The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (30 page)

Olympe Aguado had remained with his married mistress,
Mrs. Adrian Hope, until her scandalous divorce in 1855, when their affair was made public. Five years later he married Bertha de Freystedt, former demoiselle of honor to Stéphanie de Beauharnais, Grand Duchess of Baden. They had two children, Louis and ravishing, cat-eyed Carmen, named after his mother, who lived with them in the sumptuous Hôtel Milon d’Inval at 18, place Vendôme. This was also where Olympe had his photographic studio. By the 1850s, having learned the daguerrotype technique from Gustave Le Gray, Olympe had become a founding member of the Société Française de Photographie. In 1854, he and his young friend
Edouard Delessert invented the photographic visiting card, which caught on with the verve of an early Facebook. Later, Olympe became known for the tableaux vivants he staged with family and friends, dressing them up as fishermen in foul-weather oilcloths; poking fun at the pastimes of his grand milieu (
The Reader
, one of many Aguado photographs in the collection of Musée d’Orsay, shows him irreverently dozing off during
one of the reading sessions that were a regular practice at court). Madame Aguado was always a game subject, whether disguised as a lace maker or as a duenna with keys hanging from her belt. Small and rotund, she has a plain, mannish face with several chins, but her warmth is visible as she sits playing cards and gazing mischievously at her son. With Emperor Napoléon III and Princess Eugénie among Olympe’s regular sitters, he moved in a sphere that never could have included Marie. All the same, given his affection and loyalty, it is not fanciful to presume that had she lived just two more years, there would be photographs of Marie Duplessis among the Aguado archive.

Of all the men in Marie’s life, there were two who never stopped loving her. Ned Perregaux, having inherited the authentic title of count after his brother’s death in 1857, was a highly desirable bachelor, but he chose never to marry. He was living alone in Saint-Cyr, Inde-et-Loire, when on 30 May 1889, at the age of seventy-three, he died in the middle of the night. His body was discovered by two neighbors, a gardener and a farmer.

Romain Vienne was declared missing in Nonant, where reports of the ravages of cholera among émigrés in California had led villagers to suppose that he had fallen victim to the epidemic. The Ornaise writer
Gustave Le Vavasseur wondered if Vienne had rekindled his medical knowledge in order to work toward finding a cure or whether, “
with his inventive intelligence,” he had made a fortune in the gold rush. In fact, Romain did not stay long in San Francisco, instead spending almost a decade on what he called “peregrinations” across America. When he finally returned to France in 1858, having almost forgotten his native language, he settled in Nonant and became a local racing journalist. Only in his final years was he able to exorcise what Le Vavasseur called “
the phantom who had haunted him since he was a young man—that of the Dame aux Camélias.” In 1862, at the age of forty-six, Romain finally married: his wife was twenty-three, Marie’s own age when she died. Her name was Alphonsine.

The prime source as well as the inspiration for my book is Romain Vienne’s
The Truth about the Lady of the Camellias
, and yet it is by no means definitive. “I know the complete list of Marie Duplessis’s lovers and I intend to tell all,” he declared to the editor of
L’Eclair
in 1886, the year he began writing the book (issue 10 April 1894). But there were several lovers whom Marie kept to herself. One was Alexandre Dumas fils, whose affair Vienne believed was pure invention. “He was bragging,” he continued. “He never saw Marie. This beautiful girl, despite being known for her generous heart, would never have granted that writer a single kiss.” Enough evidence exists to prove otherwise, and I can’t help wondering if Vienne’s exclusion of Dumas fils from his book was motivated by an element of revenge. He was obsessively proprietary about Marie, to the point of having visiting cards printed with the words
Friend of the Lady of the Camellias
under his name. Regarding himself as a man of letters, Vienne believed that he knew Marie better than anyone else in Paris. How galling, then, it must have been that a penniless young poet had made his name and fortune out of her. Nevertheless, he actively sought Dumas fils’s approval by sending him a copy of his own work. The famous novelist eventually responded, and his description of Vienne as “a sympathetic and faithful historian of the model”
would today be used as a jacket quotation (extract of a letter dated 1 April 1887, catalogue to Hôtel Drouot sale on 23 and 24 March 2009). But this must have been an early draft. In a preface in which Vienne describes being taken to a performance of the play after a decade of living abroad, he claims never to have read “a traitorous word” of
La dame aux camélias.
He left before the curtain rose.

Vienne himself, I feel certain, would have kept Marie’s confidences to the grave, had it not been for the publication of two revealing articles. The first, by
Charles du Hays, exposed “the bitter truth and secret sadness” of her childhood and was collected in a book published in 1885 (
L’ancien Merlerault: Récits chevalins d’un vieil éleveur
). The second, “
Les quartiers de la dame aux camélias
,” by Count de Contades, was a detailed, if erroneous, investigation into her genealogy and appeared at the end of that year in
Le Livre
(reprinted in Contades’,
Portraits et fantaisies
). These clearly acted as a trigger. In an unpublished letter to Contades, a well-known Ornaise figure, Vienne announced his intention to write his own book, saying he had begun assembling reminiscences and jotting down notes.

“A hundred times I have felt inclined to write the story of Marie Duplessis. A hundred times I have been urged to do this. I was not able to decide for a number of reasons which do not have any place here. Now at last I am resigned.… The memory of Marie herself has been lost for too long under the fanciful pen of Dumas” (letter from the collection of Jean-Marie Choulet).

He was, he told Contades, the only person alive who knew all the particularities of the courtesan’s life, but he promised to treat its “devilish details” with discretion. He was obliged for reasons of the narrative, he said, to give himself a leading role, although it vexed him to do this. When writing the book itself, Vienne also felt the need to explain his motives. Not only does the title attest to his monopoly on the truth, but he ends the memoir with a
pedantic series of paragraphs intended to put the record straight. A remark made decades earlier (by Jules Janin), that Marie’s love letters had been auctioned along with everything else, produced a tirade of protest from Vienne. He knew the whereabouts of a secret drawer, he declared, and had personally overseen the burning of all three hundred letters, apart from saving thirty—which must have been his own.

Romain Vienne was, in the words of a contemporary, “a real character” (
L’Eclair
, 10 April 1874). He studied medicine, read for the bar, became involved in politics, worked as a journalist and a financier, and joined Lamartine’s revolutionary movement in 1848. He regarded himself primarily as a writer and in the Great Fire of San Francisco claimed to have lost ten volumes of work—“diverse poems, dramas and comedies, two libretti which Donizetti had commissioned, certain novels, etc.” This, I believe, was wishful thinking, as Vienne was never prolific. His only other extant work is
Le berceau
, a collection of juvenilia, and
Système des bornes
, a political pamphlet. Another book,
Pages oubliés
, was advertised but never appeared.

The Truth about the Lady of the Camellias
was published in 1887 by Paul Olendorff and reprinted eleven times that year. The daily journal
L’Estafette
had serialized it between 21 August and 5 October 1887, and although the first extracts were anonymous (“by a childhood friend”), Vienne was named in all the others. He had clearly expected his book to cause a stir because in an unpublished letter to Delphine, dated 21 October 1886, he urged her to wait until publication to sell her sister’s portrait. “It will be the moment when everyone is talking about the true story of Marie Duplessis … and if you miss this opportunity you will never have another” (from the collection of Jean-Marie Choulet). He was mistaken. Marie’s great champions, literary giants Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, were no longer alive, and Vienne’s memoir was not reviewed in any major publication. Then, almost
a decade later, came a resurgence of interest in the real Lady of the Camellias. This had been initiated by the prestigious Parisian
Revue Encyclopédique
, which devoted the issue of 15 February 1896 to Marie, publishing previously unseen portraits and half a dozen of her notes to Ned Perregaux. A subsequent issue of 24 October 1896 contained a long, deferential article focusing on “A Friend and Biographer of the Dame aux Camélias” by Edmond Deschaumes. For Vienne, though, this accolade was too late. On 9 April 1894, he had died in Nonant, at the age of seventy-eight.

In 1898 came George Soreau’s
La vie de la Dame aux Camélias
, which closely followed Vienne’s account, even adopting his pseudonyms for Marie’s lovers.
Johannes Gros’s exhaustively researched
Alexandre Dumas et Marie Duplessis
appeared in 1923, followed six years later by the even more thorough
Une Courtisane romantique, Marie Duplessis.
The punctilious Gros was maddened by Vienne’s factual inaccuracies, lapses into fiction, and disguised dramatis personae, but his own books are completely without any linear narrative or sense of character. I decided to draw extensively on both. I used Gros as a bibliography, his invaluable footnotes with details of articles (not always correctly dated) leading me to obscure nineteenth-century journals, stored either as bound tomes or on microfilm in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Crucial too was his reprinting in
Une courtisane romantique
of the sale catalogue, with its list of successful bidders, as well as the long, detailed medical instructions by Marie’s two doctors. Vienne I felt I could trust on everything to do with Marie’s Normandy background, but I had to follow my instinct when it came to believing his account of her life in Paris.

The almost total absence of any personal correspondence (destroyed either by accident or intention) was a serious obstacle. Agénor de Guiche’s papers were burned in a fire at his château, Mauvière; Perregaux family legend has it that Marie’s letters to Ned, “tied with a pink ribbon,” as well as his to her, tied in
blue, were thrown on the fire in 1915 by fifteen-year-old Claudine de Perregaux on the orders of her blind grandfather Frédéric de Perregaux (Béatrice Perregaux in
Violetta and her Sisters
, edited by Nicholas John). There are no references to Marie in Stackelberg’s archive in Tallin, nor have any letters between Marie and Liszt come to light. I found I had to be grateful for a fragment of a letter quoted in an Hôtel Drouot catalogue or already published in a book. One important source for several unknown letters and documents was Jean-Marie Choulet’s
Promenades à Paris et en Normandie avec la dame aux camélias.
With its illustrations of nineteenth-century Paris and photographs of the unchanged villages of the Orne, Choulet’s book is also a splendidly evocative portrayal of Marie’s two worlds. Essential, too, as a visual representation of her life and afterlife, is Christine Issartel’s
Les dames aux camélias de l’histoire à la légende.

Several articles contained fascinating new material. In
L’Entr’acte
, Charles Matharel de Fiennes, a well-respected theater critic, defended Marie’s maid in print after she had been accused of stealing. In return, Clotilde gave him some extraordinarily vivid, intimate information about Marie’s early life and final days (published in two parts on 10 and 11 February 1852).
L’Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et Curieux
, a nineteenth-century news aggregate, picked up an item published without a date in the Caen-based theatrical journal
Les Coulisses.
It was a conversation about Marie’s upbringing between Delphine and a lawyer, pseudonymously named “Quivis,” under the heading “The Truth about la Dame aux Camélias” (the title Vienne later used for his book). This gave rise to a “curious letter” published in
Les Coulisses
on 8 November 1882 by one E. du Mesnil, whose convincing account of Marie’s ancestry provided me with a fresh interpretation. (Both accounts appeared in
L’Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et Curieux
on 10 September 1890).

Two unexpectedly valuable sources were a quirky book and a
single page of a sale catalogue. Docteur Lucien-Graux’s
Les factures de la dame aux camélias
itemizes and discusses all the bills kept by Marie—a revealingly exact record of how she lived—and includes two previously unpublished letters. The Hôtel Drouot sale,
Théâtre et Spectacle
, on 28 June 2004 auctioned Jean Darnel’s collection of Marie Duplessis’s memorabilia (much of it now in the Frederick R. Koch Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale). The Furnishings category included 1842 receipts for Chinese vases, a clock, and candlesticks paid for by Stackelberg, which enabled me to date the beginning of his relationship with Marie. A rental bill was even more telling—the evidence I needed to challenge Dumas fils’s account about the duration of his affair with Marie. As Lucien-Graux says, “Dates can speak.”

“For several days”:
Letter (written in French) by Dickens to Count d’Orsay, Paris, March 1847. Published in Robert du Pontavice de Heussey,
L’inimitable Boz: Etude historique et anecdotique sur la vie et l’oeuvre de Charles Dickens
(Paris: M. Quantin, 1889).

“I should have died”:
Quoted in Francis Gribble,
Dumas, Father and Son
(London: Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, 1930).

“It’s original!” Alexandre Dumas fils, “Mémoires littéraires:
L’odyssée de la dame aux camélias,”
L’Illustré Soleil du Dimanche
, undated, from the collection of Jean Hournon.