The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (14 page)

To onlookers it was hard to believe that the pair were friends. “
The Irish woman confronted this world with head erect and flashing eyes,” Claudin remarked, “the Lady of the Camellias with a blush and trembling lips.” And yet, there were some similarities: the same pale oval face, huge dark eyes, and little
Mona Lisa
mouth.
Lola’s phony Spanish look must have been admired by Marie, as she copied it exactly when she was painted by Olivier,
wearing a full-skirted black dress with long tight sleeves, her head shrouded,
à l’espagnole
, in a black lace mantilla pinned with a red rose. Certainly both young women had reinvented themselves, feigning aristocratic refinement while acting as if they were entitled to the sexual freedom of men. As far as the public was concerned, they belonged in the same category, although
Albert Vandam insists that they could not have differed more. “Lola Montez could not make friends. Alphonsine Plessis could not make enemies.”

Marie’s demure appearance touched just about every man she met. “
Only the large black eyes, lacking innocence, protested against the purity of this virginal physique,” wrote one admirer. Intensifying the effect was her simplicity of dress. Her favorite garment was a shawl—cashmere in winter; crêpe de chine or Chantilly lace in summer—which artfully complemented her tall, thin frame. Balzac, however, would have regarded such subtlety as cynical provocation. Marie epitomized his delicate, decorous-seeming girls who enliven the orgy scene in his novel
The Wild Ass’s Skin
—the “make-believe virgins, whose pretty hair breathed out pious innocence … wrapping themselves in a mantle of virtue in order to give greater charm and piquancy to the prodigalities of vice.”

Marie also embodied the paradox of the sylph. Since Gautier’s 1832 ballet
La Sylphide
, a romantic masterpiece, this airy creature had become a contemporary icon—the subject of poems and essays, even the title of a fashion magazine. Expressing the spiritual sensibilities of the eighteenth century, the sylph was an intellectual symbol capable of conjuring up a lost world, the world painted by Watteau, and prized by writers like Gautier and Houssaye. The creator of the role had been
Marie Taglioni, whose grace and fragile charm were the qualities most admired in Marie, a resemblance she enhanced with frothy white dresses, her face framed by neat, parted black hair and a diadem of flowers. Taglioni’s landmark performance, which first established the preeminence
of the ballerina, corresponded to the sylph’s own emancipation. Cherishing her freedom and unconstrained by bourgeois conventions, the ballet’s heroine is, in the words of one recent historian, “
a woman of unnerving contrasts … strong but frail, sexually alluring but chaste.” It could be a description of Marie.

And yet to have won “
the devotion of the erotic Boulevard,” Marie was required to be there on their terms. These were all men who sought the society of women of the demimonde, and their familiarity with grisettes, courtesans, and actresses fed their work, creating Balzac’s Esther, Sue’s Rigolette, Musset’s Mimi Pinson. In one of the Café de Paris’s private salons, all decorum had to be left at the door. This was the condition for a woman to participate in
Le
Souper des Douze
—a dinner held by the dozen “
Disciples of Eros,” who included Dr. Véron,
Alfred de Musset, and
Nestor Roqueplan. Seated with the men, at a large table decorated not with flowers but with a cluster of figurines in acrobatic lovemaking positions, was a selection of “pretty girls, lorettes and mistresses” who were unlikely to be discomfited by the male after-dinner conversation. “Because when dessert was served with champagne, frothing in its glasses, we were accustomed to recount, without any reticence, our amorous adventures.”

Examples of these erotic vignettes, which take the form of a letter to a fellow “apostle” who has been obliged to leave Paris, were privately published in a volume entitled
Voluptueux souvenirs; ou, Le Souper des Douze
—available only to subscribers. The collection, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, must be read in the rare books salon with the protection of white gloves and located by its code ENFER—French for “hell.” Seeming today to be quaintly risqué, one describes how a frigid courtesan, whose only passion was money, was transported to near nymphomania by the sight of her lover’s state of arousal. In another, the narrator plans to cure his mistress of her jealousy with the help of a complicit blonde. When Valérie receives an anonymous note telling her that her lover is being unfaithful, she rushes to his apartment,
opening the door with the key he has given her, and catches him with his breeches down. “Madame … this is mine and I forbid you to touch it!” she shrieks, launching into a catfight, and rolling on the floor with her rival. The man watches voyeuristically as the two women enlace, and the story concludes with a consensual threesome.

The author of
Voluptueux souvenirs
was
Roger de Beauvoir, “
the most audacious of this band” and an escort of Marie. He, too, came from Normandy and had aggrandized himself by changing his name and adding “de” to his patronymic (Beauvoir was the name of the land he owned there). His friends nicknamed him Roger Bontemps because of his love of pleasure and extravagant lifestyle. With a cigar in his left hand, a cane of rhinoceros horn in his right, he was a persuasive charmer, a tall bachelor in his early forties, and one of Paris’s most elegant dandies. He was born rich—“
thrice rich,” wrote Dumas, “through his mother, his father and the second husband of his mother.” His black beard and long, curling tresses gave him the air of an Italian nobleman. (The writer and photographer Maxime du Camp thought he resembled one of the young Venetians whom Veronese painted in his
Wedding at Cana.
) Almost always good-humored, he was an original, brilliant conversationalist and compulsive scribbler, who composed more than three hundred poems, songs, and madrigals and kept notebooks full of quatrains and epigrams on his friends and enemies. “I have known almost all the witty men of our time,” remarked Dumas, “and I am not afraid of saying that
not one had the verve of Roger de Beauvoir.”

That Beauvoir liked Marie enough to see her outside the confines of the Café de Paris is confirmed in a letter written to poet
Félix Arvers, another member of the Twelve.

In fact, Marie got much closer than others in her position to gaining access to le monde. Vienne claims she was received at balls where young women of her kind were never admitted, and even the most meticulous observers of form would greet her while pretending not to know her name. The social rigidity of the ancien régime had relaxed under Louis-Philippe, and dowagers and titled women of fashion had begun to mix with the demimonde at charity balls and the races. “
At first glance they were the same women, dressed by the same dressmakers, the only difference being that the demimonde seemed a little more chic,” writes Houssaye. This, of course, was especially true of Marie, whose elegance and dignity had made her indistinguishable from the grandees.
Lola Montez also had the comportment of a duchess, but, Vandam claims, the moment she spoke the illusion vanished.

Montez was also incapable of humility—a concept Marie had discovered to be an effective way of breaking down social barriers. It was certainly how she had endeared herself to Mme Judith, who would one day find herself impersonating the courtesan in the role of Marguerite Gautier.

Marie was at the Variétés the night the actress collapsed onstage from a cerebral fever. Finding out her address (
Nestor Roqueplan was the theater’s director), Marie went every day to her home while she was convalescing, leaving a bouquet of flowers but not revealing her name. Told by her maid that the young woman was beautiful and aristocratic-looking, Mme Judith left a note, urging the mysterious visitor to disclose her identity. Signing her reply “Your devoted and unworthy admirer, Marie Duplessis,” Marie admitted the reason for her anonymity: “I feared that if you had known my identity you would refuse my
flowers. And I am afraid that in learning it today you will regret having received them.”

This may seem overly self-abasing, but Marie knew what she was doing. It was precisely Mme Judith’s reaction when she discovered that another “
fervente admiratrice
” was a celebrated figure in the demimonde. Every day at the theater a bouquet had arrived with a note from a woman signing herself Céleste and expressing concern about the actress’s ill health. Mme Judith was in her dressing room one evening, entertaining a group of writers and artists, when the latest missive was delivered. She passed it around to her friends, one of whom recognized the signature and exclaimed, “Don’t you know who this woman is? It’s
Céleste Mogador!”

An exact contemporary of Marie, Mogador, whose real name was Elisabeth Vénard, had spent part of her youth in a Parisian brothel until
Alfred de Musset took her under his wing. She was now a star dancer at Le Bal Mabille, her brilliance at performing the polka and cancan having challenged the fame of
la reine
Pomaré. Shocked by this, Mme Judith was then informed about Mogador’s reputation as a lesbian, which shocked her even more. Taking out one of her cards for her maid to deliver to the young woman waiting expectantly at the stage door, she wrote, “Good for a strong shower at La Salpêtrière” (the prison for prostitutes). The flowers were thrown in the rubbish.

Mme Judith’s response on learning that Marie was “the famous
marchande d’amour
” surprised even herself. “I don’t know why her letter pleased me so much. The modesty it revealed was so unexpected in a courtesan, and I resolved to bury my prejudice. I invited Marie Duplessis to come and see me.” Marie returned the invitation, and they met several times, once in the Bois de Boulogne, where Mme Judith was on foot and Marie promenading in her carriage. They spotted each other, but Marie made only an imperceptible sign of recognition so as not to compromise her
new friend. When Mme Judith went up to the carriage and suggested they walk together, Marie hesitated for an instant before springing down and strolling beside her. “The Bois was crowded that day and we were noticed,” writes Mme Judith, who years later still remembered Marie’s outfit of a magnificent blue velvet coat lined with pink satin over a pale green dress braided with black velvet. On her head she wore a plumed black velvet cap, its feather secured with diamonds. Some people, said Mme Judith, were critical of this public display of friendship, but others, who could not help admiring the beautiful young courtesan, showed approval. Marie, she claimed, felt touched and indebted to her.

Daughter of a lace vendor and earning her living in a flamboyant profession still regarded as morally suspect, Mme Judith’s attitude defines the meaning of
folie de grandeur.
It was not rash for an actress—many of whom had similar lowly backgrounds—to form an attachment to Marie Duplessis. There was, however, no possibility of friendship with a woman of society—even though, as Vienne puts it, “their curiosity was constantly put on alert by men’s conversations about this marvelous sinner who was the talk of Paris.”

But if Marie could not belong to the world of these women, she already belonged to the world of their men. She was an invisible presence in the Jockey Club, an exclusive male bastion, to which the grandest
salonnière
would have been forbidden entry. Also known as Le Club des Lions, the Jockey had introduced to Paris the concept of gentlemen riders, and was such a closed environment that even
Alfred de Musset had been blackballed. “Some of the most fashionable habitués of the Café de Paris, though not knowing a fetlock from a pastern, were all too pleased to join an institution which, with the mania for everything English … then conferred upon its members a kind of patent of ‘good form,’ ” wrote Vandam. The members’ hedonistic routine, in which it was considered proper never to get up before noon, was Marie’s own. She frequented the same
restaurants, cafés, parks, boulevards, and theaters, and, had she been permitted, she would have lingered on at the Jockey Club until four or five in the morning. On a page of the Register of Requests, someone had added her name in a feminine hand to the signatures—“evidence of
the consecration of Marie Duplessis in this grand milieu.”

One of her ex-lovers was Fernand de Montguyon, whose reputation was largely responsible for the Jockey Club’s being seen as a place of depraved behavior. It was in Montguyon’s name that the infamous Loge Infernale was rented for first nights at the Opéra. Virtually onstage, between the curtain and the orchestra pit, this was a special box whose access bestowed great cachet. With the Jockey Club then situated on rue de la Grange-Batelière, a few minutes’ walk from the Opéra on rue Le Peletier, the route to the stage door entrance could not have been simpler—an alleyway led directly there. A dandy’s destination was either a ballerina’s dressing room or the
foyer de la danse
, which Dr. Véron had opened to privileged outsiders so that the performers could arrange assignations with their wealthy admirers. There is a painting by
Eugène Lami of this grand salon, ornately decorated with pillars, mirrors, and sculptures, a marble bust in one alcove of the eighteenth-century
ballerina assoluta
Mlle Guimard.
Le foyer de la danse
is a busy portrayal of half a dozen costumed dancers, a couple of whom are in off-duty, Degas poses, with the great Fanny Elssler (Taglioni’s rival), taking center place. Seated or standing among them is a scattering of formally dressed men—the key figures from Marie’s own circle: Dr. Véron,
Alfred de Musset, Fernand de Montguyon, and
Nestor Roqueplan.

By the early 1840s, the Opéra had lost its two stars (Taglioni to Russia and Elssler to America), but French ballet had by no means lost its luster, due largely to the appointment of the remarkable Italian ballerina
Carlotta Grisi. The first Giselle in Gautier’s 1841 ballet, Grisi had became the poet’s muse, creating
the title role in
La Péri
in 1843—another personal triumph. For romantic writers such as Musset the idealized, supernatural world of
ballet blanc
fired the imagination, its dancers representing in visible form their evanescent ideas. As in Tannhäuser’s Venusberg, however, spirituality was inseparable from sexual excess—an antithesis captured in the illustrations to
Voluptueux souvenirs; ou, Le Souper des Douze.
These were drawn by the celebrated
Achille Devéria, whom
Roger de Beauvoir claimed was a member of their group. In one, a dreamy, top-hatted, baby-faced youth sits alone in his box, a manicured hand resting on its velvet ledge, the other clasping an impressive erection. In a second, a Taglioni-pure sylph, with roses in her hair, kneels while performing fellatio on a good-looking dandy. No wonder the
Goncourts viewed the ballet as a debauched stock exchange of women: