The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (21 page)

With Dumas’s assurance that his account of that night was absolutely exact, we are given a fascinatingly impartial picture of Marie. In this scene Marguerite is a pitiless, petulant diva, who flings a piano score across the room in a tantrum of frustration and reveals harsh peasant roots beneath her discreet, aristocratic veneer. By l a.m., when the atmosphere and conversation have disintegrated into debauchery, she is tipsy and as raucous as a street porter. Gaston is amused by her bawdiness, but Armand is saddened to hear profanities coming from the lips of “this beautiful creature of twenty.” When she starts to sing a squalid song, he is embarrassed and asks her to stop.

She waves her hand as if to say, “Oh, it’s a long time since I was concerned about chastity.”

With each glass of champagne Marguerite’s cheeks get more flushed, and a cough, light at first, becomes troublesome enough to force her head against the back of her chair and make her support her chest with both hands. Toward the end of supper she is seized by an even more violent coughing fit, turns purple, shuts her eyes in pain, and brings a handkerchief to her lips. Seeing it stained with blood, she gets up and runs into her dressing room. Ignoring Prudence, who says that this happened every day and that she would soon be back, Armand goes after her.

In just this way, Alexandre followed Marie. It was, he wrote, “
the same supper, the same animation, the same sudden indisposition of Marie Duplessis.… Of those who were at supper I was the only one to be concerned when she left the table.” In a room lit by a single candle, he saw her lying on a sofa, deathly pale, her dress undone and one hand resting on her heart. She was struggling to get her breath back, and beside her was a silver bowl half full of water, which she had used as a spittoon. It was marbled
with strands of blood. Alexandre sat down next to her. “I was not able to hide my emotion. I cried on kissing her hand.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, when
Sarah Bernhardt played this scene onstage, anyone in the audience with medical knowledge was appalled. The tuberculosis germ was now known to be transmitted by sputum droplets expelled through coughing, and the saliva was considered life-threatening. Invalids using spittoons were told never to leave them uncovered, and an article in
Le Monde
warned that spitting into handkerchiefs and letting them dry on beds or pillows “
is likely to coat these (as well as the room’s occupants) with bacilli.” In 1898 the physician Joseph Grancher delivered a lengthy report singling out contagious spittle for his attack. “We know … that the
tuberculeux
is dangerous and that we must be protected from him.”

Marie’s era, however, was a time of “romantic medicine,” when the profession still used a patient’s individual temperament to explain the cause of the illness. In fact, René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec, who invented the stethoscope, attributed the cause of pulmonary consumption to “sorrowful passions.” Romantic literature and art exploited this notion with images of the frail, consumptive heroine whose beauty was enhanced by the disease’s wasting effect on the body. Marguerite Gautier, with her slender frame, pallid face, and eyes half circled by bluish shadows, became one of many idealized stereotypes. Dumas fils was partially responsible, but the responsive youth in Marie’s boudoir did not have his literary future in mind and was genuinely overcome by her condition.

An early experience of intense misery had left Alexandre with a great capacity for compassion. When he was a small child, his mother had said, “
You don’t have a father … that doesn’t mean that your father is dead: it means that a lot of people will despise and insult you.” At the Pension Saint-Victor, the most renowned and least disciplined private boarding school in Paris, he had been persecuted by his peers, who called him “bastard,”
interrupted his sleep with surprise nocturnal attacks, and covered his exercise books with obscene drawings labeled with his mother’s name. He said nothing but began to suffer from heart palpitations and nervous crises that went on for several years. The opening of his autobiographical novel
L’
affaire Clemenceau
(1867) helped him to exorcise memories of this torment, but he never lost his conviction that on a basic level, human beings were cruel. Feeling he had a mission, Dumas fils became a writer “
fired with proselytizing,” in the words of English writer
Edmund Gosse. “His great father,
le père prodigue
, had been all for self. Alexandre would be all for others.”

His dissipated life, first in Paris with his father and then in Marseille with Méry, had fortified his sympathy for fallen women. In an 1872 pamphlet,
Homme-Femme
, he uses the term
feminist
, its earliest recorded use. It could describe his younger self. In a long diatribe in
The Lady of the Camellias
, he recalls seeing a girl being arrested in the street, still clasping the baby from which she was about to be separated, an image that filled him with as much dismay as the discovery of another victim, who had been led into a life of vice by her own mother. By the time Alexandre met Marie he was consumed by sympathy for courtesans. He was only twenty years old but had an intuitive knowledge of female psychology, and unlike most men, was indulgent about a woman’s frailties. In Marie he saw great sadness behind the veil of feverish ebullience, and he sensed that the wanton behavior he had witnessed was her way of forgetting who she was. The dialogue that follows between Armand and Marguerite replicates almost word for word their own exchange.

But the tall, broad-shouldered young poet exuding kindness and sympathy was too engaging to turn away. “Adet,” as Marie called him (from the French pronunciation of his initials), found himself being favored more and more in the coming weeks. He was sometimes invited into her box at the theater, and eventually allowed to spend the whole night. “
One morning I left at eight, and a day came when I was permitted to leave at midday.” He became known as
Marie Duplessis’s new
amant de cœur
—a situation that posed no threat to Agénor de Guiche, then in the midst of an affair with Rachel, but that devastated Ned Perregaux. In a letter dated March 1845, Ned reapplied to join the
Foreign Legion. Thanks to three endorsements from well-connected friends of his family, his application was accepted this time, but the authorities could find no trace of him. Vienne says he vanished from Paris for four months.

Alexandre was exactly the same age as Marie. Like two children, they seized the chance to have fun together, roaming the dark alleys of the Champs-Elysées and making excursions outside Paris. A favorite outing was to stables owned by a man named Ravelet, who bought horses from the garrison of Saint-Germain—cast-off horses that kicked, reared, and bolted—and charged thirty sous an hour for vertiginous rides. “
He was famous among our generation,” Dumas fils wrote to his publisher, recounting how the nags were soon corrected of the vices that had expelled them from the regiment.

They often went walking together by the Rond-point des Roses and the terrace beyond Ravelet’s property in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. This was close to Villa Médicis, the house that Dumas père was renting, but Alexandre did not take Marie to visit his father. “
As soon as a woman takes my arm,” he once told him, “the first thing she does is to lift her skirt to stop it getting dirty, and the second is to ask me when she can meet you.”

Alexandre Dumas père was in his heyday and one of the best known and most affectionately regarded public figures in Paris. The moment he appeared in a theater or concert hall, the entire audience would rise to its feet. Journalist
Hippolyte de Villemessant recalled, “
Everyone turned to look at the illustrious novelist, whose tall figure dominated the crowd and who, smiling right and left at his friends and even at strangers, progressed only slowly towards his seat in the stalls, detained as he was by all the hands held out for him to shake on the way.” This fascination was due as much to Dumas’s charisma and notoriety as a womanizer as to his fame as a writer. His Caribbean ancestry also intrigued both men and women, “
He benefited from the myth, already current, of the superior sexual prowess of men of African extraction,” as one biographer put it.

Across the Channel, another national treasure,
Charles Dickens, would, at forty-five, inspire the love of an eighteen-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan, the secret of his final years. For Marie, the
idea of becoming the mistress of the forty-three-year-old French literary titan had equal appeal, and she had already made the first approach. Unattached and fabulously wealthy, Dumas père was an irresistible life force whose joie de vivre infected everyone around him. “It was absolutely impossible to be dull in his society,” remarked
Albert Vandam. He also had the power to make things happen. Another reason Alexandre fils’s Marseille actress gave for ending their affair was that it might jeopardize her career by “
causing problems” with his father. Perhaps suspecting that he was once again being used as a link and knowing of Marie’s own ambition to go on the stage, Alexandre went out of his way to keep her to himself.

A section of his poem collected in his book
Sins of Youth
is addressed to “M.D.” and describes the spring evenings they spent together. Marie was swaddled in winter clothes, sitting close to the fire, staring dreamily at the flames, or playing the piano while Alexandre listened. She was, he wrote, “always ready for love” and seemed to find a release through sex for her incessant insomnia.

Like Marguerite, whose eyes Dumas fils describes as flickering intermittently with flashes of desire, Marie could not hide her innate sensuality. But while the young writer championed a woman’s right to feel unbridled passions, the moralistic, mature Dumas fils was implacably censorious. The narrator of
L’affaire Clemenceau
, published nineteen years after
The Lady of the Camellias
, is shocked when he discovers his lovely young wife, Iza, swimming naked in an icy river. She had asked him to bring her
a large sheet and some hot milk in a silver basin, and when he prudishly rushes to cover her, she insists on drinking the milk first, swallowing it in long, slow gulps. “Then she threw herself into his arms, offering her red lips tinted with milk.”

Iza’s craving for new experiences is regarded in the novel as dangerous, the first sign of nymphomania. “Such is the woman you married,” the husband is told. “You have naively developed her natural sensuality.” Unable to remember the names of the men she has slept with, she admits that she is ill—a response that was standard at the time. Sexual appetite in a woman was seen as a symptom of disease or insanity, and tuberculosis was believed to set into motion a biochemical process that heightened a patient’s libido. A Dr.
C. Cabanes, writing about famous victims of the virus, including Marie and Rachel, entitles his book
Poitrinaires et grandes amoureuses
(
Consumptives and Great Lovers
). Alexandre was unsure whether Marie’s love of sex was intrinsic to her nature “
or else an effect of her state of health”—whatever the case, Dumas père was convinced that his son had toned down his portrayal.

Dumas may have formed this opinion from boulevard gossip, from what his son had told him, or from an incident he described in his newspaper,
Le Mousquetaire.
He recalled walking along one of the passages at the Théâtre-Français when the door of a box opened and someone caught hold of his coattails. It was Alexandre.