The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (23 page)

As for Liszt himself, the breakup with Marie d’Agoult, compounded by the strain he incurred during a disastrous music festival in August, had led him to the point of collapse. To celebrate the unveiling of the Beethoven monument in Bonn for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the composer’s birth, the event had been arranged almost single-handedly by Liszt. But instead of being credited as its moving spirit, he found himself criticized for using it as an opportunity for self-promotion. He had written a new cantata for the festival, and so strong were the currents against him that, as a German student observed, “
People were hoping his work would fail.” He did, however, have one staunch advocate. Jules Janin, drama critic of the
Journal des Débats
, was almost alone among journalists in recognizing Liszt as a great artist rather than an “acrobat of the piano”—or, as the Lisztophobes would have it, a “pretentious strummer.” On August 10, Janin wrote a letter to his wife, describing the pressures Liszt was facing.

When Liszt first saw Janin, quietly reading Horace’s
Odes
, he fell into his arms. Liszt may have been a demigod for several days, but he badly needed moral support. “One can see that he is perturbed,” continued Janin, who was right to be concerned: soon after the festival ended, Liszt was confined to bed with jaundice and complete exhaustion.

He arrived in Paris on the morning of October 25, staying with his mother and children on the rue Louis-le-Grand, and by midday he was at Jules Janin’s house. “
Very happy to see me.… His complexion still a touch yellow.” Liszt was counting on Janin’s help with a French translation of his cantata, and they shut themselves up to start work immediately. Janin had disliked the original German text—“
Pompous nonsense,” he told his wife. But having felt that he was being asked the impossible, Janin managed to come up with a libretto in two days that pleased both men. By way of celebration, he invited Liszt to accompany him to the premiere of the new Dumas play.

The Ambigu-Comique was filled to capacity that night, not with the usual elegant first-night audience but with the kind of crowd attracted by popular spectacles like
The Three Musketeers
, a melodrama lasting six hours. “
There were more caps than hats with feathers, and more threadbare overcoats than new suits,” wrote Janin. Marie’s appearance created an extraordinary effect. “It seemed as if she illumined all these burlesque, uncultivated beings with a glance of her lovely eyes. She came into the room and moved, her head erect, through the astonished rabble.”

Liszt’s own version, told to his Hungarian compatriot the journalist
Janka Wohl, was that “
a very conspicuous young woman” had walked past them during an interval and stared intently at him.

Marie knew Liszt by sight because she had been at one of the concerts he gave in Paris, in either the spring or early summer of 1844. Intrigued to see if this passionate, demonic genius lived up to his rapturous acclaim, she had found herself so moved by his performance that she was inspired to start learning the instrument herself. She rented a piano and began buying increasingly challenging scores of popular tunes like “The Blue Danube” and Weber’s “Invitation to the Waltz,” the piece that Dumas fils’s novel describes Marguerite trying and failing to master. One passage in particular always defeated her—“the third part with all the sharps”—and sometimes she would practice it until the early hours of the morning. Instructing Armand’s friend Gaston to play it for her, Marguerite intently follows each note on the page, softly humming along and silently moving her fingers on the top of the piano. “Re, mi, re, do, re, fa, mi, re. That’s what I can never do,” she sighs. “Invitation to the Waltz” was a favorite in Liszt’s repertory, and if Marie had heard his version, the memory would have made mockery of her own workaday attempts. His music transcended the piano, which seemed to vanish before people’s eyes, giving the audience the sensation that he was calling up mysterious living forms—“
as if the air were peopled with spirits,”
as one spectator put it. This was Marie’s experience too. The first words she spoke to Liszt was that his playing had “
set [her] dreaming.”

He had been at a table by the fire with Janin when she came over and sat beside them. “We were very much surprised for neither he nor I had ever spoken to her,” Janin writes, noting how her familiarity soon gave way to an element of hauteur “as if [Liszt] had been presented to her at a levee in London, or at a party given by the Duchess of Sutherland.” Visibly shivering, Marie had drawn near the flames, her feet almost touching the logs, allowing a glimpse of the embroidered folds of her petticoat. As she and Liszt fell into conversation, Janin observed her closely, admiring everything he saw.

He was supposed to be reviewing the play for the
Journal des Débats
but, sitting with Liszt in the foyer, was reduced to listening to the cries of bravo and stomping of feet heard throughout the six hours. Guilt may have been the cause of Janin’s bad temper—“
I am convinced that the lady thought me grumpy and perfectly absurd”—or else the fact that Marie hardly addressed a word to him, except once or twice out of politeness. But it was hardly surprising that the enormously rotund, white-haired, whiskery Janin held no allure for her. It was Liszt who had captivated her, and they talked as if they were alone together throughout the whole of the third act.

On first hearing Liszt’s vibrant, original conversation, Marie d’
Agoult had felt a new world opening up. It was an impression Marie Duplessis must have shared. The pianist’s itinerant life had led him to all of Europe’s landmarks and museums, giving him an exotic air of having knowledge in reserve, of horizons far beyond the narrow Parisian beau monde. His initial exchange with Marie d’Agoult had been serious, she said. “
We embarked at once upon elevated subjects … talked of the destiny of mankind, of its sadness and incertitude, of the soul and of God.… Nothing of coquetry or of gallantry was blended with our intimacy.” In the Ambigu foyer with Marie, on the other hand, Liszt ran through the usual gossip and fashionable small talk, almost certainly laughing about their mutual acquaintance
Lola Montez, who had ambushed him in Bonn. Claiming to be there as his guest and undaunted by the fact she was completely ignored by Liszt, Lola had then gate-crashed the international banquet and created an uproar by springing up onto a table strewn with bottles and glasses—a performance that almost eclipsed everything that had gone before it.

Liszt was adept at talking to women, moving from topic to topic, frivolous at one moment, erudite the next. And he clearly drew the best out of Marie, as both men were struck by her intelligence, tact, and common sense. Liszt, Janin says, totally abandoned himself to her, “
listening with uninterrupted attention to her beautiful language, so full of ideas, and, at the same time, so eloquent and pensive.” He kept asking questions, trying to discover more about this exceptional young woman, who lacked all protocol yet was full of dignity.

The next day a mutual friend offered to take Liszt to Marie’s house. This was her Prussian doctor, David Koreff, whose patients also included Marie d’Agoult and Liszt’s mother. Koreff was often used as a go-between, according to Flaubert’s friend Maxime du Camp: “
If a salonnière wanted to invite an artist or writer of renown she turned to Koreff to make the introduction.”
A highly sought after guest in his own right, Koreff would far rather have been celebrated as a poet, translator, and librettist than as a physician. Marie had not been treated by Koreff for several months, but she continued to invite him to boulevard de la Madeleine, knowing that few grand soirées were given without him. She was no doubt also aware that Marie d’
Agoult had set a high precedent for Liszt. In her salon in the Hôtel de France,
George Sand had been introduced to Chopin, an encounter that marked the start of their ten-year affair, and the countess prided herself on her skillful mix of guests, telling Liszt, “
Koreff said the other day that I will soon have a circle such as Paris has never seen.”

It was not unknown for a demimondaine to establish a distinguished salon. The Second Empire courtesan known as La Païva, also a mistress of Agénor de Guiche, had married into the aristocracy despite being born in a Moscow ghetto and held court in the most opulent private house in Paris. Guests at the Hôtel Païva included Gautier and Delacroix, who, though disturbed by its overwhelming luxury, rarely refused an invitation. A combination of money and willpower had allowed La Païva to surround herself with some of the great men of her time, although, to her chagrin, she never gained recognition in French society. Marie, too, had no opportunity to learn the art of entertaining from the celebrated
salonnières
of the day, but her presence at
dinners given by friends like
Roger de Beauvoir and Nestor Roqueplan would have taught her everything she needed to know. An intimate gathering at Roqueplan’s sumptuous apartment on the rue Le Peletier was a blueprint of how to receive. His guests—five or six like-minded men and a cluster of decorative women—would move from the crimson, damask-lined drawing room, where they had been surrounded by Louis XIII furniture, paintings, and sculptures, to the oblong dining room hung with antique Gobelin tapestries. A discreet, white-haired butler served each course—a menu that rarely changed: consommé, fish, roast
meat, salad, cheese, and dessert. Roqueplan detested the “
abominable inventions and falsifications of modern cuisine” and would tolerate only simple, provincial cooking. But if the cuisine hardly varied, the ingredients were sourced from the best merchants in Les Halles, just as the single wine on offer was “such that old vignerons would drink at the wedding of their only daughter.” Two years earlier Marie’s dinners had been frivolous, decadent occasions, but now, by assembling brilliant performers at her table and serving choice dishes from La Maison d’Or, she had achieved the renown she coveted. “
The Lady of the Camellias had her own salon where others of her kind had no more than a dressing room,” wrote an admiring
Arsène Houssaye.

Liszt was certainly satisfied. “All the best people of Paris were there,” he told
Janka Wohl, who mentions the presence of writers and artists and singles out the Duke of Ossuna, a member of one of the oldest and richest families in Spain. “Liszt went there often after this.” Drawn to strong-willed, independent women, he had been unfazed by Marie’s making the first move (Marie d’
Agoult had also been the instigator of their affair). Nor was he under any illusions about the origin of her wealth and position. “I am not partial as a rule to Marions de Lorme or Manons Lescaut,” he told Wohl, “but Marie Duplessis was an exception.… I maintain that she was unique of her kind.” He knew that she was ill, because Koreff had confided poignant details about her suffering, and Marie herself could not have been more frank. “
I shall not live,” she told Liszt, an avowal that affected him greatly (he had lost a brother to consumption). He found himself forming “a somber and elegiac attachment” for “Mariette,” as he called her, while at the same time being enchanted by her joie de vivre and childish abandon. “[She] was certainly the most perfect incarnation of Woman who has ever existed.”

Apart from Koreff, whom Liszt acknowledged as the one who helped him to appreciate her in a more profound way, his liaison with Marie was known to few. He met the young Dumas at one
of her soirées and would later admire his fictional depiction of Marie, telling Wohl that Dumas completely understood her and could create her again with great ease.
Nestor Roqueplan was aware of the situation, as he includes “
the illustrious pianist L.” among Marie’s lovers. The fact that Liszt was still alive in 1887, when Vienne’s memoir was published, may explain why he gives no hint of a romance, saying only that Liszt went twice to Marie’s salon. Very probably, this was a relationship that Marie kept to herself, though Liszt could not help confiding his feelings to Marie d’
Agoult. “
I have never told you how strangely attached to this delightful creature I became during my last visit to Paris,” he wrote. “Hers was a truly delightful nature in which practices commonly held to be corrupting (and rightly so, perhaps) never touched her soul.”

In late January 1846 he was to embark on the most arduous tour of his life, traveling for eighteen months through northern France, Austria, Romania, Hungary, Transylvania, Russia, and Turkey. After that, he planned to abandon the concert platform altogether and settle in Weimar, where he had been appointed director of court music. The current duke, Carl Alexander, emulating the Renaissance-style patronage of his grandfather, wanted to reestablish the city as a haven for artists and intellectuals, and Liszt had ambitions of his own for Weimar. While concentrating on composing and conducting, he intended to create a workshop environment to convert audiences to “difficult” music. He had felt engulfed recently, not only by his impossibly demanding performing schedules but also by his spiraling dissipation—what he called “
excitements … leading to disgust and remorse.”