The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal which divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent. Sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly having communicated French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was sent to the penal colony at Devil’s Island in French Guiana and placed in solitary confinement.

Two years later, in 1896, evidence came to light identifying a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the real culprit. However, high-ranking military officials suppressed this new evidence and Esterhazy was unanimously acquitted after the second day of his trial in military court. Instead of being exonerated, Alfred Dreyfus was further accused by the Army, on the basis of false documents fabricated by a French counter-intelligence officer, Hubert-Joseph Henry, seeking to re-confirm Dreyfus’s conviction, and uncritically accepted by Henry’s superiors.

Word of the military court’s framing of Alfred Dreyfus and of an attendant cover-up began to spread, largely due to a vehement public protestation in a Paris newspaper by writer Émile Zola, in January 1898. The case had to be re-opened and Alfred Dreyfus was brought back from Guiana in 1899 to be tried again. The intense political and judicial scandal that ensued divided French society between those who supported Dreyfus (the Dreyfusard) and those who condemned him (the anti-Dreyfusards), such as Edouard Drumont (the director and publisher of the anti-semitic newspaper La Libre Parole) and Hubert-Joseph Henry.

Eventually, all the accusations against Alfred Dreyfus were demonstrated to be baseless. Alfred Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army in 1906. He later served during the whole of World War I, ending his service with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

Benoît-Constant Coquelin (January 23, 1841 – January 27, 19090 was a French actor, “one of the greatest theatrical figures of the age

He was made sociétaire in 1864, and during the next twenty-two years he created at the Comédie Française the leading parts in forty-four new plays, including Theodore de Banville’s Gringoire (1867), Paul Ferrier’s Tabarin (1871), Émile Augier’s Paul Forestier (1871), L’Étrangère (1876) by the younger Alexander Dumas, Charles Lomon’s Jean Dacier (1877), Edward Pailleron’s Le Monde où l’on s’ennuie (1881), Erckmann and Chatrian’s Les Rantzau (1884).

In 1900 Coquelin toured in America with Sarah Bernhardt, appeared on Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre in a production of Cyrano de Bergerac (Bernhardt played Roxane). He made his only film, the duel scene from Cyrano de Bergerac with sound recording on phonograph cylinder . On their return to France he continued with his old colleague to appear in L’Aiglon, at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. He was rehearsing for the creation of the leading part in Rostand’s Chantecler, which he was to produce, when he died suddenly in Paris in 1909. The New York Times printed an obituary, in which it described many tributes to the dead actor, including a visit by the personal secretary of the Republic, Armand Fallières

Illuminata- featuring John Turturro and Susan Sarandon, It’s about Duse, D’Annunzio and Sarah, about this very trip to Paris. Here is the IMDB link to check it out.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120709/

Cherie- deals with a courtesan of the Belle Epoque- the period of “The Lady of the Camelias”

Napoleon III (20 April 1808 – 9 January 1873), was the first President of the French Republic and the last monarch of France. Made president by popular vote in 1848, Napoleon III ascended to the throne on 2 December 1852, the forty-eighth anniversary of his uncle, Napoleon I’s, coronation. He ruled as Emperor of the French until September 1870, when he was captured in the Franco-Prussian War. He holds the unusual distinction of being both the first titular president and the last monarch of France.

The French economy was rapidly modernized under Napoleon III, who desired a legacy as a reform-minded social engineer. The industrialization of France during this period, in general, appealed to members of both the business interests and the working classes. Downtown Paris was renovated with the clearing of slums, the widening of streets, and the construction of parks according to Baron Haussmann’s plan. Working class neighbourhoods were moved to the outskirts of Paris, where factories utilized their labour. Some of his main backers were Saint-Simonians, and these supporters described Napoleon III as the “socialist emperor.” Saint-Simonians at this time founded a new type of banking institution, the Crédit Mobilier, which sold stock to the public and then used the money raised to invest in industrial enterprises in France. This sparked a period of rapid economic development

Napoleon’s Empire has been said to be the first regime in France to give “distinct priority to economic objectives”. Napoleon sought to advance his belief in free trade, cheap credit, and the need to develop infrastructure as ways of ensuring progress and prosperity through government policy.

Her real name was Rose Alphonsine Plessis and she was born in Normandy on January 15, 1824. On her father’s side, her grandmother was a prostitute, and her grandfather was a priest. Her father, who owned a drapers shop, was a drunkard and a brute. Her mother, Marie-Louise Deshayes, came from a far more respectable background, and clearly married down, living to regret it. Her mother eventually left her father, obtaining employment as a maid to an English family in Paris, and placed Marie and her younger sister with a cousin. Her mother later died when she was 8. Her father, who had no use for her, continued to farm her out to relatives where she lost her virginity to a young farmhand when she was 12. When her guardian learned of the incident, he returned young Marie to her father.

Marie was 13 when her father decided that she could make more money on her back then working for a laundress. He sold her to a seventy year old wealthy bachelor named Plantier who used her for a year and then sent her back to her father. Eventually her father decided he’d had enough of being responsible for her, so he sent her off to live with relatives in Paris, who were grocers. Marie eventually moved out, taking cheap lodgings in Quartier Latin, bouncing around from one form of employment to another, including working as a clerk in a hat shop.

Marie Duplessis was a beautiful young woman, with a petite figure and an enchanting smile. By the time she was 16, she had learned what other pretty girls in her position had learned, that prominent men were willing to give her money and pay her way in exchange for her company. She decided to give up working in a dress shop for little money and become a courtesan. She applied herself to learning to read and write more fluently, and to stay abreast of current events so as to be able to converse on these topics with her clients.

Her career started when she and two girlfriends, stopped for a snack in a restaurant near the Palais-Royal. The owner, a widower by the name of Nollet, took a fancy to her and soon installed her as his mistress, with an apartment on the Rue de L’Arcade. After about a year, Nollet could no longer afford Marie. One evening she was seen at the theater by Count Ferdinand Monguyon, who could better afford to keep her in the style to which she rapidly became accustomed.

It was around this time that she changed her name from Rose Alphonsine to Marie. She told a friend from her village that she had named herself after the Virgin Mary, but she might also have named herself after her mother, or after Mary Magdalene. Marie was a regular at a church dedicated to the Saint. She also added the faux noble ‘du’ to her name.

The names of Marie’s lovers read like a laundry list of the aristocracy of France, including Agenor de Guiche, the future Duc de Guiche-Gramont, who whisked Marie off to the spas of Germany for the summer. There is a possibility that Marie had a child by de Guiche in 1841, and that de Guiche placed the child with foster parents. The child was later thought to have died of pneumonia. At one point, 7 of Marie’s lovers banded together to keep her, buying her a bureau with 7 drawers where they could keep their clothes. Another of her lovers was the witty Comte Edouard de Perregaux, who had been a member of the French Calvary in Algeria. He had inherited a fortune which he proceeded to spend entirely on Marie.

In 1844, when Marie was 20, she was kept solely by the elderly Count de Stackelberg, whom she met while at the baths in Bagneres. He had been the Russian ambassador to Vienna, was married and wealthy. He told Marie that she reminded him of his daughter who had died young. Even though he paid the bills, imported horses for Marie from England, and rented boxes for her at all the best Parisian theaters, he could not give Marie the love that she craved, the love that she never got from her father.

Marie had finally hit the big time as a demi-monde. She was able to move from the Quartier Latin into a beautiful flat on the Boulevard de Madeleine. The apartment was furnished with Louis XV furniture, silk hangings on the wall, and books galore. At the time of her death, Marie owned 200 books. She continued to educate herself, learning to speak French without a Norman accent and to read and write with ease. Her days started at 11 in the morning when she woke up, had a cup of chocolate, read for a little bit, and then spent several hours deciding what she would wear. She would then either take a walk in the park or a ride in her carriage. Her days were now filled with shopping, and getting ready for the salons and parties that she attended, or a night out at the theater or the opera.

At one point she was spending over a 100,000 francs a year on her upkeep, not including clothes, carriages, servants, rent and travel. She was also a compulsive gambler. Like most young women who had led a deprived childhood, Marie was like a kid in a candy store after getting her allowance. She spent partly out of boredom, and partly out of an almost compulsive need for luxury. As if she knew already that she didn’t have long to live and wanted to cram as much life as possible into a few short years.

For all her excesses, she still managed to look like a startled virgin. The actress Judith Bernat described Marie in her memoirs as “Very slim, almost thin, but wonderfully delicate and graceful, her face was an angelic oval and her dark eyes had a caressing melancholy, her complexion was dazzling. She had an incomparable charm.When Judith asked Marie why she sold herself, Marie replied that the labor of a working girl would never have afforded her the luxuries for which she had an irresistible craving.

Did Marie like Marguerite ever fall in love? She admitted as much to Judith Bernat, sounding like the character from La Dame aux Camellias, telling her that while she had loved sincerely, no one had returned her love. “That is the real horror of my life. It is wrong to have a heart when you’re a courtesan. You can die from it.”

What made Marie so successful as a courtesan was her candor, (she once stated that lying kept her teeth white!) her flashes of gaiety, and above all her world-weariness, brought on by the futility of her lifestyle, and the consumption that would soon take her life. In the meantime, she enjoyed her life, her dogs, her carriage outings in the country, gambling and throwing dinner parties where authors liked Eugene Sue, Honore de Balzac and Theophile Gautier were guests.

She first met the man who would make her immortal when they were both 18 in 1842. He was unsuccessful while she was infamous. Alexandre Dumas fils was the illegitimate son of the famous writer and a laundress. He was struggling to become a writer in his own right out of the long shadow of his famous parent. They met again two years later in 1844 when they were both 20 at the salon of Madame Prat, a hatmaker who lived near Marie. Their affair lasted one year as Dumas struggled to keep up with his more worldly lover. He spent what little funds he had, and when he ran out, he tried his luck at the Baccarat tables. He borrowed money, and was insanely jealous of all the other lovers that Marie had kept on.

In the meantime, the consumption that eventually killed her was slowly growing worse. Marie tried every cure known at that time, including mesmerism, which was an early form of hypnosis. At Dumas insistence, she tried giving up her social life, spending time with him in the country until boredom overcame her and she fled back to her beloved Paris. Finally Dumas could take it no longer and he set her a ‘Dear Jeanette’ letter. The letter read in part, “I am neither rich enough to love you as I could wish not poor enough to be loved as you wish.” Later after her death, Dumas recovered the letter and presented it to Sarah Bernhardt when she played Marguerite Gautier on stage.

Marie did not reply to Dumas’s letter. She was too busy, and too ill, plus the final love of her life had just arrived in the form of Franz Liszt. Liszt had recently separated from his long-time over Countess Marie d’Agoult. He was 30 and had recently returned from a concert tour of Europe. Marie saw the musician in the lobby of a theater and introduced herself to him. They remained in the lobby chatting throughout the third act. Marie, insisted that her doctor, who knew Liszt bring him to one of her receptions. The doctor willing obliged, and by the end of the evening the musician and composer was her latest conquest.

The relationship was not long-lived, although Liszt later told an acquaintance that the woman he called Mariette was the first woman he’d truly loved. When he left for his next concert tour, Marie begged him to take her with him, claiming, “I know I shan’t live. I’m an odd sort of girl and I can’t hold onto this life that’s the only kind I know how to lead and that I can’t endure.” Liszt promised to take her to Turkey later in the year, but it was too late. He never saw her again. Later on he regretted that he had not been at her bedside.

In her weakness and fear that all of her friends would desert her as she became increasingly ill, Marie allowed herself to be persuaded by her old lover the Comte de Perregaux to marry him. They were married in February of 1845 at Kensington registry office in London, but they quickly separated and never lived together and husband and wife. The marriage was also not legal in France, although that didn’t stop Marie from using the title and creating her own coat of arms. Despite his marrying Marie, his fear of what his family would think kept him from having the banns were published in France which was all that would have been needed to make the marriage legal.

The last year of her life was spent running from one doctor to the next, from one rest cure to the next, in the fruitless attempt to starve off death. Her debts were also mounting as one by one her protectors fell away. She was buried in the cemetery at Montmartre. De Perregaux had her reburied two weeks later in a better burial plot that he had purchased. Five months later, Dumas immortalized her as La Dame aux Camellias. In his version, Marguerite Guatier sacrifices the love of Armand Duval (AD just like Alexandre Dumas) to save him from ruin. He wrote it in just four short weeks.

The first edition sold out 12,000 copies, but it didn’t continue to sell well. It wasn’t until Dumas adapted it to the stage, that Marie’s story reached a wider audience. The play opened almost five years to the day of Marie’s death at the Theatre du Vaudeville. It was a great success. Verdi was among the theatergoers, later he was inspired to create La Traviata which premiered in Venice two years later which only added to Marie’s legend.

Although he wrote several plays and books, nothing came to near to the popularity of La Dame aux Camellias. Later in life, Dumas became obsessed with what he considered the wickedness of prostitution and proposed to the government that all unmarried women be drafted and taught a trade in state schools to keep them off the streets. Also that all street walkers be deported to the colonies.

Marie’s death made his career. In writing La Dame aux Camellias he was finally able to have the Marie that he wanted, the one that had eluded him during her lifetime.

Below is Marie at the Theatre in 1845 and Franz Liszt who gace piano leassons to Marie, he claimed that she was the first woman he ever loved

Dumas was born in Paris, France, the illegitimate child of Marie-Laure-Catherine Labay (1794-1868), a dressmaker, and novelist Alexandre Dumas. During 1831 his father legally recognized him and ensured that the young Dumas received the best education possible at the Institution Goubaux and the Collège Bourbon. At that time, the law allowed the elder Dumas to take the child away from his mother. Her agony inspired Dumas fils to write about tragic female characters. In almost all of his writings, he emphasized the moral purpose of literature and in his play The Illegitimate Son (1858) he espoused the belief that if a man fathers an illegitimate child then he has an obligation to legitimize the child and marry the woman.

Dumas’ paternal great-grandparents were a French nobleman and a Haitian woman. In boarding schools, Dumas fils was constantly taunted by his classmates. These issues all profoundly influenced his thoughts, behavior, and writing.

During 1844 Dumas moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye to live with his father. There, he met Marie Duplessis, a young courtesan who would be the inspiration for his romantic novel The Lady of the Camellias. Adapted into a play, it was titled in English (especially in the United States) as Camille and is the basis for Verdi’s 1853 opera, La Traviata. Although he admitted that he had done the adaptation because he needed the money, he had a great success with the play. Thus began the career of Dumas fils as a dramatist, which was not only more renowned than that of his father during his lifetime but also dominated the serious French stage for most of the second half of the 19th century. After this, he virtually abandoned writing novels (though his semi-autobiographical L’Affaire Clemenceau (1867) achieved some success).

Alexandre Dumas fils died at Marly-le-Roi, Yvelines, on November 27, 1895 and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. His grave is, perhaps coincidentally, only some 100 meters away from that of Marie Duplessis.

La Dame Aux Camelias in English

La Dame Aux Camelias in French

Gabriele D’Annunzio (12 March 1863 – 1 March 1938) was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, dramatist, and daredevil who had a controversial role in politics as an influence on the Italian Fascist movement.

In 1883 D’Annunzio married Maria Hardouin di Gallese, and had three sons, but the marriage ended in 1891. In 1894 he began a love affair with the famous actress Eleonora Duse which became a cause célèbre. He provided leading roles for her in his plays of the time such as La città morta (The Dead City) (1898) and Francesca da Rimini (1901), but the tempestuous relationship finally ended in 1910.

D’Annunzio became well known worldwide because of his short stories and poems, but his later worked turned him into a successful dramatist. His Città Morta (1898), which was written for Sarah Bernhardt, is certainly among the most daring and original of modern tragedies, and the only one which by its unity, persistent purpose, and sense of fate seems to continue in a measure the traditions of the Greek theatre.

Below is a photo of D’Annunzio in the gardon of La Capponcina

Flavio Ando (1851-1915) was the leading man in the Rossi Company. Armand to Eleonora Duse’s Marguerite Gautier in La Dame Aux Camelias and also playing Turiddu to her Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana. During the South American tour, as her marriage was disintegrating, Duse and Ando had a brief affair. After it ended, he continued to be her leading man; and when she formed her own theatre company in 1886, Ando was the principal actor. In 1894 he left Duse to join another company, but he acted again with her- at her insistence- at the opening of her 1897 Paris season in La Dame Aux Camelias.

Here are two post cards from the Naples theatre, another resource is http://badigit.comune.bologna.it  It doesnt have phtos of Duse but does give imformation on Zacconi and other members of his company, which later became Duses.