The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (6 page)

Mme Toutain instructed her husband to go to Exmes to find out more.

“The information was deplorable,” Vienne reports. “It was, in effect, Plessis who had taken his fourteen-year-old daughter to Plantier. It was evident that the two scoundrels were in perfect accord, and that they had made an infamous pact.” Worried about the possibility of scandal, Mme Toutin decided to get rid of Alphonsine, who had anyway become capricious and slapdash. Not only that, but there had been complaints from the parents of other apprentices whom the girl was corrupting by teaching them about what she had learned, in shockingly indelicate language. Alphonsine was given no alternative but to return to Exmes.

“What went on during the next months in this isolated house, sheltered from curiosity, between the child and the hideous satyr?” writes Vienne. “One can guess without any trouble.” The ménage of
la petite
Plessis and Plantier had become a topic of such concern that the police were informed and began to make inquiries. Had the old man employed Alphonsine as a maid, or had she been “sold”? No one knew, but the fact was that she was living alone with an old man, and most people imagined the worst. When they were together a few years later, Vienne pressed Alphonsine about what had taken place, but was met with bitter silence. “This only confirmed my suspicion that there were passages in the story that would make even a
grande horizontale
blush.”

The 1981 film
Lady of the Camelias
shows Alphonsine complicit in the arrangement. A dirty urchin begging in the rain, she first encounters the Plantier figure when he gives her a coin, which she delightedly hands over to her father, who is watching from a café window. She willingly moves in with the old man and becomes sullen and resentful only with the onset of puberty. Her father is there in the bedroom with Plantier when Alphonsine first sees menstrual blood on the sheets, a moment Bolognini uses to dramatize the origin of one of the best-known aspects of the
Dame aux Camélias
myth. Wiping away her tears, Marin mawkishly whispers, “Don’t let that upset you. It’s quite natural at your age.… When it happened to your mother she wore a flower on her dress. A red flower. It was her way of letting me know not to bother her. There was a time when she didn’t wear any flower and you came into the world nine months later.” The truth, however, which Vienne claims that Alphonsine confided to him, was chillingly different. Completely ignorant about female matters, she was panic-stricken by the flow of blood and, seized by a primal terror of mutilation and defilement, fled from the house.

A couple named Denis, who ran a reputable inn on the Grand-Rue, took pity on the child and engaged her as a servant. Marin dared not object, as the mayor of Exmes had summoned him and questioned him at length. Earning a salary of sixty francs a year, Alphonsine remained for about eight months in this honest, tranquil house where Mme Denis kept a motherly watch over her charge—even having her sleep in a box room next to the couple’s bedroom. But one evening in October 1838, Marin arrived and announced that he had found employment for his daughter in an umbrella shop in Gacé. It was an opportunity too exciting to resist. Compared with the sedate Ornaise villages Alphonsine had known, Gacé was a city of light, a vibrant center with forty cafés, a dozen dress shops, and regular fairs and markets.
Maison Fremin, the umbrella shop where she began work
as a maid and apprentice, was one of eleven in the town. Women in modish bonnets and shawls wandered among the lime trees of Place du Château (its thirteenth-century tower now houses the Musée de la Dame aux Camélias), and, admiring them, Alphonsine felt as if she had been given a new life. There was also
a louche element to Gacé; the livestock market drew farmers from all around—men spending nights away from their families, who were only too glad to pay for the company of local girls. But after only two months, Marin arrived to take Alphonsine away.

This was another period that triggered a barrage of rumors. There was the possibility of incest, something Bolognini’s
Lady of the Camelias
makes much of. In the film, Alphonsine’s father is a swarthy male whom she nuzzles with adoration and kisses like a mistress. Theirs is the forbidden bond depicted by
Edith Wharton in her semipornographic fragment “Beatrice Palmato”—the sexual collusion between a father and his consenting, highly aroused daughter. Beatrice’s father is an adept lover, his silver-sprinkled head between her parted knees, conjuring in her “
the old swooning sweetness,” “the lightnings of heat” that her new husband, with his rough advances, can never achieve. And in Wharton’s fantasy, the sexual expertise is reciprocal, with the father expectantly pressing into his daughter’s palm “that strong fiery muscle that they used in their old joke to call his third hand.” Was this also the case with Marin—was he deliberately grooming his daughter in preparation for her future career? Twice Vienne broached the subject with Alphonsine but obtained first denials and tears and then an order to cease his questions.

There are various stories about Alphonsine’s life at this point, but what is clear is that she was on her way to Paris.
Charles du Hays said that she had been only eleven years old when Marin tried to sell her to Gypsies.

Delphine told a curious local lawyer who questioned her in later years about Alphonsine’s upbringing that their father had sold her to mountebanks, a claim also made by
E. du Mesnil. “Seeing in the sweetness of the child, a source of income in the future,” he writes, “they dressed Marie and taught her how to appear in public.”
Vienne, however, insists that it was Marin himself who delivered her to Paris. Weighed down by an enormous pack made from rabbit skins, they left Le Merlerault on foot, traveling in stages, sometimes sleeping in stables. During the journey,
Alphonsine was given a stuffed green lizard in a box for good luck—a talisman that had a special meaning for her and which she kept for the rest of her life.

Marin went back to Nonant alone, and to those who demanded to know why he had not brought Alphonsine with him, he replied dismissively, “
What do you expect? Paris is so big that I lost her. In this devil of a town, there’s no drum you can beat to find stray objects.” The Sorcerer’s violent character, combined with the sulfurous rumors, had made him an object of such universal contempt that his return sparked what amounted to a witch hunt. He found that all his possessions and furniture had been thrown out, and no one was prepared to offer him lodgings. Eventually, out of pity, the proprietor of a house in Ginai let him stay in an outbuilding used for sheltering animals. Vienne describes him at this time as a filthy, railing alcoholic clad in rags—a picture he would have been given by his brother-in-law, who was the local doctor and treated Marin at the end of his life. He had been afflicted by leprous sores (probably caused by syphilis), which made him even more of a pariah, and only the doctor and Nonant’s curé would visit him. On 7 February 1841,
at the age of fifty-one, Marin Plessis died in Ginai. His body was discovered by neighbors.

And Alphonsine? What was to become of this “
child full of fear, who spoke of the devil, ghosts and werewolves”? The infamous Saint-Lazare hospital, where prostitutes were treated for venereal diseases, was full of girls from the provinces forced to survive in Paris as
filles publiques à vingt sous
, soliciting in the streets and sleeping in warehouses or abandoned buildings. One report claims that Alphonsine did in fact “
pay for her promiscuity with a visit to Saint-Lazare,” a place whose very name expressed the ultimate in misery and humiliation. There she would have joined the 1,300 other detainees imprisoned in the penitentiary for a minimum of six weeks or until they had been cured. The writer
Gustave Claudin heard that she had been seen in “
the most suspect places,” and the first recorded sighting of Alphonsine in Paris has it that one of these was the
Pont-Neuf.

The bridge crossing the Seine from the Latin Quarter to the Louvre was a place where all classes of the population converged. It was a street theater of teeth extractors, pimps, purse snatchers, quack doctors peddling purgatives and ointments, jugglers, singers, bootblacks calling from their boxes, stalls selling sweets, chickens, delicacies, secondhand clothes, and books. To Alphonsine it was like an urban version of the
Saint-Mathieu fair, and she was drawn to one booth in particular, held by the aroma and sight of potatoes turning golden brown in a bubbling cauldron of fat.

Watching her was the distinguished dandy Nestor Roqueplan. A bachelor and
flâneur
, he had recently given up the editorship of
Le Figaro
to become director of the popular
Théâtre des Variétés. Cane in hand, top hat inclined over one ear, he was considered to be the most Parisian of all Parisians, whose urbane loathing of the countryside was well known. (Pointing to a row of elms on the boulevard des Italiens, he once declared, “Look—they were so bored they had to come here to get away.”) The Boulevard,
with its exclusive cafés and restaurants, was Roqueplan’s domain, and it was only his eye for fetching working-class girls that had brought him to the hubbub of the Pont-Neuf.

He spotted Alphonsine straightaway. “
She was nibbling a green apple which she seemed to despise,” Roqueplan recalled. “Fried potatoes were her dream.” These were a delicacy with a special significance for the poor, as
Théodore de Banville noted in his book on Parisian mores: “
Not only delicious, but sacred like everything that costs only one sou.” Alphonsine, however, did not have one sou, and between her and the
pommes frites
, which she was eyeing “
like a peasant craving gold coins,” was an abyss. Reading her mind, Roqueplan went up to the stout
friteuse
and bought a large cornet, which he handed to the waif. “This made her blush, but she dropped her apple core and devoured the chips in three minutes.” For Alphonsine, it was the defining moment of her arrival in the metropolis—the first time that she had tangible proof of the luxuries her beauty could buy.

A
LPHONSINE
’
S FIRST FRIENDS
in Paris were students. She may have come across them among the
Pont-Neuf crowd or in the Luxembourg Gardens, where young men headed between lectures to have assignations with the girls who strolled along its paths or sat sewing demurely under the willow trees. But the most likely meeting place was at one of the lively public balls. The undergraduates’ favorite was Le Prado, near the Louvre, where women were exempt from paying, and it was not unusual for them to arrive alone. “
Most of those without cavaliers left better accompanied,” remarked one contemporary, while another described a typical first encounter. Sitting at a table drinking punch, a student urges his friend to act as go-between by charming a pretty girl in a corner on her own. Ten minutes later, after many peals of laughter, the conquest has been achieved, and she is introduced to her admirer. “
Louise was one of those birds of passage who, through fantasy, and often through need, make their nest for a day—or rather a night—in the attics of the Latin Quarter and remain there voluntarily for several days. Provided, that is, one knows how to keep them.”

To be the mistress of a student living in a garret near the Sorbonne was a situation envied by the street girls of the city. Equally at home by the fireplace of a grand salon as at the rough table of a Left Bank café-cabaret, these would-be lawyers, doctors,
philosophers, musicians, artists, and writers provided strays like Alphonsine with their first experiences of a worldly, learned society. The Latin Quarter of the mid–nineteenth century had a certain clannish charm, being totally free of the tourists who swarm its sidewalks today. If top-hatted interlopers ventured there from across the Seine, they rarely stayed after nightfall and were never seen inside the smoky student cafés. Here, long-haired youths wearing workingmens’ caps, a pipe between their lips, played cards and billiards or conversed intently over a beer or shot of absinthe. Most were on an allowance of no more than two hundred francs a month, which bought them breakfast of a buttered baguette and bowl of milk at a
crémerie
and dinner for three francs somewhere like Magny’s, a cheap restaurant on the rue Mazet. Toward the end of the month, when funds ran low, they would move en masse to brasseries such as Viot’s or Bléry’s, where you could eat for twenty-two sous, or survive on a meat pie from one of the
charcuteries.

The Bobino theater on the rue de Madame was another student hangout. It was where vaudevilles rather than serious plays were performed, and audiences would join in the choruses of well-known songs or drown out the dialogue with raucous interpolations. On Monday and Thursday nights the grand salon of
La Grande Chaumière, a public ball on boulevard du Montparnasse, was packed with young people watching the dance celebrities of the day.
Clara Fontaine, a curvy brunette with a pale, round face, had been awarded the title
la reine des étudiants
(the students’ queen). Her rival was Elise Sergent, a beautiful Gypsy with black hair and olive skin, known as
la reine
Pomoré, (the queen of Tahiti), because of her exotic appearance and copious bangles and beads. Although untrained as a dancer, she was brilliant at improvising and always attracted a cheering crowd with her version of the polka, a craze she is said to have launched. Clara Fontaine is credited with inventing the cancan, which first appeared at the La Grande Chaumière and quickly caught on.