The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (25 page)

Vienne says that for several months after her marriage, Marie took on no new protector, turning down all propositions out of gratitude for what Ned had done for her. Her debts, amounting to nearly thirty thousand francs, bear this out: 1,449 francs owed for linen, 250 to her vet, 225 for unpaid laundry bills … and she made nineteen transactions at the Mont-de-Piété to pawn jewels and other valuables in return for cash. In April she was sued by her lingerie merchant and could not pay the rent of her stable, yet she gave no outward sign of any change in her circumstances. In the early afternoon of April 25, her carriage was spotted among a procession on the boulevard des Invalides, the starting point for demimondaines, aristocrats, and ordinary Parisians in a crush of cabs, chariots, phaetons, and landaus en route to Croix de Berny races. “
I can see her now,” writes
Charles du Hays, “pale and distressed, all dressed in white, in her faded green landau borne along at full trot by four splendid white horses.” Marie’s main reason for being there was to watch the steeplechase of gentleman riders performing feats of horsemanship over hedges and ditches in the great meadow. One of the two chosen to represent France, displaying more courage than good fortune, was a mud-spattered Ned Perregaux.

By May 1846 she had taken on a wealthy new lover—eighteen-year-old
Count Olympe Aguado de las Marismas, whose father, the late marquis, had left a legacy estimated at between 35 million and 65 million francs. The first nineteenth-century banker to acquire a Bordeaux château, Château Margaux, the Marquis de las Marismas also owned an immense and important art collection and was close both to the imperial court and to renowned artists and musicians of his era. (Rossini composed a cantata for Olympe’s baptism.) Wanting to link the two great Spanish families of Aguado and Montijo, he had ambitions for Olympe to marry Eugénie, later empress consort of France, but he died in 1842, when his son was still an adolescent. Having inherited his father’s passion for art as well as his fortune, Olympe studied drawing at Henry IV College before entering le beau monde, becoming an habitué of the
foyer de la danse
and a member of the Jockey Club. With his theatrical black beard, hair combed forward, and hefty build, he was not especially good-looking but was highly sought after by women. “Thanks to his opulence, he had a number of mistresses on the go, without counting those in reserve,” says Vienne, who disguises the young count as Gaston de Morenas and evidently approved of his easygoing character and kind heart. Olympe had made clear to Marie from the start, Vienne maintains, that he did not want a long, complicated relationship, but, at the same time, he realized that she was too special to be just a passing fling. Olympe was loyal, sweet-natured, and generous, and Marie had complete confidence in him, acquiescing to demands she would refuse any other lover.

To illustrate this, Vienne presents a scene in which the dialogue is invented, as he was not there, but the story itself is convincing and could have been passed on to him by Marie or Olympe. A group of women in a sumptuous drawing room are discussing the lovely young girl they have often seen in her box at the theater. Propriety forbids them to invite her to their salon, and they cannot visit hers. “I wish I could talk to her incognito,”
says one, “so that I could see for myself whether she deserves the praise lavished on her by men.” Aware that Marie Duplessis is “not unknown” to Olympe, they ask him to think up a pretext for them to meet her. Her work for charity might be the answer, he says, as she had always been discreetly generous to the needy—especially to girls of ill repute. The women each pledge between five hundred and one thousand francs, and Olympe makes them promise that if he brings the courtesan to see them, they will ask no personal questions. He then pays a visit to Marie, telling her that he has organized a collection for orphaned girls, and asks for her cooperation. She immediately reaches for her purse, but Olympe says that he needs more from her than a donation: he wants her to take on the role of patroness and collect funds from the women of the grands faubourgs herself. Marie is shocked—“I’ll be chased away by their valets”—but Olympe vows to be her escort, reassuring her that any injurious remarks would have to be made in his presence. “Anyone else would have failed in this proposal,” writes Vienne, “but [Olympe] occupied an exceptional place in Marie’s esteem.”

On the day of the rendezvous, everyone present was in on the secret. Marie was pale and trembling as she entered the room but gained confidence from the murmur of approval that greeted her arrival. She had dressed with simple, almost severe elegance, and as the women chatted to her on all manner of subjects, they were struck by her dignity, tact, and eloquence. “She’s enchanting,” the hostess whispered to Olympe, remarking how unfortunate it was that a woman so distinguished should be lost to society. She was, indeed, a fine girl, he replied, and it was through no fault of her own that she had been thrown into a life of vice. “You must pity her and not condemn her.” When Marie took around the collection box, only one woman was frosty toward her. Vienne calls her the Countess de la Brosse, but she is very likely to have been
Valentine Delessert, whose eighteen-year-old son, Edouard, was
one of Olympe’s closest friends. Wife of Gabriel Delessert, the prefect of police, she was hardly a model of convention herself, being
mistress for ten years of Prosper Mérimée, the author of
Carmen.
But what either irked or embarrassed her was that she knew her own son was infatuated with Marie. A protégé of Mérimée, who helped him with his first attempts at writing, Edouard Delessert was a painter, archaeologist, and soon to be (along with Olympe) one of France’s first photographers. “
A delicious young man,” wrote an acquaintance, “of a grand culture and chivalrous heart … he had read everything, seen everything, knew everything.” Marie would undoubtedly have enjoyed Edouard’s company, but she asked Olympe to discourage him from pursuing her. She could not face another young man’s declaration of undying passion, she told him, but her real reason, according to Vienne, was the respect she felt for Edouard’s mother. Because Mme Delessert had been gracious enough to receive her, she felt it would be tasteless to accept the attentions of her son.

It was Olympe who introduced Marie to Aguado’s personal physician,
Casimir Davaine. A precursor of Louis Pasteur in discovering the role of microbes in infectious diseases, Davaine would like to have concentrated on scientific research but was too generous with the time he devoted to his patients. (He was with the Aguados in Spain when the marquis collapsed during a meal and never recovered.) A nature lover, he believed that health is the principal element of happiness, and he suggested to Marie that she should to go for a rest cure to the countryside. Heeding his advice, she went back to Normandy, staying with her great-uncle Louis Mesnil, now a widower, in La Trouillère. Living nearby with her new husband, Constant Paquet, a weaver, was Delphine, whose modest, respectable life Marie could not help envying. “She has done a thousand times better by staying in the village,” she would remark to Romain. “How much happier she is.… And how misguided I was to have tried to persuade her to
live a life like mine!” And yet, when Clotilde arrived after little more than a fortnight, saying that she was wanted back in Paris, Marie needed no persuasion to return.

Olympe planned to take her on a tour of the German spas, but first they were to travel to Brussels for the social event of the summer. This was the inauguration of the Great Northern Railway, launching a new line from Paris whose significance for a new era of European travel was greeted with excitement (Berlioz had composed a cantata in celebration). “
Over there is the Ocean and the Mediterranean, behind is England … the world and Paris at the center of the universe!” exclaimed Jules Janin, one of numerous journalists covering the occasion. Assembling a spectacular wardrobe for the trip but more susceptible than ever to feverish chills, even in June, Marie had ordered a selection of furs from Révillon to be delivered to her on deposit—coats of ermine, sable, and wolf. Vienne says that the couple left in a
chaise de poste
“without having said goodbye to anyone,” but in fact the cortege bound for Brussels traveled from Paris by train. At four in the morning on Saturday, June 13, three thousand people set off on the journey, although only three hundred would attend the grand soirée the following evening. It was an impressive gathering, according to Janin, a “moving mass of nations”—the royalty and nobility of Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, and Flanders—uniformed men decked with medals, dowagers displaying ancient jewels, and Europe’s most elegant women. Marie, although more pallid than usual, stood out among them all, writes Janin.

This was the young blond man named Prince Paul by Vienne. “He had regular features, eyes pale and lustreless; thick, sensual lips—a physique that altogether lacked expression. There was a touch of English haughtiness in his attitude and of Teutonic stiffness in his manners, which was unsympathetic.… On first acquaintance one judged him unfavorably.”
Vienne describes him as being very close to Liszt, but, if so, he was not known to Janin, who watched Marie punish the “Anglo-German” for his reservations about her. At the end of a long, well-lit corridor, she caught sight of someone she knew—“a friend without any pretensions … one of our own acquaintances, an artist, a painter.” Clearly, this was Olympe
Aguado. “Ah, here you are!” she said to him; “give me your arm, and let us have a dance.” Abandoning her companion, she began a Strauss waltz.

From Brussels Marie went on to Spa, where the doctors insisted that she must rest more to restore her health. For a few days she did as she was told, going for walks or reading quietly under the trees. She wrote a letter while she was there to her horse dealer, Tony, who had become extremely attached to her.

But her good intentions were in vain. She was seen by day on horseback, recklessly clearing high hedges, and spending most of her evening hours in the casino. “
In Spa no other fever is known
than ball fever, no other remedies but those of talking, dancing, music and the excitement of gambling,” writes Janin, who, needless to say, was there himself, noting Marie’s every move.

In his book
Consumptives and Great Lovers
, Dr. Cabanes sees this kind of euphoria as a symptom of the disease. He quotes a remark made by the eighteenth-century
salonnière
Julie de Lespinasse, in a letter to a friend, “I do not know if it is my ill health,” she wrote, “but I have never been so pressed to live.”

Marie’s frenzied routine was not appreciated by Olympe, who had left Paris to relax and be reinvigorated by the mountains and panoramas. The count was happiest when he was somewhere wild and rustic, Vienne says, and his sketches capture his passion for nature—poetic studies of landscapes flooded with sunlight, trees reflected in water, woods casting mysterious shadows—the tranquil, topographical scenes that would define his pioneering photographs a decade later. But despite his own inclinations he understood the reason for Marie’s fast living and put two hundred thousand francs at her disposal. In three weeks she had lost half, according to Vienne, only to win most of it back again. “Losses left her indifferent, gain only gave her mediocre satisfaction,” he says, echoing Janin’s remark.