The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (7 page)

On Sunday nights in the summer, the students and their girls—
les biches étudiantes
—went dancing themselves in the rotunda of La Chaumière. Determined to challenge the conventions of the time, they adopted wild alternatives to the more formal dancing then in vogue. The quadrille’s square patterns could be embellished with countless variations—“
Jumps, fluttering, twisting, foot-stamping, contortions and undulations of the whole body would vary according to the inspiration of each one, becoming more and more animated, expressive and eccentric.” The polka was instantly controversial, with more bodily contact between partners than ever seen before. The cancan—or cachucha, as it was also known—could escalate into a bacchanalian frenzy. The public ball version was nothing like the high-kicking chorus line of the belle époque with its swishing skirts, flashing knickers, and jump splits. It began sedately, a dance for a couple in a quadrille, with the student in an academic position—left foot forward, hand on one side, back curved, right arm around his partner; she rested one hand on his shoulder and held her skirt in the other. Once the music started, according to a contemporary, all propriety was cast aside.

Every public ball was policed by municipal guards who were there to uphold decency, but La Chaumière’s director,
le père
Lahire, a gigantically tall, rotund man, had obtained government permission to keep order himself. If one of the students danced in an excessive, disorderly manner, he would take him in his arms like Hercules and carry him to a quiet corner of the boulevard to compose himself. On hot nights he patrolled the garden outside the rotunda, where alleys wound through bowers of hornbeams with benches hidden in the groves. It was the scene of numerous trysts, though morals were strictly maintained by Lahire, who, while brusque with the youngsters, was a good man with a dry wit, and greatly liked.

Between university terms, La Chartreuse, on the rue d’Enfer, became the place to go. It had the advantage of being lively during the dead season, although it was simple to the point of being grubby. The orchestra was third-rate and the atmosphere so riotous that the rickety floorboards trembled under the dancers’ stamping feet, throwing up choking clouds of dust. To
Albert Vandam, an Englishman in Paris, the pleasures of high society paled beside the noisy bohemia of student balls, theaters, and restaurants. “I preferred the Théâtre Bobino to the Opera and the Comédie-française; the Grande-Chaumière … to the most brilliantly lighted and decorated ballroom.” There was a special camaraderie among students, who spoke a patois colored with jargon from painters’ studios, theater wings, lecture halls, and newspaper offices. Their high ideals and good humor had such romantic appeal that graduates who went on to lead bourgeois lives, making respectable marriages and establishing themselves as notaries, “
would recount their misery as artists with the kind of relish a homecoming traveller might brag about his escapades with tigers.”

This was the world of
La Bohème
, where every day presented a new challenge to find enough money for food or lodgings. “
Since when have we eaten two days in a row?” quips one student to another in
Henri Murger’s
Scènes de la vie de bohème
, the source for Puccini’s opera. In
La Bohème
, the quartet of jovial young friends is used to dodging debt collectors and living a routine of bed without supper or supper without bed. Murger’s Rodolphe, an aspiring playwright with a daytime job as editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine, first meets his mistress, Mimi, when she timidly knocks on his door. An impoverished seamstress living on the floor below, she has come in search of a light for her candle. For Alphonsine, too, it was hunger that drove her one day to the lodgings of a young man she knew called Henry. When she turned up on his doorstep, she was in great distress, saying that she had not eaten for the last forty-eight hours.

They went out together to buy a pound of cherries, and her young benefactor was rewarded by watching Alphonsine’s “
explosion of joy” as she received them; the sensuality with which she devoured each cherry—“her lips even more brightly scarlet than the pulp of the fruit”—was an image he still vividly recalled more than a decade later.

Observing the ravenous Alphonsine on the
Pont-Neuf, Nestor Roqueplan had immediately identified her as “
one of those girls of the Latin Quarter improperly known as grisettes.”
Grisette
—a term that first appeared in the mid–seventeenth century to describe the gray fabric,
grise de serge
, worn by young working women—had come to describe almost any pretty young girl of easy virtue. The grisette may, like Alphonsine, have been
brought up in the country, but she was a specific Parisian type, often the heroine of popular novels and stories, like
Henri Murger’s Mimi or Rigolette from
Eugène Sue’s 1842
Mysteries of Paris.

Nubile, coquettish, sincere in love and light without being immoral, she was the poet’s muse, the painter’s model, and the ideal mistress of a frugal student. She may have taken responsibility for the sentimental education of these sons of the bourgeoisie, but she would not accept the gauche offer of a young man’s money. Instead, she adored being given cakes, trinkets, and treats—“
A dinner tempts her, the theatre seduces her, a ball wins her heart.” Honest and gay, the
étudiante
, as she was also known, was gifted with the kind of spontaneity lacking in girls of the students’ own class; she danced, she sang, she drank and smoked, and she was quite content with a meager dinner of soup or a plate of vegetables costing three sous. Accustomed to hearing intellectual conversations day and night “
on anatomy, physiology, philosophy—and every other subject ending in ‘my,’ ‘by,’ and ‘phy,’ ” some grisettes found themselves absorbing serious abstract ideas, whereas others were completely out of their depth. It was Murger’s Rodolphe who had picked up the enticing Louise at Le Prado, but it soon became clear that he expected more of her than she could give; Rodolphe wanted to speak
le beau langage
and write her reams of moonlit verse, while she spoke only the patois of love and would have far preferred the gift of a hat or a pair of boots.

By now, Alphonsine’s fustian skirt and heavy Normandy clogs, which she had worn on her arrival in Paris, had been replaced by a modest silk dress and black leather ankle boots, while a coquettish little bonnet encircled her lovely face—an effect that “
sparked a revolution” in the students. “It was even reported that aspiring doctors of law, in spite of the gravity of their future position, proved themselves assiduously attentive and gallant towards her.” But while enjoying the students’ company, unfazed by scholarly conversations about legendary jurists
Cujas and Barthole, Alphonsine is said to have spurned the young bohemians as lovers, choosing instead to bestow her favors on the lead violinist at Le Prado.

There are several versions of Alphonsine’s first weeks in Paris. Delphine declared that her sister had been “
welcomed by two students, one of whom was very rich, educated her and made her his mistress.” Alternatively, she may have been working at the age of fourteen in a dress shop on rue Saint-Jacques, where she was maltreated, even beaten. “
Tired of this miserable life the Sorcerer’s daughter escaped one day and was taken in by the students of the Latin Quarter, who made her their companion and their servant.” Or it was the dress shop in the arcades of the Palais-Royal, where Alphonsine’s employer will die of cholera? Thrown out without money or shelter, she wanders off crying into the street, where “a blackguard offers her his friendship and bread.”

Vienne, presumably passing on Alphonsine’s own version of her Paris debut, tells a lighter story. It was always Marin Plessis’s aim, he says, to take his daughter directly to his Parisian cousins, a couple named Vital, who lived on the rue des Deux-Ecus, an alleyway in the old quarter of Les Halles. This was Zola’s belly of Paris, a decade before the ironwork and vast glass expanses of the covered market were built. Bordered by gabled, ramshackle houses, the medieval streets were crowded before dawn with horse-drawn carts arriving from the countryside full of fresh produce. Market gardeners brought bundles of vegetables and handfuls of fruit; wholesalers piled their huge baskets with artichokes, lettuces, celery, and cauliflowers, stacked symmetrically like cannonballs; cart axles bulged under the weight of damp, seaweedy sacks of mussels, coops of squawking poultry, whole carcasses of sheep and beef. Throughout the early hours there were the cries of wagoners unloading their wares and the constant rumble of wheels on cobbles “
lulling the dark city with the sounds of food on the move.”

The Vitals had a vegetable stall of their own, but their business was too modest to employ Alphonsine, so they asked an acquaintance, Mme Barget, who owned a laundry business, to take her on as an apprentice. This establishment was on the rue de l’Echiquier, way out in the Tenth Arrondissement near the dreaded Saint-Lazare prison-hospital, but the opportunity of a job there would have been greatly appreciated by Alphonsine. Though factory workers were women of disrepute in the professional hierarchy of the mid–nineteenth century, the feminine trades associated with couture—laundry maids, seamstresses, shop assistants, milliners, florists, and corsetmakers—were considered, in the main, to be respectable. “
They’re virtuous because they spend the day making clothes that are the most indispensable to modesty,” wrote the poet
Alfred de Musset, singling out laundresses for particular praise. “They are very caring and clean, given that they’re constantly handling washing and fabrics which they can’t spoil without forfeiting their pay.”

To
Nestor Roqueplan,
blanchisseuses
were, for the most part, irresistibly pert and appealing—“
the prettiest working girls in Paris”—although Zola paints a far harsher picture in his novel
L’Assommoir.
In a large hangar containing enormous reservoirs of water and zinc cylinders are lines of about a hundred kneeling women working for one sou an hour, their arms bare to the shoulders, their skirts gathered up as they lean over their tubs, beating furiously. The heat from coke-fired stoves is intolerable, the air thick with steam and the acrid stench of bleach, and as they laugh and shout at each other above the racket of machines, their flesh turns ruddy and gleams with sweat. Zola’s laundresses are bawdy and rumbunctious—a dispute ends with two of them locked in a catfight—but in Mme Barget’s atelier, there was never any unruly behavior or risqué talk. “She was an upstanding woman,” writes Vienne, “proud of the honour of her household, and more importantly, of the honour of her two daughters, whom she had brought up with strict surveillance.” Alphonsine would
have worked beside these two girls, using an iron filled with hot charcoal and starching lace petticoats that were frothier and more delicate than anything she had ever seen.

Having slaved for six days in succession, most grisettes, as described by Musset, “
frisked about like fish in the water as soon as their work was over,” and Alphonsine was no exception, living for the fun and freedom of Sundays with her Latin Quarter friends. She told Romain Vienne that one night she accepted an invitation to a ball followed by supper. Her escort had chosen a tavern renowned for its rabbit stew and wine priced at six sous a bottle, and after they had eaten, he took her to the Bois de Boulogne. In spring, when the acacias and linden trees were in flower, or on summer evenings, the Bois became a grand boulevard attracting the most elegant Parisians, who strolled down its long, central avenue, or paraded past in their carriages. After dark, however, it took on a mysterious, clandestine aspect, and couples secluded themselves amongst the trees or in coupés with shaded windows. “
It’s the intimate hour of the Bois, the hour of abandon and sweet talk … when the wood becomes the confidant of a thousand charming adventurers whose secrets it guards.” Alphonsine laughed as she recounted how the young man had caressed her on a footpath overhung with flowers while swearing eternal love, although the consequences turned out to be far from amusing at the time. She claimed to have been spotted by her employer, who was out walking with her daughters, but this seems too far-fetched. Whatever the circumstances, Mme Barget discovered that her apprentice had lied to her about being at home with her relatives that night, and Alphonsine was abruptly sacked.

Mme Vital, on the other hand, was understanding and forgiving. Although her reprimand was severe, she softened her words with advice and kindly warnings, pardoning Alphonsine on the condition that she behave from now on. She needed to find her young ward a situation more likely to engage her interest,
and since Alphonsine was developing a real interest in fashion, Mme Vital went to see a friend who owned a dress shop near the Palais-Royal.
Mélanie Urbain had had her own share of misfortune and been forced to bring up an illegitimate child alone. Consequently, she was sympathetic toward the wayward Alphonsine and willing to employ her.