Camille: The Lady of the Camellias

A view into the life of a sex worker in Paris in the 19th century. Her lifestyle required $100,000 francs a year to support; you can imagine the balancing act she had to keep up. She was 20 years old, beautiful, intelligent, but sick with tuberculosis, and a young man of modest means wanted her all to himself. The sh*thead never realized the sacrifice she made for him. Ah well.
Dumas fils writes so descriptively of Marguerite; what is hard to take is the attitude on the part of men that she is somehow less than her non-sex-worker counterparts. Shades of Sor Juana...Why do they create this job in society yet want to blame the woman who fills it?

I adore complicated, tortured stories of difficult love affairs if they don't descend into the sacarine or trite. Dumas fils does not disappoint with this fictionalized account of his own fractured love affair. Nothing burns quit so much as the passions that pain us in our youth. Although it's going on nearly 200 years old it wears well and has been mined for inspiration for books stage and film by lesser writers since. Sniff a camellia and heave a sad sigh for lost love.

I have so many thoughts about this tragedy. The concept of love in the context of the books intrigues me so much because the characters use the word love for what I would consider infatuation or just plain attraction. At first Armand, like the rest, just like having the idea of having her. That's why he is continuously expecting her to be someone that she's not.
Then there's the portrayal of women: the narrator made us understand the prejudice of the time (which still exists today) but it also redeems the protagonist through pain and sacrifice.
I was certainly not expecting the horror of them opening her grave or the despair of her last moments alive.
BTW, it's so funny to me that the narrator is just a nosy man that wanted to hear all show more the gossip show less

Melodramatic and with characters that aren’t all that likeable, but yet somehow an enjoyable read, perhaps because of the depth of the emotions, and how the book transports you to early 19th century France. Marguerite is a ‘kept woman’, one who trades her sexual favors to aristocratic old men for their money and lavish gifts. She keeps up an extravagant lifestyle while juggling suitors, which she can do without offending those involved too much as long as she maintains a sense of decorum about it. Armand is a young bourgeoisie who falls madly in love with her, and despite not having the economic means to pay her expenses, gets petty and jealous of her other men and tries to take her from it all, to the alarm of his father.

The show more book is restrained and doesn’t give us detail for the amorous relations, and yet it’s refreshingly frank about them, both of which were good things. While it’s a completely different world that these characters inhabit, when they go through the ups and downs of their affair, we recognize emotions and actions that are timeless. It drags on a bit towards the end, but the story of sacrifice and love is touching.

Quotes:
On affairs, this from Marguerite:
“Men, instead of being satisfied in obtaining for a long time what they scarcely hoped to obtain once, exact from their mistresses a full account of the present, the past, and even the future. As they get accustomed to her, they want to rule her, and the more one gives them the more exacting they become. If I decide now on taking a new lover, he must have three very rare qualities: he must be confiding, submissive, and discreet.”

On chance:
“One day a young man is passing in the street, he brushes against a woman, looks at her, turns, goes on his way. He does not know the woman, and she has pleasures, griefs, loves, in which he has no part. He does not exist for her, and perhaps, if he spoke to her, she would only laugh at him, as Marguerite had laughed at me. Weeks, months, years pass, and all at once, when they have each followed their fate along a different path the logic of chance brings them face to face. The woman becomes the man’s mistress and loves him. How? Why? Their two existences are henceforth one; they have scarcely begun to know one another when it seems as if they had known one another always, and all that had gone before is wiped out from the memory of the two lovers. It is curious, one must admit.” show less

Quite good and similar to Zola's [b:Nana|371456|Nana (Les Rougon-Macquart, #9)|Émile Zola|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1174236758s/371456.jpg|89633] in many ways, although, good storytellers as they were, neither Dumas Papa or Dumas Fils were in Zola's league.

What happens to the pretty girl who trades off her looks for money when she is past her sell-by date? Then she has to hope the man who always loved her will stump up the cash she needs so badly despite her constant rejection when she was at the top of the game and judged him too poor to supply her with the luxuries she felt entitled to. And hope he doesn't mind that she says she loves him only now she's desperate. Nor mind the sickness that has ravaged her body and destroyed her show more beauty, putting her out of work and losing her the gilded place in society and the envy, if not respect, of the women she never failed to lord it over?

Does being feckless go with the job of being a whore? Did none of them ever think of putting something by? Or is this just a literary device by the male authors who were looking to entertain rather than enlighten? show less

The narrator buys a courtesan's old book at a whim. Some time later, the man who gave her the book comes looking for it, and shares with the narrator their tale of love and sorrow. They had but a few short months together before her debts and his family's need to maintain their reputation came between them. I hadn't realized how closely the movie Moulin Rouge was based on this--the broad outline and many of the visual details (like the courtesan visiting her true love one last time, pale and waxy under her black veil) are the same. That said, Ewan McGregor's character was far less frustrating (nay, hateful!) than Armand Duval, the "hero" of this tale. But the courtesan of this tale is even more affecting than in the bombastic movie. I show more was helplessly crying near the end, distraught at Marguerite's courage and how little she hoped for (in vain, as it turns out).

"...I am tired out with seeing people who always want the same thing; who pay me for it, and then think they are quit of me. If those who are going to go in for our hateful business only knew what it really was they would sooner be chambermaids. But no, vanity, the desire of having dresses and carriages and diamonds carries us away; one believes what one hears, for here, as elsewhere, there is such a thing as belief, and one uses up one's heart, one's body, one's beauty, little by little; one is feared like a beast of prey, scorned like a pariah, surrounded by people who always take more than they give; and one fine day one dies like a dog in a ditch, after having ruined others and ruined one's self."

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I read the Le Livre de Poche (French) 1966 edition of this book, not the one indicated. Although intended as a Catholic morality tale, it's well-written & fun to read (of course, it's tragic). Jettisoning the "save one's immortal soul" reading prompt and replacing it with socio-economic & feminist critique makes for a more illuminating reading experience. Good detailed depiction of the catch-22 circumstances of a 19th century "kept woman" and her "respectable" lover.