The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (22 page)

The flirtatious exchange at the theater was reason enough, but Alexandre admitted that their fling was over. They had
parted, he writes in
Sins of Youth
, as a result of a quarrel. “Why? I don’t know: Over nothing! The suspicion of an unknown lover.” It was an Englishman, he told his father.

They discussed Marie’s tuberculosis, Alexandre saying the fatal outcome was still not certain but would soon be confirmed. “With the life she leads things will move fast from probability to certainty.” After that, Dumas claimed, they never spoke about her again, although years later, after a particularly moving performance of the play, Alexandre felt obliged to confess to his father that Armand had loved Marguerite that night with a passion he never felt for Marie.

Father and son began living together in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, “
more closely bound to the other by ties of affection than to any other soul, his mother excepted in the young man’s case.” Marie, meanwhile, was missing the company of her
bel ami.
She had an Englishman, a generous, horse-mad aristocrat whom
Méjannes calls “
Lord A.,” but he was of no consequence. She valued friendships with passion and wanted to keep Alexandre in her life.

Only Romain, among her male friends, was consistently loyal and reliable. Like Alexandre, he was convinced that her wild lifestyle was hastening her end and asked which doctor was taking
care of her. “I have three,” she told him, “two French and a Prussian. You’d approve of the first two as they prescribe rest, country air, nutritious diet, Bordeaux wine and meals at regular intervals all of which is perfect, but impossible for me. As for the Prussian, I believe, quite frankly, that he’s poisoning me. He’s saturating me with a drug to which he gives some diabolic name, probably so that I won’t know what it really is.”

One of the French doctors Marie first consulted was Pierre Louis, a specialist in consumption who was researching the difference in occurrence in the two sexes. Another was
Pierre Manec, who had also written a study of the disease and is regarded by anesthetists today as a pioneer, having performed major operations using the first ether inhalers. The German, David Ferdinand Koreff, was a controversial character. He had been personal physician to the king of Prussia and was a practitioner of magnetism (a belief in the existence of an indefinable, fluctuating current of energy in the human body with healing powers). The French medical community branded him as a mountebank, but his lively mind made him a valuable guest in Parisian salons, where he recruited most of his patients. Women in particular were drawn to Koreff, whose conversational ease and understanding of their foibles inspired confidence. “
He always had a number of little remedies, anodynes and secrets on conserving beauty and youth,” remarked the romantic novelist Countess Dash. And there was something about Koreff’s physical charisma—his all-black clothes, combined with his unconventional doctrines—that gave him an air of necromancy, of being able to work miracles. “One often hears it said that he has saved the life of such and such a person,” Madame de Bawr reported to the Duchess de Dino (both well-known women of letters), voicing the general view that Koreff was optimistic against all odds. The physician’s popularity collapsed as a result of a lawsuit in which he demanded an absurdly high back payment of fees from one of his aristocratic clients. The beau monde’s doors closed, and Koreff
was denounced for his obsession with money and celebrity. “
He is no longer received,” Balzac wrote to a friend. “I no longer greet him, and hardly respond when he speaks to me.”

Marie, however, liked Koreff and often invited him to her soirées, although she was far less appreciative of his professional skills. “I am continually agitated, I have heart palpitations, headaches and my cough gets worse instead of better,” she complained to Romain, who, deeply suspicious of Koreff’s infamous reputation, had the contents of Marie’s vial of medicine analyzed by a chemist. The solution contained strychnine, of which Koreff had instructed Marie to take a centigram a day. This, in Romain’s view, branded him unequivocally as an “abominable charlatan,” although in fact poison was an accepted form of treatment. Eight decades later, an article in
The British Medical Journal
confirmed the efficacy of strychnine in tubercular patients—“
It always improves the appetite and general condition … and acts as a general tonic and nervine stimulant”—while Marie’s own Dr. Manec administered arsenic in the treatment of cancer—a rudimentary form of chemotherapy. Manec also prescribed a paste of arsenous acid mixed with black mercury sulfide to relieve coughs and mucus irritability in consumptives.

By June 1845, Koreff, who was traveling in Germany, had stopped treating Marie, and bills confirm that her summer was spent in Paris. In July, her account at Kuher, a saddler on rue Tronchet, reached a staggering 2,390 francs—the result of a splurge on new buckles, halters, stirrups, snaffle bridles, girths, a chain-mail breastpiece, and an embossed leather crown. As reimbursement for a dinner she had hosted for
Lord A., he had promised to import a saddle horse for her from London, but it never arrived.
Seeing how ill she was, he abandoned the idea of a horse and instead sent her an enormous rosewood trunk, one meter high by two meters long, full of chocolates, each wrapped in a hundred-franc note. Lord A.’s dealer, however,
Tony Montel, who doted on Marie, is said to have made a gift to her of
a magnificent
pair of thoroughbreds. Catching sight of her galloping
en amazone
(sidesaddle) in the Bois de Boulogne,
Gustave du Puynode, author of a long homage to her in verse, suggested that a pawing, prancing thoroughbred excited her far more than any lover.

Marie might have been spending rapturous days on horseback, but her nights seem to have been relatively tranquil. Receipts from Chez Voisin and La Maison d’Or show that a number of meals were delivered to boulevard de la Madeleine, the dishes themselves revealing a healthy appetite. One night she dined alone on a pigeon with peas, mashed potatoes, a salad, and a bottle of eau de Seltz; on another she ordered supper for two—trout with prawns, partridges, a dessert of vanilla
bavaroises
, a bottle of Bordeaux, and a bottle of champagne. She indulged her sweet tooth with cakes from Rollet the pâtissier, glacéed fruit from Boissier, and on one occasion sent for twelve biscuits, macaroons, and maraschino liqueur.

This last bill is dated 30 August 1845, the very night on which Alexandre is supposed to have written his famous
lettre de rupture:

Forty years later, intending to make an extravagant gesture of thanks to Marguerite Gautier’s most eloquent interpreter, Dumas fils sent a rare illustrated edition of his novel to
Sarah Bernhardt. “
What makes this one unique,” he told her, “is the signed letter which you will find on the 212[th] page, and which slightly resembles the letter printed there.

“[It] was written by the real Armand Duval … the only palpable thing remaining of this story. It seems to me to be yours by right, because it is you who have given youth and life to the deceased.”

Dumas fils always maintained that he had bought the letter back from a Parisian dealer of autographs, but this is highly suspect. Marie’s private correspondence was not put up for sale (no letter from any other friend or lover has ever come to light), and papers that were included in a posthumous auction of her belongings, such as the bills she kept in a Moroccan leather box, were all marked with a notary’s squiggled initials. The letter from “AD” has no such distinctive squiggle. Was it written by Alexandre and never sent to Marie, or was it replicated later by the author with posterity in mind? Whatever the case, there was no novelistic symmetry to the end of their affair. By September, Alexandre had taken up with a Vaudeville actress,
Anaïs Liévenne, for whom he rented an apartment in his name, but Marie still kept in touch. Dumas père’s new play,
Mousquetaires
, was soon to open at
Théâtre L’Ambigu-Comique, and she asked
Alexandre to use his influence to get her a good seat. “
It was 7 October 1845,” he wrote. “I remember the date exactly because that was the day which I broke up with Marie Duplessis … and I broke up with her because of not being able to procure a box in the gallery.”

In fact, the premiere was on October 27, and Marie must have managed to secure herself a ticket, as she was spotted in the foyer by the critic
Jules Janin. “
She walked on the muddy floor as if she was traversing the boulevards on a rainy day, raising her dress intuitively … The whole of her appearance was in keeping with her young and lithesome form; and her face, of a beautiful oval shape, rather pale, corresponded with the charm she diffused around her, like an indescribable perfume.” Alexandre was there himself in a box with his father, but neither he nor Dumas père was on Marie’s mind. Among the noisy crowd in the second interval she had seen a man with a beautiful, noble face and mane of long hair whom she recognized instantly as
Franz Liszt. He had been a little surprised when she approached him, although he had noticed her too, “very much astonished at seeing such a marvel in such a place.” When the three solemn knocks of the prompter resounded through the theater, calling the spectators and critics back into the auditorium, Marie and Liszt remained behind. Sitting in front of the greenroom fire, they talked throughout the whole of the third act, each equally captivated by the other. The pianist’s plan to stay in Paris “
for a week at the most” was about to be dramatically extended.

Part Five
The Countess
 

A
T THIRTY-FOUR
, F
RANZ
L
ISZT
was a European sensation, a romantic icon with the long hair and charisma of a 1960s rock star. His genius as a pianist produced what
Heinrich Heine called “
a delirium unparalleled in the annals of furore,” and when he dropped his gloves after a concert that year, they were seized by women in the audience, torn into fragments, and shared among them. Not that Lisztomania was a female passion only. “We were like men in love, men obsessed,” exclaimed one young Russian. “We’d never heard anything like it.” But if Liszt had reached the apogee of his career as a performer, his private life was bleak.

A decade earlier, he had fallen in love with thirty-year-old Countess Marie d’
Agoult, author, intellectual, and rebellious wife of a French nobleman. Her affair with Liszt was as volatile as it was intense, their exchange of lofty ideas regarded as a blueprint for the grand passion. Mother of his three illegitimate children, d’Agoult sacrificed wealth and respectability for her younger lover—something she never let him forget. She was a joyless, brooding personality who became increasingly resentful and critical of Liszt’s success. Dismissing his astonishing virtuosity as mere tricks, she accused him of seeking publicity and invitations to grand salons and never ceased regarding him as an incorrigible philanderer. Her “Don Juan parvenu” did his best to be conciliatory.
“I have always been susceptible to physical temptations, you to those of the heart and intellect,” Liszt admitted in one letter, while pointing out in another that his merciless touring schedules scarcely gave him time to lead the “orgiastic” life of which he was accused. In the spring of 1845, things finally came to an end. There had been newspaper reports about Liszt’s liaison in Dresden with the scandalous
Lola Montez, and Marie d’Agoult, after years of alternating threats and pleas, decided that this was the ultimate insult. She would be his mistress, but not
one
of his mistresses, she famously declared. As hostilities spiraled, their children (aged ten, eight, and six) became weapons of war. “
If she tries to take Cosima by force,” Liszt remarked, “I will retaliate in full by taking the three children to Germany where she will have no hold over them.” Fortunately, his mother—an unassuming, warmhearted woman—gave her grandchildren a home in Paris, where they found the love and stability that had been missing from their lives.