The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (33 page)

“one immense Belshazzar’s hall”:
Lord Beaconsfield,
Correspondence with His Sister, 1832–1852
(London: John Murray, 1886). Letter of 16 January 1843.

“Your conversation tonight interested me”:
Quoted in Gros,
Une courtisane romantique.
First printed in
L’amateur d’autographes
, no. 18 (April 1865) as the only letter of MD to have been sold at auction, first in the collection of Trémont (1852) and then in that of Laverdet (1861).

“When we were installed”:
Mané,
Le Paris viveur
(Paris: E. Dentu, 1862).

The beautiful grace which he brought:
This all sounds entirely plausible, except for the fact that Henri de Pené would have been only fourteen years old at the time. It could be argued, though, that he was an exceptionally precocious student, as he had established himself as a political columnist by the age of nineteen. Also, if Marie had been approached by teenagers, it would explain her initial hesitation about accepting their invitation. “You know, don’t you, that an Opera ball is every schoolboy’s dream,” remarks the narrator of Alexandre Dumas fils’s
La vie à vingt ans
(Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1854
).
“I sold my dictionaries in order to go,” replies his friend.

Count Edouard de Perregaux:
Vienne disguises him as “Robert de Saint-Yves,” a name he may have taken from the original French translation of Verdi’s
La Traviata
, in which the surname of the heroine, Violetta, Marie’s operatic counterpart, is de Saint-Ys.

“Mlle A.O.”:
Edition of 8 May 1843.

The tone of a formal, impatient note:
No trace of evidence exists for this voyage, but her most reliable biographer, the scholarly Johannes Gros, was convinced that a large medallion called
Tête d’étude avec fleurs
, which appeared at the Salon of 1849, was a portrait of Marie painted in Rome. Its subsequent disappearance makes his claim impossible to verify.

“After her death a copy of the novel”:
Claudin,
Mes souvenirs.
Charles Matharel de Fiennes claimed to have seen a portrait, “painted by a master,” which was a version of Greuze’s famous work
Jeune fille à la cruche cassée
; instead of the broken vase, a symbol of lost virginity, “Marie holds in her hand the immortal book of Abbé Prévost” (
L’Entr’acte
, 10 and 11 February 1852).

their passion was a source of misery:
In Dumas’s novel, it is Armand who sends Marguerite a copy of the book, wanting to draw her attention to their resemblance to Prévost’s lovers. (It is inscribed “Manon to Marguerite. Humility” and signed “Armand Duval.”) Realizing that he cannot change his mistress’s life, Armand resolves to change his own; he starts gambling in order to meet their expenditure and discovers this to be an effective distraction. “Jealousy would have kept me awake … while gambling gave a new turn to the fever which would otherwise have preyed upon my heart.” Ned, however, could not bring himself to be complicit.

Ned Perregaux had acquired:
There is no entry of a sale in the name of Perregaux—or anyone else associated with Marie—in the listings of the region’s notary at the time, Léon Armand Gaucheron, whose records are held in Montigny Archives. According to Vienne, though, the Perregaux family had their own notary in Paris, but with no knowledge of a name, it is impossible to trace a confirmation of the property sale. An article in
La Gazette de Bougival
(undated clipping in the collection of Jean-Marie Choulet) is illustrated with a photograph of the house—now a suburban villa—believed to have been Marie’s. No source of evidence is given for this, nor for the following claim: “Marie Duplessis lived on the Ile de la Chaussée, the eastern tip of which is known as Ile Gautier (Marguerite’s surname).”

is said to have been frequented by Marie:
Called La Camélia in response to local lore, the restaurant still exists today and has one Michelin star.

As a laureate of Chantilly:
With thoroughbreds costing fabulous prices there were only nine of the Jockey Club’s three hundred members wealthy enough to
faire courir
—to own and raise racehorses. Edouard de Perregaux was one of them.

“enormous debts and terrifying losses”:
Le Siècle
, 8 May 1843.

“It’s a very agreeable surprise”:
Quoted in Choulet,
Promenades à Paris et en Normandie avec la dame aux camélias.

“But he kept Alphonsine out of sight”:
Quoted in Nicholas John,
Violetta and Her Sisters.

“I adore you”:
This is the passage read aloud by Armand in the play, after which he remarks, “She’s right, but she does not love, because love knows no reason.”

“lady companion”:
Faculté de droit de Toulouse
(Toulouse: Caillol et Baylac, 1869).

“a free, blissful society”:
Quoted in Prasteau,
The Lady of the Camellias: A Story of Marie Duplessis.

But even a century earlier:
In
John Neumeier’s 1978 ballet version, the heroine is shadowed by a second ballerina in the role of Manon, who becomes the amoral, materialistic doppelgänger of loving, tender Marguerite.

“At the beginning of the third act”:
Quoted in Vandam,
An Englishman in Paris
, vol. 1.

“Mme la Comtesse Deperegaud”:
Lucien-Graux,
Les factures de la dame aux camélias.

“a great similarity with her own”:
Hays,
L’Ancien Merlerault.

“as a work of charity”:
Quoted in Georges Soreau
La Vie de la dame aux camélias
(Paris: Editions de la
Revue de France
, 1898).

“She was discovered twelve years later”:
Parent-Duchâtelet,
La prostitution à Paris au XIXe siècle.

Count von Stackelberg had come back:
Baden-Baden’s Liste des Etrangers records that “Stackelberg, baron de, Russe” was staying in the town (without his wife, who went earlier that summer) between 21 August and 22 September—a period coinciding exactly with the dates that Ned Perregaux had been alone in Spa. But if Marie was reunited with Stackelberg in Baden-Baden she left no evidence to confirm it.

“Have you given it”:
“Méjannes,” column in
Gil Blas
, 18 October 1887.

it was back in rue d’Antin:
Joséphine Bloch, aka Marix, posed for two Ary Scheffer paintings in 1837 when she was fifteen. A Scheffer oil painting given the title
Marie Duplessis, la dame aux camélias
, was sold at an auction in Fontainebleau in November 1996, but the pensive girl sitting in an armchair bears little resemblance to Marie. Catalogue from the collection of Jean Hournon.

“an arsenal of the most elegant coquetterie”:
Henry Lumière, “
La dame aux camélias: Une lettre inédite de Marie Duplessis
,”
La Revue Normande
, 1900.

“She particularly owed her fortune”:
Le Corsaire
, 8 March 1852.

“a thousand plots”:
Vandam,
An Englishman in Paris
, vol. 1.

“interested her far less”:
Gros,
Une courtisane romantique.

The cause of tuberculosis would not be discovered:
Evading the medical profession for centuries, the means of transmission was not known until the German bacteriologist Robert Koch identified the bacillus, subsequently given his name. R.T.H. Laënnec, one of the most revered figures in the history of French medicine, regarded the question of contagion as “highly dubious … 
In France, at least, it does not seem to be,” he wrote in 1818, his opinion still virtually unquestioned by physicians forty years later.

“elixir of long life”:
Catalogue for Hôtel Drouot sale, 28 June 2004, from the collection of Jean Darnel.

“with perfect mediocrity”:
Le Corsaire
, 4 April 1852.

“the coming of old age”:
Dumas fils,
La dame aux camélias.

“You’re wasting your time, Marquis”:
There is a very similar exchange in the novel between Marguerite and the Count de N.

Some chroniclers of Marie’s:
According to Johannes Gros, Ned “certainly provided Dumas with several character traits for the suitor,” while the historian R. du Mesnil du Buisson cites evidence for this in the scene where the Count de N. pulls out a splendid pocket watch and announces that it is time for him to go to his club. The Swiss Perregauxs were famous watchmakers, and Ned himself owned a magnificent example encased in gold and engraved with his entwined initials and the family coat of arms.

The veteran actor Marie Bouffé:
Le dîner de Madelon
was a one-act vaudeville by Désaugiers. Davesne’s
Le père Turlututu
had Bouffé as the lead, and the program included Racine’s
Phèdre
with Jacques-Charles Odry,
La Basquaise
by Fusch and Mlle Bertin, and
Premières armes de Richelieu
, starring Virginie Déjazet. The performance concluded with the two-act
Le gamin de Paris
, by Bayard and Van den Bruck; a polka,
Le pas de la sylphide;
followed by a quadrille in which various artists appeared. “Then M. Cavallo, the pianist, played several pieces of his own composition,” wrote Paul d’Ariste. “A rather overloaded programme, as one can see.”
La vie et le monde du boulevard (
1830
–
1870
)
(Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1930).

“Her name on the posters”:
Eugène Pierron,
Virginie Déjazet
(Paris: Bolle-Lasalle, 1856).

“Every member of the press” and “She spoke in all the jargons”:
Eugène de Mirecourt,
Déjazet
(Paris: Gustave Havard, 1855).

“She was alone there”:
If this was the same gala night, then it must have been Stackelberg, not Ned Perregaux, who provided the box for Marie—not surprisingly, as the price for a stage box at a special benefit performance such as this was “enough to keep a family for six months.” Jules Janin,
L’Artiste
, 1 December 1851; Dumas fils,
Théâtre complet
, vol. 3: Notes.

Alexandre was eyeing but Marie:
Marie could have been collecting the bronze frame itemized on her Susse account as paid for by Ned and engraved with the Perregaux arms. Susse was also the dealer of sculptures by James Pradier, whose wife, Louise, had seduced Dumas fils in 1843 and was the model for the nymphomaniac heroine of his novel
L’affaire Clemenceau.

“She wore a muslin dress”:
Dumas fils (preface by André Maurois),
La dame aux camélias.
Years later, Dumas fils bought Marie’s chain from an antiquarian—“links of two centimetres separated by a tarnished little pearl”—which he gave to his daughter Jeanine d’Hauterive-Dumas, who wore it as a necklace.

Forced to pay his creditors:
Alexandre Dumas fils is listed among the contributors to
Sylphide
from June–November 1843, and has a poem,
“À une jeune fille,”
in its July issue. In
Paris Elégant
(1 Octobre 1844) is a piece published under his own name, a tribute to the writer Joseph Méry.

“I know of no two characters”:
Quoted in F.W.J Hemmings,
The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979).

“We went together”:
Quoted in Gros,
Une courtisane romantique.

“What are you complaining about?”:
Quoted in Viel-Castel,
Mémoires.

“If you have spent a little too much time”:
Paris Elégant
, 1 October 1844.

“She gave me to understand”:
Quoted in Edith Saunders,
The Prodigal Father: Dumas Père et Fils and
The Lady of the Camellias (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951).

On one such day:
In the notes he gave to prepare the actors for a new production of his play, Dumas fils declared this to have been “a fine day in September ’44”—the date every biographer and Dumas scholar, from André Maurois to Claude Schopp, has used to mark the beginning of his liaison with Marie. But not only was Alexandre involved with his actress in September 1844—their breakup, which caused him to “shed hot tears,” was at the beginning of October—Marie had not yet moved in to boulevard de la Madeleine, where the events Dumas fils describes took place. Their first meeting must have been after January 1845, when she left rue d’Antin, and as both Marie and Eugène were present at the Variétés gala of February 25, it seems likely that Alexandre was there too. His reason for predating his first encounter with Marie by six or seven months—and presumably also for using her previous address in the novel—can only have been to make their affair appear more significant: she was, after all, the most profound influence on his career. Albert Vandam was right in saying that Dumas fils “had not seen half as much of Alphonsine Duplessis during her life as is commonly supposed.”