The Girl Who Loved Camellias, by Julie Kavanagh – review

Verdi’s La Traviata is the story of a courtesan who is redeemed when she gives up the man she loves in order to preserve his family honour, and then dies tragically in his arms. Verdi based his opera on a novel by Alexander Dumas the younger, The Lady of the Camellias (1852). This work was inspired by a courtesan whom Dumas had known — and had an affair with — but she has been largely forgotten. Her name was Alphonsine Plessis — later changed to Marie Duplessis — and she was only 23 when she died. Julie Kavanagh has written the story of her extraordinary life.

Alphonsine was born in 1824 in Normandy. Her peasant family could hardly have been worse. Today, social workers would have put her in care. She was probably sexually abused. Her father was a violent, promiscuous alcoholic; when he tried to kill her mother, the family broke up, and Alphonsine and her sister were farmed out to relations to be brought up in poverty. By the age of 14 she was working as a prostitute.

Aged 16, Alphonsine arrived in Paris. The capital’s demi-monde was a world which revolved around sex, and where bachelor flâneurs prowled the streets searching for poor girls with beautiful faces. Alphonsine soon became the teenaged mistress of an older man. Right from the start, she was very high maintenance, bankrupting her lovers by spending vast amounts on expensive clothes. Conspicuous luxury was crucial to her career. She needed to be seen as a poule de luxe in public places in order to attract a high class of admirer. A dizzying succession of rich men queued up to lavish money on her.

Alphonsine’s aristocratic lovers, such as the glamorous Duc de Guiche, educated her in the manner of Pygmalion.