‘My Favors Cost a Great Deal’

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/books/review/the-girl-who-loved-camellias-by-julie-kavanagh.html

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In 1847, shortly before 23-year-old Marie Duplessis, one of 19th-century Paris’s most celebrated courtesans, died of consumption, she told her maid, “I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life.” Her prophecy came true: she found enduring fame in the work of a former conquest, Alexandre Dumas fils, “La Dame aux Camélias” (there’s a newly translated version by Liesl Schillinger, a regular contributor to the Book Review), as well as in “La Traviata,” the opera Verdi based on Dumas’s novel and play.

Duplessis had also been a celebrity during her lifetime, thanks to her ethereal beauty (willowy and pale, with black hair and “lips redder than cherries,” she looked to Dumas “like a little figurine made of Dresden china”) and her high-profile paramours (Dumas himself, an assortment of pre-eminent noblemen, Franz Liszt). But the novel, play and opera made Marie — renamed Marguerite by Dumas and Violetta by Verdi — a cultural icon by imbuing her with a purely fictional trait: the willingness to sacrifice her own material comforts, and her most cherished lover, for the sake of that lover’s familial honor. Like Dostoyevsky’s Sonia Marmeladov, the prostitute with the heart of gold in “Crime and Punishment,” Marguerite/Violetta enchants audiences because her trajectory takes her from debasement to its opposite — transfiguration through repentance, redemption through selfless love.

With her colorful new biography, “The Girl Who Loved Camellias,” Julie Kavanagh exposes the tawdry reality behind her heroine’s legend. The author of an acclaimed life of Rudolf Nureyev, Kavanagh reveals that cold-eyed pragmatism, not saintly self-abnegation, formed the bedrock of Duplessis’ character and career. “Marie was practical, willful, grasping and manipulative,” her conduct of a piece with the brutal materialism and frank hedonism associated with both the trade she plied and the era in which she lived. (This last, the go-go period of France’s so-called July Monarchy, was “the epoch of the fortune seeker, a world defined by self-indulgence, frivolity and a febrile quest for excitement.”) As Duplessis herself put it in a note to one potential suitor:

“Monsieur le baron, I realize that mine is a sordid profession, but I must let you know that my favors cost a great deal of money. My protector must be extremely rich to cover my household expenses and satisfy my caprices.”

Such mercenary shrewdness may surprise readers expecting or hoping to find in Marie Duplessis the sublime integrity with which Dumas and Verdi endowed her alter ego. Setting forth this caveat, Kavanagh cites in her introduction the response from one early reader of her manuscript: “You’re actually demolishing the myth. . . . I regard Violetta as one of the great characters in drama. . . . Marie can’t help but be morally dwarfed by her. She’s the sow’s ear.”

In Kavanagh’s sympathetic telling, the sow’s ear seems the regrettable but all too comprehensible product of a childhood straight out of Dickens or Zola. Rose-Alphonsine Plessis was born to an unhappy, wretchedly poor family of Norman peasants. Her father, an alcoholic peddler named Marin Plessis, regularly and savagely abused her mother, who died when Alphonsine was 7. Marin formally abandoned his daughter a year later. For a time, the little girl scraped by thanks to charitable relatives and to a brief stint as a laundress’s apprentice. But when she was 14, Marin Plessis resurfaced and took her to live with “a septuagenarian with ‘a detestable reputation’ as a debaucher.” (Here and throughout her book, Kavanagh quotes from a memoir by Duplessis’ trusted childhood friend, Romain Vienne.) Neighbors suspected that Alphonsine’s father had “sold” her to the other man, a story that seemed all too likely given that Marin had already reportedly tried to barter for her with a band of Gypsies (when she was 11) and a troupe of mountebanks (when she was 13). Eventually, Marin packed her up and traveled with her to Paris — then, according to one account, proceeded to “lose” her there, leaving Alphonsine to fend for herself in the vast, unfamiliar metropolis.

At first, the girl made her way by working in a laundry and then in a dressmaker’s shop. But as she “was becoming disturbingly pretty,” Alphonsine soon realized she had another option: being “kept” by a man of means. The first such prospect presented himself in the form of a middle-aged, middle-class widower who offered her a furnished apartment, rented in her own name, and 3,000 francs up front for her “initial needs.” However degrading this proposal may have been, Kavanagh writes, the alternative was “even less appealing,” for Alphonsine most likely earned no more than 22 francs a month working six-day weeks, 13 hours a day, as a shop girl — “a punishing routine in which it was all too easy to become trapped for decades.” In fact, according to Kavanagh, “in Alphonsine’s mind, there was no alternative.” And while one might question the certainty with which a biographer purports to know the workings of her subject’s mind (especially when the subject has left behind no diaries and very few letters to document those workings), the outcome of Marie’s musings was incontrovertible. Weighing disreputable comfort against respectable hardship, Alphonsine chose comfort. A femme entretenue was born.

It did not take long for Marie Duplessis — Alphonsine selected the nom de guerre because “Marie” was “the name of the Virgin” and because the particule “du” implied patrician birth — to trade her first benefactor for a slew of grand aristocrats. Notable among these was Agénor de Guiche, the dashing scion of an august ducal family. In addition to buying Marie magnificent clothing, jewels and horses (not to mention the camellias that became her trademark accessory), he arranged for her to receive daily instruction in French, drawing, music and dance. This training imbued the once impoverished waif from Normandy with an air of distinction and refinement that would make her, as Liszt later observed, “unique of her kind.”

Subsequent lovers further advanced her metamorphosis. The Estonian Count Gustav von Stackelberg, over 50 years Duplessis’ senior, spent lavishly to enhance “the style and surroundings of his teenage mistress.” As for the Comte Edouard de Perregaux, the hopelessly besotted young man on whom Dumas based Marguerite’s grand amour, Armand Duval, he provided an arguably even more precious gift: on Feb. 21, 1846, he married her, thus making her a countess.

Unfortunately for Perregaux, Marie wanted his title only to enhance her status with Liszt, who, although (or perhaps because) he was a chambermaid’s son, eagerly sought exalted company and connections. And unfortunately for Marie, Liszt declined her offer to accompany him on the 18-month performing tour he had begun shortly before her wedding. (“I shan’t bother you,” she pleaded. “I sleep all day . . . and at night you can do with me what you will.”) Marie reacted to the composer’s rejection by throwing herself into a frenzy of boozy, nonstop merrymaking that directly anticipated Marguerite’s and Violetta’s feverish joie de vivre. Less than a year later, she was dead. Laid low by tuberculosis, the courtesan-turned-countess left behind a trove of luxury items that were sold off to pay her many creditors. Still, her coachman reported, “at the end she drank nothing but Champagne.”

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> Caroline Weber is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.