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

  It was that summer of 1841 that Alphonsine spent in Nonant—her first visit since 1838. Having sent her maid, Rose, back to Paris, she stayed with the Mesnils in La Trouillière, sleeping in a cupboard-sized room off the kitchen and paying her great-aunt sixty francs a week toward her upkeep. Her nineteen-year-old sister still lived nearby with the elderly aunt, Mme Lanos, who had brought her up. Delphine was a typical country girl, described by an Ornais lawyer who had met her as “moderately pretty among her peasant sort, a brunette like her sister, although between them there was no comparison.” Vienne is more critical, commenting on Delphine’s rude manners and brusque, imperious ways, which had made her unpopular with her young colleagues. “Alphonsine, by contrast, was sweet, cheerful and warm; she made friends everywhere because she never prejudged or uttered a disobliging word against anyone.” However unlikely it was that Delphine could thrive in the demimonde—since there was nothing at all sensual about her—Alphonsine was determined to improve her sister’s prospects by persuading her to come to Paris and had asked a couple of lorette friends to write an enticing portrayal of its attractions.

  On the day she expected these letters to arrive, Alphonsine took Delphine with her to the post office, stopping en route at the Hôtel de La Poste and inviting Romain Vienne to accompany them. Hortense’s account, which he was asked to read, was full of intimate details and protestations of friendship, while the other letter, signed Georgina, gave a deliberately seductive picture of their twilight world. But while Delphine had previously seemed tempted to follow in her sister’s footsteps, her response to the letters was bitterly reproachful. This may have been brought on by embarrassment in Romain’s presence or genuine distress over the choices her sister had made; whatever the reason, Delphine turned the situation into an opportunity to castigate Alphonsine for her conduct, reminding her of the shame she had brought on the family by giving birth to a bastard. Deeply hurt, Alphonsine turned her back on Delphine and was silent throughout the journey when Romain drove them home. After dropping her in La Trouillère, he took Delphine on to her aunt Lanos’s house, seizing the opportunity of their being alone to try to prevent an irreconcilable breach between the sisters. “I scolded Delphine for her harsh language, and encouraged her in her resolution to marry and to continue her work as a laundress. She promised not to bring up the subject again.”

  Two or three times a week, when she passed by the inn on her way to collect her letters from the post office, Alphonsine had long talks with Romain, who always accompanied her home. They discovered a Parisian friend in common in Elisa Vimont. “You were her mother’s lodger when you were a student,” Alphonsine reminded Romain, who then guessed that the shop where she had worked must have been Mlle Urbain’s, “because to know one was to know the other.” Romain promised to visit Mlle Urbain and Elisa the next time he was in Paris, and Alphonsine said she would do her best to widen his circle of women friends by introducing him to Ernestine and Hortense.

  On one occasion, suspecting he did not believe that she was the mistress of a man with such an illustrious name, she invited him to read a letter she had received from de Méril. Now living in Burgundy, where he had been transferred, the viscount was, as Hortense put it, “lost to Alphonsine.” He assured her, however, of his intention to oversee the upbringing of their son, whom he had installed with a family nearby. His letter, Vienne reports, was affectionate and full of details about their vigorous child. What was lacking, though, was any sign of love. “But I kept this observation to myself. To avoid the subject of how long their relationship was likely to last, I told Alphonsine that I was enchanted by her good humour and complimented her on her joyful expression—the sign of a healthy nature.”

  Alphonsine’s health had indeed improved significantly. On fine days she went for walks in the afternoon, and this regime, combined with long, tranquil nights of sleep, had added a sparkle to her eyes and a glow to her complexion. But her sense of well-being was not to last. She had had more than enough of the countryside and longed to return to the boutiques, cafés, and balls of her beloved Paris. The Saint-Mathieu fair, which she had no intention of missing, was on September 22, and Alphonsine announced that she would be leaving Nonant the very next day. Romain was with her as she wandered from stall to stall, buying numerous trinkets to hand out to the peasant urchins scampering around. “Aren’t you going to give me a present?” she teased Romain, who told her to choose something she fancied. Picking out a knickknack of no value, she said, “This is what I’d like, and nothing else. I may never return to Saint-Mathieu, and this little thing will remind me of it.”

  The following evening she arrived at the Hôtel de La Poste with Mme Mesnil, who had come to see her off. When they embraced, she whispered to her great-aunt to look for three little packages that she had left under her pillow. These all contained money, she told Vienne, including a hundred francs for Delphine—“My wedding present to her if she marries.”

  The Hôtel de La Poste was full that night, and as Alphonsine had left it too late to reserve a room, she had the option either of traveling to an inn in Laigle or settling for a corner of the attic. She chose the latter, steeling herself to climb up the ladder under the gaze of lascivious eyes. Romain came to her aid, protecting her from the stares of the carousing onlookers by holding her skirts pressed against her thighs—an image he describes with a suppressed erotic charge.

  Two months after her departure from Nonant, Louis Mesnil received a letter from his great-niece. Enclosing another hundred francs, ten of which she asked him to give to Delphine, she told him that she had arrived safely in Paris, but her health was still poor and she had been obliged to see a doctor. This was not, as might be assumed, the onset of tuberculosis (whose symptoms would not appear for another three years) but rather the ill effects of an overhectic city routine. Vienne maintains that a month after her return, Alphonsine had begun a new affair, her lover this time an aging baron who was even richer than de Méril. It lasted eight months, he says, although this can not have been the case. In a second letter to Louis Mesnil, written a fortnight later (November 25), Alphonsine tells him that the reason she has not been in touch is because she has returned to work in the shop. She also thanks her great-uncle for sending her money. Clearly, there was no beneficent protector in her life at this period. Alphonsine had assured Vienne in Nonant that she could count on continued support from de Méril; “He has no intention of abandoning me.” But the viscount’s letters and payments had then stopped, she told him later, after news came that their child had contracted pneumonia and died.

  For Alphonsine to return to the lowly rank of shopgirl was a humiliating setback. Proof that this can have been only a momentary reversal of fortune, however, is an 1842 bill found among her papers for a “plush white hat” priced at 25 francs. Nothing denoted status in the demimonde of Paris more than a woman’s choice of hat. No grisette would dare wear the bonnet of a lady, but a lorette was proud to be seen in one. Alphonsine had bought the hat at Mlle Urbain’s new boutique on rue Louvois. The shop’s former assistant was now one of its most affluent customers.

  Her benefactor, Vienne eventually learned from Hortense, was the “duke de R,” the head of a noble family who had an income of eighty thousand francs a year. He was, she enthused, “the real thing” and was so passionate about Alphonsine that he refused her nothing. “She has a brilliant equipage, a profusion of jewels and a splendid wardrobe of lace and cashmere. Professors of French, drawing, music and dance come every day to give her lessons; this duke seems to want to transform his mistress into a duchess.” Having been promised that she would be launched that season in the fashionable spa resort of Baden-Baden, Alphonsine sent a euphoric letter to Delphine, urging her to come and see her before she undertook the long journey. “Our cousin Marie Lanos could accompany you, and I will be responsible for all your expenses,” she wrote on 28 February 1842. “When you have once seen this delightful city of Paris you’ll never want to leave it again.”


  Rare lorettes made their fortune by their beauty or their spirit; they bid adieu to the quartier, and to the Arthurs they despise, and establish grand existences in respectable houses with a salon, and the company of men whom society women envy; they write letters and make remarks that are quoted.… Each day, from two to four, the boulevards and the Champs-Elysées are filled with these Amazons riding towards the Bois on rented stallions.

  The account is Nestor Roqueplan’s, and it could very well be a description of Alphonsine—or rather, of her new incarnation. He had seen her for a second time at the Ranelagh, the only aristocratic public ball, where she was accompanied not by her magnanimous, elderly protector but by one of the most eligible young aristocrats in Paris.

  I felt myself tapped on the shoulder by a tall youth, as fresh as a rose, with hair as blond and curly as Cupid’s—the duke de …, who had on his arm a charming person, elegantly dressed. It was none other than my gourmande of Pont Neuf, whom he was exhibiting with all the pride of an inventor. She had passed through all the preliminary stages of la galanterie, appearing in dubious places and with dubious people, and had at last fallen into the hands of a man who had instilled her with dignity.

  Her name, Roqueplan discovered, was now Marie Duplessis.

  Part Two

  Marie

  THE YOUNG DUKE’S name was Agénor de Guiche. He was the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess de Gramont, and he could hardly have been much grander. His descendants were linked to the royal blood of Aragon and Navarre, and his parents were as influential at court as their own parents had been before them. His elegant mother was feted and admired, while his father, a remarkably handsome nobleman, served the dauphin in the household’s most prestigious position of First Gentleman. As a child, Agénor’s playmate was Charles X’s grandson Henri, Duke of Bordeaux, who, for one week, at the age of nine, would be king of France.

  Agénor was one year older than Henri, and when Paris fell under siege in the July revolution of 1830, both he and his younger brother, Augustus, were trapped by the barricades in their college of Sainte-Barbe. Their father, refusing to forsake the royal family in adversity, had accompanied the Bourbons at the start of their journey of exile, traveling through Normandy to Cherbourg, while his wife and children remained in Paris. When an angry mob planted two cannons in front of their gate, the duchess fled to the Gramonts’ country estate, a perilous journey owing to the fact that their carriage bore the royal arms and livery. Agénor and Augustus were rescued from the college by a family friend charged with conducting them to the country, and once the duke had dealt with the disposal of the dauphin’s property, the Gramonts joined the royal family in the refuge offered to them in Scotland.

  For the next two years Agénor was brought up in Holyrood Palace, in the Old Quarter of Edinburgh. A vast edifice built around a quadrangle, it looked magnificent but made a dismal home, and to the ex-king and his little band of devotees, Holyrood was a prison: the Duke de Gramont referred to the exiled court as “inmates.” Agénor took Holy Communion in the Catholic chapel, standing beside Henri, and he was almost certainly schooled by the two tutors chosen to mold the mind and morals of France’s legitimist heir to the throne. But this was by no means a lavish upbringing. The duke mentions in a letter the family’s need for money and their ongoing miseries, offering to sell one of his wife’s diamond-and-emerald jewels. Conditions were no better in the exiles’ next place of refuge, Hradschin Palace in Prague, which the duchess left in disgust, soon followed by her husband. From 1833 the family remained in France, at Versailles. “The Gs have retired from Court and keep themselves aloof,” Benjamin Disraeli, Britain’s future prime minister, wrote to his sister in 1837. “The Duke devotes himself entirely to the education of his three sons.” Gramont’s efforts were rewarded when, at the age of eighteen, Agénor entered the Ecole Polytechnique, a unique educational establishment reputed to be one of the best in the world.

  It was the Polytechnique that had intellectually formed the male elite of France—leaders of the armed forces, politicians, magistrates, wealthy industrialists—and when Agénor was promoted to underlieutenant in the artillery service in 1839, he seemed destined for a brilliant career. A portrait of him as a student painted by his uncle, Count d’Orsay, the famous dandy, shows a young man with a black moustache and magnificent side whiskers who exudes privilege and self-confidence. The Gramonts’ days of glory may have been over, but Agénor’s beauty and rank allowed him to maintain a charmed position in society. Even knowing him to be “absolutely without fortune,” the Duchess de Dino included the nineteen-year-old Duke de Guiche on her list of four aristocratic suitors for her daughter. Agénor, however, living in his bachelor apartment in a backwater of the Eighth Arrondissement, had no intention of relinquishing his freedom. He preferred an evening at a demimonde café or public ball to any grand soirée, and he was always on the lookout for a pretty girl. One, according to the journalist known as “Méjannes,” was Alphonsine. “The Duke de G.… was still an elegant Polytechnicien when, twice a week, he would gaze through the window of the shop where she worked in the rue Coq Heron [sic], admiring the little one’s arresting profile.”

  Over the next couple of years, to the despair of his parents, the youth whom Disraeli had admired as “quiet with great talents” was acquiring a reputation as dissolute as that of his ancestor Armand de Gramont, Count de Guiche, one of the most infamous playboys of the seventeenth century. Agénor had become a typical Parisian “lion,” frequenting the fashionable cafés and restaurants of the boulevard des Italiens dressed, even at noon, as if he were going to a ball. Very tall, with startlingly blue, caressing eyes, he was irresistible to women, whom he courted and admired but only as an aesthete and epicurian. “He never wasted his time by loving them,” writes Vienne. “It was said that a young and sweet dressmaker had been able to captivate him for several months, but then he abandoned her like all the rest.”

  Instead of progressing, as expected, to the artillery and engineering school of Metz, Agénor took an illegal absence from the army for more than a year and then in September 1841 received an order forbidding him to return to military service. Enforced civilian life meant only one thing to this “beautiful lion”—the pursuit of pleasure. And one of his hunting grounds was Le Prado.

  On a day of mourning, of desolation for the Latin Quarter … a pure-blooded lion of the boulevard des Italiens, shod in the shiniest leather boots, wearing the whitest kid gloves, the Duke de G., slipped amongst the ungloved bear cubs at le Prado, drunk with latin and legal articles, and swept off Marie Marin [sic] who became Marie Duplessis. A week later, the only talk on the Italiens, at the Opera, in the galante society of Paris was of the beautiful mistress of the Duke de G.

  Charles Matharel de Fiennes, a literary critic at Le Siècle, dates Agénor’s coup as 1840, but Vienne, as usual, takes a different line. Barely disguised in his memoir as the Viscount de Tiche, Count de Grandon, Guiche, he says, had met Marie on earlier occasions and even been received in her salon, but they had become lovers only when she was established as a young courtesan. Their affair, Vienne claims, began at La Maison d’Or (also known as Maison Dorée).

  Situated on the corner of the boulevard des Italiens and rue Laffitte, this elegant restaurant, with its Aubusson-hung doors, its sculpted paneling, paintings, mirrors, and silk curtains, was a favorite meeting place of the city’s gilded youth. Its owner, a Monsieur Hardy, had introduced to France the English “grillroom” and would stand in front of the enormous white marble chimney supervising the barbecuing of succulent slabs of meat. After an evening at an Opéra ball, a boisterous young crowd descended on La Maison d’Or, calling for bottles of champagne, gambling, and crashing out tunes on the piano until dawn. One half of the restaurant was for customers from the street, but the other, overlooking rue Laffitte, was reserved for important regulars, who sheltered themselves from curious eyes in private booths piled high with soft cushions. (An engraving from the time of a salon p
articulier shows a ribald scene of two lorettes and their conquests, one a bearded rake with unfastened shirt, who rests his hand on the pretty girl’s rump as she ladles out punch from a steaming cauldron.)

  Accompanying Marie that evening was a delicate eighteen-year-old blonde whom she had adopted as a protégée. Well brought up and from a good family, Lili had fallen for a cad who seduced and then abandoned her, leaving her without resources. Aware that a sense of shame prevented Lili from returning to her parents, Marie befriended her, and, for a brief period when she was between lovers, the two young women became inseparable. If their intimacy was a sapphic interlude, it was something that Marie would have kept strictly to herself: lesbianism in nineteenth-century Paris was regarded as an abomination. Not surprisingly, Vienne provides no clues, but he does cynically suggest that this was a mentorship motivated by aesthetic considerations. The striking color contrast of their blond and jet-black hair was guaranteed to attract attention as they rode beside each other in an open carriage through the Bois de Boulogne.