The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (35 page)
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Authors: Julie Kavanagh
“Celebrated for more than a title”:
L’Epoque
, 9 February 1847.
“Why, Madame?”:
Matharel de Fiennes,
L’Entr’acte
, 10 and 11 February 1852.
“Go quickly to her”:
Revue Encyclopédique
, 15 February 1896.
“If I had happened to be in Paris”:
2 May or 2 June. Liszt and d’Agoult,
Correspondance.
“banned from the bedroom”:
Matharel de Fiennes,
L’Entr’acte
, 10 and 11 February 1852.
“Forty-eight hours before”:
Amédée Achard (Grimm) in
L’Epoque
, 9 February 1847.
“Oh, I’m dying!” and following descriptions of Marie’s final moments:
Matharel de Fiennes,
L’Entr’acte
, 10 and 11 February 1852.
That evening Clotilde answered the door to Romain:
Vienne says that he returned to Paris on Tuesday, 20 February, but, writing forty years later, he has forgotten the exact date. He must have meant Tuesday, 2 February (the 20th, a Saturday, is the date of Marguerite’s death in the novel).
“The tenderness and touching taste”:
Roqueplan,
Parisine.
The church was still hung with black draperies:
In the announcement of Marie’s death in
Les Petites Affiches, Le Constitutionnel et Le Moniteur des Ventes
, she is plain “Mlle Plessis.”
“Olympe A.”:
“Méjannes,” column in
Gil Blas
, 18 October 1887.
thoroughbred “of superb genealogy”:
Gros,
Une courtisane romantique.
Clotilde was “hunted down”:
Matharel de Fiennes,
L’Entr’acte
, 10 and 11 February 1852.
In the novel:
Could Dumas fils himself have been there observing Ned? He had learned of Marie’s death when he was in Marseille, but had returned to Paris by February 12 or 13. The exhumation took place on the 16th. In the first two editions of the novel the cemetery is described as Père Lachaise, not Montmartre, but this may just be another of Dumas fils’s amendments of the facts. There is no written evidence of his presence at the exhumation (undisclosed to all but Ned Perregaux, the grave diggers, and the prefect of police). But how else was he able to describe the procedure in such grim detail?
“delivered up to sepulchral worms”:
1 May 1847. Liszt and d’Agoult,
Correspondance.
“I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life”:
Matharel de Fiennes,
L’Entr’acte
, 10 and 11 February 1852.
OSTSCRIPT
“a rich and elegant property” … “After the death”:
Gros,
Une courtisane romantique.
“The greatest medical practitioner”:
Letter (in French) from Dickens to Comte d’Orsay, Paris, March 1847, in Pontavice de Heussey,
L’inimitable Boz.
“For my part”:
Ibid.
“the gaudy and ghastly”:
Dickens, letter to the Rev. Edward Tagart, 28 January 1847. Pilgrim edition of
The Letters of Charles Dickens
, vol. 5: 1847–1849, ed. Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
“with a dreadful insatiability”:
John Forster,
The Life of Charles Dickens
(London: Cecil Palmer, 1928).
“Everyone whom”:
Letter to d’Orsay, in Pontarice du Heussey,
L’inimitable Boz.
“each object speak”:
Dumas fils, “M.D.,” in
Péchés de jeunesse.
“This one was dead”:
Dumas fils,
La dame aux camélias.
“For it is there, in the past”:
Dumas fils, “M.D.,” in
Péchés de jeunesse.
Delphine had held back:
In an unpublished letter dated 28 October 1869, Gustave Le Vavasseur describes an encounter with Delphine that took place at a notary’s office in Vimontier (Frederick R. Koch Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University). “The unhappy Plessis girl” admitted being in miserable circumstances, he says, having sold every item she had inherited and lost twenty thousand francs through speculation. She was trying to negotiate a loan and was considering selling the last remaining thing of value, which was Vidal’s portrait
Marie Duplessis aux bains des Pyrénées.
The fact that it was found in an attic a century later by her descendents suggests that Delphine either changed her mind or did not find a buyer.
“Did he intend to give the courtesan’s”:
Boudet,
La fleur du mal.
But the explanation:
Letter to Calmann Lévy, printed in the 1886 edition of
La dame aux camélias
(Paris: Quantin).
Count de G. who “launched” … “no more than”:
Dumas fils,
La dame aux camélias.
“It’s a history”:
Saint-Victor,
Le théâtre contemporain.
“The habitués”:
Vandam,
An Englishman in Paris
, vol. 1.
“Acting on impulse”:
Gustave Le Vavasseur, in
L’almanach de l’Orne
, 1895.
“The Faubourg St Germain” … “Haughty with men”:
Elisabeth de Gramont,
Pomp and Circumstance
, trans. Brian W. Downs (New York: Jonathan Cape’s Harrison Smith, 1979).
“My dear count”:
Alice Ozy to Théophile Gautier, Letter 960, 14? March 1847. Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre, ed.,
Théophile Gautier, correspondance générale 1846–1848
, vol. 3 (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1988).
“an amiable and witty”:
Alice Ozy to Théophile Gautier, Letter 162, Gautier correspondence, Lovenjoul Collection, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France.
“And he has kept”:
Mané,
Le Paris viveur.
“very extraordinary and distinguished”:
Quoted in Perényi,
Liszt.
“It was the last”:
Iassy, May or June 1847.
“He loved to lay stress”:
Wohl,
François Liszt.
“with his inventive intelligence”:
Le Vavasseur, in
l’Almanach de l’Orne
, 1895.
“the phantom who had haunted”:
Ibid.
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