EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Alexandre Dumas and Verdi
ALEXANDRE DUMAS, born in 1824, was the son of a famous father, also Alexandre, the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo. Often known as Alexandre Dumas, fils, his mother had been a seamstress. The young boy hated having his illegitimacy jeered at by his schoolmates. He failed his exams but his larger-than-life father, for all his faults, stood by his son and introduced him to Parisian literary life.
Tall and handsome, by 19, Dumas the younger had acquired his first mistress and Victor Hugo cautioned his own son against him. Life for Alexandre Dumas became a round of gambling, drinking, womanising, running up bills and avoiding boredom. On a September day in 1844, having arrived back in Paris from visiting his father, he and a friend dined together and decided to seek some much-needed entertainment at the Théâtre des Variétés. There, in her usual box, sat the most notorious courtesan of all, Marie Duplessis. She was incredibly beautiful, genuinely likeable, extravagant and already consumptive – although illness did not keep her at home. Dumas had seen her before but this time, through his supper companion who knew Marie’s neighbour, a meeting was arranged.
Although he was unable to finance her lifestyle, they became lovers, so it is apparent that Marie, only a few months older, must have shared his obsessive passion. Her story was far more shocking than his. She had been born in Normandy to a pedlar, the son of a priest and a peasant girl. Marie’s mother was the daughter of a minor aristocrat who had married a servant. In turn she had been brutalised by her pedlar husband and left him, taking the future Marie Duplessis, then Alphonsine and her sister with her. But she died when Alphonsine was only six. She was returned to her father, who sold her to gypsies.
Eventually she arrived in Paris and began trading in sex. By 16, in the aftermath of an affair with a man who served briefly as Napoleon lll’s foreign minister, she was in demand by rich, older, often old, men. Set up in a series of fashionable apartments, she learned to read and write. But the tuberculosis that had killed her mother was already rampant. Her fraught love affair with Dumas lasted 11 months. She continued to see her paying suitors. Dumas left her and she died aged 23. Her only other passion was with Liszt. Fuelled by either ambition or remorse, Dumas wrote La Dame aux Camélias. Published in 1848, it was phenomenally successful.
Of the many variations, including film, it has inspired, none is more appealing than Verdi’s opera, La Traviata (1853), due to be performed tonight at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Now one of the most beloved in the repertoire, the first performance was panned because the soprano was too robust to convince. But the work would triumph and the demanding lead role of Violetta remains coveted by great sopranos including Maria Callas, who own life proved eerily tragic. Verdi, though, lived long and happily, dying in 1901. More than 250,000 mourners followed his funeral cortege.