The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (10 page)

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.

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 particulier
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.

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:

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.

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.

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!”