The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (18 page)

Part Four
Marguerite
 

O
NE DAY TOWARD
the end of 1844, Romain Vienne’s concierge gave him a note, a characteristically terse single line from Marie, asking him to visit her the following evening. When he arrived she was waiting impatiently, saying that she wanted to have a long talk with him and had ordered dinner from Chez Voisin. They fell into conversation, but it was not long before Marie broke off to fetch something from the mantelpiece. It was a cameo of a young woman. With a tiny beribboned waist and light brown hair curling onto her shoulders, she was exceptionally small and delicate, with an oval face, neat little mouth, and melancholy, heavy-lidded eyes. Romain recognized her instantly as Marie’s mother.

The portrait had been given to her by an Englishwoman who had visited earlier that week, saying that she was there on behalf of “Madame la baronne
Anderson,” for whom Marie Plessis had worked as a lady’s maid after fleeing Nonant in 1828. Over two years Marie had become more of a companion than a servant to her employer, who could sympathize with her lasting sadness as she, too, had lost a child, a daughter who had died at the age of fifteen. While spending the summer months of 1830 on Lake Geneva, Marie became fatally ill, a cause Vienne attributes to her broken heart. As she was slipping away, she took Madame
Anderson’s hand and begged her to find the two daughters she had left behind in Normandy.

This had seemed impossible, due to a series of errors of name and address, but more than a decade later, following her return from England, the baroness made a trip to Normandy and tracked down the elder sister. By then Delphine had become engaged to a local weaver named Constant Paquet (they married the following year), and so Marie became her primary concern. She had been shocked and saddened to learn of the girl’s occupation but was determined to honor her pledge. “The baroness wants to meet you and get to know you,” the woman said. “And if you are prepared to renounce your current life, and take the place of her own daughter, she will put an end to her mourning and start a new existence with you and for you. Her house will be yours … she will start an immediate fund to make provision for your future, and she will adopt you, as she promised your mother that she would.” She then gave Marie the miniature, explaining that it was one of two portraits that the baroness had especially commissioned. “She kept one, and she begs you to accept the other as the first token of her affection.” Exquisitely rendered in pale pastel crayon, it is so much in the style of miniatures by the portraitist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, a favorite of Marie Antoinette, that it is tempting to wonder if it could be her work. Vigée-Lebrun claims in her memoirs to have been a friend of a Madame Anderson, whom she saw in London, and they may well have resumed contact during her travels to Geneva and Chamonix. Vienne, however, says that the miniature was painted by a man, “a gifted artist” whom the baroness met at the Chamonix baths.

To what extent can this story be believed? Vienne’s is the only account of Marie’s offer from the baroness, although
Charles du Hays, whose mother was responsible for helping Marie Plessis to escape, confirms the existence of a wealthy English benefactress. In one version, while protecting the woman’s identity by
calling her “Lady B.” du Hays alludes to the possibility of the loss of a child by saying that she found in her maid’s situation “
a great similarity with her own.” (A subsequent version deletes this personal reference, saying instead that she regarded her duty to help Marie “
as a work of charity,” but names the baroness as “Lady Henriette [
sic
] Anderson Yorborough [
sic
].”

There was indeed a
Lady Henrietta Anderson Yarborough, who would have been thirty-eight years old at the time of employing Marie Plessis, but she had died in 1813, at the age of twenty-five. The true identity of Marie’s benefactress remains a mystery, and yet two pieces of evidence corroborate Vienne’s narrative. One is a certificate recording the death in Châtelard, Montreux, of “Marie Louise Michelle Deshayes, wife of Duplessis [
sic
]”; the other is the miniature itself. Mounted as a gold medallion, it was passed on to Delphine and her descendants and is now on display in the Musée de la Dame aux Camélias in the Normandy town of Gacé.

Marie’s news that night delighted Romain Vienne. They had had many conversations on the subject of her future during which he would express his concern about what would happen once her beauty and youth had faded. There were disturbing stories of wealthy kept women who had fallen into abject misery.
Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet cites one, describing a courtesan whose protector had once provided her with two to three thousand francs a week. “
She was discovered twelve years later in a slum house on the rue de Macon, frequented by the scum and filth of the population.” Not being part of Marie’s world, Romain found it hard to understand her obsession with luxury since his own friends were professionals—doctors, journalists, colleagues from the Bourse—and in the rue Saint-Lazare lodgings that he shared with two actresses they had just one maid among them. Inevitably, his appeals to Marie’s sense of reason resulted in a bantering exchange:

Marie had come to rely on the frankness and genuine devotion of her “severe, sincere friend” as a welcome contrast to the flattering vacuities of her admirers. Not only could she reminisce with Romain about her youth, family, and friends, she also valued his sane outlook on life, addressing him sometimes as Mr. Philosopher and once, when introducing him to
Lola Montez, describing him as “a financier, a journalist, a man of letters … and above all a wise man.” Nevertheless, his constant entreaties to prepare herself “for a more tranquil future” could be exasperating.

But this, Romain argued, was shortsighted. “Don’t you ever feel a sense of human mortality? You’re the victim of a life which comes at a terrifying cost … and your opulence is a lie. It’s not yours alone, it belongs to another—or rather to others.… Look into your heart. Why is it that you want to see me so often? It’s certainly not to receive my compliments.”

It was clear that Marie needed Romain to force her to confront brutal facts. Although only twenty years old, she often found herself brooding about “the abyss and the horror that awaits those who grow old and lose their charm.” After he left, she would spend hours in a state of melancholy contemplation, but come the evening, when she was surrounded by smiling adorers, her anxieties would vanish. “Your lecture is too somber, in fact I find it not harsh enough,” she told him. “I take your estimation of my character seriously … and I know that the body quickly wears itself out in this métier. But when you’re young and full of passion, you don’t control your destiny the way you should, you live only for the moment.”

Now, though, Marie was being given a real chance of redemption. She had felt profoundly moved by Mme
Anderson’s offer, but had asked for time to reflect. Different scenarios kept playing through her mind. She thought of the strain she would be under in becoming a surrogate for the baroness’s beloved daughter, and she was convinced, as she pointed out to Romain, that her past would be revealed.

There was also the fact that Paris was a city Marie adored. She told Romain that the stiff severity of society in London, where she would be required to live, had as much appeal for her as the foggy Thames air. “It would kill me quicker than any penal colony, because the calm of such an existence would not be a deliverance but the peace of the tomb. I have neither the energy nor the inclination to bury myself there at the age of twenty. It would expose me to too many physical and moral deprivations.”

She had already made up her mind not to accept the baroness’s offer when she went to visit her on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, but she had not prepared herself for the emotional turmoil she went through. The warmth of Mme Anderson’s greeting—a spontaneous, motherly embrace—was disarming enough, while Marie’s plan to express her gratitude and repeat the arguments that she had outlined to Romain, “adding others more convincing and more conclusive,” now seemed brutally calculating.

But of all the reasons that had influenced Marie’s decision, she had not told Romain the most decisive of all. She now had no need of a wealthy patroness:
Count von Stackelberg had come back into her life.

There is no way of knowing how long Stackelberg had stayed away, but the death of his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Elena, in February 1843—the third daughter he had lost in three years—may well have driven him to Marie for consolation. An account published in
Gil Blas
claims that when Stackelberg, ever possessive, visited her at rue d’Antin, one of the first questions he asked was what had become of her portrait by Olivier. “
Have you given it to your monsieur Duval?” he is quoted as saying—a reference not to Ned Perregaux but to Agénor de Guiche. During the young duke’s exile in England, Marie is supposed to have hung the painting in his apartment—a touching attempt to sustain a presence in his life. But, according to the article, Agénor still felt great tenderness toward her, and after his return to Paris was “so impatient to make love to his beauty” that he went to call on her in the morning. What followed could be a scene by Feydeau. “Everything was calm … Ding! The bell rang.… It’s the count! Quick, there—behind this curtain!” When Stackelberg interrogated Marie about the Olivier, it was her maid—“the
most alert of soubrettes”—who came to the rescue, whispering that she would run to Agénor’s apartment to fetch it. Fifteen minutes later
it was back in rue d’Antin, hanging between an unfinished portrait of Marie and a framed print of her look-alike, the plaintive black-haired Marix, in a reproduction of
Mignon aspirant au ciel.
“The count immediately went on his knees swearing never to forgive himself for his unworthy and unjustified suspicions.”