The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (9 page)

When Alphonsine found out that she was pregnant, she realized she had only herself to blame, telling Louis Mesnil, “It’s not his fault that I didn’t follow his good advice.” But the viscount had no intention of abandoning his sixteen-year-old mistress. On the contrary, he was sweetly solicitous toward Alphonsine, giving
his word that he would take care of her and their child. Keeping her condition a secret even from Ernestine and Hortense, she rarely went out and, when the delivery date grew near, moved into the modest apartment the viscount had rented for her outside Paris.
There, a midwife was employed to take care of her, and after the birth a wet nurse took over. Alphonsine, who seems to have taken next to no interest in her son other than a concern for his future, was impatient to return to her city life, but her doctor would hear none of it, insisting that she spend three months recuperating in the country.

It was that summer of 1841 that Alphonsine spent in Nonant—her first visit since 1838. Having sent her maid, Rose, back to Paris, she stayed with the Mesnils in La Trouillière, sleeping in a cupboard-sized room off the kitchen and paying her great-aunt sixty francs a week toward her upkeep. Her nineteen-year-old sister still lived nearby with the elderly aunt, Mme Lanos, who had brought her up. Delphine was a typical country girl, described by an Ornais lawyer who had met her as “
moderately pretty among her peasant sort, a brunette like her sister, although between them there was no comparison.” Vienne is more critical, commenting on Delphine’s rude manners and brusque, imperious ways, which had made her unpopular with her young colleagues. “Alphonsine, by contrast, was sweet, cheerful and warm; she made friends everywhere because she never prejudged or uttered a disobliging word against anyone.” However unlikely it was that Delphine could thrive in the demimonde—since there was nothing at all sensual about her—Alphonsine was determined to improve her sister’s prospects by persuading her to come to Paris and had asked a couple of lorette friends to write an enticing portrayal of its attractions.

On the day she expected these letters to arrive, Alphonsine took Delphine with her to the post office, stopping en route at the Hôtel de La Poste and inviting
Romain Vienne to accompany them. Hortense’s account, which he was asked to read, was full of
intimate details and protestations of friendship, while the other letter, signed Georgina, gave a deliberately seductive picture of their twilight world. But while Delphine had previously seemed tempted to follow in her sister’s footsteps, her response to the letters was bitterly reproachful. This may have been brought on by embarrassment in Romain’s presence or genuine distress over the choices her sister had made; whatever the reason, Delphine turned the situation into an opportunity to castigate Alphonsine for her conduct, reminding her of the shame she had brought on the family by giving birth to a bastard. Deeply hurt, Alphonsine turned her back on Delphine and was silent throughout the journey when Romain drove them home. After dropping her in La Trouillère, he took Delphine on to her aunt Lanos’s house, seizing the opportunity of their being alone to try to prevent an irreconcilable breach between the sisters. “I scolded Delphine for her harsh language, and encouraged her in her resolution to marry and to continue her work as a laundress. She promised not to bring up the subject again.”

Two or three times a week, when she passed by the inn on her way to collect her letters from the post office, Alphonsine had long talks with Romain, who always accompanied her home. They discovered a Parisian friend in common in
Elisa Vimont. “You were her mother’s lodger when you were a student,” Alphonsine reminded Romain, who then guessed that the shop where she had worked must have been Mlle Urbain’s, “because to know one was to know the other.” Romain promised to visit Mlle Urbain and Elisa the next time he was in Paris, and Alphonsine said she would do her best to widen his circle of women friends by introducing him to Ernestine and Hortense.

On one occasion, suspecting he did not believe that she was the mistress of a man with such an illustrious name, she invited him to read a letter she had received from de Méril. Now living in Burgundy, where he had been transferred, the viscount was, as Hortense put it, “lost to Alphonsine.” He assured her,
however, of his intention to oversee the upbringing of their son, whom he had installed with a family nearby. His letter, Vienne reports, was affectionate and full of details about their vigorous child. What was lacking, though, was any sign of love. “But I kept this observation to myself. To avoid the subject of how long their relationship was likely to last, I told Alphonsine that I was enchanted by her good humour and complimented her on her joyful expression—the sign of a healthy nature.”

Alphonsine’s health had indeed improved significantly. On fine days she went for walks in the afternoon, and this regime, combined with long, tranquil nights of sleep, had added a sparkle to her eyes and a glow to her complexion. But her sense of well-being was not to last. She had had more than enough of the countryside and longed to return to the boutiques, cafés, and balls of her beloved Paris. The
Saint-Mathieu fair, which she had no intention of missing, was on September 22, and Alphonsine announced that she would be leaving Nonant the very next day. Romain was with her as she wandered from stall to stall, buying numerous trinkets to hand out to the peasant urchins scampering around. “Aren’t you going to give me a present?” she teased Romain, who told her to choose something she fancied. Picking out a knickknack of no value, she said, “This is what I’d like, and nothing else. I may never return to Saint-Mathieu, and this little thing will remind me of it.”

The following evening she arrived at the Hôtel de La Poste with Mme Mesnil, who had come to see her off. When they embraced, she whispered to her great-aunt to look for three little packages that she had left under her pillow. These all contained money, she told Vienne, including a hundred francs for Delphine—“My wedding present to her if she marries.”

The Hôtel de La Poste was full that night, and as Alphonsine had left it too late to reserve a room, she had the option either of traveling to an inn in Laigle or settling for a corner of the attic. She chose the latter, steeling herself to climb up the ladder under
the gaze of lascivious eyes. Romain came to her aid, protecting her from the stares of the carousing onlookers by holding her skirts pressed against her thighs—an image he describes with a suppressed erotic charge.

Two months after her departure from Nonant, Louis Mesnil received a letter from his great-niece. Enclosing another hundred francs, ten of which she asked him to give to Delphine, she told him that she had arrived safely in Paris, but her health was still poor and she had been obliged to see a doctor. This was not, as might be assumed, the onset of tuberculosis (whose symptoms would not appear for another three years) but rather the ill effects of an overhectic city routine. Vienne maintains that a month after her return, Alphonsine had begun a new affair, her lover this time an aging baron who was even richer than de Méril. It lasted eight months, he says, although this can not have been the case. In a second letter to Louis Mesnil, written a fortnight later (November 25), Alphonsine tells him that the reason she has not been in touch is because she has returned to work in the shop. She also thanks her great-uncle for sending her money. Clearly, there was no beneficent protector in her life at this period. Alphonsine had assured Vienne in Nonant that she could count on continued support from de Méril; “He has no intention of abandoning me.”
But the viscount’s letters and payments had then stopped, she told him later, after news came that their child had contracted pneumonia and died.

For Alphonsine to return to the lowly rank of shopgirl was a humiliating setback. Proof that this can have been only a momentary reversal of fortune, however, is an 1842 bill found among her papers for a “
plush white hat” priced at 25 francs. Nothing denoted status in the demimonde of Paris more than a woman’s choice of hat. No grisette would dare wear the bonnet of a lady, but a lorette was proud to be seen in one. Alphonsine had bought
the hat at Mlle Urbain’s new boutique on rue Louvois. The shop’s former assistant was now one of its most affluent customers.

Her benefactor, Vienne eventually learned from Hortense, was the “duke de R,” the head of a noble family who had an income of eighty thousand francs a year. He was, she enthused, “the real thing” and was so passionate about Alphonsine that he refused her nothing. “She has a brilliant equipage, a profusion of jewels and a splendid wardrobe of lace and cashmere. Professors of French, drawing, music and dance come every day to give her lessons; this duke seems to want to transform his mistress into a duchess.” Having been promised that she would be launched that season in the fashionable spa resort of
Baden-Baden, Alphonsine sent a euphoric letter to Delphine, urging her to come and see her before she undertook the long journey. “
Our cousin Marie Lanos could accompany you, and I will be responsible for all your expenses,” she wrote on 28 February 1842. “When you have once seen this delightful city of Paris you’ll never want to leave it again.”

The account is
Nestor Roqueplan’s, and it could very well be a description of Alphonsine—or rather, of her new incarnation. He had seen her for a second time at the Ranelagh, the only aristocratic public ball, where she was accompanied not by her magnanimous, elderly protector but by one of the most eligible young aristocrats in Paris.

Her name, Roqueplan discovered, was now Marie Duplessis.

Part Two
Marie
 

T
HE YOUNG DUKE
’
S
name was Agénor de Guiche. He was the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess de Gramont, and he could hardly have been much grander. His descendants were linked to the royal blood of Aragon and Navarre, and his parents were as influential at court as their own parents had been before them. His elegant mother was feted and admired, while his father, a remarkably handsome nobleman, served the dauphin in the household’s most prestigious position of First Gentleman. As a child, Agénor’s playmate was Charles X’s grandson Henri, Duke of Bordeaux, who, for one week, at the age of nine, would be king of France.

Agénor was one year older than Henri, and when Paris fell under siege in the
July revolution of 1830, both he and his younger brother, Augustus, were trapped by the barricades in their college of Sainte-Barbe. Their father, refusing to forsake the royal family in adversity, had accompanied the Bourbons at the start of their journey of exile, traveling through Normandy to Cherbourg, while his wife and children remained in Paris. When an angry mob planted two cannons in front of their gate, the duchess fled to the Gramonts’ country estate, a perilous journey owing to the fact that their carriage bore the royal arms and livery. Agénor and Augustus were rescued from the college by a family friend charged with conducting them to the country, and
once the duke had dealt with the disposal of the dauphin’s property, the Gramonts joined the royal family in the refuge offered to them in Scotland.