The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (39 page)

A chubby, teenage Marie in a Parisian theater in her phase as a lorette, not yet able to afford a box of her own, and with no signature corsage and bouquet of camellias. The watercolor is by Camille Roqueplan, her friend Nestor’s brother.
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Nestor Roqueplan, the quintessential Parisian dandy, whose domain was the fashionable cafés and restaurants of the boulevard des Italiens. Former editor-in-chief of
Le Figaro
and then director of the Théâtre des Variétés, he more or less discovered Marie on the Pont-Neuf, when she was still a waif without a sou, and remained a friend.
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One of ten pen-and-ink drawings by Viset of intimate scenes from the demimonde (illustrating
Une Courtisane Romantique
by Johannes Gros).
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The Paris Opéra’s infamous Foyer de la danse—an erotic marketplace for ballerinas and their wealthy admirers—painted by Eugène Lami. The elegant male habitués included figures from Marie’s circle: the Opéra’s director Dr. Louis Véron, poet Alfred de Musset, man-about-town Fernand de Montguyon, and Nestor Roqueplan. The legendary Romantic ballerina Fanny Elssler is pictured in the center, and on the right, lounging against an ornate pillar, is Monsieur Lautour-Mézeray. He was known to his friends as l’Homme au Camélia because of the white camellia he always wore—a habit Marie may well have copied.
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A summer night at La Grand Chaumière, the favorite haunt of students and their grisette girlfriends on boulevard du Montparnasse. A couple head off through the hornbeams for a romantic tryst while at the rotunda in the background other youngsters dance wild versions of the polka, quadrille, and cancan.
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Eugène Lami’s painting
A Box at the Opera
—a larger version of the box Marie ordered for most first nights, when she attracted almost as much attention as the artists on stage.
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An imagined rendering of Marie and an admirer in her opera box—the frontispiece to a memoir by her Normandy confidant Romain Vienne.
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Lola Montez, the famous courtesan and acquaintance of Marie’s, who was also part of the inner circle of the Café de Paris set, here in her favorite Spanish guise, c. 1847. Lithograph by J. G. Middleton.
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Die Allee der Bereiche der Klosterwiese, one of the fashionable promenades in Baden-Baden, where Marie met Count Gustav von Stackelberg and discovered her passion for horseriding.
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Marie’s first love, Duke Ag‌énor de Guiche, the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess de Gramont, who helped to mold the country girl into a model of Parisian style and manners. The portrait is by Ag‌énor’s uncle Count d’Orsay, the celebrated dandy and friend of Dickens’s.
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The doting Ned Perregaux, model for Dumas’s Armand, who defied his family by marrying Marie in an English registry office in 1846.
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