The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (28 page)

Marie was swathed in lace—Alençon lace made in her native Normandy. “
The tenderness and touching taste of her friend had adorned her so well!” Roqueplan writes. “Her hands held a bouquet of camellias, her favorite flower, in the midst of which was a crucifix.… Her coffin was filled with camellias.… The beauty of the dead girl was a new marvel.” But not to Romain, who says nothing about camellias, only that Marie’s body was already rigid when he removed the winding sheet.

He staggered into the dining room and collapsed into an armchair. When he came around Clotilde was standing in front of him with a pair of scissors, and he asked her to cut a lock of Marie’s hair as he did not have the strength to do it himself. Romain then left the apartment as soon as he could, only to find Etienne waiting for him on the pavement. “I knew you were coming and I’ve been here since seven o clock,” he said. “I am deeply sorry that I was not given your address: you could have consoled the dear lady in her last moments, and she could have confided her last wishes to you. But [Clotilde] did not want this. I believe I will not be telling you something you don’t know if I say that she does not like you.”

They went to a nearby café together, and Etienne described Marie’s last months—“an impossible life of theatre, balls, la Maison d’Or, the Café Anglais. At the end she drank nothing but champagne.” By December most of her close friends, Agénor de Guiche among them, had stopped coming to see her, but not a day went by, Etienne said, without Olympe visiting Marie. He told the story about her “birthday present” from the bailiffs and how the young count had prevented the seizure with a check for a thousand francs. But they returned a few days later, and this time Marie said, “There’s no point, my friend. I am crushed by debts and my creditors are pursuing me relentlessly, which means that my end is near.… Let them ruin me to the point of destitution. If I don’t die then I will learn from this lesson.” Olympe had left in tears. Etienne then spoke of Stackelberg’s desertion, and how Ned Perregaux had not been received for several months. “I don’t understood why.… He loved her, despite everything, as much as in the beginning.… This morning, an hour after the death three men came into her bedroom. One of them—I don’t have to name him—knelt by her bed, praying and sobbing. The two others [presumably Ned’s guardian and lawyer] searched through all the drawers in all the chests; [Clotilde] helped them. They took letters and papers, but they did not find
the important one they were looking for.” It was a document “written in English”—Marie and Ned’s marriage certificate.

Two days later, on the afternoon of February 5, Marie’s funeral took place at La Madeleine. Parish archives record that the cosignatories on the death certificate were Frédéric Romain Vienne and Marie’s concierge,
Pierre Privé, who paid the ceremony cost of 1,354 francs.
The church was still hung with black draperies from two earlier requiems that day, the decoration of a crown and silver initial
D
(the insignia of the deceased Count Ducamp de Bussy) assumed by
Le Siècle
’s obiturist to be Marie’s own coat of arms.

In
Sins of Youth
, Dumas fils maintains that only two men followed Marie’s coffin. He identifies them in his novel as the “Count de G., who came from London on purpose, and the old duke, who was supported by two footmen.”
Méjannes, however, who claimed to have attended Marie’s funeral himself, says that there were four other men present—but not Guiche or Stackelberg. These were: “
Olympe A. Edouard D[elessert]…. Tony and Edouard P.” Vienne provides yet another version. He noticed Guiche there as well as “a grand old man,” who he did not think could be Stackelberg, as he had not been invited. In his account the congregation at La Madeleine comprised “a sympathetic, welcoming crowd”—a fact that can be documented, because chairs for a special mass at La Madeleine had to be paid for, and a receipt exists listing twenty of them.

The same people followed the hearse to Montmartre cemetery, Romain walking beside Ned, who was trying in vain to hold back his tears. Behind them, at a slight distance, came Olympe, also visibly moved, and then the other friends. “I saw several women crying on the tomb,” said Romain. “They had come to say goodbye to the one who had been so good to them.” He also saw the relative with whom Marie had first stayed in Paris, Mme Vital, who had not spoken to her distant cousin since throwing her out of her house, now loftily declaring that she had come to
pardon her. Standing at the graveside, Ned Perregaux was growing even more distraught, oblivious to everything around him, his gait unstable, his features distorted. He seemed about to faint when he was handed the holy water sprinkler that the priest was passing around, and when the service was over, out of respect for his grief, the rest of the group left him alone by the grave.

Some days later, Delphine, wearing her usual rough serge clothes and clogs, arrived in Paris with her husband, Constant Paquet. They were there to claim their inheritance but were immediately faced with a barrage of unpaid bills and lawsuits. Dr. Koreff would be suing them, alleging (falsely) to have made 280 visits to Marie, and Ned Perregaux had already started legal proceedings. He was claiming back diamonds he had given Marie and a
thoroughbred “of superb genealogy,” which he said had only been loaned to the deceased. A vet had testified that the horse was the viscount’s property, and jewelers had produced bills in his name, as well as receipts for the rental of her apartment, but Ned, capricious as ever, abandoned the suit after the court’s first sitting.

When an emerald necklace and other jewels were reported missing,
Clotilde was “hunted down” by the beneficiaries.
Charles Matharel de Fiennes defended her in print, declaring that the dead girl had been buried with the rings and “a magnificent rosary” that her maid was accused of stealing. It was Romain who was most convinced of her guilt, and he went as far as reporting her to the police. He had taken on the role of adviser to the Paquets, suggesting that they go together to a marble cutter to arrange a headstone and escorting them to
Montmartre cemetery. But when they reached the place where Marie had been buried a fortnight earlier, they discovered the earth leveled off: her grave had disappeared.

This was Ned Perregaux’s doing. Distressed to find that Marie had been allocated a space for only five years, he had immediately
arranged to buy a vault and two meters of ground with a concession for perpetuity. Moving a body from one grave to another required the permission of the deceased’s family as well as the presence of the police. Dumas fils, who records this
in the novel, has Armand leave Paris for a few days to seek the permission of Marguerite’s sister. But as Marie’s husband, albeit in English law, Ned was not obliged to contact Delphine and instead had acquired the consent of the prefect of police—
Edouard Delessert’s father.

In the novel, the gardener at Montmartre—who has been paid by Armand to keep Marguerite’s grave covered with fresh white camellias—is convinced that the young man’s motive for exhuming her body is more emotional than practical. “I would wager that he wants to change her grave simply in order to have one more look at her,” he tells the narrator. “The first word he said to me when he came to the cemetery was: ‘How can I see her again?’ ” This was Heathcliff’s response after Cathy’s burial in
Wuthering Heights
(coincidentally published at the end of that year). “I’ll have her in my arms again!” he vows, casting aside his spade when it hits the coffin and scraping away the earth with his hands. He never sees her body but hears a sigh, and then another, close to his ear, which convinces him that Cathy’s presence is still with him. “I relinquished my labour of agony, and felt consoled at once: unspeakably consoled.” Armand, on the other hand, needs the horrible reality of the corpse itself to persuade him that Marguerite is lost to him forever. Taking pity on him, the narrator volunteers to accompany him to the cemetery.

Marie was now, as Liszt put it, “
delivered up to sepulchral worms,” lying beneath a tomb of white marble engraved with the words

On one side the initials
A
and
P
are entwined in an exact replica of the Perregaux script—a token consolation for Ned. Her destiny had come full circle, but this was not the end. “
I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life,” she told Clotilde, as if foreseeing the last words of Marguerite (“I am going to live!”) and of Violetta (
“Ah! ma io ritorno a viver!”
). Her final wish could not have been more specific. “I want you to put a very weak bolt on my coffin,” Marie implored. “This is the most important thing of all.”

O
N
18 F
EBRUARY
1847, an advertisement in several leading Parisian journals gave notice of an auction the following week of “
a rich and elegant property.” Its entire contents were to come under the hammer, from kitchen utensils to objets d’art—even the horses, bridles, and saddles from its stables. Two hundred posters were erected around the city and eight hundred catalogues distributed, but what caught everyone’s eye were the words in small print: “After the death of Mme Plessis boulevart [
sic
] de la Madeleine, no 11.” It was this that caused such excitement. The public preview and four-day sale would provide the chance to explore a celebrated courtesan’s domain; to examine not only Marie’s furniture, ornaments, paintings, and books but her dresses, furs, jewels, cosmetic pots, and all the other glamorous accessories of her profession. Grandes dames, dandies, and demimondaines could talk of little else, and among others determined to attend were genuine collectors, enthralled by the rarity of certain items, as well as more unexpected figures. One of these was
Charles Dickens.

Dickens had been in Paris at the time of Marie’s death, renting number 48, rue de Courcelles, in the elegant Eighth Arrondissement. His incredulity at the public’s response was compounded by a fascination of his own. Fallen women of all types intrigued him, and, according to his friend and biographer
John Forster, it
had crossed his mind to make Marie the subject of a book, feeling that her short life contained a powerfully moralistic story. He was aware of legends starting to circulate about her, from the romantic to the absurd, and he himself had already fictionalized her end. “
The greatest medical practitioner in Paris was called to her bedside. ‘What are your wishes?’ he asked when he saw that she was lost. She replied, ‘To see my mother,’ and her mother came running, a simple Breton peasant, wearing the picturesque costume of her province; she knelt at the bed of her daughter, stayed there praying until Marie was dead.” Dickens had heard it said that a broken heart had killed the young courtesan, but he was not convinced. “
For my part, as a genteel Englishman, I am inclined to believe that she died of ennui and satiety. Satiety can kill just as effectively as hunger.”

He and Forster had spent a fortnight together sightseeing, their itinerary taking in the usual attractions—the Louvre, Versailles, opera, theaters, and concerts—interspersed with “
the gaudy and ghastly.” Of far more interest to Dickens were their visits to the women’s penitentiary of Saint-Lazare, to hospitals, prisons, cemeteries, and the morgue, all of which he observed “
with a dreadful insatiability.” The sale of Marie Duplessis’s possessions would be another such excursion. Although not in Paris for the day of the preview, he was back in time for the sale itself, and in a letter to Count d’Orsay (who, as Agénor de Guiche’s uncle, already knew all about Marie Duplessis), Dickens expressed his astonishment.