Prologue
In my opinion, it is impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired.
Not being old enough to invent, I content myself with narrating.
I beg the reader to assure himself of the truth of a story in which all the characters, with the exception of the heroine, are still alive.
Marguerite was a pretty woman; but though the life of such women makes sensation enough, their death makes very little. They are suns which set as they rose, unobserved. Their death, when they die young, is heard of by all their lovers at the same moment, for in Paris almost all the lovers of a well-known woman are friends. A few recollections are exchanged, and everybody’s life goes on as if the incident had never occurred, without so much as a tear.
But to be really loved by a courtesan: that is a victory of infinitely greater difficulty. With them the body has worn out the soul, the senses have burned up the heart, dissipation has blunted the feelings. Then, when God allows love to a courtesan, that love, which at first seems like a pardon, becomes for her almost without penitence. When a creature who has all her past to reproach herself with is taken all at once by a profound, sincere, irresistible love, of which she had never felt herself capable; when she has confessed her love, how absolutely the man whom she loves dominates her!
They have lied so often that no one will believe them, and in the midst of their remorse they are devoured by their love.
Sacrifice
The courtesan disappeared little by little. I had by me a young and beautiful woman, whom I loved, and who loved me, and who was called Marguerite; the past had no more reality and the future no more clouds. How many ways does the heart take, how many reasons does it invent for itself, in order to arrive at what it wants! In this girl there was at once the virgin whom a mere nothing had turned into a courtesan, and the courtesan whom a mere nothing would have turned into the most loving and the purest of virgins.
If those who are going to go in for this hateful business only knew what it really was they would sooner be chambermaids. But no, vanity; 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.
If men knew what they can have for a tear, they would be better loved and we should be less ruinous to them.
They are sometimes obliged to buy the satisfaction of their souls at the expense of their bodies, they no longer belong to themselves. They are no longer beings, but things.
What equal sacrifice could you make for her? When you had got tired of her, what could you do to make up for what you had taken from her? Nothing. You would have cut her off from the world in which her fortune and her future were to be found; she would have given you her best years, and she would be forgotten.
Passing
What was the meaning of the hold which this woman had taken upon my life? She is consumptive, and the sort of life she leads isn’t exactly the thing to cure her. She has taken to her bed; she is dying.
The story of Marguerite is an exception, I repeat; had it not been an exception, it would not have been worth the trouble of writing it.
– Excerpts from the novel La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils (Dianne Bean and David Widger), freely adapted by Peter Quanz
