34. La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils

The character of Marguerite Gautier, the Lady with the Camellias in Dumas’s six-hankie novel of 1848 - the book which inspired La Traviata - was taken directly from the life of the early-nineteenth-century Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis, who became Dumas’s lover for a short time between 1844 and 1845. During her brief, consumptive life, Marie’s penchant for camellias (and dukes) was well-known; in the novel she wears white camellias for twenty-five days each month and red for the remaining five, in what is surely some kind of sexual traffic-light system. The choice of title had another influence. In Isidora (1846) by George Sand, the flower-loving courtesan-heroine is also described as ‘la dame aux Camélias’. Sand, it seemed, misspelled ‘Caméllia’, giving it one ‘l’. Dumas followed suit, admitting it was through ignorance, but adding: ‘since Madame Sand spells the word as I do, I prefer to be incorrect with her than correct with others.’

Consulted:
Dumas fils, Alexandre: La Dame aux Camélias (introduction by David Coward, Oxford World’s Classics, 1986)
Saunders, Edith: The Prodigal Father (Longmans, Green & Co., 1951)

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