The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (26 page)

Either with or without Olympe, Marie then traveled to Baden-Baden, staying once again at the Hôtel de l’Europe, before moving on to Biebrich, Koblenz, Wiesbaden, and Ems. And
then, suddenly, it was all too much. Her philosophy of carpe diem, of squeezing pleasure out of every second, seemed pathetically superficial now that death loomed so close. What she began to crave was some kind of spiritual redemption—her own
Traviata
moment of reconciliation and atonement. Feeling ashamed of her treatment of Ned Perregaux, she wrote him a farewell letter.

By mid-September, Marie was back in Paris, trying out all manner of remedies, each offering a touch of hope. She ordered packets of sulfate of quinine, almond milk, a lichen tisane, a syrup of asparagus spears, and bottles of asses’ milk (an ancient Arabic cure for diarrhea). Nothing, though, could relieve her insomnia, and she would pace her apartment throughout the night, talking to a yellow-and-blue parrot perched on her shoulder or to the dogs she adored—spaniels Duchesse and Chéri, and Dache, a magnificent hunter. Sometimes she was seen on her balcony above the boulevard, her head draped in a cashmere shawl, her thin frame lost in a copious white dressing gown. “
When the night was pitch black, it was like seeing an apparition.” Marie’s neighbor
Clémence Prat was a rare visitor, always making some excuse for her absence, as Marie was no longer of use to her.

Tuberculosis in its final stages is anything but romantic, with the dying incapacitated by paroxysmal coughs, chills, and night sweats, visibly wasting away as the disease spreads to other organs of the body. Almost all Marie’s friends had abandoned her, and watching Paris life go on in the street below her window,
she felt as solitary as Marguerite. “I saw some faces I knew. They passed rapidly, joyous and carefree, but not one lifted his eyes to my window.”

Her affair with Olympe was over. They had made a pact to part on their return to Paris, while remaining good friends. He told Marie that he wanted to keep his freedom and have only casual liaisons, but this was not the case. In 1846, Olympe became deeply involved with a countess married to an Englishman, a
Mrs. Adrian Hope, who remained his mistress for the next five years. When Romain visited Marie, she was in tears over Olympe, whom she said she had come to love without his knowing it. Olympe, though, was true to his word about their friendship. He remained as generous as ever, and he went out of his way to spend time with her.

Over the next few months, Marie’s most frequent visitors were her doctors, although they could only helplessly watch her die. Dr. Manec of La Salpêtrière saw her thirty-nine times between mid-September and November, while Dr. Davaine, who had become her main consultant, went eighty-four times during the same period. One of her notes to him has survived—a couple of lines scribbled on her white writing paper with its blue coat of arms:

With his kind, pinkish face, white curly hair, and steel-rimmed spectacles on a chain, Davaine was a comforting presence. Marie gave him her miniature by
Edouard Vienot, the portrait that best captures her demure appeal, showing her long black
anglaises
and signature corsage of a white camellia. In the opera, Violetta gives Alfredo one such medallion to pass on to his future
wife. It is a gesture heavy with sentiment and self-abnegation (“Tell her it’s the gift of one who from heaven, amongst the angels, prays always for her and for you”). The gift to Davaine, on the other hand, was characteristic of Marie—gracious and practical. It was to show gratitude for the fact that he would accept only a token fee.

Davaine must have decided to seek advice on Marie’s treatment from King Louis-Philippe’s personal consultant
Auguste-François Chomel (a descendant of Jean-Baptiste Chomel, Louis XIV’s doctor). She had four consultations with Chomel, who is cosignatory with Davaine on three elaborate prescriptions:

“How distressing it is to read the prescriptions made in 1846 by Davaine and Chomel to the unfortunate Lady of the Camellias,” said
Georges Daremberg in his 1905 study of tuberculosis.
“The care of consumptives by the grand physicians who practiced their art in the middle of this century was ridiculous. The two celebrities have the good idea of prescribing asses’ milk for their beautiful patient, but they cannot resist recommending that she sweeten the precious nourishment with syrup of tolu [an aromatic balsam obtained from a South American tree] or of maidenhair: an excellent way of suppressing the appetite and inciting disgust.” Daremberg also ridicules Chomel’s mentor, the eminent specialist Réne Laënnec. Believing that sea air had a therapeutic effect on tubercular patients, Laënnec had advocated the use of seaweed inhalers in hospital wards. Daremberg called this artificial atmosphere disastrous, as only fresh air can help consumptives to get well. Marie was in the hands of the greatest practitioners of nineteenth-century French medicine, but, working in the dark, they were powerless to cure her.

The morphine was making her act bizarrely. Romain Vienne had not seen her for two months, as he had been in Nonant in the late summer of 1846 following his mother’s death, and when he went to boulevard de la Madeleine in October, he was deeply disturbed by her deterioration. Marie was in bed and very frail, leaning back on her pillow, although some color came into her cheeks as she chattered away. She insisted that she was well enough to get up and go out somewhere, but Romain made her stay in bed by promising to spend a couple of hours with her. Her mood darkened when she started to complain about the lovers and friends who had abandoned her, embarrassing him by her revelations and recriminations. “I had never seen Marie like this—she who was so sweet and good, who never had a bad word for anyone.” Understanding that she was overwrought, even delirious, he did all he could to calm her, telling her that her grievances were no more than hallucinations produced by the drugs she was taking. “This had the opposite effect to what I’d hoped. She ranted more and more.”

Stranger still was the hostility Marie was showing toward
Ned Perregaux, whom she said she hated more than she had ever loved. “I don’t want him ever to set foot here; if [Clotilde] opens my door to him I will chase him away.” The writer
Charles Matharel de Fiennes confirms this. “She developed a great aversion toward the count P. whom she did not wish to see again.” Matharel de Fiennes tries to explain it as “a caprice of the dying,” and Vienne is no wiser, convinced only that the rupture was final. On 30 July 1846 Ned had asked once again to be admitted to the
Foreign Legion, but when the ministry tried to contact him a fortnight later, he was not to be found at his address, number 25, rue de la Ville-l’Evêque. “He is said to have gone to the countryside.” This suggests that Marie’s note begging his forgiveness had not reached him, though by early September he was back in Paris. On the other hand, Ned may simply not have felt ready or inclined to pardon her.

Distressed by what he was hearing, Romain rose from his seat as if to leave, which had the effect of forcing Marie to regain her composure. They moved on to mundane topics, discussing a field that she and her sister had inherited from their grandfather: Delphine wanted to sell it, Marie to buy her out. Romain would be able to act as go-between, as he was returning to Nonant to put his mother’s affairs in order, but he promised to be back in Paris within a few months’ time.

Marie’s devoted staff were doing all they could to care for her; Clotilde was with her day and night. The concierge,
Pierre Privé, had taken charge of the domestic finances (his wife cleaned the apartment every day for sixty francs a month). Unable to face another glass of asses’ milk or eau de Bussang, Marie sent him out one night to buy a two-franc bottle of champagne and on another occasion a
cigare camphré.
Debts were mounting alarmingly, and, like Clotilde and Etienne, Marie’s coachman, Privé had paid several hundred francs of his own money to keep the bailiffs at bay. This was proving a losing battle.

A young advocate named
Henry Lumière, a recent graduate
from law school, was visited by a locksmith one day who sought his help in recovering an unpaid sum for work on an apartment on the boulevard de la Madeleine. “
Although everything there is luxurious, indicating great wealth and opulence, my repeated requests have been ignored,” he complained to Lumière, who then wrote to the
débitrice
, asking her to come to his office to discuss a matter that concerned her. After some time had passed he received a brief note written “in a fine, anglicised hand” on lightly perfumed paper:

The following day he went to Marie’s apartment and was shown by Clotilde into her bedroom. The sight of the lovely invalid in her sumptuously draped bed—a “
nest of pink silk”—disarmed Lumière, who found himself stammering out his reason for coming, while emphasizing that he was only executing his client’s request. Marie, dressed in a peignoir of white cashmere edged with blue silk, explained that because of her illness she was without funds for the moment and asked if it might be possible to delay the payment. “She was so deliciously pretty, her plea so touching, that I was seduced and fascinated into agreeing.… I was rewarded with a gentle, gracious smile of thanks, and the offer of a little hand, practically diaphanous, which seemed to me to be burning with fever.” Other creditors, he discovered, had been less indulgent and had called in bailiffs to intervene.

Another young man was equally charmed. Charles Chaplin was an art student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts when he received word that a beautiful woman living in a splendid apartment on boulevard de la Madeleine wanted him to paint her. Although the
name Marie Duplessis meant nothing to the unworldly twenty-one-year-old, who still lodged with his mother and siblings in rooms on the rue d’Enfer, he was delighted to have a commission. He had been asked to bring an example of his work, and, trying to think of something that would impress “
such a noble person,” he chose one of his religious paintings. When Marie saw it she burst out laughing, and she was still laughing when the humiliated young man got up to leave. Calling him back, she said that she would like him to go ahead with her portrait, and also asked him if he would copy a painting in the Louvre for her.

Preliminary sketches were done at Marie’s apartment as she lay under covers on a chaise longue, attempting to smile between coughing fits. Sometimes she lacked the strength to receive Chaplin, but he would return the following day without complaint. “He worshipped this dying woman as much as one of those saints pictured in the old mass-books,” writes Claude Vento in
Les peintres de la femme.
One unseasonably sunny day, Chaplin’s subject, feeling better than usual, suggested that they go for a promenade in the Bois. The carriage was already waiting on the boulevard, and Marie, wearing blue velvet, her waist svelte in a tight-fitting coat, looked ravishing as she walked along holding her young escort’s arm. She was soon recognized and beset by admirers who gathered round to greet her. Chaplin knew then that the woman who had sat for him was someone famous and suddenly felt intimidated, although it did not prevent him from finishing the painting.