The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (27 page)

The result is a truthful and not particularly flattering portrait of Marie. She wears no jewels and a plain, governessy dress, and yet the somber effect is softened by her almost beatific expression of serenity. It is not known what she thought of the painting, but she made sure that Chaplin, of whom she had grown fond, was amply rewarded. When the time came to be paid, and he blushingly hesitated about naming a price, Marie cut him short by saying, “
Ask for 200 francs.… M de T. [Marie’s horse dealer,
Tony] is rich enough to pay you.” Chaplin was overwhelmed and could hardly believe that he was taking home ten louis that he had earned himself. As he was leaving, Marie called out, telling him not to forget the painting she wanted him to copy at the Louvre. Sadly, however, death was swifter than he was.

On December 11, Marie had her hair styled at home by the hairdresser Dezoutter, who fitted the crown of six white camellias delivered that day from her florist. (To complete the effect, she had also ordered a large
bouquet à la main
of white camellias, costing twenty francs.) She wanted to go one last time to the theater. Marguerite, too, had insisted on seeing a final performance. “Despite the burning fever which devoured me, I made them dress me.… Julie put on some rouge for me, without which I should have looked like a corpse.” Marguerite goes to the Vaudeville, but Marie went to the Palais-Royal, to see the revue
La poudre de coton.
Taking its title from
the discovery that year of the explosive known in English as guncotton, it was a satirical roundup of the year’s inventions, fashions, new novels, plays both good and bad, and eccentric personalities (Le Bal Mabille’s
Céleste Mogador among them). For Marie the evening was a way of suspending reality and turning back the clock. The two-and-a-half-hour show was like gaining twelve months as she revisited the excitements and absurdities of Parisian life in 1846.

Act 1 had already started when she made her entrance, carried in the arms of Etienne and his son, Marie’s stable lad, who had both dressed up to make an impact. “
Two lackeys gold-laced in braided uniform from head to foot set her down in a stage box,” wrote the young journalist
Alfred Delvau. “She was no more than a shadow of a woman—white and diaphanous, with consumptive pallor and a large bouquet of white camellias.” The account by
Charles Matharel de Fiennes is more emotive still.

For centuries the Catholic ideology had associated the wasting away of youth and beauty with spiritual innocence—the redemptive suffering later embodied by the patron saint of tuberculosis, Thérèse Martin of Lisieux. In recent months Marie, too, had acquired a tragic, quasi-religious aura. Seeing her looking so pure and dignified in her carriage,
Charles du Hays described her as a saint being transported up to heaven. (It was this sense of transfiguration captured by
Sarah Bernhardt’s Marguerite with “
the halo of a saint” upon her forehead.) Marie was expecting to be forgiven for her past. “My heart lifts up toward heaven from where I trust will come truth and salvation,” du Hays quotes her as saying. “I have remained pure amidst affections which have only inspired sadness in me.” In the play, too, Marguerite’s friend Nichette believes that even the erotic liaisons will somehow transmute and augment her deliverance. “Rest in peace,” she whispers, kneeling by the bed. “You will be much pardoned because you have much loved.”

Eros was giving way to Agape—but not just yet. There was to be one more outing. January was Carnival time in Paris, and Marie was determined to attend her last Opéra ball. “
Her faded, still voluptuous grace” made the writer
Paul de Saint-Victor think of a fallen flower trampled underfoot, and as he watched her throughout the evening, his feelings of pity were mixed with admiration.

Marie’s pallor and the melancholic delirium of her dancing reminded Saint-Victor of “one of those dead bacchantes who, in Northern fables, waltz in moonlight on the grass of their tombs.” They are the Wilis of the second act of
Giselle
—the ballet Gautier created from a
Heinrich Heine story set in the Rhine Valley—vengeful spirits who dance the men who betrayed them to their death. But Marie was not seeking retribution: this was her swan song, her last waltz, and a farewell to the Paris she loved.

Then she went home to die. Her curtains were drawn day and night, with only lamps and candles casting a wan light in the rooms. Her doctors tried to get her to open the windows to
let in fresh air and sunlight, but their pleas were in vain. It was a foreshadowing of the tomb.

On Marie’s twenty-third birthday, January 15, the bailiffs forced their way into the apartment, citing the name of the law. As she lay in bed she could hear a monotonous voice making an inventory of contents and the sound of furniture being moved. Describing the scene in a letter to Armand, Marguerite’s maid told of her despair:

In the novel it is the Count de G. who settles Marguerite’s debts and gets the creditors to leave her in peace. Marie’s benefactor, however, was not the Count de Guiche but Olympe Aguado. Writing under the pseudonym Grimm, Amédée
Achard says that the count, whom he does not identify, still being a minor, could do nothing himself but rushed home to beg his mother’s help. “
His mother listened to him, and every other thought disappeared in the face of death. She told her lawyers to take care of the
debts of Marie Duplessis. How many other virtuous grandes dames of the world would have accomplished such a noble action which she made appear so simple?”
Hippolyte de Villemessant tells the same story in his memoirs, also paying tribute to the humane generosity of the marchioness. While not revealing the Aguado name, he calls them a family with a soul. “
All the poor of Paris and of Spain knew that they would never find the door closed.… When the marchioness heard what her young son had to say, she blushed perhaps in thinking of the French aristocracy’s
reaction but without reproach or thought of her immorality, she paid the dying girl’s debts.”

Why had Marie not appealed to her “pseudo-father” for money, as Marguerite does in the novel? She had deeply offended Stackelberg, but, according to Roqueplan, he did return to Paris to see her before she died. In Marguerite’s description of the encounter, two large tears rolled from the old man’s eyes when he saw how pale she was, and he remained with her for several hours, hardly saying a word. “Since she got so ill the old duke has not returned,” Marguerite’s maid told Armand. “He said that the sight was too much for him.” Stackelberg, who had now witnessed the dying of four young women he had loved, had far more reason to stay away. But for Marie’s Etienne, his desertion was unforgivable. “He’s a miserable old screw,” he remarked to Vienne. “When you’re eighty years old, what’s the point of economizing? As soon as he realized that she was dying, he completely abandoned her.”

Amédée
Achard suggests another reason why Stackelberg might have stayed away. That summer in Dieppe when a steamer arrived from Brighton and the passengers alighted, a Russian called Gustave noticed an elegant young beauty promenading along the jetty. “
Celebrated for more than a title,” she had not been introduced to the Russian, but by that evening the pair were walking together by the sea.

Marie was vacillating between despair and the belief that she might recover. She had told Clotilde that she was leaving everything to her in gratitude for her loyalty, and she asked for a notary to be summoned so that she could make a will. “
Why, Madame?” Clotilde said, humoring her. “You’re going to get better.… If it was the end, and if you were really dying I would obey you … [but] I’m going to stay by your side. Then I will hear you say that you made a mistake and that in a few days
you will be saved.” Convinced of this herself, Marie got Clotilde to pawn some jewels (for 1,500 francs) to provide the rent for a depot where she could hide her most precious things. “Because they’ll return in a few days to seize more, and this time they’ll succeed.… I can’t be allowed to die hungry, and I want to keep something for starting again, when I will be healed.”

Ned Perregaux, still forbidden to enter the apartment, was so desperate to know how much time Marie had left that he begged Clotilde to smuggle out one of her flannel vests for a psychic to interpret. He took it to the twenty-year-old phenomenon
Alexis Didier, who, given an object charged with personal association, could recount an individual’s history, make a medical diagnosis from a distance, or predict events to come. Blindfolded, in a hypnotic trance, he could read messages in a sealed envelope or the pages of a closed book. His paranormal gift for “remote viewing” had enabled him to detail the contents of the French emperor’s study; and when
Céleste Mogador consulted him to identify the thief who robbed her lover, he described exactly where the woman lived. But Alexis’s clairvoyance was more precise about the past and present than about the future. “
Go quickly to her,” he urged Ned. “She has no more than a few hours to live.” In effect, this was inaccurate: Marie had two more days left.

It is this moment in the play and opera that provides a soaring
coup de théâtre.
As soon as Armand/Alfredo appears on her threshold, Marguerite/Violetta runs to the door and flings herself into his arms. They ask each other’s forgiveness, and she tells him that she wants to live. Liszt had imagined himself in this role, confiding to Marie d’
Agoult, “
If I had happened to be in Paris when la Duplessis was ill, I would have had my quarter of an hour as Des Grieux and tried to save her at any price.” But he was thousands of miles away, and of all those who had loved Marie, only Ned, “
banned from the bedroom of her for whom he wept”—and Olympe—were faithful to the end. “
Forty-eight hours before her death she still recognized one, the younger
[Olympe], and she took his hand. ‘You’ve come to see me,’ she whispered. ‘Adieu, I’m going away now.’ ”

Like the novel’s Marguerite, Marie was alone with her maid and a priest during her last hours—and she was very frightened. “
Oh, I’m dying!” she cried, grabbing Clotilde’s hand. “I want you to bury me yourself. Do not declare my death straight away so that I can stay here longer in my house.” Fighting the inevitable, Marguerite utters a series of tortuous cries and sits upright in bed two or three times, “as if she would hold on to her life.” Marie’s behavior was even more disturbing. “When the death-rattle began she made the strangest exclamations,” claims
Charles Matharel de Fiennes. “This woman, who had never spoken of affairs of state, cried out three times, an hour before her death, a pronouncement baffling for this era, a prophetic cry which we will not reproduce because it is improbable even if certified as true.” Armand had struggled to pry his hand out of Marguerite’s when all was over, but it was Clotilde’s hand that Marie squeezed so tightly “that it was almost impossible to disengage the hand of the living from that of the dead.” Clotilde closed her eyes and kissed her on the forehead. It was a little before 3 a.m. on February 3. “Then I dressed her as she had asked me to do … and put her in her shroud.”

That evening Clotilde answered the door to Romain Vienne, who had sent a note to Marie saying that he was back in Paris and would be calling around eight o’clock to see her. The creditors’ representative, Nicolas Ridel, who was holding Marie’s papers, had told Clotilde to expect him, saying, “It’s likely that this monsieur will want to see the body, so do not close the coffin.” Clotilde disliked Romain, who she felt should have visited more often and who, because he was just a friend, had never tipped her as a courtesan’s lovers were expected to do. She had made no attempt to contact him in time to see Marie alive, nor to prepare him for the shock in store. He had hardly stepped into the apartment when she coldly announced, “Monsieur, Madame is dead.”

Stunned, Romain walked behind her, through the dining room and into Marie’s candlelit bedroom, hung with black drapes, where a young priest was praying. To his right, under the window, was the coffin, raised on trestles. As Clotilde removed the cloth and lifted the lid, Romain felt a jolt of terror. “I’m not superstitious … but there is nothing more hideous than the sight of death.”