Camille
'Camille' Summary
Alexandre Dumas fils when he was 23 years old, and first published in 1848, La Dame aux Camélias is a semi-autobiographical novel based on the author's brief love affair with a courtesan, Marie Duplessis. Set in mid-19th-century France, the novel tells the tragic love story between fictional characters Marguerite Gautier, a demimondaine or courtesan suffering from consumption, and Armand Duval, a young bourgeois.[6] Marguerite is nicknamed la dame aux camélias (French for ''the lady of the camellias'') because she wears a red camellia when she is menstruating and unavailable for making love and a white camelia when she is available to her lovers.
Armand falls in love with Marguerite and ultimately becomes her lover. He convinces her to leave her life as a courtesan and to live with him in the countryside. This idyllic existence is interrupted by Armand's father, who, concerned with the scandal created by the illicit relationship, and fearful that it will destroy Armand's sister's chances of marriage, convinces Marguerite to leave. Until Marguerite's death, Armand believes that she left him for another man. Marguerite's death is described as an unending agony, during which Marguerite, abandoned by everyone, regrets what might have been.
The story is narrated after Marguerite's death by two men, Armand and an unnamed frame narrator. Some scholars believe that both the fictional Marguerite's illness and real life Duplessis's publicized cause of death, "consumption", was a 19th-century euphemism for syphilis, as opposed to the more common meaning of tuberculosis. Dumas fils is careful to paint a favourable portrait of Marguerite, who despite her past is rendered virtuous by her love for Armand, and the suffering of the two lovers, whose love is shattered by the need to conform to the morals of the times, is rendered touchingly. In contrast to the Chevalier des Grieux's love for Manon in Manon Lescaut (1731), a novel by Abbé Prévost referenced at the beginning of La Dame aux Camélias, Armand's love is for a woman who is ready to sacrifice her riches and her lifestyle for him, but who is thwarted by the arrival of Armand's father. The novel is also marked by the description of Parisian life during the 19th century and the fragile world of the courtesan.
Book Details
Author
Alexandre Dumas
France
Dumas began his career by writing plays, which were successfully produced from the first. He also wrote numerous magazine articles and travel books; his published works totalled 100,000 pages. In the...
More on Alexandre DumasDownload eBooks
Listen/Download Audiobook
- Select Speed
Related books
The Gamester by Edward Moore
"Gambling can be a dangerous addiction, and it can destroy lives." The Gamester by Edward Moore is a play about the dangers of gambling. The play tel...
Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides
Iphigenia in Aulis or Iphigenia at Aulis is the last of the extant works by the playwright Euripides. Written between 408, after Orestes, and 406 BC,...
Phaedra by Jean Racine
In the court of Louis XIV, adaptations of Greek tragedies were very popular. This play, heavily influenced by Euripides' Hippolytus, deals with love t...
Hernani by Victor Hugo
It tells the story of the love triangle between the titular character, Hernani, the noble Don Carlos, and the beautiful Doña Sol. The play takes place...
Beyond the Horizon by Eugene O'Neill
Beyond the Horizon is a play written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. Although he first copyrighted the text in June 1918, O'Neill continued to...
Faust II by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust is a tragic play in two parts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, usually known in English as Faust, Part One and Faust, Part Two. Although rarely st...
Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen
Ghosts is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was written in 1881 and first staged in 1882 in Chicago, Illinois, in a production by a...
The Seats of The Mighty by Gilbert Parker
The Seats of the Mighty is a novel published in 1896 by Gilbert Parker. It was first published in serial form in The Atlantic starting in March 1895,...
At The Sign of The Greedy Pig by Charles S. Brooks
In the heart of a quaint, sleepy village, hidden away from the prying eyes of the modern world, lies "At The Sign of The Greedy Pig" by Charles S. Bro...
Reviews for Camille
No reviews posted or approved, yet...