From the author of Nureyev, the definitive biography
of the celebrated Russian dancer, now comes the astonishing
and unknown story of Marie Duplessis, the courtesan who
inspired Alexandre Dumas fils’s novel and play La dame
aux camélias, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata,
George Cukor’s film Camille, and Frederick Ashton’s
ballet Marguerite and Armand. Sarah Bernhardt,
Eleonora Duse, Greta Garbo, Isabelle Huppert, Maria Callas,
Anna Netrebko, and Margot Fonteyn are just a few of the
celebrated actors, singers, and dancers who have portrayed
her.
Drawing on new research, Julie Kavanagh
brilliantly re-creates the short, intense, and passionate
life of the tall, pale, slender girl who at thirteen fled
her brute of a father and Normandy to go to Paris, where she
would become one of the grand courtesans of the 1840s.
France’s national treasure, Alexandre Dumas père,was
intrigued by her, his son became her lover, and Franz Liszt,
too, fell under her spell. Quick to adapt an aristocratic
mien, with elegant clothes, a coach, and a grand apartment,
she entertained a salon of dandies, writers, and artists.
Fascinating to both men and women, Marie, with her stylish
outfits and signature camellias, was always a subject of
great interest at the opera or at the Café de Paris, where
she sat at the table of the director of the Paris Opéra,
along with the director of the Théâtre Variétés, the
infamous dancer Lola Montez, and others. Her early death at
age twenty-three from tuberculosis created an outpouring of
sympathy, noted by Charles Dickens, who wrote in February
1847: “For several days all questions political, artistic,
commercial have been abandoned by the papers. Everything is
erased in the face of an incident which is far more
important, the romantic death of one of the glories of the
demi-monde, the beautiful, the famous Marie
Duplessis.”
With The Girl Who Loved
Camellias, Kavanagh has written a compelling and
poignant life of a nineteenth-century muse whose independent
and modern spirit has timeless appeal.
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