The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (19 page)

If this incident really happened, then Stackelberg’s way of making amends was to set Marie up in even greater splendor. On 1 October 1844, at a cost of eight hundred francs a quarter, she began renting an apartment at 11, boulevard de la Madeleine, today’s number 15. Situated on the ground floor, it was not large but was unusually light with five windows onto the boulevard and more overlooking a courtyard at the back. Redecoration went on for several months while Marie continued living on rue d’Antin (15 January 1845 is the date of her last rent bill there—a more moderate sum of 540 francs). She had erected an unusual trellis of gold wood interlaced with flowering plants to cover the length of the entrance hall, and the salon had also been designed to give an impression “of brilliance, of freshness and lively colors.” This was achieved by daylight filtering through handmade lace curtains, Venetian mirrors on the walls, and more flowering plants, including camellias, planted in
jardinières
around the room. At night an antique chandelier gave a rich opulence and gravity to the room, enhanced by the cerise damask curtains and matching wallpaper, while perfume pans and scented candles produced a musky ambiance. To Marie’s actress friend Mme Judith, the Louis XV interior was as grand as a palace or museum. “There were sofas covered in Beauvais tapestries, small rosewood tables displaying Clodion pottery, divine Riesener trinkets with copperware chiseled by Gouthière [
sic
]. She showed me each room with the passion of a connoisseuse.”

Predictably, Marie’s bedroom created the most impact. With
caryatids on every foot and four posts sculpted with vines, the Boule bed was her stage, raised on a platform and curtained with sumptuous pink silk drapes. The adjoining
cabinet de toilette
was also a courtesan’s natural habitat, its dressing table a jumble of lace, bows, ribbons, embossed vases, crystal bottles of scents and lotions, brushes and combs of ivory and silver. To one awestruck young admirer, it was “
an arsenal of the most elegant coquetterie … a profane little altar consecrating the cult of feminine beauty.”

A Boucher-like boudoir element had infiltrated elsewhere, and even the sofas were “softened with a snow-covering of embroidered muslin,” a profusion of pink satin, lace, braid, tassels, and gilded furniture was painted with flights of birds and garlands of flowers. It was not to everyone’s liking. One observer ridiculed Marie’s ornate rosewood furniture and her collection of porcelain figurines and platters painted with sentimental bucolic scenes. Signed and extremely valuable, many of these pieces would have been given as gifts and did not necessarily reflect Marie’s own taste. Mme Judith recalled her burst of laughter as she pointed to a Sèvres biscuit container showing a drunken bacchante being teased by a faun, while in the Dumas novel, Marguerite finds a Saxe statuette of a shepherd holding a bird in a cage “hideous” and wants to give it to her maid.

Only the dining room was austerely masculine with dark walls of Córdoba leather, plain Henri II cabinets, and sculpted oak bookshelves with folding glass doors encompassing her extensive library. Here Marie began to play the role of hostess, running up huge accounts for feasts
au domicile
from nearby restaurants such as Chez Voisin and La Maison d’Or. There is little chance that Stackelberg was present at the dinners he funded. Marie was his private obsession, and like the duke of the novel, he would have gone out of his way to avoid large, high-spirited gatherings. (Marguerite’s old duke arrived one day for a rendezvous
à deux
only to find that he had interrupted a luncheon party for fifteen,
“his entrance greeted by a burst of laughter.”) During this period, Stackelberg’s extravagance knew no limits. His Christmas gift to Marie was a diamond ring priced at 4,364 francs. “I had a hard time reining him back,” she told Mme Judith. But was this just largesse with no return? One report suggests not. “
She particularly owed her fortune of several years to the little services she delivered,” claimed an article in
Le Corsaire
: “Marie Duplessis played the role of a Russian secret policeman for the benefit of [Czar] Nicolas.”

If Marie was being used by Stackelberg as a spy, she was not alone. “I do not positively assert that [the courtesan]
Esther Guimont had a direct and clearly defined mission of
espionage,” wrote
Albert Vandam. “But several of her letters … prove beyond a doubt that at least on one occasion she was engaged in very delicate negotiations on behalf of the Government with certain journalists of the Opposition; while her salon during the middle of the forties was looked upon in the light of a political centre.” Marie herself would have been party to topical intrigues, as two new young admirers, Baron de Plancy and
Henri de Contades, were both embarking on ministerial careers, while Agénor de Guiche was now deeply embroiled in foreign affairs. Not only had he come under the wing of Prince Friedrich Schwarzenberg (a protégé of Metternich and soon to be Austria’s prime minister) but he was also growing very close to the future Napoleon III. The title Stackelberg had once held of Secret Adviser would have given credibility to this theory were it not for the fact that the Secret Council (
Tainii Soviet
) for which he had worked was a largely honorific body in the czarist era—the equivalent of the Privy Council. Now seventy-eight years of age and long retired from diplomatic duties, he seems as unlikely to have been involved in state espionage as Marie was to have been an informant. Whereas the politically powerful Esther Guimont had reveled in her access to “
a thousand plots, clandestine adventures and secret machinations,” Marie made it known that government
figures, however eminent, “
interested her far less than gens du monde, artists, and writers.”

A more plausible motivation for Stackelberg’s excessive indulgence of Marie may have been guilt. During the past few months, her resemblance to his daughters had only increased as she began to reveal alarming signs of tuberculosis, the disease that had killed all three. Could he have been a latent carrier?
The cause of tuberculosis would not be discovered until 1882, but even though it was not considered contagious, Stackelberg, being Russian and innately superstitious, must have felt himself jinxed.

A bill for nightwear, including a cashmere nightdress and three bonnets, suggests that Marie may have been experiencing night fevers as early as March 1844, though Romain Vienne was made aware of her symptoms only at the end of that year. “They came on with immense speed as she led an impossible life of parties, balls, dinners and every sort of pleasure without any kind of break.” Certainly by autumn she almost always had a temperature and suffered from appalling insomnia. A chemist’s account details the remedies to which she resorted: laudanum, belladonna ointment, ether, leeches, opium patches, and—most poignant of all—an “
elixir of long life.”

To fill the hours after midnight Marie frequently called on her new neighbor,
Clémence Prat, whose dressing room window looked directly onto hers. Once a courtesan herself, she was now a well-known procuress, a heavily built woman in her forties, who operated under the cover of a millinery business that she ran from her apartment. In the Dumas novel and play she is Prudence Duvernoy, so thinly disguised that everyone who knew of Clémence recognized her. She had made a brief, unsuccessful attempt at acting, and in an 1859 revival of
La dame aux camélias
she took on the role of Prudence, playing herself “
with perfect mediocrity.” To Marie she was a reminder of what Dumas fils called “
the coming of old age, that first death of courtesans,” a
grim example of what happens to yesterday’s kept women who still have expensive tastes.

Their friendship was based on mutual gain: Marie depended on her company, while Clémence relished the perks that no longer came her way, grateful to ride in Marie’s carriage, borrow her cashmere shawls, and share her box at the theater. In a tellingly cynical portrayal, Marguerite tells Armand that women such as Prudence are companions rather than friends, adding that her ingratiation was always self-serving. When Prudence acted as go-between to squeeze extra cash from the old duke, she would ask also to borrow five hundred francs, which she did not return. “Or else she pays it off in hats which never get taken out of their boxes.” Prudence cannot understand why Marguerite refuses to take on as her protector the wealthy “count de N.,” an ardent young aristocrat, instead of the duke, “an insipid old man” who watches her every move. “She says he’s too stupid,” Prudence tells Armand, “Well, he may be stupid, but he could provide her with a good position, whereas the old duke will die one of these days.”

This was presumably the young dandy scorned by Vienne as “an idiot … a badly brought up fop of deplorable ignorance.” In his account, the “
Baron de Ponval” first made contact with Marie on New Year’s Day 1845, when among the gifts she received was a box delivered by a groom dressed in grand livery. Opening it, Marie found a dozen oranges, each wrapped in a thousand-franc note. The card, which read, “Hommage from M. le baron de Ponval to Mme Marie Duplessis,” intrigued her, but she heard no more for a fortnight. On January 14, the eve of her birthday, the groom reappeared, this time bringing a casket containing a number of jewels and a note in which the baron asked to be received the following day.

Vienne, who met the young man, describes him as tall with reddish blond hair and the gaucherie of a grown‑up schoolboy. A spoiled only son whose chief interests were hunting and fishing, he had been orphaned at twenty-five and was now squandering
his parents’ fortune. Marie took an instant dislike to him. Although gracious about the presents he had given her, complimenting him on his choices, she let him struggle to formulate his sentences and made it clear after only twenty minutes that their meeting was over. He, on the other hand, appeared enchanted by his visit, particularly since Marie had given him permission to return. But when, on this second occasion, he stammered out his wishes, she bluntly declared her own conditions:

This was no deterrent. Stirred by the prospect of a chase, the fervent suitor redoubled his attentions—as Prudence put it, “He thinks he can get somewhere with her by visiting at eleven at night and sending her all the jewels she could ever want.” In desperation, Marie arranged that her maid, Rose, would act one night as her replacement. All went according to plan, Vienne says, but then the joke rebounded: Ponval lured Rose away, “promising to make her a provisional baroness,” yet gave no sign of giving up his pursuit of Marie.

In a version by
Méjannes in
Gil Blas
, Ponval becomes the “marquis de G.” (A possible model, if only because of the chime of his name, is the marquis de Grandval, who was also a Jockey Club member). “Marie Duplessis really did cast him aside, as Dumas wrote—even on the occasion when he brought her a tenth diamond ring.” Méjannes then gives the following passage as an example of Marie’s derision:

Some chroniclers of Marie’s story have assumed that Dumas’s doting young count is a caricature of Ned Perregaux. Now reduced to spending his money on necessities, Ned, according to Vienne, had become an encumbrance to Marie, but he certainly was not the Count de N. The fictional count, bombarding Marguerite with jewels, is an “imbecile” who infuriates her, whereas Marie was still fond of Ned. As Vienne says, “She had too big a heart to forget what he had thrown at her feet—everything that was left of his lavish inheritance.” Her continuing affection is evident in the note she wrote on 25 February 1845. Although the favor she was asking could account for her endearments, she clearly preferred Ned’s company to that of his profligate young rival, who had exasperated her in her box at the theater by his trivial remarks and braying laugh.

The veteran actor
Marie Bouffé had recently been taken on at the Variétés by
Nestor Roqueplan—a significant coup, as Bouffé had made the fortune of the
Théâtre du Gymnase. But as the actor’s health was poor, and he did not think he could carry the repertory alone, he had suggested that Roqueplan engage as a second star the celebrated
Virginie Déjazet. The gala that Marie was so keen to attend was as much a tribute to Déjazet as to Bouffé, an opportunity for the public to welcome her back to Paris after an absence of several years. “
Her name on the posters was enough to attract the finest flowers of Parisian society,” wrote one of her biographers.

By early evening on February 25, the Variétés was full to bursting, its auditorium ablaze with light from gas jets and the huge central chandelier, the buzz of anticipation exactly like that which Zola describes at the start of his novel
Nana: