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

  Was Marie a reincarnation of either one? Different scenarios featuring the bereaved old man have been produced time and again, although in each case there is only ever a single adored daughter whom Marie was said to have resembled. She had “the same waxy virginal pallor, the same black eyes enlarged and elongated by misfortune, the same smile, the same size, same hands, same feet,” writes Alfred Delvau in Les lions du jour, claiming, too, that Stackelberg had promised to make Marie his sole legatee. Dumas fils in his novel sets Marguerite’s encounter with the old duke in the French spa town of Bagnères, where she actually meets his daughter. “She had not only the same illness, but also the same face as Marguerite—to the point that they could be mistaken for sisters.” Dumas goes on to say that the young duchess was in the third degree of consumption, and that she died a few days after Marguerite’s arrival.

  In Vienne’s memoir the initial meeting place has become the Belgian town of Spa, and Stackelberg is “The Duke de Kelberg … an eighty-year-old beau, former German diplomat and a fabulously rich landowner.” Marie, he said, had attached no importance to the insistent attentions of this affable, gallant octogenarian and had readily accepted his arm for a daily walk in the park.

  Stackelberg, who had a gift for making women of any rank feel special, was immensely enjoyable company. “He’s a unique character, and I am sure that his extraordinary style is having an effect on me—for better or worse,” wrote one grand duchess in the 1820s. And it is more than likely that it was he, described in the Badeblatt as “Rittmeister,” a cavalry officer, who sparked Marie’s passion for riding (Agénor was known to hate horses). If so, the pair would have been among those galloping at exhilarating speed down Lichtentaler Allee, beating up the dust and causing the promenaders to scatter. High-spirited, fresh, and hungry for new experiences, Marie must have been more of a tonic to a father in mourning than any recuperative treatment the spa had to offer. But she, according to Vienne, had no delusions about his fixation on her. “She was certainly far from doubting that she inspired in him an emotion which had nothing paternal in it, and that it would not be long before he began courting her with the conceit of a young hero.”

  “The poor old man, he would have been embarrassed to be her lover,” counters Marguerite’s friend Prudence in The Lady of the Camellias—a belief apparently shared by its author, who writes, “The feelings of this father for Marguerite had a motive so chaste … anything else would have seemed to him like incest.… He never said a word to her that his daughter could not have heard.” Dumas fils himself, however, was unequivocally damning. In the notes he gave to actors while rehearsing his subsequent play, he insists that the lachrymose story of the consumptive daughter whose double Stackelberg had discovered in Marie was a complete fiction. “The count, in spite of his great age, was not an Oedipus looking for an Antigone, but a King David looking for a Bathsheba,” he writes, though, as one biographer has pointed out, he has confused the story of Bathsheba with that of Abishag the Sunammite. What Dumas had in mind was a comparison between Marie and the young virgin brought to cherish David in his old age, lying in his bosom so that the king might “get heat.” “The essential fact,” says Francis Gribble, “is that Marie Duplessis, for the sake of money, submitted to the intimate caresses of a man old enough to be her great-grandfather.”

  Vienne, who—unlike any other chronicler of the time—knew all about Alphonsine’s sexual history with an old man, was himself in no doubt of the reality of the situation. “After short preliminaries,” he says, “the triumphant octogenarian was honored by admission to the bedroom and to the privileges reserved for a protector-lover.” According to him, this consummation took place soon afterward in Paris, although accounts in the Badeblatt may suggest otherwise. By July 29, Stackelberg had moved—alone—to the Hôtel de Hollande, and by August 2, Marie had moved out of the Hôtel de l’Europe.

  Back in Paris, the count made frequent visits to Marie “every morning at an hour when Parisians are not yet awake,” Vienne says. A receipt dated October 1842, detailing the redecoration of a new apartment at number 22, rue d’Antin, suggests that he had found premises for her, a five-minute walk from favorite haunts like La Maison d’Or. It was also equidistant from Stackelberg’s own house on the rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin. Just as he and his wife worked at polishing the manners of their grandchildren—“they were taught not only to dance but also to walk elegantly”—Stackelberg set about enhancing the style and surroundings of his teenage mistress. Improvements to rue d’Antin amounted to a total of 11,952 francs, and two bills settled by Stackelberg for Chinese vases, candlesticks, and a clock are evidence of his lavish patronage and attention to aesthetic detail. “From this moment, he took care of all my expenses,” Marie told Mme Judith. “He would not allow me to decrease these; on the contrary, he insisted that I increase my standards of luxury.”

  Her developing taste was simple in that she was satisfied only with the best. And now that she could have anything she wanted, Marie made sure that not only her apartment but everything to do with her appearance was of the highest standard. There is an account of one Stephen Drake searching England for thoroughbreds that had been inscribed in the Stud Book because Marie wanted only equine nobility to draw her carriage. And she found them. Sporting chain-mail breastplates, buckskin culottes, and coronets of embossed, polished leather, her horses were as beautifully dressed as she was. For her promenades à cheval, Marie had ordered from the renowned French tailor Humann a riding jacket of chestnut velvet and downy cashmere, a Basque-style, richly ornamented petticoat and bodice to be worn over a shirt with tight sleeves buttoned at the wrist. Marie’s coiffeur, M. Degoutter, came every day; her pedicurist was Joseph Pau, whose clients included the Opéra’s star ballerinas; her suppliers were the finest in Paris: gloves—buttoned and laced à la Medicis—from Mayor, “supplier to the Queen and the Court, Empress of Russia and Mesdames the Grandes-Duchesses”; shoes from Jacob, who also had a boutique in London’s Bond Street; Portuguese soaps from Postansque, perfumer to the Duchess de Nemours. When Marie entertained at home, elaborate meals were brought in from Chevet or La Maison d’Or, whose specialties of the house were l’omble chevalier, a rare freshwater fish, and sautéed livers of monkfish.

  Her household expenses alone, Vienne reckons, amounted to forty thousand francs a month, paid by the count, who, in addition, gave her everything she could possibly want. And in return? “The reader may wonder what she did with an eighty-year-old lover. I do not intend to dwell on unpleasant details.… I know no more. I deliberately abstained from questioning Marie, who was grateful for my reserve.”

  Romain Vienne was now living in Paris and working as a journalist. Soon after leaving Normandy he had established a flirtatious bond with Alphonsine’s two grisette friends Ernestine and Hortense, and he had also renewed his acquaintance with her ex-colleague Elisa, whose mother had been his landlady when he was a student. Still renting cheap lodgings, he was a nineteenth-century Herr Issyvoo, whose memoir of Marie, like a nonfiction version of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, would eventually capture the personality of a wanton, born-to-be-legendary young woman.

  Not having seen Marie since her move to rue d’Antin, Romain had left his card with the concierge in the rue de l’Arcade, only to be told that Mlle Plessis was no longer living there. It was Hortense who took him to the new address, where Rose answered the door and led them into a sumptuously furnished drawing room. Waiting to receive her two friends, with what Vienne describes as charming coquetry and incomparable grace, was Marie. The transformation was astounding. “Her manners were not affected, her dress was skillfully correct, her attitude irreproachable, her walk aristocratic and her conversation of an admirable purity. Her voice had acquired melodious tones.… It was an apparition.”

  Still addressing her as Alphonsine, Romain was surprised to learn that she had changed her name to one that was much more common. This was because it was the name of the Virgin, Marie told him—
a reply he found amusing. “There’s an original idea! Do you intend to add that of Magdelene?” he teased, asking her also to explain the prefix du added to Plessis. “Call it a project, a fantasy—whatever you wish,” she answered, “but if it comes up for sale I intend to buy the beautiful château of Plessis in Nonant—which you know better than anyone.” For all her newly acquired sophistication and wealth, Marie would always remain for Romain “la petite Plessis.” Only with him could she call up memories of her childhood and of people they knew in common—a fact she acknowledged when she said, “You are alone in my entourage in knowing everything about my life that I have kept hidden from the world.” Mindful of how she was always surrounded by idolators, he prided himself on never flattering Marie and, as he grew to know her better, would tell her truths about herself that only a trusted friend could broach. But, while she valued Romain’s frankness and loyalty, she became increasingly aware of his deepening feelings for her. She noticed how he stayed away when she took on a new protector, yet she spotted him almost every day in the street outside her house. His ardor—palpable between the lines of his memoir—was all the more intense for being suppressed, but he knew he could never confess his feelings to Marie. To do so would be to lose her; she had told him as much herself. “Our lovers often bore us, our protectors always do, our friends never.… I was very happy when I was certain that you were not going to try to be my lover. If it had been otherwise, our splendid, uncomplicated relationship could never have existed.”

  Within a few months after returning from Baden-Baden, Marie had broken the tacit vow she had made to Stackelberg. In her conversation with Mme Judith, she explains, “For some time, I lived without lovers. I had hoped to reform, believing it possible to accept the life which he offered me. But what can you do? I found I was dying of boredom.” Dumas fils’s picture of Marguerite confirms this. “She kept her promise to the duke … but once she had returned to Paris it had seemed to this girl, accustomed to the dissipated life, to balls—and even orgies—that her solitude, broken only by periodic visits from the duke, would make her die of boredom.”

  In the novel, it is the old man’s friends—“always on the watch for a scandal on the part of the young woman with whom he had compromised himself”—who break the news that she is betraying him, reporting that she sometimes received visitors who stayed until the morning. Having seen one of the duke’s servants hanging around her street, Marguerite knew that she was being watched and referred to her protector as “My Old Jealous One.” When questioned she confessed everything, telling him that he must stop caring for her because she did not want to carry on receiving benefits from a man whom she was deceiving. “The duke stayed away for a week, but on the eighth day he came to beg Marguerite to allow him to see her, giving her his word that he would accept her as she was.”

  Shortly after this, Stackelberg lost his third daughter. Living in Naples and only twenty-three years old, Elena died in February 1843. The effect on her father, who had suffered from depression most of his life, can only have been catastrophic (his recurrent nervous attacks were described by a friend as “like fits of madness”). We will never know if Marie was supportive of him during this period. No letters between them exist, although there is a stamp on the reverse of her passport confirming that she was not in Paris in February but had gone to London. Was this to be reunited with Agénor? There is no mention of any trip at this time in Vienne’s account, although a paragraph in The Lady of the Camellias suggests that it was indeed Guiche whom she went to see. “I traveled over to join the Count de G,” remarks Marguerite. “He gave me a marvellous welcome, but he was the lover of a society lady there, and was afraid of compromising himself by being seen with me. He introduced me to his friends, who organized a supper party for me, after which one of them took me home with him.”

  A beautiful young woman who was not only wealthy but free, Marie had reached a turning point. “I thought I might perhaps find a young man who would understand my remorse and make me his companion” she told Mme Judith, “but the only ones to appear were adventurers drawn by my money. The young men who might have attracted me mocked my ideas of marriage, questioned my self-restraint, and constantly threw my past at me. I felt that my faults of old irrevocably condemned me and that in the society of today the once-fallen woman can never reform—however sincere her contrition might be.”

  She said much the same to Vienne. “We lost girls will be eternally reproached. Every honest door to me is closed; it is in vain for me to invoke pity; social conventions are without pity. Rehabilitation? Never! Pardon by men? Never! I know them too well in that regard to retain the smallest illusion.” Was she right? Indistinguishable in dress and manners from women of the noblest birth—“a duchess could not have smiled differently”—Marie now had the ability and the independence of means to invent a new life for herself, a “retired existence” as pictured by Albert Vandam:

  She might, like so many demimondaines have done since, bought herself a country house, re-entered “the paths of respectability,” have had a pew in the parish church, been in constant communication with the vicar, prolonged her life by several years, and died in the odour of sanctity.

  But not Marie. Her very nature, as he rightly says, “revolted against such self-exile,” and she admitted her “horror of hypocrisy” to Vienne.

  I don’t feel I’m blessed with a virtue sufficient enough to become a hermit. I have been, for too long, accustomed to the pleasures of my era to consider attempting to deprive myself of them … to break off, without transition, without hope of return, the past habits of the flesh, of the blood, of the character to which I am enslaved.… Alas, it is too hard.

  So it was not out of despair, as Marie disingenuously told Mme Judith, that she went back to a life of vice: it was her own choice. In refusing to submit to the punitive moral code of her day and accept “a monastic existence, with no parties, no amusements, no lovers,” she entered a world denied to any respectable woman. Marriage and motherhood were what society expected of her sex, but the role of femme à partie—a courtesan of the highest rank—was a far more seductive option. “Mixing only with men of wealth and education, they themselves were refined and quick-witted,” writes nineteenth-century social historian Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet. A woman’s qualities of beauty, grace, and charm were not sufficient for these men; they expected her also to be cultivated and intelligent. To this end, Marie became part of a distinguished group of intelligentsia, sharing a table at the Café de Paris with a secret society of twelve members of the city’s elite—men whose appetite for stimulating conversation, gastronomy, fine wines, and infernal pleasures exactly matched her own.

  Part Three

  The Lady of the Camellias

  PARIS OF THE early 1840s was a ferment of creativity, learning, and social change. The July revolution of 1830 had replaced the old nobility of the House of Bourbon with a wealthy bourgeoisie who thrived under the reign of Louis-Philippe, “the citizen king.” It was an era of entrepreneurs and parvenus, and with this new democracy came a felling of traditional barriers. Writers, like the poet Alphonse de Lamartine, a liberal thinker and critic of despotism, had risen in stature by involving themselves in affairs of state. Women were more emancipated, some entering the aristocracy through marriage, others discovering the power of money and using it to their own gain. Fortune seekers by nature, courtesans could flourish in a city Balzac saw as dominated by two passions: gold and pleasure. But even respectable women began showing examples of conduct previously only enjoyed by men. “In novels,” wrote Arsène Houssaye, “we find heroines who go hunting, carry arms, play the stock market, ride horses intrepidly and swim without fear. They light your cigar; they let you smoke only because they smoke themselves.… The days are over for women as they used to be—obedient, servile, in the shadows. Yesterday they ruled the home, today they rule the government.”

  Not only the scientific and medical center of Europe, Paris had replaced Vienna a
s the musical capital, and it was where theater, ballet, and the visual arts were at their vibrant best. Parisians could see exhibitions of current work by Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, and Courbet; attend recitals by Liszt and Paganini; hear the latest compositions by Berlioz and Rossini, who, as director of the Théâtre-Italien, had revolutionized the public’s response to opera. Rachel, the great French classical tragedienne, was conquering Paris; Marie Taglioni, the legendary star of romantic ballet, though past her prime, was still captivating audiences by seeming to float above the stage; her successor Carlotta Grisi had inspired poet Théophile Gautier to create Giselle.

  Paris was also a city of readers. Foreign visitors would be surprised to see a flower seller or street porter with a book in hand—very likely the latest novel by Eugène Sue or Alexandre Dumas père, both at the peak of their fame and revered by rich and poor. This was the age of serialization. A popular triumph like Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, a naturalistic novel set in the city’s underworld, was published in enticing intallments in the Journal des Débats between June and October 1843. Even illiterate people, eager to know what happened next, would form a crowd as the next installment was read aloud to them. At the other end of the social scale, readings were held in grand salons as a way of testing reactions and publicizing new works. The Boulevard cafés and restaurants, frequented by the prominent writers and journalists of the day, provided another lively stimulus for literary conversations—as did the Boulevard itself.