The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (11 page)

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 confessional 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.

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.

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.”