The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (16 page)

A couple of years later, the talk of Paris was an incident at the Chantilly races in May 1843, when the horses pulling her carriage bolted toward a lake.
Le Siècle
reported that “
Mlle A.O. with long
anglaises
, diamonds, sapphires, rubies” had been rescued with seconds to spare by the Duke de Nemours, who ran to her aid. “That evening there was almost a heated incident
between P. and d’A. because the former had found the other established, without ceremony, next to his favorite.” By the summer, however, Ozy had shed both her young adorers and, having decided that influence was more seductive than money, begun an affair with
Théophile Gautier, who had written a role especially for her in his vaudeville
A Voyage in
Spain
(premiered at the Variétés in September). The Liste des Etrangers in the resort town of Spa that August records Edouard de Perregaux staying at the Hôtel de Flandre: he was alone and free.

It is hardly surprising that Marie targeted the count for herself. Prospects apart, Ned Perregaux was a sympathetic young man—honest, kind, attentive, and loyal to his numerous friends. With his hair combed forward and curling on his brow, he was also extremely good-looking, his lips girlishly full, his large eyes fringed with thick, black lashes. “I kiss your blue eyes a thousand times,” Marie writes in one of several surviving notes to Ned, telling him in another that she is “all yours from the heart.” She had given him the privileged position of
amant de cœur
, and yet these notes are completely different in mood from her one surviving letter to Agénor de Guiche. That was written by a girl smitten by first love, but the Perregaux correspondence—sometimes just a few lines hastily scribbled to arrange a meeting—are from a dispassionate courtesan. Marie is the one in control, and she comes across as a woman determined not to give up her independence—nor, for that matter, her other lovers. She opens her door to Ned at specific hours (as in “This evening, at six o’clock”), and for only small portions of her time. He receives his “orders,” just as Armand does in the novel, although—mindful of her suitor’s title—Marie is far more courteous than Marguerite at the start of the relationship.

Marguerite to Armand
:
“Tonight at the Vaudeville. Come during the third interval.”

Marie to Edouard: “It will give me great pleasure, dear
Edouard, if you would like to see me this evening (Vaudeville Theatre [box] No 27).”

Elated by the prospect of their first rendezvous, Armand cannot stop himself from seeking out Marguerite before the prearranged hour. He gazes at her promenading in her carriage in the Champs-Elysées, and goes early to the Vaudeville to see her arrive. But when he catches sight of the “count de G.” sitting in the back of her box, a chill cuts through his heart. Just before the third interval, however, she turns and says two words to her companion, who leaves the box. Marguerite then beckons to Armand to join her.

The beginning of Ned’s affair with Marie coincided almost exactly with Agénor de Guiche’s return from London. For just over a year, between September 1842 and December 1843, Agénor’s name appears in social columns of
The Times
—at the Champagne Stakes of Doncaster Races, at the Polish Ball with his father, at a reception for the Duke of Bordeaux, and at gatherings of the French mission to China, the first sign of him embarking on his future career as a diplomat. Vienne recounts that when his exile was due to end, “Grandon” Guiche sent Marie a letter saying he wanted to see her as soon as he returned. He was graciously received, and during the course of their meeting she told him that she might have to sell her stable of horses. Forty-eight hours later, she discovered a little purse in her apartment, which contained tens of thousands of francs. Guiche, however, soon went back to his philandering ways, and in order to avoid rows and reconciliations, Marie decided to give him free rein, while still allowing him to call on her. This was, says a disapproving Vienne, “because of his princely generosity.”

In the novel, Armand tries to convince himself that “M. de G.” is no threat: he and Marguerite have a history together, and he has been told that the count has always given her money. But when he receives a note saying, “Dear child, I am a little
unwell.… I will go to bed early tonight, and not see you,” his first thought is that Marguerite is deceiving him. He searches in vain for her on the Champs-Elysées and in all her favorite theaters, until finally, at eleven o’clock at night, he goes to her apartment. It is in darkness, and the concierge tells him that she has not yet returned. He remains in the street outside and at around midnight sees “G’s” carriage pull up. The count enters the building, and, four hours later, he is still inside.

Receiving an almost identical excuse (“Imposssible to dine with you, I am not at all well”), Ned Perregaux would also have experienced searing pangs of suspicion. Marie absorbed his entire being, Vienne says. “It was folly, exultation, adoration. For him, she was not a woman, she was a divinity.” Marie, on the other hand, could sign a note “Completely yours,” and yet regard Ned as only part of her life. She knew that she made him suffer, but she had warned him about the rules: “I beg you not to forget the subject of my letter.”

A courtesan reformed by love was key to the romantic tradition, but
George Sand discredited this convention. Her Isidora (who owes her name to Molière’s Greek slave and concubine) deplores the conditions that her lover tries to impose. “You accept the sinner provided that, from tomorrow, from today, she will pass into the position of a saint! Oh! There will always be pride and domination in a man.” In this reluctance to be owned she speaks for Marie—and so does Marguerite, who tells Armand that she has never yet found a man able to love without distrust, without claiming his rights. “Men, instead of being satisfied with having obtained for so long what they once scarcely dared hope for, exact from their mistresses a full account of the present, the past, and even the future. As they get accustomed to her, they want to rule her, and the more ones gives them the more exacting they become.”

For this reason alone, Marie would have felt little guilt about deceiving Ned. In what is probably another alibi note—“I lie to
keep my teeth white” she once quipped—she uses a rendezvous with a woman friend as the reason for not seeing him.

There were times, though, when she did not even attempt to spare his feelings by dissimulation.
The tone of a formal, impatient note written while planning a trip to Italy is not just insensitive, it is insulting:

Marie was able to establish a divide between love and “business,” and she expected Ned to do the same. “Do you wish to do me harm?” she snapped after he had committed some breach of their arrangement. “You are well aware that this could be a disaster for my future, which you seem absolutely determined to make unhappy and unfortunate for me.” In this respect she was a reincarnation of Manon Lescaut, whose love of luxury outweighs the tenderness she feels for her
amant de cœur
, des Grieux. It was a kinship Marie acknowledged and one that absorbed her to the point of obsession. She had read and reread
Manon Lescaut
, which moved her greatly,
Gustave Claudin said. “
After her death a copy of the novel was found with notes and observations written in her hand in the margins.”

Apart from recognizing her alter ego in the perfidious Manon, Marie could see that Ned was a latter-day des Grieux—well born and willing to forfeit his reputation and his fortune for love. For both young men,
their passion was a source of misery; des Grieux, “able to live only through Manon,” and Perregaux, “living for no one but Marie.” Unable to continue sharing her, he wrote on 23 April 1844 to the Ministry of War, outlining the reasons for his resignation from the army and requesting to be readmitted.

Ned had not particularly distinguished himself as a brigadier in a corps of cavaliers stationed in Bone, although he was admired for his horsemanship, and family influence had seen him quickly promoted through the ranks. He was regarded by his superiors as immature and dissipated, one character note officially recording his “light conduct and insolvency.” A Bordeaux wine merchant issued a claim to the army for an outstanding sum of 3,630 francs for claret and eau de vie, and there were numerous other unpaid bills. He tells the maréchal that he had gone to Paris hoping to persuade his family to clear his debts, but they had refused to help, and consequently, he had felt that it was impossible to remain in his regiment. He left the Spahis in April 1841. In the reply to his letter he learns that his voluntary resignation has ruled out reentry into the French army but that he is still entitled to apply to join the Foreign Legion. This news did
not reach him until June 11, and he decided not to take things any further. There was no need.

It was the dream of many eminent Parisians to own a summer house in a village near the city, and Bougival, still many years away from being the crowded resort painted by the Impressionists, was a tranquil idyll in the late spring of ’44. Terraced gardens descended the hill to the Seine, where little red-roofed houses were spaced between the poplars and willows on the riverfront.
Ned Perregaux had acquired one such property for Marie, feeling that there, he alone could possess her. But what had brought about her capitulation? A remark made by Marguerite is one explanation: “I have a sudden aspiration toward a calmer existence, which might recall my childhood.” Despite all the hardships of her Normandy upbringing, Marie regarded the French countryside as a healing place, a redemptive alternative to her city life, and perhaps even a prelapsarian prelude to it. In this she would have been influenced by her reading. Her decision to leave Paris for Bougival corresponds exactly with Manon’s summer in Chaillot, where she and des Grieux sequestered themselves in order to live “a simple, honest existence.”

Even more persuasive would have been the idyllic notion of rural life expressed in two other novels she loved, Rousseau’s
The New Hélöise
and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s
Paul and Virginia.
Common to both is the theory of natural goodness—man is born virtuous, in a state of nature; vice comes from living among worldly society and artificial urban pressures.
Paul and Virginia
was displayed in every bookshop and regarded as a fashionable classic (Marie bought her copy for 3 francs 50). “To many devoted to salon and boudoir life it called for an about-face toward a wholesome frankness, simplicity and naturalness,” its English translator wrote in 1841. The hero and heroine, two children of Nature, are unrelated but brought up as brother and sister, until, in their teens, they developed a devouring passion for each other.
In an interesting coincidence, the book’s wild exotic setting is Mauritius, then known as the Île de France—the same name as the region in which Bougival is located.

Now Marie the actress could play a role—she addresses Ned in one of her notes as “dear little brother.” But, just as
Paul and Virginia
’s cloying picture of an idealistic society based on love and innocence fails to convince (“Voluptuous Nature squanders her caresses upon two nurslings … lulls them to the murmur of the springs and smiles upon them in a thousand brilliant colours”), the Bougival episode, as depicted by both Dumas and Vienne, seems doomed. Dumas’s lovers walk together by the river, drinking milk, Marguerite wearing a white dress and a straw hat. “We breathed together that true life which neither she nor I had ever known before,” says Armand. “There were days when she ran in the garden, like a child of ten, after a butterfly or a dragonfly.”

Vienne’s version is even more fanciful:

There was a train link from Paris to nearby Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and, according to Vienne, visitors would come once or twice a week, providing a brief diversion from the couple’s routine. On a fine day they might make an excursion in the neighborhood or to the Bois de Boulogne, and occasionally they went back to the city for an evening at the Opéra and supper at La Maison d’Or. Marie, who had known only frivolous, ephemeral pleasures, was proud and happy, he reports, to find that she was
capable of devoting herself to one man. “
Nobody
had loved like this.”

Over the next decades Bougival and its neighboring islands on the Seine would become a watering place as vibrant as Le Trouville or Deauville. Posters and caricatures show bathing belles diving off wooden platforms and hiding behind reeds to strip off their corsets and stockings. Strolling under the shade of parasols were the Second Empire’s most celebrated
filles de joie
, while the quays and café-restaurants thronged with a mix of aristocrats,
jeunesse dorée
, and shopgirls with their
canotiers
—sinewy rowers in sleeveless white vests and straw boaters. Renoir painted the end of a lunch party on a canopied balcony of La Maison Fournaise and made several portraits of the owner’s pretty daughter, also named Alphonsine. La Grenouillère had a floating restaurant festooned with lanterns and held a ball every Thursday night. On the Île Gautier, a casino would eventually be built and a dance hall made almost as famous as the Moulin Rouge by cancan stars Jane Avril and La Goulue. In the 1840s, however, only a few auberge-restaurants existed in Bougival, one of which, overlooking the Seine,
is said to have been frequented by Marie.