The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (15 page)

Alexandre Dumas fils suggests that Marie, too, did not go to the theater for intellectual stimulation. Sitting in her box, sniffing at a bouquet and nibbling sweets from a bag, she paid very little attention to what was happening onstage: “hardly listening, making eyes in every direction, exchanging looks and smiles with her neighbors.” Vienne, however, insists that she was a cultivated judge of the arts, and that the actors and actresses, whom she received in her box, profited from the notes she gave them on their interpretations. She loved the company of performers and took an equal, if different, kind of pleasure in the atmosphere backstage: “The directors knew her and would provide her with a behind-the-scenes pass without her even having to ask,” says
Vienne. She even considered going on the stage herself, an ambition that, as Houssaye remarks, was not unusual among her kind. “
All these girls wanted to be actresses. The theater provided the baptism which saved them from original sin.”

Acting was one of the few lucrative options open to women, and it was also virtually the only profession in which independence was possible. A grand actress could, and often did, flout sexual norms, and society was prepared to accept behavior that they would denounce in a demimondaine. (Rachel’s reputation for loose living had not prevented her from being sought out by Parisian
salonnières
, including the venerable Mme Récamier.) Marie was already a practiced role-player in life, whether mimicking aristocratic ways or acting out passions she did not feel, and she was clearly confident about her talent. In the middle of recounting her life story to Mme Judith, she suddenly broke off and exclaimed, “Everything I’ve told you about my unhappiness is to make myself more interesting—and you’ve been taken in! I act well, don’t I! Almost as well as you!”

Marie studied for a short time with the well-known drama teacher
Achille Ricourt, who vowed he had spotted Rachel’s genius when she was a street urchin and who was constantly on the lookout for exceptional pupils. His public classes at the Ecole des Jeunes Artistes on the rue de la Tour-d’Auvergne were made up mostly of respectable young girls watched by their mothers, but Marie would not have felt out of place as Ricourt did not exclude the occasional demimondaine among his pupils.
Charles Monselet provides a lively picture of Ricourt at work. He rarely remembered anyone’s name, and he would catch a girl’s attention by calling out things like “
Mademoiselle, you, the little blonde … over there … yes, you!” After some initial warm‑up euphonic exercises, his favorite pupil, Agrippine, demonstrates his method, an eccentric distillation of the three facets of theater—comedy, drama, and tragedy—into three words. The first, “elegant,” enunciated by Agrippine as
“Eé-liéé-gan-tiéé,”
delights the teacher. “
There
you have the tone of comedy, there is the spirit, the brio, the piquancy!” Agrippine then inflates her cheeks as if about to play trombone and prepares to tackle the second, “montagne,” a challenge which Ricourt warns requires “biceps in the throat.” But only the maestro himself can demonstrate the essence of tragedy, the invented word “superbatandor”: “You must emphasise the ‘r,’ everything rests on the ‘r’—it’s the great secret:
Superrrbatandorrr!
”

It could have been a dislike of the passionately febrile Ricourt, dropping names of prominent literary friends, reciting alexandrines, and intoning “in the manner of Diderot,” or it could have been the strain of arriving at the school by 10:15 in the morning, but Marie’s enthusiasm for the stage did not last long. Dumas père, who had learned of her ambition, was not surprised.

Instead, Marie used the proscenium of her theater box as her stage. “
It’s there above all that she gave to the mute, disdainful audience, the impact of her beauty,” remarked
Paul de Saint-Victor, whose portrayal of Marie confirms that she already possessed the inner radiance of a star—the ability to be a cynosure while remaining stationary and silent. “Her presence never failed
to cause a sensation; every eye avidly took in this fresh, Raphaelite face.” Aware that the positioning of her box was of key importance, Marie went out of her way to compete for a choice one—as this flirtatious note indicates.
It was sent to the
distributeur des faveurs
of the
Théâtre de Vaudeville.

In a painting believed to be by
Eugène Lami, Marie, wearing a sylphlike white dress, reclines languorously in her box with two admirers by her side. One man scans the upper tier opposite; the other is very attentive, but Marie is ignoring him, reading from a large, single-page program. On the ledge are the props with which she came to be identified: a pretty pair of opera glasses, a small
bouquet à la main
, and a flower pinned to her corsage, which appears to be her namesake camellia.

This was a flower much in vogue. With an out-of-season stem of hothouse blooms costing up to twenty francs, camellias were also a symbol of status. And not only in Paris. An anonymous 1841 portrait of Verdi’s mistress, Giuseppina Strepponi, shows her with a single white camellia pinned to her décolletage and a cluster worn in her hair—an effect even more striking now as an uncanny prefiguration of her lover’s most famous heroine. Camellias have no scent, which is why the consumptive Marie is said to have favored them, but in fact she loved all flowers—even those as heavily scented as hyacinths. A bill from the florist Ragonot, dated 9 November 1843, confirms this:

Worth noting is the red “camellia impérialiste” bought on January 2. In the novel, Marguerite takes a single bloom from a bouquet of red camellias and places it in Armand’s buttonhole, telling him that he may see her again when her camellias are white again.
It is her way of alluding to the fact that she will be indisposed for the next five days of the month.

La dame aux camélias
may have been a title given to Marie by one of the Opéra’s usherettes, by her florist, or by Dumas fils himself. He always insisted that any portraits painted during Marie’s lifetime that showed her wearing a camellia were apocryphal or retouched, since the whole idea of associating her with the flower belonged to him alone. Mme Judith echoed this: “It was
Dumas’ invention to give her a taste exclusively for camellias.” In fact, this was not the case. An earlier Lady of the Camellias, almost certainly using Marie as a model, had appeared two years before the novel came out.
George Sand’s
Isidora
was serialized in
La Revue Indépendante
in the spring of 1845 and published in book form in 1846. A woman of simple elegance and aristocratic manners describes herself as “
la dame aux camélias.
” She reveals that she is consumptive, has known poverty and misery, but now that she is wealthy finds herself filled with self-reproach. George Sand never refers to Marie by name, but in a 1853 preface, as if describing a Mme Judith–type encounter, she gives a brief, enigmatic depiction of “a very beautiful person, extraordinarily intelligent, who came several times to pour forth her heart at my feet.” This, she says, took place in Paris in 1845.
And with several friends and acquaintances in common, it is more than likely that the two women had met.

No camellias were ordered for the night Marie appeared incognito at one of the season’s Opéra balls, but a bill from Geslin, dated 21 January 1844, details the hire of a velvet mask with satin fringe for four francs. This formed part of a domino outfit—a half-mask and hooded black cloak—which was required dress for women at these balls. That Saturday night, Marie would have been among a black flood of people surging into the brilliantly lit grand salon of the Opéra. It was “
one immense Belshazzar’s hall,” in the words of
Lord Beaconsfield, who had been in Paris at Carnival time the year before and witnessed a sight that amazed him:

An emancipated woman like Marie would have felt exhilarated by the domino disguise, which not only licensed a reversal of protocol between the sexes but allowed couples to speak their minds. In an Opéra ball scene in Sand’s novel, the narrator is scandalized at first by Isidora’s candor, but her “supple, fertile spirit and feverish eloquence” begin to captivate him. He learns that she is the famous Parisian courtesan, and she speaks freely about women of her kind and about the men who feign to love them but in fact feel nothing but contempt. With the laws of the masked ball permitting bolder emotional games, Marie made clear her own awareness of male duplicity in a note she wrote to a potential (anonymous) lover whom she had just met.

It was after an Opéra ball—so, during the Carnival months of January or February 1844—that Marie appears to have met the man on whom Armand Duval is most closely modeled. A colorful account of the night exists written by the journalist Henri de Pené, under the pseudonym Mané. A woman in domino disguise had intrigued their group of friends throughout the evening, and, impatient to discover her identity, they invited her for supper. She seemed hesitant to accept and asked to see the guest list,
which was persuasive enough for her to agree to join them. Pené continues, “
When we were installed in one of the salons of the restaurant where so many infatuations are tied and untied, she removed her mask, and we saw that we had played a good hand.” He noticed that one member of their party appeared to interest her more than any other. “I heard the first words of her conversation with Edouard P. a sentence that has remained engraved in my memory: ‘Monsieur, I have often seen you on horseback in the Bois de Boulogne, and your mount seems to delight in carrying a cavalier such as you.’ ” Dining on prawns, lobster, and shrimp, Marie declared that she would drink nothing but pink champagne, and watched Edouard uncorking the bottles himself.
The beautiful grace which he brought to this simple action won him the heart of Marie, who was already firmly disposed in his favor.

Count Edouard de Perregaux was an ex-cavalier and member of the Jockey Club, and his father had been Napoleon’s chamberlain.
Count Alphonse de Perregaux had died in the summer of 1841, leaving his two sons a fortune, but much of Edouard’s share had been lavished on the actress
Alice Ozy, whom he had stolen from the king’s youngest son. In September 1841, when the nineteen-year-old Duke d’Aumale left Paris to fight in the North African campaign, Edouard made his move. One night after a performance at the Variétés, Alice found a fabulous carriage and pair waiting at the stage door—a first glimpse of what was in store for her. Aumale was a dashing war hero, also heir to a vast sum, but as a minor, his allowance and army income were negligible: Alice Ozy allowed herself to be driven away.