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

  The Vitals had a vegetable stall of their own, but their business was too modest to employ Alphonsine, so they asked an acquaintance, Mme Barget, who owned a laundry business, to take her on as an apprentice. This establishment was on the rue de l’Echiquier, way out in the Tenth Arrondissement near the dreaded Saint-Lazare prison-hospital, but the opportunity of a job there would have been greatly appreciated by Alphonsine. Though factory workers were women of disrepute in the professional hierarchy of the mid–nineteenth century, the feminine trades associated with couture—laundry maids, seamstresses, shop assistants, milliners, florists, and corsetmakers—were considered, in the main, to be respectable. “They’re virtuous because they spend the day making clothes that are the most indispensable to modesty,” wrote the poet Alfred de Musset, singling out laundresses for particular praise. “They are very caring and clean, given that they’re constantly handling washing and fabrics which they can’t spoil without forfeiting their pay.”

  To Nestor Roqueplan, blanchisseuses were, for the most part, irresistibly pert and appealing—“the prettiest working girls in Paris”—although Zola paints a far harsher picture in his novel L’Assommoir. In a large hangar containing enormous reservoirs of water and zinc cylinders are lines of about a hundred kneeling women working for one sou an hour, their arms bare to the shoulders, their skirts gathered up as they lean over their tubs, beating furiously. The heat from coke-fired stoves is intolerable, the air thick with steam and the acrid stench of bleach, and as they laugh and shout at each other above the racket of machines, their flesh turns ruddy and gleams with sweat. Zola’s laundresses are bawdy and rumbunctious—a dispute ends with two of them locked in a catfight—but in Mme Barget’s atelier, there was never any unruly behavior or risqué talk. “She was an upstanding woman,” writes Vienne, “proud of the honour of her household, and more importantly, of the honour of her two daughters, whom she had brought up with strict surveillance.” Alphonsine would have worked beside these two girls, using an iron filled with hot charcoal and starching lace petticoats that were frothier and more delicate than anything she had ever seen.

  Having slaved for six days in succession, most grisettes, as described by Musset, “frisked about like fish in the water as soon as their work was over,” and Alphonsine was no exception, living for the fun and freedom of Sundays with her Latin Quarter friends. She told Romain Vienne that one night she accepted an invitation to a ball followed by supper. Her escort had chosen a tavern renowned for its rabbit stew and wine priced at six sous a bottle, and after they had eaten, he took her to the Bois de Boulogne. In spring, when the acacias and linden trees were in flower, or on summer evenings, the Bois became a grand boulevard attracting the most elegant Parisians, who strolled down its long, central avenue, or paraded past in their carriages. After dark, however, it took on a mysterious, clandestine aspect, and couples secluded themselves amongst the trees or in coupés with shaded windows. “It’s the intimate hour of the Bois, the hour of abandon and sweet talk … when the wood becomes the confidant of a thousand charming adventurers whose secrets it guards.” Alphonsine laughed as she recounted how the young man had caressed her on a footpath overhung with flowers while swearing eternal love, although the consequences turned out to be far from amusing at the time. She claimed to have been spotted by her employer, who was out walking with her daughters, but this seems too far-fetched. Whatever the circumstances, Mme Barget discovered that her apprentice had lied to her about being at home with her relatives that night, and Alphonsine was abruptly sacked.

  Mme Vital, on the other hand, was understanding and forgiving. Although her reprimand was severe, she softened her words with advice and kindly warnings, pardoning Alphonsine on the condition that she behave from now on. She needed to find her young ward a situation more likely to engage her interest, and since Alphonsine was developing a real interest in fashion, Mme Vital went to see a friend who owned a dress shop near the Palais-Royal. Mélanie Urbain had had her own share of misfortune and been forced to bring up an illegitimate child alone. Consequently, she was sympathetic toward the wayward Alphonsine and willing to employ her.

  There were “pretext shops” in Paris that were actually brothels run by procuress-dressmakers, who offered to lend fine clothes to attractive young women they had spotted, with the intention of launching them as prostitutes. Vienne says, however, that there was nothing disreputable about Mlle Urbain, who kept a close, motherly watch over her apprentices, to the point of employing porters to make deliveries in order not to expose the girls to the dangers of the street. With food and lodging provided as part of her job, Alphonsine left the Vitals’ household, although she now chose to spend her Sundays with them instead of keeping company with her Latin Quarter friends. “She found that work was the best way to escape temptation,” writes Vienne, “and she remained in this honest establishment for about six months, tranquil, wise and relatively happy. The good Mme Vital was enchanted by the progress and conduct of her little cousin, while Mlle Urbain began to be proud of her young assistant. Only one thing troubled these two women: “Alphonsine was becoming disturbingly pretty.”

  By this time, Alphonsine had made two close girlfriends, both a couple of years older: a fellow shop assistant called Ernestine, and Hortense, who worked in another boutique nearby. Neither was particularly attractive, but they were spirited and a lot of fun. Vienne, who met them later, describes Ernestine as the most mischievous of the trio, with a devilish side and a particular suggestive look in her eye that raced the heart of anyone who met her gaze. The three had decided to go on a trip one Sunday to the annual fair in the park of Saint-Cloud, just outside Paris, and Alphonsine, eager to have enough spending money, had persuaded a sympathetic colleague to lend her five francs. But on this particular September Sunday the weather was dreadful, and so they decided to go window-shopping in the Palais-Royal instead. After making five or six tours of the galleries, the girls went into a restaurant to have lunch, their entrance making the kind of effect captured by social historian Edmund Texier in his description of a typical demoiselle de boutique: “Her hat is not much more than a piece of woven straw with very little trimming, her dress a piece of cotton fabric, her shawl a square of printed material; and yet altogether it makes a captivatingly graceful and elegant ensemble. Her eyes glance and sparkle beneath the modest hat brim; she moves with a gently swaying motion of her figure, her skirt rippling in an undulating, provocative way.” The girls had immediately caught the attention of the patron, who, with complete tact, offered them a glass of old Burgundy. M. Nollet, as Vienne calls him, was an amiable widower in his late forties, who upon hearing of the canceled excursion to Saint-Cloud, volunteered to be the girls’ escort the following Sunday.

  This time the weather was beautifully sunny, and, dressed in their finest outfits, the three arrived at their agreed meeting place in the place de la Concorde. M. Nollet ushered them into a carriage and took them straight to a popular restaurant, where a friend of his was waiting. This M. Fleury, a rich bon vivant, paid court to Hortense, while M. Nollet, who also came from a small village in Normandy, made it clear that he was seriously taken by Alphonsine. Conversation during lunch was animated, but at the same time courteous and respectful, and after they had eaten, they made a tour of the fair, where there was plenty to amuse them. Young men on raised platforms tried their strength at hitting punch balls, others blew into yardlong mirlitons that amplified the voice; there were puppet shows and stalls selling all kinds of trinkets. The girls’ companions bought them more gifts than they could carry and then treated them to a lavish supper, after which M. Nollet drove them back to Paris. Before taking leave of each other, he and Alphonsine made a plan to meet again.

  One meeting led to another. Hortense, who was the most practical and cynical of the trio, took it upon herself to advise Alphonsine how she should proceed. She had been well trained to avoid the traps of seduction because her employer, Mlle Urbain, who had worked her way up from streetwalker
to her position of proprietress, spoke crudely in front of her girls about the exploitative nature of men. “They’re all monsters,” she would spit venomously. “Even the best are of no value.” Hortense had resolved to accept only a protector who agreed to her conditions, but Alphonsine had things under control. It was about a month later that M. Nollet asked if she would come and see a little furnished apartment he had found for her in the rue de l’Arcade, near the Tuileries gardens. Alphonsine, whose lodgings can have been no more than a grisette’s narrow little room with an iron bed, was charmed and excited by the place. “Then will you allow me to offer it to you?” asked M. Nollet. “I will rent it in your name, and when you move in, you will find in this drawer three thousand francs* for your initial needs.”

  This was a critical turning point. To accept would propel Alphonsine from a respectable working girl to the status of kept woman—what Nestor Roqueplan deemed the “ugly, improper” term of une fille entretenue. The alternative, however, was even less appealing. In a boutique like Mlle Urbain’s, the average wage was twenty-two francs a month, with a six-day week beginning at seven in the morning and ending at eight at night—a punishing routine in which it was all too easy to become trapped for decades. “Today working girls can’t freely give their love, they have to find a complement to their salary,” writes the anonymous author of Paris dansant; ou, Les filles d’Hérodiade. “Each of them has her lover as she has her bonnet, her shopping bag … the celibate working girl is disdained.”

  In Alphonsine’s mind, there was no alternative, although the shame she felt in succumbing to M. Nollet’s offer would not allow her immediately to confess to Mlle Urbain that she would not be coming back. She stayed away from work for several days before summoning the courage to return to the shop. Splendidly dressed in her new acquisitions, she effusively embraced her employer, thanking her over and over again for her kindness, and wept as she bid goodbye to her colleagues. The elderly Elisa Vimont, who had lent her five francs for the Saint-Cloud outing, had become a real friend. (As a young girl she had been the image of Alphonsine, so deliciously pretty that the well-known portraitist Achille Devéria asked her to model for him.) As well as returning the money she owed, Alphonsine begged Elisa to accept as a token of remembrance her precious Saint-Mathieu fair ring that her aunt had given her. The prospect of breaking the news to her cousins was far too daunting, and so, instead, Alphonsine wrote them a letter. The reply was pitiless. “If ever you set foot in my house again,” Mme Vital replied, “I will chase you away like the vermin you are.”

  *  In the 1840s, the exchange rate of French gold and silver francs stood at approximately 5 francs to the U.S. dollar.

  Lorette

  IN THE EYES of the respectable world, Alphonsine had fallen irrevocably into disrepute. As far as she was concerned, however, she had achieved the ambition of every grisette: to attain the status of lorette. “The lorette is a grisette who has swopped her bonnet for a hat, her Indian dress for one of silk, her small shawl for a cashmere,” writes one historian, while a contemporary notes: “The lorette sleeps in an acacia gondola, the grisette makes do with a folding bed.… Lorettes have an aesthetic eye and regard with contempt the commode of fifteen francs, the mirror of five francs with which the working girl is satisfied. Their furniture has to be of mahogany, of lemon-wood and rose-wood, their mirrors and shelves coverered with objects of bronze, crystal and porcelain.”

  The term came from the Ninth District’s church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, a quarter where many lorettes lived, the church itself described by Alexandre Dumas père as more boudoir than temple. Lorettes were a new genre of women first identified by Nestor Roqueplan in his gossipy, palm-size society bulletin Nouvelles à la main. They were a product of contemporary Parisian life—girls who had set out to take a lover, not through attraction or affection but for financial gain. They would never ask for money or accept it from suitors whose offer was too direct, but they were acutely aware of their market value. “The grisette gives, the lorette receives.” This element of calculation had to be practiced with skill and exercised with elegance, even modesty. It was essential to be beautifully dressed—“to this aim one sacrifices everything … it is more important to be well-adorned than to eat”—and a lorette would think nothing of spending forty francs, nearly two months’ salary for a shopgirl, on just a shawl of crêpe de chine. Casting aside her grisette wardrobe of two shirts, one skirt, one bonnet, and a pair of woollen stockings, she would replace it with marvels of the season bought from boutiques of the Palais-Royal and rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin. Outfits for a ball detailed in the fashion pages of the January 1839 edition of Paris Elégant describe dresses of pale pink crêpe garnished with lace and velvet roses and accessorized with white gloves, silk stockings, and white cashmere or taffeta shawls. In the spring of that year, misty tulle bonnets came into fashion worn with capes of Alençon lace—“little masterpieces of lightness and freshness.”

  Confronted with such unimaginable luxuries, Alphonsine had been gripped by a wild, sensual excitement and within a month, according to Vienne, had spent M. Nollet’s three thousand francs. “He gave her another two thousand but this sudden affluence made her ambitious,” he writes. “She’d already dreamt of moving on to millionaires capable of satisfying her foibles and fantasies. She disdained M. Nollet’s third handout and, knowing he could not continue, he stopped seeing her.”

  The goal of the lorette was to be noticed in public places, to attract the attention of admirers who could offer dinners and theater outings. Alphonsine no longer frequented the student balls of the Latin Quarter but the more exclusive Jardin Mabille, near the Champs-Elysées, whose proprietor had been an eminent professor of dance. “At Chaumière the woman dances for pleasure, at Mabille it’s for business; at Chaumière she’s open to caprices, at Mabille, she speculates.” At Mabille, women whose appearance was as strikingly stylish as that of any society beauty could dance only with men to whom they had been presented—a select group from the world of literature, finance, arts, journalism, and politics. “From these acquaintances the lorette must learn to distinguish unproductive suitors whose pockets are empty and who only know how to offer their love.… Before long she will have mastered the art of finding unexpected compensations in gray hair and physical flaws.”

  Alphonsine’s friend Ernestine had already led the way. A wealthy banker had installed her in a sumptuous apartment on the rue Tronchet, where she kept a carriage, coachman, and groom, and gave extravagant, Rabelaisian dinners behind thick curtains. It was on one of these evenings that Alphonsine met a colleague of Ernestine’s protector, to whom Vienne gives the pseudonym of Valory. This agreeable young man, elegant and at ease with himself, made Alphonsine his mistress within two days, joining the ranks of what were known as “Arthurs.” These were the bourgeois young men who had given up simple, modest grisettes for more sophisticated, fashionably dressed women with whom they were proud to be seen. Good families considered that a son who kept company with lorettes was lost, and this was certainly the case with the likable Valory, who in three months spent tens of thousands of francs on Alphonsine. Intelligent enough to realize that his entire inheritence would disappear if he continued to see her, he resolved to bring the arrangement to an end, claiming that he was forced to go away on business. But while Valory’s passion had decreased as fast as the money in his wallet, Alphonsine had allowed herself to become extremely fond of her lover, whose youth and insouciance, combined with his generosity, were aphrodisiacs after the unwelcome attentions of middle-aged M. Nollet. When she realized that Valory had abandoned her, she was mortified. “Oh how she ranted,” says Vienne, “vowing to revenge herself on her next lover, and to be more clear-sighted in the future in imitation of her two friends.” Even Hortense, who claimed to be waiting for a husband and still worked in her dress shop, had played things to perfection with M. Fleury, who, despite having been allowed no more than prim rendezvous, had assiduously wooed her since the girls’
Saint-Cloud outing. It was only six months later, after the desperate promise of “a small fortune, a dazzling wardrobe, an equipage, and all the rest,” that M. Fleury had succeeded in his conquest.

  With no protector for two months, Alphonsine squandered her savings to the last sou. She was on the verge of becoming one of those lorettes who regarded every admirer as the source “either of a hat, or a scarf or the rent which is overdue, or at least lunch for the next day.” These were the women you saw waltzing at Mabille in their hats, muffs, coats, and scarves, either because they wanted to parade their hard-earned treasures or because they did not have fifty centimes to give the cloakroom attendant. In society’s view, they were not victims but dangerous “blood-sucking parasites,” whose only ambition was to siphon off the fortune of every man they met. But to the women themselves, this marketing of their sexuality was the only way of transcending their fate, the opposite extreme of the opulence they sought being an abyss of poverty, misery, and disease.

  By the early summer of 1840, Alphonsine’s circumstances had radically changed. In Hortense’s salon she had met a viscount whom Vienne calls de Méril, a handsome, kind man attached to the minister of the interior. Delighted to be the mistress of such a distinctive figure, she wrote excitedly to her great-uncle Mesnil, who had become her guardian on the death of Marin Plessis. Exclaiming how grateful she was, she described her lover as “a true friend” who took a constant interest in her. “I lack nothing, and I’m filled with hope that I will now have the means to live as I please.”

  When Alphonsine found out that she was pregnant, she realized she had only herself to blame, telling Louis Mesnil, “It’s not his fault that I didn’t follow his good advice.” But the viscount had no intention of abandoning his sixteen-year-old mistress. On the contrary, he was sweetly solicitous toward Alphonsine, giving his word that he would take care of her and their child. Keeping her condition a secret even from Ernestine and Hortense, she rarely went out and, when the delivery date grew near, moved into the modest apartment the viscount had rented for her outside Paris. There, a midwife was employed to take care of her, and after the birth a wet nurse took over. Alphonsine, who seems to have taken next to no interest in her son other than a concern for his future, was impatient to return to her city life, but her doctor would hear none of it, insisting that she spend three months recuperating in the country.