The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (2 page)

Part social document, part romantic melodrama, both ahead of its time and rigidly conventional,
The Lady of the Camellias
was an instant success. Dumas fils had sold only fourteen copies of his first book,
Sins of Youth
, a collection of long poems, including one entitled “M.D.,” which intimately details what it was like to make love to Marie Duplessis. Printed at his father’s expense in 1847, it had passed unnoticed, whereas his novel received an advance of a thousand francs from the reputable firm of Cadot, whose first edition of 1,200 copies was quickly followed by a sell-out printing of another 1,500. Having grown up in the shadow of his illustrious father, Dumas fils was overjoyed by this first taste of literary fame, confessing, “
I should have died of shame and jealousy if I had not contrived to acquire a little glory of my own.”

The impact of the novel, though, was nothing compared with the sensation caused by the play. It had been a three-year struggle to persuade a theater to take on
The Lady of the Camellias
, which Dumas fils adapted in 1849. His father’s response had been ecstatic—“
It’s original! It’s touching! It’s audacious! It’s new!,” he exclaimed as he tearfully embraced Alexandre, while also warning him that his work was too authentic to be allowed onstage.
Nepotism counted for nothing—“
I was the son of the greatest dramatic author of his time, no-one could have a more powerful protector, but I might as well have arrived from the provinces with an unknown name.” Dumas père’s
Théâtre Historique had closed by 1850, and
The Lady of the Camellias
was turned down by the Gaîté, the Ambigu-Comique, and the Gymnase, which had just mounted
Manon Lescaut.
Eventually, the new director of the Vaudeville accepted it, but it was immediately banned by the censors. When
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte became president of the Second Republic in December 1851, the author’s friendship with his half brother, the Duke de Morny, helped force a cancellation of the veto, but he was told that it would make no difference; the audience would stop the play. The actress cast as Marguerite, the Vaudeville’s diva, thirty-three-year-old Anaïs Fargueil, withdrew after the first reading, and the part was offered to the more suitable
Eugénie Doche, a young beauty with something of a louche reputation. Armand, twenty-three-year-old
Charles Fechter, was three years her junior, with all the bullish surliness of a conceited young star. When Dumas fils suggested that in Act 4, Armand, overcome by jealousy and anger, should fling Marguerite to the floor, Fechter refused. “
It’s impossible,” he said. “The public will never allow it.” Convinced of its effect, the author persisted until finally Fechter shrugged. “As the play will not get to that point, I might as well agree.”

Courtesans, romanticized by legend, had regularly been represented onstage, but only in a historical setting. Hugo’s
Marion Delorme
took place in the time of Louis XIII, and Scribe’s
Adrienne Lecouvreur
was set in the eighteenth century, the actress-courtesan’s own time. French theater, with its comedies in couplets and costume dramas portraying kings and cavaliers, was itself embalmed in the past and had never featured characters or situations taken from life. Then suddenly, here was Dumas fils, “
a young scamp,” transporting the audience directly into the demimonde, using actual dialogue and the spicy expressions
of Left Bank cafés and dance halls. Establishment figures, such as the Louvre’s director, Horace de Viel-Castel, recoiled in horror. “
This play is shameful.… During five acts
The Lady of the Camellias
unfolds before civilised people the sordid details of the life of a prostitute. Nothing is left out.… The police, the government tolerate these scandals, and seem to ignore the fact that this will result in the demoralisation of the public.”

In fact, the public was enchanted. At its premiere on 2 February 1852, the play received a thunderous ovation, and twenty thousand printed copies were sold almost overnight. During the Vaudeville’s first run of two hundred performances, Place de la Bourse was blocked by the carriages of grandes dames who found themselves weeping over the fate of a fallen woman, plucking flowers from their corsages and throwing them onstage. Even innocent young girls, chaperoned by their nannies, went again and again, sitting in the upper boxes in floods of tears. “It was the first time I had heard of
pocket-handkerchiefs as a provision for a play,” wrote
Henry James, who remembered as a small boy walking in the Palais-Royal with his cousins, American girls who lived in Paris, and envying them as they recounted how often they had sobbed while watching Mme Doche as Marguerite. Neither he nor they had any idea of the profession of the lady of the expensive flowers, “but her title had a strange beauty and her story a strange meaning.”

The fascination endured, and James wrote two essays on Dumas fils, praising his naturalness as a dramatist and the brilliance of his dialogue. French contemporaries were just as admiring. “
It’s the new theatre—human, true and strange,” wrote
Arsène Houssaye in his poem “Memories of Youth”:

Making art out of what he saw and being true to his own time, Dumas fils had anticipated by more than a decade the momentousness of Manet’s painting
Olympia
, which provoked an uproar when it was shown in the Salon of 1865. While also drawing on traditional precedents, this brazen portrait of an odalisque and her black maid updates the idealized nude in a classical setting to a
grande horizontale
’s bedroom in Second Empire Paris. With her immodest, confrontational stare, Olympia is a modern woman (supposedly the courtesan Marguerite Bellanger impersonated by Manet’s model Victorine Meurent). And, like Marguerite Gautier, she is not only an uncompromising embodiment of the present but a harbinger of the future. Dumas fils had perfectly judged the appetite and readiness of his audience; as James observed, “
He could see the end of one era and the beginning of another and join hands luxuriously with each.”
The Lady of the Camellias
became a theatrical phenomenon, bringing its young author the wealth and renown he craved.

In the audience at the Vaudeville one night during the winter of ’52 was the composer
Giuseppe Verdi with his mistress, Giuseppina Strepponi, a retired soprano. The novel had already inspired him to begin composing an opera, and the play provided even more of an incentive. The vitality of the demimonde offered rich theatrical opportunities, and he had been deeply moved by Marguerite’s selfless courage. Verdi saw how music could intensify her spiritual journey, expressing secret doubts and psychological nuances untapped by the play. In Francesco Piave’s libretto for
La Traviata
(
The Wayward Girl
in English), the original story would be further distilled into three acts—Love; The Sacrifice; Death—and the heroine and her lover renamed Violetta and Alfredo. The controversial nature of their unmarried love had resonated with Verdi, who had been forced at that time to defend his own relationship with Strepponi. The play’s immediacy had impressed him, too, and he was determined to make Violetta a contemporary figure. But with opera implacably
bound by convention, the modern setting that he “
desired, demanded and begged” was refused. Obliged not only to accept the period of Louis XIII, Verdi failed in his insistence that the soprano must be young and graceful and sing with passion. The first Violetta, thirty-eight-year-old Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, was a prim-lipped, portly matron with a huge bosom, and every time she coughed consumptively, the audience burst out laughing.

If the premiere at Teatro La Fenice, Venice, on 6 March 1853, was not exactly the fiasco its creator described, then neither was it the work he had intended. Just over a year later, the role of Violetta was sung by Maria Spezia, who, though young, was no beauty, and it took the piquant little prima donna, twenty-year-old Marietta Piccolomini, to make a sensation of
La Traviata
and to launch it in London and Paris in 1856. Verdi’s insight into the characters had amplified the play’s atmosphere of forgiveness, and the emotional core was now the tremendous confrontation between Violetta and Alfredo’s father—itself a drama within a drama. At first ruthlessly self-righteous, Germont finds an inner sensitivity that grows into true compassion (made audible in the soaringly beautiful “Piangi, piangi, o misera”). Marie Duplessis’s short life had evolved into a masterpiece—a rapturous parable of human redemption through love. And it was this metamorphosis that so impressed Proust on first seeing
La Traviata.
“
It’s a work which goes straight to my heart,” he remarked. “Verdi has given to
La Dame aux Camélias
the style it lacked. I say that not because Alexandre Dumas fils’s play is without merit, but because for a dramatic work to touch popular sentiment the addition of music is essential.”

Eclipsing its source,
La Traviata
went on to become one of the most popular operas of all time. For many, the definitive portrayal remains that of
Maria Callas, who identified with Violetta to the point of obsession. The hefty diva in a ballooning gown of the 1951 Mexican production transformed herself four years later into a slender beauty for Visconti’s belle époque version at
La Scala in Milan. Not only resembling the raven-haired Marie with her ballerina shoulders, tiny waist, and lack of décolletage, Callas shared her passion for fine clothes, furs, and jewelry as well as a weakness for wealthy men and marrons glacés. She never again put so much of herself into the creation of a character and went so far in the interest of psychological truth as to allow her voice to suffer. “
How could Violetta be in her condition and sing in big, high, round tones? It would be ridiculous,” she said, and proved her point in the last act by creating a reedy, gasping sound of a consumptive fighting for breath. Callas was able to combine her phenomenal technique with exceptional glamour, but this vital combination has eluded other interpetators, who sing with seraphic purity but do not look the part. In 1994 an unknown Romanian, the lovely Angela Georghiu, was Violetta in a Covent Garden
Traviata
, her mesmerizing, full-blooded performance making her a star overnight. The great contemporary Violetta is
Anna Netrebko, a playful minx who stole the famous Callas detail of kicking off her stilettos after the party scene. Netrebko has completely redefined the character, giving her a stark veracity and sexual audacity that the twenty-first century demands.

Although hardly a night goes by that
La Traviata
is not performed somewhere in the world, the impact of the play has diminished drastically with time. This was something Dumas fils had foreseen when he remarked in the preface to the 1867 edition that
The Lady of the Camellias
was “already ancient history” and owed its survival to its reputation alone. His view was shared by the novelist and critic
Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, who a year later saw “a revival which hasn’t revived.”

It was not until the great
Sarah Bernhardt first played the heroine during her United States tour of 1880 that
The Lady of the Camellias
, renamed
Camille
for the American public, came triumphantly back to life. A beautiful, worldly Parisian, Bernhardt went on to play Marguerite around three thousand times, inhabiting the role so entirely that audiences believed she
was
the consumptive courtesan. As her febrile gaiety in the opening scenes deepened into idealistic passion for Armand, the high romance was all the more transporting for its underlying trace of cynicism. Using her knowledge of the pathological details of tuberculosis, she made Marguerite’s suffering so harrowing in its authenticity that no other actress succeeded in challenging the supremacy of Bernhardt’s interpretation. Until, that is, the Italian actress
Eleonora Duse made her Paris debut in 1897.

Watching her rival from a central box was Sarah Bernhardt, bejeweled and exquisitely dressed, like a reincarnation of Marie Duplessis. There in the audience, too, was the first Marguerite,
Eugénie Doche, who was now an old lady. Duse’s nerves showed, and she made little effect that night. With her plain, melancholy face devoid of makeup and her ascetic personality, she had none of the gregarious sophistication necessary for the first act and so did little with the heroine’s transition. But whereas Bernhardt, the star diva, imposed her own personality at every moment, la Duse soon came to discover what she called an inexplicable reciprocity of feeling for women like Marguerite and in this way conveyed far subtler shades of mood. In fact, as Verdi himself recognized, her internal, reflective technique, which could register shifts of conflicting emotion in eloquent pauses and modulations, more closely resembled the vocal coloring of a singer. “
If only I had seen her Marguerite before composing
La Traviata.
What a splendid finale I might have put together if I had heard
that crescendo invoking Armand that Duse has created simply by allowing her soul to overflow.”

For the rest of the century, and well into the next, Marguerite Gautier became a favorite vehicle for the world’s actresses—not all of whom were legends.
Henry James recalled seeing a fat Marguerite and a coy production in Boston in which the lovers were represented as engaged. Nevertheless, he never lost his regard for the play, which he felt withstood any amount of mediocrity in the performance. “
Nothing makes any difference. It carries with it an April air: some tender young man and some coughing young woman have only to speak the lines to give it a great place among the love-stories of the world.” For
Coco Chanel, even the dismaying sight of Bernhardt as “
an old clown” performing Marguerite at the end of her career could not dim her lifelong passion for
The Lady of the Camellias.
In homage to its heroine, Chanel adopted the white camellia as her own emblem, printing it on fabrics, embossing buttons with it, and fashioning it into rings and necklaces.