The Lady of the Camellias Read Free Page A

extreme polemic he calls for new legislative measures on paternity, which would mean a five- to ten-year prison sentence for a young man who abandons the mother of his child.) And yet his own conduct was hardly exemplary. His daughter Colette was born four years before his marriage to Nadejda (Nadine) Naryschkine, another bored, beautiful Russian child bride, a friend and confidante of Lydia Nesselrode’s. With her “tigress claws” and pathologically jealous nature, Nadine did not have the submissive nature that Dumas
fils
demanded in a wife, and their marriage was far from tranquil. This, combined with self-doubts and despair about human conduct, brought him close to suicide in the early 1860s. “I am completely worn out in body and in mind, heart and spirit,” he wrote to George Sand, who would introduce him to her physician, Henri Favre, a mystic and a pioneer of psychoanalysis.
    Although Favre was able to fortify Dumas
fils
’s wavering spirits, he had a disastrous influence on his work, fanning his moral fervor and encouraging him to write tediously verbose prefaces and pamphlets. Throughout the 1870s the plays became no more than homilies, their characters either voice pieces for the author or hallucinatory abstractions of vice and virtue. “His terrible knowledge suggested a kind of uniform,” remarked Henry James. “It was almost like an irruption of the police.” Dumas
fils
had lost touch with his public, and he knew it. In an 1879 preface to the ill-received
L’Étrangère
, he writes: “As a dramatist grows older he loses in clarity and suppleness, in the power to bring his stage alive, what he gains in his knowledge of the human heart. . . . A moment comes when he finds himself pushing the study of character and the analysis of feeling too far. He frequently becomes heavy, obscure, solemn, portentous, and, not to beat about the bush, a bore.”
    Two plays staged at the Comédie-Française,
Denise
(1885) and
Francillon
(1887), signaled a return to form and a reengagement with people, not symbolist types. But despite the barren years, Dumas
fils
remained his country’s most successful dramatist, who won, by his 1875 election to the Académie Française, the official recognition and public respect denied his father. In today’s France, however, this is no longer the case. It is Dumas
père
who is the literary giant, while his son has become the one-book author that he has always been elsewhere. His best novel, the compelling
L’Affaire Clemenceau
, whose sultry, scandalous heroine is modeled on his first infatuation, Louise Pradier, remains out of print. Only
The Lady of the Camellias
is to be found on the shelves of most bookshops and lending libraries, the other novels and plays available as badly scanned Internet editions in French.
    Just as Flaubert, maddened by what Henry James called “the boom of the particular hit,” expressed a wish to buy up all the existing copies of
Madame Bovary
and burn them, Dumas
fils
came to resent the public’s unquenchable appetite for his best-loved work
.
In a preface he was asked to write in 1886 for a lavish, illustrated quarto edition of the novel, his exasperation is evident. In earlier prefaces, and in the notes he wrote as background for actors, he had recounted everything he knew of Duplessis, but now he insisted, “I have nothing more to say.” And yet the youthful memories this grand old man retained were the ones he cherished most. He admitted as much in an unpublished letter of April 1887 to Duplessis’s first biographer, Romain Vienne. “If anyone had told me when I galloped in the forest of Saint-Germain with Marie that I would one day write a scholarly homage to Victor Hugo I would have been astonished. But between you and me, I would happily surrender this glory to anyone who could give me back that day, my twenties, and the Lady!”
    JULIE