The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis by Julie Kavanagh Read Free Book Online Page B

himself, I feel certain, would have kept Marie’s confidences to the grave, had it not been for the publication of two revealing articles. The first, byCharles du Hays, exposed “the bitter truth and secret sadness” of her childhood and was collected in a book published in 1885 (
L’ancien Merlerault: Récits chevalins d’un vieil éleveur
). The second, “
Les quartiers de la dame aux camélias
,” by Count de Contades, was a detailed, if erroneous, investigation into her genealogy and appeared at the end of that year in
Le Livre
(reprinted in Contades’,
Portraits et fantaisies
). These clearly acted as a trigger. In an unpublished letter to Contades, a well-known Ornaise figure, Vienne announced his intention to write his own book, saying he had begun assembling reminiscences and jotting down notes.
    “A hundred times I have felt inclined to write the story of Marie Duplessis. A hundred times I have been urged to do this. I was not able to decide for a number of reasons which do not have any place here. Now at last I am resigned.… The memory of Marie herself has been lost for too long under the fanciful pen of Dumas” (letter from the collection of Jean-Marie Choulet).
    He was, he told Contades, the only person alive who knew all the particularities of the courtesan’s life, but he promised to treat its “devilish details” with discretion. He was obliged for reasons of the narrative, he said, to give himself a leading role, although it vexed him to do this. When writing the book itself, Vienne also felt the need to explain his motives. Not only does the title attest to his monopoly on the truth, but he ends the memoir with apedantic series of paragraphs intended to put the record straight. A remark made decades earlier (by Jules Janin), that Marie’s love letters had been auctioned along with everything else, produced a tirade of protest from Vienne. He knew the whereabouts of a secret drawer, he declared, and had personally overseen the burning of all three hundred letters, apart from saving thirty—which must have been his own.
    Romain Vienne was, in the words of a contemporary, “a real character” (
L’Eclair
, 10 April 1874). He studied medicine, read for the bar, became involved in politics, worked as a journalist and a financier, and joined Lamartine’s revolutionary movement in 1848. He regarded himself primarily as a writer and in the Great Fire of San Francisco claimed to have lost ten volumes of work—“diverse poems, dramas and comedies, two libretti which Donizetti had commissioned, certain novels, etc.” This, I believe, was wishful thinking, as Vienne was never prolific. His only other extant work is
Le berceau
, a collection of juvenilia, and
Système des bornes
, a political pamphlet. Another book,
Pages oubliés
, was advertised but never appeared.
    The Truth about the Lady of the Camellias
was published in 1887 by Paul Olendorff and reprinted eleven times that year. The daily journal
L’Estafette
had serialized it between 21 August and 5 October 1887, and although the first extracts were anonymous (“by a childhood friend”), Vienne was named in all the others. He had clearly expected his book to cause a stir because in an unpublished letter to Delphine, dated 21 October 1886, he urged her to wait until publication to sell her sister’s portrait. “It will be the moment when everyone is talking about the true story of Marie Duplessis … and if you miss this opportunity you will never have another” (from the collection of Jean-Marie Choulet). He was mistaken. Marie’s great champions, literary giants Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, were no longer alive, and Vienne’s memoir was not reviewed in any major publication. Then, almosta decade later, came a resurgence of interest in the real Lady of the Camellias. This had been initiated by the prestigious Parisian
Revue Encyclopédique
, which devoted the issue of 15 February 1896 to Marie, publishing previously unseen