Alexandre Dumas

Written by Alexandre Dumas fils when he was 23 years old, 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. 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.

Large Print

The Lady of the Camellias

Draculelle

Elena M.

It is my opinion that you cannot create a convincing character until you have made a broad study of human nature, just as you cannot speak a foreign language until you have studied it thoroughly.

That eternal regret, not of the wrong road taken, but of bad planning and ill-spent money, is one of the saddest things a person can hear.

These days, by the time you are twenty-five years old, tears come so rarely that you don’t want to waste them on just anybody. It’s more than enough to weep for the parents who have paid for the privilege of being mourned.

That heroine is so real that I feel as if I have known her.

Let us not despise the woman who is neither mother nor daughter nor wife. Let us not limit our esteem to family life, narrow our tolerance to simple egotism.

The child is small, and contains the man; the brain is a cramped space that houses all thought; the eye is only a dot, and encompasses miles.

The Lady of the Camellias quotes

Join the club