The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (3 page)

With the arrival of silent movies,
The Lady of the Camellias
underwent a fourth incarnation. A Danish film of 1907 was followed by a 1911 version in which Bernhardt herself appeared, and a decade later came
Alla Nazimova giving a high-camp performance opposite Rudolph Valentino’s sloe-eyed Armand. The advent of sound brought Abel Gance’s 1934 adaptation, with the sparkling Parisian chanteuse Yvonne Printemps, and then the great classic:
George Cukor’s 1936 film
Camille
starring
Greta Garbo
.
Of all the legendary interpreters, Garbo may have come closest to embodying the real Marie, bringing an ironical intelligence to the role, ridding it of sentiment, and changing the notion of the heroine as a victim of men. She believed that Marie, whose story she researched, had loved her work and the lifestyle it allowed her, and to Cukor’s delight, she took the initiative in her scenes with Armand (Robert Taylor). “
She never touches but kisses her lover all over the face. Often she is the aggressor in
lovemaking. Very original.” Since Garbo’s
Camille
there have been movie versions in numerous foreign languages, including Egyptian (the 1942
Leila, ghadet el camelia
). In
Mauro Bolognini’s heavy-handed
Lady of the Camelias
(1981), Isabelle Huppert gives a biographical portrait of Marie Duplessis herself. This was followed three years later by an English film in which Greta Scacchi’s Camille starred opposite a baby-faced Colin Firth. The list of film spin-offs includes Antonioni’s 1953
La signora senza camelie
and Baz Lurhmann’s
Moulin Rouge
of 2001, in which Nicole Kidman stars as a consumptive courtesan in love with an impoverished young writer (Ewan McGregor).

Of the dozen or so
ballets based on
The Lady of the Camellias
, the first was the quaintly named
Rita Gauthier
[
sic
], created in 1857 by Filippo Termanini, which ends happily with the lovers’ marriage. John Taras made
Camille
for the Ballets Russes in 1946, and Antony Tudor choreographed his own
Lady of the Camellias
for New York City Ballet in 1951. There were Gsovsky’s intolerably long
Die Kameliendame
, staged in Berlin in 1957, and Maurice Béjart’s 1959 pas de deux
Violetta
, danced by Violette Verdy to music from
La Traviata.
But the only two versions in current repertories are
Frederick Ashton’s
Marguerite and Armand
, made in 1963 as a showcase for Fonteyn and Nureyev, and
John Neumeier’s 1978
Lady of the Camellias
, created for Stuttgart’s dramatic ballerina Marcia Haydée. When Ashton choreographed his ballet, the Dumas fils source was considered such an “
old hack story” that he avoided a conventional narrative by distilling it into headlines—Prologue, The Meeting, The Country, The Insult, The Death of the Lady of the Camellias—which must be bafflingly elliptical to people unfamiliar with the plot. In today’s audiences they are the majority. The play still resurfaces from time to time (in 2002 it was staged as a West End musical,
Marguerite
, set in German-occupied Paris with a TV soap star in the title role), but the name Marguerite Gautier has barely survived the twentieth century. As for Marie Duplessis, it was her love of
camellias and romantically early death that provided the springboard for all these reinterpretations, yet she is unknown now to anyone apart from the (mainly French) cognoscenti.

I first discovered her while researching the life of Ashton and learned more when working on my biography of Nureyev. Wanting to say something new about
Marguerite and Armand
, I began casting around for background material on Marie Duplessis. There wasn’t much. She appeared in English anthologies of courtesans or in syrupy fictionalized versions of her life, and as her hold on me grew, I had no choice but to improve my O-Level French. A year or two later, with Marie becoming more and more seductive as a subject in her own right, I had begun working my way through just about every book, article, obituary, and tribute ever written about her. Most of these were stored in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s intimidatingly vast repository in the concrete wasteland of Quai François Mauriac, a ten-minute TGV ride from Paris’s Saint-Michel station. I’d been warned of the challenge of locating BnF material, but I hadn’t anticipated that this search would require cryptanalysis skills to crack its codes, as well as the patience and nimble fingers of a lace maker to prevent the microfilm machines from wildly unraveling their spools of archival treasures.

In the notes to a French paperback edition of
La dame aux camélias
, I had been intrigued by the mention of “
a mysterious friend” from her native village who was one of the few mourners at her funeral. I remember wishing at the time that Marie had lived a century and a half later so that I could track down this man as the key source for her Normandy background. And then I found him. It was her first biographer,
Romain Vienne, the son of Nonant innkeepers, who knew everything about her upbringing—and a great deal more. Before this discovery I couldn’t see how it was possible even to attempt a rounded portrait of Marie: no diaries existed and almost all her letters had been destroyed. But in Vienne’s
The Truth about the Real Lady
of the Camellias
, her voice could be heard as vividly as if it had been tape-recorded, and her character—witty, skeptical, modest, sophisticated, merry, subdued—emerged on page after page. Like countless others before me, I fell in love.

I think a large part of Marie’s appeal was the fact that, as Nureyev would have said, she made her own luck. The mythical versions begin with the courtesan at the height of her success, giving no idea of her trajectory—of what she overcame. Abandoned by her mother and abused, degraded, and sexually exploited by her father, she used her burgeoning beauty to make a new start for herself. From the moment of her arrival in Paris Marie took charge of her destiny: she was a survivor—she knew what she wanted and how to get it. The money she earned from selling her body did not make her a victim; it bought her independence, a privilege generally available only to women who were aristocrats. But Marie was freer than they were. As she was not required to conform to the ethics of the age, conversations in her presence could be as lewd as they were enlightening, which was the reason why a particular coterie of Parisian wits and intellectuals preferred demimondaines to grandes dames at their dinners. Often two or three of the Opéra’s most beautiful ballerinas would be there, magnificently dressed and bedecked with diamonds, but rarely did they speak a word. As the poet and essayist
Théodore de Banville explained, “
No one had told them to remain silent. But they instinctively guessed that the sparkle of their eyes and their scarlet lips had more value than anything they could say.” Marie, by contrast, was too clever and observant to remain appealingly mute in such company. An autodidact, avid reader, and regular theatergoer, she was determined to profit from Parisian culture and sample the same hedonistic pleasures available to men.

As Marie’s story mutated into different genres, her own personality became overshadowed by the dominant themes of sickness, sacrifice, and death. Dumas fils and Verdi softened her, capitulating to the romantic ideal that sought to exonerate and
desexualize the fallen woman. Psychologically, Marie had less in common with Violetta than with two other operatic heroines: Carmen, the sultry rebel, whose grave danger is that she acts like a man; and the remorselessly materialistic Manon Lescaut. Like Manon, whom she recognized as an alter ego, Marie was practical, willful, grasping, and manipulative. But these are human flaws, whereas Violetta, who renounces her own happiness, can seem infuriatingly and unconvincingly saintly to modern feminists. “
What rankles in me is that male composers and writers create women who are such gleaming ideals,” remarks Rebecca Meitles in
Violetta and Her Sisters.
“So few women have been able to be true to themselves.” Sophie Fuller agrees. “Why on earth didn’t Violetta simply ignore the self-righteous Germont?” she asks—a point that also troubled the singer Helen Field: “She wouldn’t actually have done that—at least
I
wouldn’t have done that! You find yourself asking who would.” And yet, Dumas fils was perfectly aware that he was stretching credibility. “One looks around in vain for a young woman who could justify the novel’s progression from love, through repentance to sacrifice. It would be a paradox,” he wrote in his 1867 preface. “Young people in their twenties who read it will say to themselves: ‘Were there ever girls like that?’ And young women will exclaim: ‘What a fool she was!’; It is not a play, it’s a legend.”

La Traviata
has survived for the reason recognized by Proust. It is Verdi’s music, with its transfiguration of the human voice, that reconciles an audience to the heroine’s conversion, signaling her capitulation by a key change and expressing pure, altruistic virtue in a surge of beatific sound. But for those moved by Violetta’s noble nature, the prosaic reality of the model may come as a shock. “You’re actually demolishing the myth,” the writer
Peter Conrad, a friend of mine, remarked in an e‑mail after reading my manuscript. “I regard Violetta as one of the great characters in drama. She acquires a true tragic grandeur, and Marie can’t help but be morally dwarfed by her. She’s the sow’s ear.”

Marie is a different woman to different people. To Garbo she was strong and controlling, to Fonteyn she had “
something of that vulnerability of the feminine woman, like Marilyn Monroe.” Duality was part of her nature; like Violetta, she was addicted to pleasure but beset by misgivings. And if their circumstances had been the same, who knows whether Marie would have made Violetta’s selfless choice? She believed herself capable of an infinite capacity to give—“
Oh how I could have loved!” she once exclaimed—and she, too, underwent a spiritual journey, begging forgiveness and wanting to atone for her moral irresponsibility.
Performance history has made this a love story between an older woman and a possessive youth, but it should be remembered that Marie was only twenty-three when she died. To the men whose sexual needs she served she brought beauty, grace, and distinction, and at the same time she elevated every aspect of her own life with the sensibility of an artist. This is what Dumas fils meant when he described Marie to his father as “
far superior to the profession she practises.” It was something also recognised by Liszt, whose attachment to Marie may have had consequences far more profound than their brief liaison. “
Without her knowing it,” he wrote, “she put me into the vein of poetry and music.” Marie Duplessis was one of the great romantic muses, and that, to me, is reason enough to tell her own, unsung story.

Part One
Alphonsine
 

O
N AN EARLY
summer afternoon in 1841, the stagecoach from Paris drew up in front of the Hôtel de La Poste in Nonant, a village in Lower Normandy. Among the alighting passengers were two girls in their late teens: the tall one, pale and elegantly dressed, was Alphonsine Plessis, a fledgling courtesan; the other, plump and pink-cheeked, was her maid, Rose.

Alphonsine had spent her early childhood in Nonant, where she was born on 15 January 1824. This was the first time she had returned home since leaving for Paris three years before. In spring she had given birth to a child fathered by the viscount who was her protector and on her doctor’s orders was coming to convalesce in the country. She had arranged to stay with her older sister, Delphine, who lived nearby, but the long journey had exhausted her, and she decided to rest at the hotel for a couple of days before moving on to Delphine’s cottage. At around five o’clock, refreshed by a siesta, Alphonsine came downstairs and said, smiling, to the proprietress,

“La pauvre Plessis” was still a subject of conversation in Nonant and its neighboring hamlets. Tales were told of her angelic mother, who had been forced to abandon her two children to escape the murderous abuse of her husband. It was said that Marin Plessis, a man whose infamy had earned him the reputation of an evil sorcerer, had sold the thirteen-year-old Alphonsine to Gypsies, and even more disturbing were the rumors of incest. Mme Vienne had last seen Alphonsine as a wild urchin exploiting her precocious sexuality as a way of begging for food, but the young woman who had arrived that day, wearing a lace-edged bonnet that prettily framed her ingenue face, had indeed changed beyond recognition. Her burnished peasant complexion had gone, replaced by the smooth sheen of white china, and she had acquired a self-assurance and social ease that completely belied the misery and degradation of her adolescence.

Eager for news of relatives and mutual friends, Alphonsine asked Mme Vienne if she and Rose could join the family table for dinner. The son of the house, twenty-five-year-old Romain, was also there that night, and although he did not remember Alphonsine, he still had a vivid picture of her mother, Marie. It had been market day and Mme Vienne had stopped to greet Mme Plessis, whose pallor and air of sadness had conveyed even to the twelve-year-old boy that something must be very wrong. Soon after came word of Mme Plessis’s flight. Romain, who wrote poetry and had spent several years in Paris studying medicine and law, was a sympathetic, sharp-witted young man, and Alphonsine warmed to him immediately. As soon as dinner was over she asked him to show her round the garden, and while he picked her a bunch of flowers, she chattered away, intriguing him with hints of piquant episodes in her Paris life.