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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Camille," Alexandre Dumas fils presents a poignant exploration of love, sacrifice, and societal constraints, encapsulated within the tragic tale of Marguerite Gautier, a courtesan whose terminal illness brings into sharp focus the moral dilemmas of her choices. Written in a naturalistic style, Dumas employs rich, emotive language that reveals the intimate inner lives of his characters while also critiquing the moral hypocrisy of 19th-century Parisian society. Drawing upon the principles of realism, he adeptly navigates the themes of love versus societal expectation, gender dynamics, and the impacts of the past on individual identity, establishing a deep connection with the reader through Marguerite's tragic fate. Alexandre Dumas fils, the son of the renowned novelist Alexandre Dumas, was influenced by personal experiences and the social milieu of his time, including his advocacy for social reform and his education on the struggles of women. Dumas's background, marked by the shadows of his father'Äôs legacy and his own encounters with love and loss, lends depth to his portrayal of Marguerite, infusing her character with authenticity. His literary career, enriched by themes of passion and morality, directs a critical lens towards the plight of women, a recurring motif in his works. "Camille" is a masterful narrative that invites readers to reflect on the complexities of love and the societal forces that shape human relationships. It is an essential read for those who appreciate literary works that combine emotional depth with social critique, offering timeless insights into the human condition. Whether you are familiar with Dumas fils or new to his oeuvre, this tragic story remains profoundly relevant, urging us to contemplate the true cost of love and the judgments that society places upon us. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Camille
Table of Contents
Introduction
A glittering world of pleasure can turn, in an instant, into a courtroom where love is measured against reputation, money, and mercy.
Alexandre Dumas fils’s Camille—better known in English by this name and originally published in French as La Dame aux camélias—has become a classic because it crystallizes a modern dilemma: how private feeling survives under public judgment. Its story has endured not through spectacle alone, but through its clarity about emotional cost and social power. Readers return to it for the same reason later artists did: it offers a dramatic lens on intimacy, dignity, and the price that society demands from those it labels “fallen.”
First issued in 1848, the novel belongs to the tense, fast-changing world of nineteenth-century Paris, where wealth and display stood beside moral anxiety and rigid expectations. Dumas fils, writing as a young author who would later be celebrated as a dramatist, shaped the material with an eye for dialogue, pacing, and confrontation. The book’s period matters: it reflects an era fascinated by the theater of social life—salons, opera boxes, and the coded rules by which respectability is granted or withheld.
Camille centers on Marguerite Gautier, a courtesan moving within fashionable circles, and the love that draws her toward a different life. The premise is simple and emotionally volatile: a relationship that promises sincerity collides with the realities of status, dependence, and public scrutiny. Dumas fils establishes from the outset that appearances are never neutral in this world; they are currency, armor, and sometimes a trap. The narrative invites the reader to look past surfaces without pretending that surfaces can be ignored.
Part of the novel’s power comes from the way it blends romantic intensity with social observation. It does not treat love as a purely private refuge, because the lovers’ choices reverberate through family expectations, economic constraints, and the moral judgments of acquaintances. This tension—between what a person feels and what others will permit—gives the book its enduring dramatic pressure. Without needing elaborate plot contrivance, Dumas fils builds conflict from credible forces: pride, fear, obligation, and the cruel efficiency of gossip.
The book’s classic status also rests on its craft. Dumas fils writes with a lucid directness that keeps emotional complexity in focus, and he structures scenes to expose how compassion can be entangled with control. Characters are not merely symbols; they argue, calculate, plead, and misread one another in ways that feel recognizably human. The Parisian setting is not decorative but functional, a social ecosystem whose rules shape every gesture. That combination of intimacy and social mechanics helped make the novel widely influential.
Camille’s reach expanded quickly beyond the page. Dumas fils adapted the story for the stage as The Lady of the Camellias (1852), and that adaptation became one of the nineteenth century’s best-known dramas. The narrative’s afterlife continued as composers, librettists, and filmmakers reimagined its central situation, helping to embed it in European and later global culture. The most famous operatic transformation is Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata (1853), which drew on the same source material and carried its emotional and social themes into a new artistic language.
Its influence on later writers is visible less in direct imitation than in the way it helped popularize a serious, sympathetic treatment of women constrained by sexual double standards. Camille contributed to a tradition of realist and naturalist fiction and drama that scrutinized bourgeois morality and the economics of desire. Later novelists and playwrights would repeatedly return to the figure of the “kept woman” or socially compromised heroine—not as a moral lesson alone, but as a vantage point from which to critique hypocrisy and to test the boundaries of empathy.
At the center of the novel lies a question that remains unsettling: who gets to define a person’s worth? Marguerite’s world is one where affection can be sincere and still be treated as illegitimate, where generosity may come with conditions, and where a reputation can outweigh an individual’s own account of herself. Dumas fils does not ask the reader to ignore moral language; he asks the reader to see how it is used—sometimes protectively, sometimes punitively—within a society that claims to value virtue.
The novel also pays close attention to money, not as background detail but as a force that organizes relationships. In Camille, financial dependence and social access are intertwined, and the characters must navigate what can be offered, what can be accepted, and what must be refused. This is part of why the book feels modern: it recognizes that love stories unfold within material circumstances. Sentiment, in Dumas fils’s Paris, is never free; it is always negotiated amid the costs of living, the costs of status, and the costs of sacrifice.
Another enduring element is its emotional candor. Camille explores tenderness alongside jealousy, idealism alongside self-protection, and devotion alongside fear of humiliation. The narrative invites readers to weigh competing claims—personal happiness, familial duty, social peace—without reducing them to easy answers. That balance of intensity and restraint makes the story adaptable across eras, while keeping its moral pressure intact. It is a romance that insists on consequences, and a social critique that never forgets the private heart.
For contemporary readers, Camille remains compelling because its core conflicts have not disappeared: stigma still shapes opportunity, relationships still contend with public narratives, and people still struggle to be seen beyond the roles assigned to them. The novel’s Paris may be distant, yet its questions about judgment, compassion, and autonomy are immediate. As a classic, it endures not only for its historical importance and artistic descendants, but for its capacity to make readers reconsider what love can demand—and what society still asks in return.
Synopsis
Alexandre Dumas fils’s novel Camille, originally published in French as La Dame aux Camélias (1848), frames its story through a reflective, documentary-like approach to a celebrated Parisian figure. The narrative opens in the wake of Marguerite Gautier’s death, when the sale of her possessions draws attention from curious onlookers and those who once knew her. From this point, the book reconstructs how she lived, what she represented in fashionable society, and why her private life became the subject of rumor and fascination. The early chapters establish a world where reputation functions as currency and where intimacy is often negotiated under social pressure.
The novel introduces Marguerite as a courtesan renowned for beauty, taste, and a distinctive public image, moving among theaters, salons, and wealthy patrons. Dumas fils depicts the mechanics of her lifestyle: the financial demands of appearances, the constant scrutiny, and the uneasy balance between autonomy and dependence. Marguerite’s health is already fragile, and her fame is shadowed by physical decline that society alternately pities and exploits. The story emphasizes how quickly people convert her into a symbol—of luxury, scandal, or romance—while leaving her inner life only partially seen. This tension between public narrative and private reality shapes the book’s method and mood.
Armand Duval enters the account as a young man whose interest in Marguerite begins with admiration and curiosity rather than clear knowledge of her circumstances. Their acquaintance develops amid the codes of Parisian pleasure culture, where sincerity is difficult to distinguish from performance. Armand’s feelings intensify, and his approach to Marguerite challenges the usual transactional expectations surrounding her. Dumas fils traces how attraction becomes attachment, and how the two test what a more exclusive bond might look like within a setting that rewards visibility and punishes vulnerability. The developing relationship becomes the novel’s central experiment: whether love can exist without being reduced to spectacle or purchase.
As the relationship deepens, the narrative shifts from social observation to the daily negotiations of intimacy. Marguerite’s attempts to sustain affection collide with her practical obligations, including money, debts, and the network of men and acquaintances who have claims on her time. Armand, inexperienced in these arrangements, struggles with jealousy and pride, and he alternates between idealizing Marguerite and judging her by the very standards that profit from her role. Their interactions reveal the mismatch between romantic expectations and the structures that govern Marguerite’s life. Dumas fils treats their bond as emotionally genuine yet constantly tested by the surrounding economy of status and survival.
The couple’s desire for a quieter life draws them away from constant public display, suggesting the possibility of renewal and a more ordinary happiness. Yet the retreat also exposes new pressures: isolation, financial strain, and the difficulty of escaping a past that remains socially legible. Marguerite’s health remains an ongoing concern, and periods of tenderness are interrupted by reminders of limitation and time. Armand’s dependence on emotional certainty grows, while Marguerite’s need to manage both affection and practical reality becomes more acute. The narrative keeps returning to the question of whether personal transformation is possible when social identity has been fixed by rumor and habit.
Conflict intensifies as forces outside the couple reassert themselves, including family expectations, public judgment, and the lingering influence of wealth. Dumas fils shows how respectability operates as a gatekeeper, defining which relationships are granted legitimacy and which are treated as threats. Armand’s position in society, though less powerful than his rivals’ money, carries moral and familial obligations that do not easily accommodate Marguerite’s reputation. Marguerite, aware of how precarious her standing is, must weigh love against the likely consequences for Armand and for herself. The novel’s tension is sustained by competing claims: desire, duty, dignity, and the cost of being seen.
As misunderstandings and emotional injuries accumulate, the narrative underscores how communication fails under pressure and how quickly affection can be translated into suspicion. Armand’s reactions expose the fragility of idealized love when confronted with ambiguity, and Marguerite’s choices reveal both agency and constraint. Dumas fils carefully portrays the social environment as an active antagonist, shaping what each character believes is possible and what each fears. The story moves between scenes of intimacy and scenes of public interaction, highlighting the contrast between private intention and public interpretation. Marguerite’s illness continues as a quiet, inexorable background force that raises the stakes without dictating easy answers.
The framing device returns the reader to the aftermath, where letters, memories, and testimonies supply context for actions that were previously only partly understood. This retrospective structure encourages the reader to reconsider earlier judgments and to see how narrative itself—who speaks, what is preserved, what is omitted—affects moral evaluation. Dumas fils does not present Marguerite as a simple emblem of vice or virtue; rather, he depicts her as a person navigating limited options in a society eager to simplify her. Armand’s account, shaped by emotion and hindsight, illustrates how love can coexist with cruelty, and how remorse can coexist with social conformity.
Camille ultimately centers on the clash between authentic feeling and the social systems that commodify and police it. Without relying on sensational revelation, the novel builds a critique of hypocrisy, especially the way respectable society benefits from the very arrangements it condemns. Marguerite’s portrayal highlights the human costs of reducing individuals to reputations, and Armand’s experience probes the limits of idealism when faced with entrenched prejudice and economic reality. The book’s enduring significance lies in its compassionate yet unsentimental examination of love, sacrifice, and judgment, and in its continuing invitation to question how society decides who deserves sympathy and whose story is allowed complexity.
Historical Context
Camille, better known by its French title La Dame aux camélias, is set in Paris during the July Monarchy (1830–1848), a period when France was ruled by King Louis‑Philippe and political power was closely tied to wealth. The novel’s social world is shaped by expanding bourgeois influence, the continuing prestige of the aristocracy, and institutions that regulated public morality while quietly accommodating elite vice. Paris functioned as Europe’s preeminent capital of fashion and entertainment, and the narrative moves through salons, theatres, and private apartments that were central to elite sociability. These spaces frame the story’s scrutiny of reputation, money, and respectability.
The book emerged from the cultural climate of mid‑nineteenth‑century France, when the novel and the theatre became prominent arenas for debating social change. Alexandre Dumas fils published the novel in 1848, and soon adapted it for the stage; the play was first performed in Paris in the early 1850s. This timing matters: the work looks back on the pre‑1848 Parisian demi‑monde while addressing audiences living through rapid political upheaval. Censorship and policing of public morals influenced what could be shown on stage, yet the period also saw a growing appetite for “problem plays” and socially engaged fiction that examined class boundaries and sexual double standards.
Dumas fils’s own position helps explain the work’s attention to legitimacy and social judgment. He was the son of the celebrated novelist Alexandre Dumas père and was born out of wedlock; he later achieved legal recognition by his father. In nineteenth‑century France, birth status carried significant social consequences, and debates about family law and paternal responsibility were part of broader discussions of modernization and bourgeois order. Without reducing the novel to autobiography, it is historically grounded that Dumas fils wrote during an era intensely concerned with the public legitimacy of private life. That concern infuses his depiction of how society classifies people and restricts their futures.
Central to the story’s Paris is the world of the courtesan, a figure shaped by both economic realities and gendered constraints. The “kept woman” or high‑class mistress could attain visibility and luxury through relationships with wealthy men, yet remained socially precarious and morally stigmatized. The demi‑monde—a term associated with marginal yet fashionable circles—flourished in a city where entertainment venues and private patronage created economies of desire. Dumas fils depicts this milieu not as pure spectacle but as a system: an interlocking set of transactions, reputations, and dependencies. The narrative reflects how elite masculinity and capitalist display could coexist with public moral condemnation.
Parisian theatre and opera were not merely backdrops but influential institutions. In the 1830s and 1840s, the city’s stages were key sites of celebrity culture, social display, and political feeling, drawing audiences who treated attendance as a public performance of status. Opera houses and theatres employed large workforces and generated ancillary commerce—cafés, carriages, fashion trades—linking cultural consumption to the urban economy. Camille echoes this world by placing social meaning in who is seen where, and with whom. It also critiques how spectatorship extends beyond the auditorium: the city itself becomes an arena in which women’s reputations are watched, interpreted, and priced.
Economic change under the July Monarchy fostered new wealth and intensified inequality. France experienced industrial growth and expanding finance, while Paris concentrated luxury trades and consumer markets. Credit, debt, and visible consumption mattered in elite circles, and the boundaries between old aristocratic prestige and new bourgeois money were often negotiated through display. Camille reflects these dynamics through its attention to spending, gifts, and the monetary scaffolding beneath romantic language. The work’s social critique draws force from the fact that affection and economic dependence could be inseparable, particularly for women excluded from most respectable professions and from the political rights that underwrote male citizenship.
The revolutions of 1848 form an important historical horizon for the novel’s publication. In February 1848, the July Monarchy fell and the Second Republic was proclaimed, amid demands for political reform and social relief. The period included the establishment of universal male suffrage and intense conflict over labor and poverty, culminating in the June Days uprising in Paris. Although Camille’s narrative focuses on private life rather than street politics, it belongs to a culture grappling with the legitimacy of social hierarchies. The novel’s examination of who is deemed “fit” for respectable life resonates with the era’s broader disputes over inclusion, dignity, and the costs of inequality.
Public health and disease were concrete realities that shaped urban experience and moral discourse. Tuberculosis (often called “consumption”) was widespread in nineteenth‑century Europe and carried strong cultural meanings: it was linked in literature and popular belief with fragility, refinement, and tragedy, even as it was a leading cause of death. Paris also suffered recurrent cholera outbreaks, notably in 1832 and later in the century, reinforcing anxieties about crowded urban life. In Camille, illness is not merely a plot device but part of a recognizable medical landscape. The work echoes contemporary tendencies to moralize disease while also exposing society’s selective compassion.
Changing attitudes toward prostitution and “public morals” form another key context. French authorities regulated prostitution through policing and medical inspection in the nineteenth century, seeking to contain venereal disease and maintain public order while tolerating the trade’s existence. This system distinguished between regulated sex work and clandestine prostitution, and it reinforced classed distinctions—some women were harshly controlled while elite men often faced little stigma. Dumas fils’s story reflects the contradictions of a society that depended on sexual commerce yet disavowed it. By presenting a courtesan with interiority and moral complexity, the work challenges the simplistic categories embedded in policy and social convention.
The press and the book market expanded rapidly, shaping how stories circulated and how reputations were made. Newspapers and illustrated journals proliferated in Paris, and literary serializations and public debates about authors and actors became common. Scandals, reviews, and gossip columns helped create a shared urban audience attuned to celebrity and moral controversy. Camille’s subject matter—luxury, transgression, and social judgment—fit a media environment fascinated by private lives made public. The narrative’s framing devices and attention to documentation and testimony align with a culture in which printed accounts could confer legitimacy or disgrace, and where public opinion acted as a powerful social institution.
The novel also sits within the movement of literary realism and the broader nineteenth‑century turn toward representing contemporary social environments. While romanticism remained influential, French literature increasingly explored ordinary settings, economic pressures, and the moral ambiguities of modern life. Dumas fils is often associated with the “problem play” tradition on stage, where drama confronted issues such as marriage, morality, and social hypocrisy. Camille participates in this tendency by treating a marginalized woman not as an exotic symbol but as a subject shaped by institutions and expectations. Its critique is sharpened by credible social detail: the texture of Parisian life becomes evidence rather than decoration.
Gender norms under the July Monarchy and subsequent regimes were grounded in legal and social constraints. The Napoleonic Civil Code (in force throughout the period) structured family authority and restricted women’s legal autonomy in marriage, shaping expectations around female virtue and dependence. Respectable femininity was often tied to domesticity and chastity, while men’s sexual behavior was frequently judged by different standards. Camille dramatizes the consequences of this double standard for women who fell outside respectable categories. The story’s moral questions—about redemption, sacrifice, and social acceptance—are inseparable from the historical reality that women’s honor could function as a form of social currency that men controlled and society enforced.
Class mobility and the management of appearances were intensified by urban life in Paris. The city drew migrants and visitors, and its social scene required constant negotiation of status through address, clothing, etiquette, and access to exclusive venues. Carriages, fashionable districts, and seasonal rhythms of entertainment structured elite movement, while poorer neighborhoods remained visible reminders of inequality. Camille reflects a society in which social boundaries were both rigid and porous: porous enough for wealth and beauty to open doors, rigid enough to keep stigmatized individuals from full inclusion. The novel’s emphasis on reputation underscores how modern urban anonymity coexisted with relentless social surveillance.
Technological and infrastructural developments also shaped everyday experience. Railways expanded in France from the 1840s onward, shrinking travel times and binding Paris more tightly to provincial France and neighboring regions. Improvements in printing technology and distribution supported the growth of mass reading. Though major Haussmannian rebuilding of Paris began under Napoleon III in the 1850s, even earlier decades saw debates about sanitation, congestion, and the city’s modernization. Camille belongs to this transitional moment: a Paris not yet remade by wide boulevards, but already a metropolis of rapid circulation—of people, money, and information—that made intimate lives more exposed and more connected to public judgment.
After 1852, the Second Empire under Napoleon III fostered a culture of spectacle and luxury that would later intensify the themes present in Camille’s Paris, especially in the public display of wealth and in the prominence of theatres and fashionable nightlife. Dumas fils’s play version found success in this environment, where audiences were accustomed to seeing contemporary social issues refracted through melodrama and moral debate. At the same time, official attitudes toward censorship and morality continued to shape stage representation. The work’s ability to move between sentiment and social critique helped it navigate these constraints, presenting a story that could be read as both poignant romance and indictment of hypocrisy.
Camille also participates in nineteenth‑century debates about sincerity, virtue, and the possibility of moral rehabilitation. In a society where social identity was closely tied to family, marriage prospects, and public reputation, the question of whether a stigmatized person could be “reclaimed” had real implications. Charitable movements and moral reform efforts existed alongside punitive attitudes, and literature often served as a testing ground for these ideas. Dumas fils’s portrayal insists that moral worth and social worth were not identical, and it exposes how the language of virtue could conceal economic self‑interest and patriarchal control. These tensions were widely recognizable to contemporary readers.
Viewed in its historical context, Camille functions as both mirror and critique of mid‑nineteenth‑century Paris: a city where bourgeois respectability cohabited with commodified pleasure, and where institutions—from law and policing to the press and the theatre—helped convert private life into public verdicts. The novel echoes the era’s economic transformations, gendered legal norms, and urban celebrity culture, while questioning the moral logic that protected powerful men and condemned dependent women. Its enduring power comes from grounding personal tragedy in verifiable social structures: money, reputation, and institutionalized double standards. In doing so, it offers a historically specific indictment of how modern society distributes compassion and blame.
Author Biography
Alexandre Dumas fils (1824–1895) was a French novelist and dramatist who came to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century, during the era of Romantic and then realist-inflected French theater. Best known for the novel and stage versions of La Dame aux camélias, he became one of the period’s most influential voices in the “problem play,” drama that foregrounded social and moral questions. His work, often centered on the consequences of hypocrisy and the constraints placed on women, helped shape modern French bourgeois drama. In public life he also cultivated a reputation as a combative critic of social pretenses and moral double standards.
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Dumas grew up in Parisian literary circles and was exposed early to the theater and to the professional world of publishing. His formal schooling was supplemented by intensive self-education and practical experience in the milieu of writers, actors, and journalists who dominated cultural life in the July Monarchy and Second Republic. The artistic climate around him included late Romantic drama and an emerging taste for contemporary subjects treated with sharper social observation. Rather than aligning himself with an avant-garde school, Dumas gradually forged a personal style that mixed sentimental intensity with an insistence on moral accountability, a combination that would define his later plays.
After some early publications, Dumas achieved a decisive breakthrough with La Dame aux camélias, first published as a novel in the late 1840s. The book quickly attracted attention for its blend of emotional force and social critique, portraying a world in which respectability, money, and gendered judgment collide. Its popularity established him as a serious author in his own right and provided the foundation for his long career in the theater. The story’s continued afterlife in adaptations beyond Dumas’s own work underscored how effectively he had articulated themes that resonated widely in nineteenth-century Europe.
Dumas soon adapted La Dame aux camélias for the stage, and the play became his signature theatrical success, widely performed and central to his public reputation. Its reception confirmed his capacity to translate novelistic sentiment into dramatic structure and to use the stage as a forum for ethical debate. Over time he became associated with a form of bourgeois tragedy in which private choices have public consequences, and where dialogue is designed to argue as much as to move. The durability of this play, in particular, made Dumas a reference point for later dramatists interested in social realism and contemporary morality.
Beyond his most famous title, Dumas built an extensive dramatic repertoire that included works such as Le Fils naturel and Un Père prodigue, both of which display his interest in the legal and social frameworks governing family legitimacy and responsibility. His theater often stages conflicts between passion and convention, but it is equally concerned with institutions—marriage, inheritance, reputation—and the uneven standards applied to men and women. Critics and audiences responded to the clarity of his arguments and the emotional urgency of his scenes, even when they debated his moral positions. His plays helped consolidate the idea that serious drama could address modern social problems directly.
Dumas also wrote polemical and reflective prose tied to his theatrical aims, notably L’Affaire Clemenceau, which examines the damage wrought by scandal, judgment, and public opinion. Across genres he developed a voice that is at once rhetorical and analytical, using narrative and dialogue to press moral claims rather than merely to describe behavior. While his work can be didactic, it is rooted in concrete situations and recognizable social pressures, which kept it accessible to broad audiences. His advocacy, where it appears, is inseparable from his recurring concern with responsibility and the inequities of social condemnation, especially in matters of sexuality and reputation.
Camille
Chapter 1
In my opinion, it is impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired. Not being old enough to invent, I content myself with narrating, and I beg the reader to assure himself of the truth of a story in which all the characters, with the exception of the heroine, are still alive. Eye-witnesses of the greater part of the facts which I have collected are to be found in Paris, and I might call upon them to confirm me if my testimony is not enough. And, thanks to a particular circumstance, I alone can write these things, for I alone am able to give the final details, without which it would have been impossible to make the story at once interesting and complete.
This is how these details came to my knowledge. On the 12th of March, 1847, I saw in the Rue Lafitte a great yellow placard announcing a sale of furniture and curiosities. The sale was to take place on account of the death of the owner. The owner’s name was not mentioned, but the sale was to be held at 9, Rue d’Antin, on the 16th, from 12 to 5. The placard further announced that the rooms and furniture could be seen on the 13th and 14th.
I have always been very fond of curiosities, and I made up my mind not to miss the occasion, if not of buying some, at all events of seeing them. Next day I called at 9, Rue d’Antin.
It was early in the day, and yet there were already a number of visitors, both men and women, and the women, though they were dressed in cashmere and velvet, and had their carriages waiting for them at the door, gazed with astonishment and admiration at the luxury which they saw before them.
I was not long in discovering the reason of this astonishment and admiration, for, having begun to examine things a little carefully, I discovered without difficulty that I was in the house of a kept woman. Now, if there is one thing which women in society would like to see (and there were society women there), it is the home of those women whose carriages splash their own carriages day by day, who, like them, side by side with them, have their boxes at the Opera and at the Italiens, and who parade in Paris the opulent insolence of their beauty, their diamonds, and their scandal.
This one was dead, so the most virtuous of women could enter even her bedroom. Death had purified the air of this abode of splendid foulness, and if more excuse were needed, they had the excuse that they had merely come to a sale, they knew not whose. They had read the placards, they wished to see what the placards had announced, and to make their choice beforehand. What could be more natural? Yet, all the same, in the midst of all these beautiful things, they could not help looking about for some traces of this courtesan’s life, of which they had heard, no doubt, strange enough stories.
Unfortunately the mystery had vanished with the goddess, and, for all their endeavours, they discovered only what was on sale since the owner’s decease, and nothing of what had been on sale during her lifetime. For the rest, there were plenty of things worth buying. The furniture was superb; there were rosewood and buhl cabinets and tables, Sevres and Chinese vases, Saxe statuettes, satin, velvet, lace; there was nothing lacking.
I sauntered through the rooms, following the inquisitive ladies of distinction. They entered a room with Persian hangings, and I was just going to enter in turn, when they came out again almost immediately, smiling, and as if ashamed of their own curiosity. I was all the more eager to see the room. It was the dressing-room, laid out with all the articles of toilet, in which the dead woman’s extravagance seemed to be seen at its height.
On a large table against the wall, a table three feet in width and six in length, glittered all the treasures of Aucoc and Odiot[1]. It was a magnificent collection, and there was not one of those thousand little things so necessary to the toilet of a woman of the kind which was not in gold or silver. Such a collection could only have been got together little by little, and the same lover had certainly not begun and ended it.
Not being shocked at the sight of a kept woman’s dressing-room, I amused myself with examining every detail, and I discovered that these magnificently chiselled objects bore different initials and different coronets. I looked at one after another, each recalling a separate shame, and I said that God had been merciful to the poor child, in not having left her to pay the ordinary penalty, but rather to die in the midst of her beauty and luxury, before the coming of old age, the courtesan’s first death.
Is there anything sadder in the world than the old age of vice, especially in woman? She preserves no dignity, she inspires no interest. The everlasting repentance, not of the evil ways followed, but of the plans that have miscarried, the money that has been spent in vain, is as saddening a thing as one can well meet with. I knew an aged woman who had once been “gay,” whose only link with the past was a daughter almost as beautiful as she herself had been. This poor creature to whom her mother had never said, “You are my child,” except to bid her nourish her old age as she herself had nourished her youth, was called Louise, and, being obedient to her mother, she abandoned herself without volition, without passion, without pleasure, as she would have worked at any other profession that might have been taught her.
The constant sight of dissipation, precocious dissipation, in addition to her constant sickly state, had extinguished in her mind all the knowledge of good and evil that God had perhaps given her, but that no one had ever thought of developing. I shall always remember her, as she passed along the boulevards almost every day at the same hour, accompanied by her mother as assiduously as a real mother might have accompanied her daughter. I was very young then, and ready to accept for myself the easy morality of the age. I remember, however, the contempt and disgust which awoke in me at the sight of this scandalous chaperoning. Her face, too, was inexpressibly virginal in its expression of innocence and of melancholy suffering. She was like a figure of Resignation.
One day the girl’s face was transfigured. In the midst of all the debauches mapped out by her mother, it seemed to her as if God had left over for her one happiness. And why indeed should God, who had made her without strength, have left her without consolation, under the sorrowful burden of her life? One day, then, she realized that she was to have a child, and all that remained to her of chastity leaped for joy. The soul has strange refuges. Louise ran to tell the good news to her mother. It is a shameful thing to speak of, but we are not telling tales of pleasant sins; we are telling of true facts, which it would be better, no doubt, to pass over in silence, if we did not believe that it is needful from time to time to reveal the martyrdom of those who are condemned without bearing, scorned without judging; shameful it is, but this mother answered the daughter that they had already scarce enough for two, and would certainly not have enough for three; that such children are useless, and a lying-in is so much time lost.
Next day a midwife, of whom all we will say is that she was a friend of the mother, visited Louise, who remained in bed for a few days, and then got up paler and feebler than before.
Three months afterward a man took pity on her and tried to heal her, morally and physically; but the last shock had been too violent, and Louise died of it. The mother still lives; how? God knows.
This story returned to my mind while I looked at the silver toilet things, and a certain space of time must have elapsed during these reflections, for no one was left in the room but myself and an attendant, who, standing near the door, was carefully watching me to see that I did not pocket anything.
I went up to the man, to whom I was causing so much anxiety. “Sir,” I said, “can you tell me the name of the person who formerly lived here?”
“Mademoiselle Marguerite Gautier.”
I knew her by name and by sight.
“What!” I said to the attendant; “Marguerite Gautier is dead?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When did she die?”
