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

  At La Maison d’Or the pair was again the focus of all eyes, and it was not long before a group of young men came to sit at an adjoining table. One was Agénor. Reminding Marie that he had met her before, he introduced his friends and graciously invited the girls to join them. What would have been a modest dinner became a princely feast, and after midnight and much champagne, Marie participated in a heady round of vingt-et-un. Vienne continues:

  Lili, who had never touched a card in her life, allowed herself to be wooed by the eager Marquis de Carizy, who had a face like a furnace; Marie, as usual, played for the highest stakes and lost huge sums, but [the Count de Guiche] settled her debts with marvellous tact. At two in the morning the young women returned to their carriage on the arms of Carizy and [de Guiche], who asked to have the honour of seeing them again that evening before dinner. They met around six pm at the Café Anglais, with the same flirtatious routine as the night before but with greater intimacy. The next day they were reunited in a box at the Opera and after midnight had supper at la Maison d’Or. The fourth day, resistance had ceased. A treaty of alliance was concluded: the marquis, a gallant man and extremely rich, offered Lili a brilliant situation, and the count became the successor of the Duke de R.

  A portrait painted around this time captures the young girl Agénor found so desirable. It is a watercolor of a plump-cheeked, unsophisticated Marie at the theater painted by Nestor Roqueplan’s brother Camille. As yet unable to afford a box of her own, she is sitting in the stalls wearing a lace-edged shawl and beribboned bonnet—still more grisette than courtesan. Her hair is parted and demurely swept back, not styled into modish anglaises (ringlets), like that of the pretty Parisians around her, but it is on her that a grandee has his opera glasses trained. Alluring and defiantly unescorted, Marie would have been considered a threat by the society women in the audience—as much of a threat as the young actress a contemporary describes sitting in a reserved enclosure at the races.

  Her presence produced a vivid emotion, all the more because she was extremely attractive. A bailiff was told to escort her off the premises, but Mlle responded victoriously by showing her ticket. The law was on her side, and she, no doubt, would have capitalized on this, had it not been for an amiable, persuasive young dandy who offered her his arm, and with all kinds of compliments and galanteries, conducted her elsewhere. This delicate mission, accomplished with talent and success, would no doubt have its recompense.

  With Agénor as her beau, Marie gained entrance to an opulent new world peopled with suave, manicured young men who bowed to her as though she were their equal. She was a forerunner of Stefan Zweig’s lowly post office girl whose change of name had felt completely natural, convincing her that she was “another person, that other person.” And in becoming what she feigned to be, Marie, too, must have experienced what the novelist called “the delirium of transformation,” her metamorphosis wiping out all but the faintest memories of her miserable past. If she was fearful of revealing her unworldliness, she soon learned how to disguise it by studying the arrogant poise of the women who disdained her, learning to walk and to move as they did. She had left Normandy barely able to read and write but now began to discover classic and contemporary novels and was soon to build a library as comprehensive as that of any man of letters.

  In Vienne’s account, it is the mysterious Duke de R. who acts as Alphonsine’s Pygmalion, overseeing her education and developing her into “an incomparably distinguished woman.” Agénor, however, as Nestor Roqueplan noted, also considered Alphonsine to be his creation. He may even have been the powerful friend said to have attempted, through royal connections, to secure the title of duchess for Marie so that she could attend grand balls and court marriages. “The matter did not take place without administrative obstacles,” writes Georges Soreau, an early biographer. “I was told that mayors from various townships received orders to produce false papers so that she could get the official document required to authorise the very genuine title.”

  This was probably no more than a rumor, but had it been true, and had Agénor been involved, the scandal would have brought unimaginable disgrace to his family. And yet, if Marie had been a respectable potential fiancée for her son, the Duchess de Gramont would have taken her in hand, as she did her close friend, Lady Blessington, who was given what today would be described as a makeover by the duchess, “an oracle of fashion.” Accounts of Ida de Gramont, sitting in a swan-shaped sledge, wrapped in a coat of the finest Russian sable, her handsome duke holding the reins on each side of her, show her to have created a near-mythical impact in public—the kind of impact that Marie herself went on to cultivate, framed in her box at the theater, her black hair threaded with diamonds. Through Agénor, brought up in the family house on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré—“a picture of English comfort and French elegance”—Marie absorbed elements of the duchess’s exquisite taste. Lady Blessington describes the Gramont salons filled with pretty furniture, pictures, and vases of old Sèvres; Marie, too, would have only antique Sèvres on her shelves.

  But in fact Marie needed little mentoring. “She possessed to the highest degree the art of dressing herself.… She had du particulier … inimitable originality” (Gustave Claudin). “Who can explain to us by what prescience or divination certain women with no notion of art or taste suddenly become the most fervent priestesses of beauty? … Succeeding the Normandy peasant, the servant of the Latin quarter students, was a woman of the greatest elegance, aristocratic taste and delicacy” (Charles Matharel de Fiennes.) This sense of delicacy was the quality most praised in Marie, who presented herself in an artfully understated way. Being slender and not voluptuous, she never wore décolleté necklines but covered her shoulders with a cashmere shawl and chose dresses of white or pearl gray, which gave her an angelic, innocent appearance. Matharel de Fiennes never forgot the one time he caught sight of her at a public ball.

  I can still see her now: large black eyes, alive, sweet, astonished, almost anxious, in turn full of candor and vague desires, the brows like black velvet and placed there on her forehead to offset the whiteness of her skin and the brilliant crystal of her eyes. Lips which were half-parted, hair that was Spanish by nuance, French by grace, an effect so charming, so poetic that whoever saw Marie Duplessis—cenobite, octogenarian or student—fell instantly in love.

  The early days of Agénor’s love affair with Marie passed in an intoxicating blur—the nights given over to pleasure, performances, balls, and fine dinners, the days reserved for sleep. But unlike Marguerite’s Armand, who was partly modeled on Agénor, he does not seem to have been at all tormented by Marie’s profession. In her only existing letter to him—a touchingly frank confession of her situation and dependence—she writes, “Someone you don’t know has made me a proposition which I’ll tell you about in my next letter, if my affairs don’t bore you too much.”

  Marie’s other lovers at the time were ferociously possessive by comparison. Count Fernand de Montguyon, a middle-aged dandy, famous for his taste in corps de ballet girls, had been outraged when he spotted Agénor not only riding in the carriage that he, Montguyon, had given Marie, but also with the black spaniel that had been his gift to her. “What should I do?” he exploded to a friend, who, after reflecting for a moment and judging his man, replied, “It’s quite simple. I see the choice either of a duel … or a very witty word.” A remark made by Marie suggests that Agénor’s sudden departure for London in July 1842 may have been triggered by the reappearance of another proprietorial protector, whom they referred to as The General. “We would have been so happy if he hadn’t come to surprise us,” she wrote. “Our life was so well organised!”

  Agénor’s London sojourn was almost certainly a banishment imposed by his parents to end his degrading liaison (Vienne himself uses the word exile). There are no surviving letters from Agénor to Marie, and all his personal papers were later destroyed in a fire at his château. The Gramont family left no compromising letters, and the confession
al journal of Agénor’s uncle the Count d’Orsay—admiringly described by Lord Byron as a “History of His Own Times”—was burned by d’Orsay himself. Decadent, witty, outrageously extravagant, and exquisitely elegant, d’Orsay was a glamorous mentor to young Agénor, whom he worshipped in return. Hearing how his nephew had plunged a knife through the heart of a wild boar that had attacked him, d’Orsay compared him to a romantic hero—“a modern Raoul de Courcy.” There was scandal attached to Count d’Orsay’s own amorous situation. He had married Lady Blessington’s fifteen-year-old stepdaughter but kept the stepmother in his life, and may also have been the sexual partner of Lord Blessington. All of which makes it likely that Agénor could have counted on d’Orsay’s support over his youthful transgression.

  A banishment, then, it may have been, but certainly not a punishment. The Duke de Gramont, who had been brought up in England and served in an English regiment, ensured that his son was received in the best circles of London society, which included the Blessington-d’Orsay salon at Gore House, where Dickens and Thackeray were frequent guests. Marie, meanwhile, sorely missing her young lover, had only her forthcoming trip to Baden-Baden to distract her. The letter she wrote to Agénor in a neat, confident hand was sent to him at 11 Little [sic] Maddox Street, Hanover Square, and postmarked 24 July 1842.

  My dear Agénor,

  Although you have not been gone for long, I have some things to tell you. First, my angel, I am very sad, and very bored because I can’t see you. I do not know yet when I will leave, but I would like it to be soon, because I am being bothered by The General who insists that I receive him and continue to be with him as before. He has no intention of changing his conduct towards me.… But let’s talk of the present, my poor angel—and not regret the past.…

  I would like to ask your advice: whether or not I should travel with Mme Weller, I am very bothered because I hardly understand this woman who at times is excessively nice to me and at others changes her manner completely. So I am waiting to get your response as a friend.

  Write me a long letter soon—tell me everything you’re thinking, and what you’re doing—tell me also that you love me—I need to know this and it will be a consolation for your absence, my good angel. I am very sad, but I love you more tenderly than ever. I embrace you a thousand times on your mouth and everywhere else. Adieu my darling angel, don’t forget me too much, and think sometimes of she who loves you so much.

  Marie Duplessis.

  In the 1840s, the journey from Paris to Baden-Baden was still undertaken by stage or mail coach and lasted several days. The passport Marie ordered specially for the trip records her age as twenty-one, as French subjects had to be majeur to travel abroad, but she was still an impressionable eighteen-year-old, completely unprepared for what was in store. Having known only gentle, Normandy pasturelands, Marie must have been intoxicated by the panoramic sweep of her new surroundings; it was the first time she had left France, and every new impression roused her love of life and adventure. Baden-Baden itself, enfolded by the summits of three mountains and surrounded by fields with grazing cattle, was unlike anywhere else she had ever been—a country town with all the sophistication of a European city.

  We know she arrived there on Friday, 22 July 1842, because an entry in the Badeblatt, the newssheet distributed at midday with a list of foreigners who had reached there the evening before, records that “Dem. Duplessis” was staying at the Hôtel de l’Europe. Like the two single Englishwomen, Miss Morris and Miss Aytmer, who came the same day, she had brought two servants with her (presumably her maid, Rose, and the fickle Mme Weller). But was she also accompanied by The General? Vienne quotes from a subsequent letter he claims that she wrote to Guiche saying that she had gone to Germany “to guard her fidelity” and had been obliged to borrow forty thousand francs “for this platonic excursion.” And yet he also says that her companion in Baden-Baden was the “Duke de R.” The Badeblatt offers no possible contender at the Hôtel de l’Europe. Arriving on the same day from Paris and staying at the Hôtel d’Angleterre was one Marquis de Rodes, but a week earlier, on July 15, a Duke von Skarzynsky had arrived with his servants from Paris and moved into the Hôtel du Rhin. Skarzynsky was a general.

  The Hôtel de l’Europe, with its magnificent sweeping iron staircase and river frontage was considered to be one of the choicest places to stay—favored especially by the Russian aristocracy. It was perfectly situated, facing Conversation House, where a ball took place three times a week, and minutes away from the modish promenade of Lichtentaler Allee. As the Prussian military band played its weekly concert in the pavilion, the blare of wind instruments carried up the avenue accompanying the parade of victoria and tilbury carriages, cavaliers in military uniforms, strolling dandies, and crinolined women holding parasols in matching pastel shades. For Marie, Baden-Baden was a little Paris. Lichtentaler Allee was its Bois de Boulogne, the villas that overlooked the park adorned with caryatids were like those of the rue de la Madeleine. The names of hotels, restaurants, and menus were all in French, and even the Russians spoke French among themselves. In May, just before the start of the season, milliners, couturiers, hairdressers, pedicurists, and corset makers traveled from Paris to set up shop in the town. The Badeblatt also records the arrival that summer of one Jean-François Utz, a painter who would be “practicing the art of making portraits à la Daguerreotype”—in other words, one of the earliest pioneer photographers.

  A time would come when Marie, enfeebled by symptoms of the tuberculosis that was to kill her, would seek the healing properties of the waters and other treatments for which Baden-Baden was famous. Dumas fils’s Marguerite is “so frail, so changed that the doctors ordered her to take the waters in the spring of 1842,” but the earliest of Marie’s many medical bills is a pharmacy receipt for a gargle solution, dated 1843. In all probability, like the majority of visitors to Baden-Baden that summer, Marie was there for its social pleasures. For Parisians these were centered primarily around the casino. In the French capital, although gambling still went on in the cafés and restaurants of the boulevard des Italiens, since midnight on 31 December 1837, all the casinos in the Palais-Royal—the most famous in Europe—had been forced by law to close. Quick to seize an opportunity, one clever entrepreneur, Jacques Bénazet, had secured the license to run Baden-Baden’s casino, and within a year not only transformed it into a beautiful palace of rich baroque elegance but also made himself the patron of the town. The spectacle of the casino’s dignified, savvy croupiers and their quickly moving scoops, the piles of gold and silver on the green baize, the ivory ball spinning into the bottom of the roulette wheel were thrilling to Marie, who, though she had gambled with cards, now discovered the adrenaline rush of casino gambling. But while she was in her element, admired and flattered by men of all ages, Vienne claims that the Duke de R.—“a grand seigneur, who was a serious man, correct and a little cold”—had tired of Baden-Baden’s frivolous routine and announced that he would be leaving the following day.

  If this was the case, Marie was not alone for long. The account of what happened next is her own, recorded in the memoirs of the actress Mme Judith. On her daily walk under the firs of the promenade, Marie told Mme Judith, she had noticed a distinguished old man who was always there, and who would stare at her with adoration, sometimes even walking beside her so that he could observe her longer. One day he felt bold enough to approach her. “Do not fear, Mademoiselle, that I am trying to woo you,” he said. “It would suit neither my age nor my taste. You are very beautiful. But you will understand the kind of feelings your beauty inspires in me when I tell you that I have recently lost a daughter whom you resemble like a sister.… More than a sister.” He stopped a moment, and his look, fixed on Marie, was lit with great tenderness. He went on, “Mademoiselle, I have a favour to ask you: I would like to see you often to remind me of my daughter. It is not unusual to commission artists to paint portraits of those one has lost, and you would be the living portrait of my child
.”

  He told her that he was the Count von Stackelberg and admitted that he’d made inquiries about her, while finding it hard to believe what he had learned. “The purity of your features reveals a soul at odds with your conduct,” he said, adding that as an extremely wealthy man he was in a position to help her. “Will you renounce the existence you lead?” he pleaded. “You yourself can name the figure of income which I will undertake to provide. Accept the offer I am making you.… Help me to accomplish a doubly pious act—that of honoring the memory of the deceased, and of bringing honor to the living.”

  “I can’t explain how much this proposition moved me,” Marie confided to Mme Judith. “It was the first time that anyone had spoken to me in this way. I looked at this old man who was giving a lost girl the charity of comparing her to a child untouched by vice, and stayed silent, but as a response, I dabbed at my eyes.” The count took this to be an assent, and gravely thanked her.

  The seventy-six-year-old Gustav Ernst von Stackelberg had arrived on July 17 with his family and servants—ten people in all—settling into one of the town’s grandest private houses. He was Estonian by birth, his family having made their fortune in the Baltic states, and like his father before him he had been a diplomat and a favorite of Catherine the Great. A colleague, Charles (Karl) Nesselrode, who spent three years working alongside Stackelberg in Berlin forty years earlier, was astounded, even at this early period, by his profligacy: “He has just rented a house for 4,000 florins, which in this country is an exorbitant amount,” Nesselrode told his father in 1802, adding that his own rent was thirty-three florins. It was unclear why Stackelberg, who let it be known that he found women of the diplomatic corps very disagreeable, then chose to marry the Austrian ambassador’s daughter. But Countess Caroline von Ludolf made an excellent wife, and went on to bear Stackelberg twelve children. Nesselrode described him as a bizarre character with a hot temper, but he was universally recognized as a superb diplomat, having received the Order of Saint Andrew, Russia’s most prestigious award, for service to his country. As special envoy for the czar, Stackelberg represented Russia at the 1814 Congress of Vienna (the result of which was a balance of power in Europe and forty years of peace), and he is part of Jean-Baptiste Isabey’s group portrait of the illustrious participants, who included Wellington, Metternich, and Talleyrand. On his retirement in 1835, Stackelberg settled with his wife in Paris, but any possibility of a tranquil final phase was shattered when, in 1840, a double tragedy struck, and the couple lost not one but two daughters—Maria and Elizavetta, aged twenty-nine and thirty-three—who both died in Turin.