—had come to describe almost any pretty young girl of easy virtue. The grisette may, like Alphonsine, have been brought up in the country, but she was a specific Parisian type, often the heroine of popular novels and stories, like Henri Murger’s Mimi or Rigolette from Eugène Sue’s 1842 Mysteries of Paris.
Nubile, coquettish, sincere in love and light without being immoral, she was the poet’s muse, the painter’s model, and the ideal mistress of a frugal student. She may have taken responsibility for the sentimental education of these sons of the bourgeoisie, but she would not accept the gauche offer of a young man’s money. Instead, she adored being given cakes, trinkets, and treats—“A dinner tempts her, the theatre seduces her, a ball wins her heart.” Honest and gay, the étudiante, as she was also known, was gifted with the kind of spontaneity lacking in girls of the students’ own class; she danced, she sang, she drank and smoked, and she was quite content with a meager dinner of soup or a plate of vegetables costing three sous. Accustomed to hearing intellectual conversations day and night “on anatomy, physiology, philosophy—and every other subject ending in ‘my,’ ‘by,’ and ‘phy,’ ” some grisettes found themselves absorbing serious abstract ideas, whereas others were completely out of their depth. It was Murger’s Rodolphe who had picked up the enticing Louise at Le Prado, but it soon became clear that he expected more of her than she could give; Rodolphe wanted to speak le beau langage and write her reams of moonlit verse, while she spoke only the patois of love and would have far preferred the gift of a hat or a pair of boots.
By now, Alphonsine’s fustian skirt and heavy Normandy clogs, which she had worn on her arrival in Paris, had been replaced by a modest silk dress and black leather ankle boots, while a coquettish little bonnet encircled her lovely face—an effect that “sparked a revolution” in the students. “It was even reported that aspiring doctors of law, in spite of the gravity of their future position, proved themselves assiduously attentive and gallant towards her.” But while enjoying the students’ company, unfazed by scholarly conversations about legendary jurists Cujas and Barthole, Alphonsine is said to have spurned the young bohemians as lovers, choosing instead to bestow her favors on the lead violinist at Le Prado.
There are several versions of Alphonsine’s first weeks in Paris. Delphine declared that her sister had been “welcomed by two students, one of whom was very rich, educated h
er and made her his mistress.” Alternatively, she may have been working at the age of fourteen in a dress shop on rue Saint-Jacques, where she was maltreated, even beaten. “Tired of this miserable life the Sorcerer’s daughter escaped one day and was taken in by the students of the Latin Quarter, who made her their companion and their servant.” Or it was the dress shop in the arcades of the Palais-Royal, where Alphonsine’s employer will die of cholera? Thrown out without money or shelter, she wanders off crying into the street, where “a blackguard offers her his friendship and bread.”
Vienne, presumably passing on Alphonsine’s own version of her Paris debut, tells a lighter story. It was always Marin Plessis’s aim, he says, to take his daughter directly to his Parisian cousins, a couple named Vital, who lived on the rue des Deux-Ecus, an alleyway in the old quarter of Les Halles. This was Zola’s belly of Paris, a decade before the ironwork and vast glass expanses of the covered market were built. Bordered by gabled, ramshackle houses, the medieval streets were crowded before dawn with horse-drawn carts arriving from the countryside full of fresh produce. Market gardeners brought bundles of vegetables and handfuls of fruit; wholesalers piled their huge baskets with artichokes, lettuces, celery, and cauliflowers, stacked symmetrically like cannonballs; cart axles bulged under the weight of damp, seaweedy sacks of mussels, coops of squawking poultry, whole carcasses of sheep and beef. Throughout the early hours there were the cries of wagoners unloading their wares and the constant rumble of wheels on cobbles “lulling the dark city with the sounds of food on the move.”