Novel
The Lady of the Camellias
La Dame aux camélias
Alexandre Dumas fils · 1848
Opening lines
Mon avis est qu’on ne peut créer des personnages que lorsque l’on a beaucoup étudié les hommes, comme on ne peut parler une langue qu’à la condition de l’avoir sérieusement apprise.
My view is that one can create characters only after having studied men a great deal, just as one can speak a language only on condition of having seriously learned it.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from fr.wikisource.org
Synopsis
In Paris, the narrator attends the auction of the possessions of Marguerite Gautier, a famous courtesan who died young of tuberculosis and who was always seen with camellias. There he meets a young man, Armand Duval, who confides his story to him. Armand had loved Marguerite and had persuaded her to give up luxury and her protectors to live with him in the country, where they had been happy. Then she had left him to return to her former life, without telling him why.
Context
The novel appeared in 1848. The author transposes into it the affair he had had with a famous courtesan, Marie Duplessis, born Alphonsine Plessis. The narrative is framed: an anonymous narrator collects the story entrusted to him by Armand Duval. The author himself made a play from it, first staged at the Théâtre du Vaudeville on 2 February 1852, which was a triumph; Verdi turned it the following year into an opera, La Traviata, first performed in Venice, changing the names of the characters.
Who it is for
A short novel, in a framed narrative, in plain language, which can be read in one sitting; the melodrama is openly embraced.
Prizes and reception
Sarah Bernhardt often played the part of Marguerite, and the work was brought to the screen several times from the earliest days of cinema.
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