The Lady of the Camellias Read Free

by history or poetized by legend. Young Dumas had not only brought the public into the world of Duplessis; he had also portrayed it exactly as he had known it, using the clothes, decor, and dialogue of modern life. “A drama of facile love has been turned into a literary event,” exclaimed Jules Janin.
    It was to turn into very much more than that. The pathos of the story and immediacy of its setting inspired Giuseppe Verdi to create his opera
La Traviata
in 1853 (the year the play, retitled
Camille
for an American audience, became a Broadway hit). In Verdi’s hands the work is transfigured, acquiring a rapturousness, psychological subtlety, and tragic grandeur that music can convey far more powerfully than words. The opera’s premiere in Venice on March 3 was a failure, but it soon became the popular hit it has remained for 160 years, the role of the heroine, Violetta, sung by every great international diva. The story of the Lady of the Camellias became a cultural phenomenon throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Marguerite Gautier has been pictured by artists and photographers from Aubrey Beardsley to Cecil Beaton, and portrayed on stage by Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Isabelle Adjani, in ballets by Margot Fonteyn and Sylvie Guillem, and in films by Greta Garbo and Isabelle Huppert.
    Dumas
fils
would have been astounded by the longevity of the play he had dashed off in eight days. When he wrote the preface to a new edition in 1868, he declared that the story was already “ancient history.” No courtesan existed with the heart and selfless nature of Marguerite, and the profession had become a business exchange: “I’m beautiful, you’re rich, give me what you have and I’ll give you what I have. You don’t have money? Well, good-bye.” But the real reason for Dumas
fils
’s disillusion and cynicism was personal. A destructive two-year affair with a bored young married woman, a beautiful Russian countess he named the Lady of the Pearls, had annihilated his belief in romantic love. Lydia Nesselrode was the inspiration for another long, anguished, but much superior poem, “Saint Cloud”; for the excellent novella
Diana de Lys
; for an overlong, self-pitying novel,
The Lady of the Pearls
; and for the dismayingly melodramatic reworking of
Diana de Lys
as a play. But unlike Duplessis, this lady was a toxic muse, her duplicity, lies, and callous abandonment of Dumas
fils
resulting in an embittered edge to his writing and a misogynistic attitude toward women.
    There was also the fact that Dumas
fils
felt out of tune with his age. The sparkling
Belle Hélène
spirit of the Second Empire was anathema to him; a fierce moralist, he had decided to use his plays to pillory the license and laxity of the era. His 1855 play
Le Demi-Monde
(his own coinage) hardly seems the work of the same writer. A bitter satire, it is a portrait not of the bohemian world the term has come to define, but of a spurious society halfway between respectability and immorality. For Henry James, its grim realism and barbed dialogue made it a model for the drama of the time, “a singularly perfect and interesting work.” Now, though, with its layers of lies, infamies, and deceit, its unconvincing plot twists, and a protagonist who is Dumas
fils
at his most priggish and cynical,
Le Demi-Monde
is as tiresomely pessimistic as it is outdated.
    Dumas
fils
’s uncompromising ethics had made him sternly censorious of his father, whom he had come to blame for the dissipation of his youth: “I naturally did what I saw you do, and lived as you had taught me to live.” Determined to distance himself from his father’s excesses—the profligate spending, the affairs with actresses scarcely out of their teens, the births of two more “natural” children—he vented his anger about the stigma of illegitimacy in prefaces to his plays. (In one particularly