In the mid-1840s, Paris talked of little else but Marie Duplessis. She was beautiful, intelligent, and connected to some of the most powerful and famous men in France. Yet only a few years earlier, she had been a starving girl in rags, born into extreme poverty in the Norman countryside. Her rise was astonishing, and her fall was swift.
By the age of twenty-three, she was dead, but her story would live on in one of the most beloved novels and operas of the nineteenth century. She was born Alphonsine Rose Plessis on January 15, 1824, in the village of Nonant-le-Pin in Normandy. Her father was the illegitimate son of a prostitute and a priest. Harsh circumstances had made him cruel, and he was abusive toward Alphonsine’s mother, Marie.
Eventually, Marie abandoned the family to work as a servant, hoping to send for her daughters later. She died when Alphonsine was only six. The plan never came to pass. After their mother’s death, Alphonsine and her sister were separated.
Alphonsine was sent to live on a farm owned by a relative of her mother. According to several biographies, she was abused there by farm workers, beginning when she was about eleven years old. She was eventually rescued from that situation when she was returned to her father, who apprenticed her to a laundress. It was grueling work for little pay, but it removed her from the horrific conditions of the farm.
The relief did not last. In her early teens, her father abandoned her again, apparently selling her to an elderly bachelor in Paris. Even at her young age, Alphonsine proved resourceful. She escaped the old man and found work as a servant in the French capital.
She later trained with a dressmaker, but in her late teens she began working as a prostitute. It was this profession that would lead her to a strange kind of literary fame. One day in 1839, Alphonsine, then fifteen, stood on a Paris street, staring longingly into a shop that sold fried potatoes. She was visibly hungry.
A distinguished writer, journalist, and theater director named Louis Nestor Roqueplan happened to pass by. He noticed the look of starvation on her face, approached her, and offered to buy her some food. She thanked him and devoured the dish. It was a chance encounter, but it changed her life completely.
Over the following months, Alphonsine developed a relationship with Roqueplan, which allowed her to meet many of Paris’s literary and artistic figures, and above all, influential and wealthy men. By the early 1840s, she was clearly an attractive young woman and entered a series of relationships with rich men she met in the city. Her first significant patron was Monsieur Nol, a wealthy restaurant owner. Within weeks of meeting her, he rented an apartment for her on Rue Larcade and gave her three thousand francs for her needs.
This marked the beginning of her new life as a courtesan. But Alphonsine soon realized there were wealthier clients than Nol, and she began to look elsewhere. Around that time, she adopted the name by which she would become famous: Marie Duplessis. Marie was her mother’s name, while Duplessis was a slightly modified version of her real surname, Plessis.
She simply added “Du” to it, giving the name an aristocratic air. She also began to cultivate interests associated with the upper classes. One of her lovers, a wealthy young man named Agénor de Guiche, arranged for her to take lessons in dance and piano. She also began to learn to read and write.
During the 1840s, Marie Duplessis became the centerpiece of many Parisian parties. She was admired for her intelligence and beauty, but those who knew her well also sensed a profound, contradictory sadness around her. It was undoubtedly the product of her difficult childhood. Her awareness of how cruel existence could be showed in her charitable donations to institutions that helped abused women and abandoned girls in Paris, a fate she had narrowly escaped herself.
Her lovers included many notable men: Édouard de Perrégaux, the romantic novelist Roger de Beauvoir, the elderly German aristocrat Count Gustav von Stackelberg, and the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt. Liszt was likely the man she felt the most affection for, and if there was real love in her short life, it was probably with him. However, Marie’s romantic life is best remembered today because of her relationship with Alexandre Dumas fils, the son of Alexandre Dumas père, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. The son also had literary ambitions, though he always lived in his father’s shadow.
In 1844, he was a young man under twenty when he first met Marie, who was the same age. Their relationship began within weeks. Dumas was fascinated by Marie but tormented by her ongoing affairs with many other men throughout the mid-1840s. In 1846, he tried to distance himself from her, even though she made it clear she wished their relationship to continue, even if she was never faithful to him.
Marie fled to London briefly that year, where she married one of her lovers, the French aristocrat Édouard de Perrégaux. But her health was rapidly declining, even though she was only twenty-two. Marie suffered from tuberculosis, a debilitating and destructive disease that was becoming increasingly deadly under the crowded, impoverished urban conditions of industrial-era Europe. In the nineteenth century, little was known about how tuberculosis spread, how it affected its victims, or how to stop it.
Just a few months after her marriage, Marie died in Paris on February 3, 1847. She was only twenty-three. Her husband and another lover, Count Gustav von Stackelberg, were at her bedside. Hundreds of people attended her funeral at the Montmartre Cemetery a few days later, many from the world of Parisian art and literature.
It was proof of the high standing she had achieved as a courtesan in the French capital within just a few years. Dumas immortalized Marie shortly after her death in his most famous work, The Lady of the Camellias, sometimes known as Camille. The novel was a thinly veiled account of Marie’s life, with the main character Marguerite representing Marie, and the male lead Armand Duval representing Dumas himself. The novel was exceptional for its time in offering a sympathetic portrait of a prostitute and showing how her life was shaped by her upbringing and her era, something readers were not used to.
The book became a bestseller in France during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1852, Dumas followed the novel with a stage adaptation of The Lady of the Camellias. It was initially banned by Parisian theater censors, who were not ready to accept its portrayal of both prostitution and wasting disease on stage. However, given the reputation of Dumas’s father, they soon reversed their decision and allowed the play to be performed.
It was less fortunate elsewhere, remaining banned in London for many years. Dumas’s work was not the only one to retell elements of Duplessis’s story. A few years later, the famous Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi wrote one of his most renowned operas, La Traviata, which told Marie’s story. Verdi’s opera was based on Dumas’s play.
Verdi was visiting Paris in early 1852 when the stage version of The Lady of the Camellias premiered. He was impressed by the story and immediately began composing music for what would become an opera derived from Dumas’s account of Marie’s life. The result, completed in 1853, was La Traviata, which roughly translates to “The Fallen Woman. ” It premiered at the La Fenice opera house in Venice on March 6, 1853.
The main character was named Violetta, but she was clearly based on Marie Duplessis, and her story ends exactly as Marie’s life did, with her work as a courtesan and her death from tuberculosis. Curiously, although The Lady of the Camellias remained banned in Britain, La Traviata was performed in London just months after its premiere in northern Italy. The justification was that while English audiences might understand Duplessis’s story when told in the French used by Dumas, they could not understand Verdi’s Italian opera. La Traviata was notable at the time for presenting the first character in opera to die of tuberculosis.
Its themes resonated with people, and Marie’s story quickly became one of the most popular operas of the nineteenth century. It has remained one of Verdi’s most celebrated works for over a century and a half and is still widely performed today. Thus, while many are unaware of the fact, countless people have watched Marie Duplessis’s story enacted before them in opera. Marie Duplessis is still remembered today largely because of her connection to some of the most prominent literary and cultural figures of the mid-nineteenth century.
Several biographies have been published about her in her native Normandy. One can visit a museum dedicated entirely to her memory, the Musée de la Dame aux Camélias, named after Dumas’s work. The role of Marguerite in The Lady of the Camellias became one of the most prized roles in the golden age of theater in the late nineteenth century, and Marguerite’s story has been retold in thousands of stage productions, from the theaters of Paris to Broadway in New York, right up to the present day.