Grande Horizontales focuses on four Courtesans, and this month I will focus on Marie Duplessis who died at the young age of twenty-three of tuberculosis. One of her lovers, Alexandre Dumas, based his main character in the novel La Dame Aux Camelias, which was published in 1848. Camelias were Marie's favorite flowers. She was married in 1846 to Count Edouard de Perregauz, until her death.
MARIE DUPLESSIS
"The Virtuous Courtesan"
"La Dame aux Camélias"
Alphonsine Plessis
Countess Edouard de Perregaux (She kept her name Marie Duplessis though.)
1824 - 1847
Her father was the illegitimate son of a priest and a prostitute who was abusive to his wife, Alphonsine's mother. The poor woman took off to Paris hoping to support herself and, eventually, her daughters but she died when Alphonsine was only six. Abandoned into the care of relatives, rumor was that the girl was sexually abused from the age of eleven and a half. Accused of being a seductress, she was sent back to the father who didn't want her. He left her and her sister to become apprentice laundresses. At thirteen and fourteen years old she was a blanchisseuse. This was the fate of many girls in those days.
Excerpt Page 32 : "Such an apprenticeship involved long hours of hard and repetitive physical labour... First piles of dirty linen would be sorted and washed, the actual washing sometimes done in a communal washroom by a washerwoman, a lower level of work than the blanchisseuse. Much of the work of the blanchisseuse consisted of ironing, which would be done at a large table covered with a heavy blanket, itself covered with calico. Several irons were heated on the large cast-iron stove, and it would be the job of the apprentice to keep this stove filled - always being careful not to overfill it - with coke... The blanchissuese herself and her older employees would be busy ironing intricate objects such as caps, shirt-fronts, petticoats, and embroidered drawers, while the apprentice would be put to work on the plain items, the stockings and the handkerchiefs..."
What happened next would shock today. Her father then gave her over to a man who was sixty to seventy years old and might have actually sold her to him. When her employer realized the situation, she was fired. To escape this man Alphonsine took a job as a hotel maid. Her father than gave her over to another man. Marie would not talk about it, but there is a strong possibility that her father than took her for himself, committing rape and incest on his own daughter. In 1839 The father and daughter suddenly upped and went to Paris.
As I read these passages I do wonder if Alphonsine's father intended for her to become a prostitute as his mother had been. As author Rounding describes it, French Parisian culture had an understanding of prostitution, and many prostitutes' were legally registered. In Paris the father again left her with relatives and, now only fifteen, she was placed as an apprentice with a dressmaker. She worked long hours - 7 am to 8 pm six days a week. She attached lace and embroidery to decorate dresses there. A dressmaker did not want apprentices who became prostitutes but it was not unusual for them, due to the low, unlivable pay to become grisettes - a woman who took on a paying lover.
Alphonsine, despite her hard work, may have been going hungry.
Then one day she and two friends accepted the offer of a day away by the owner of a restaurant who probably knew they were hungry.
Excerpt Page 35: "Quite who seduced whom, who exploited whom, is debatable: Alphonsine, with her precocious sexual experience, was an easy prey for a man with a certain amount of sophistication on the look-out for a young and pretty mistress, while she was quick to realize that, if she played her cards right, Nollet was in a position to offer her a way out of a life of drudgery and relative poverty. Events progressed rapidly. Within a month Monsieur Nollet had installed Alphonsine in a small apartment in the rue de l'Arcade and given her three thousand francs for her initial needs."
Poverty, hard physical labor, and sexual abuse would give Alphonsine motivation to improve her life, quite obviously. Her relatives in Paris, realizing also what she had done, outcasted her. She was alone in the world. Nollet was her first known patron and she soon overspent for his means and took other lovers as well. It was as if she gave in to her fate, or realized there was only one way to survive.
Alphonsine Plessis would fashion herself Marie Duplessis and rise out of poverty and obscurity by becoming an honored Courtesan. To do that she needed the patronage of a man and one known to other Courtesans came into her life. The next seven years or so of her short life would be dramatic and, perhaps because she had to know she was dying, gravely ill, she earnestly sought entertainments.
Notes: The image on the book is not that of Maria Duplessis.
Here at Mistress Manifesto I've featured a great many Courtesans and Paris seems to have been the epicenter of Courtesan culture. You can click on the tag below to bring up posts such as Paris, or Courtesan.
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