The Lady of the Camellias

After being totally immersed into the opera La Traviata I had to read this novel, The Lady of the Camellias, which was the base for the libretto of La Traviata. You recognise yourself directly starting to read it, all is there, but it is much more in the novel. But two things has caught my eye. Marguerite Gautier (Violetta in La Traviata) is in the novel a much colder, more calculating person than Violetta. I guess this has to do with the scene of the opera where you cannot develop characters in the same way as in a novel, but when she let herself fall into love with Armand, she breaks completely with her former life (this goes much faster in the opera). We can also see in the two films of La Traviata how Armand and Alfredo in the 1967 film are more alike, Armand being consumed with love and desire accepts nearly everything, even his great jealousy that he feels knowing that Marguerite have other lovers, all so that she can continue her life of luxury. She is probably sick with tuberculosis, but I do not know if she feels that her time is running out. Or is she in reality trying to punish a loving God. This is not unheard of. People think they can crush God by throwing themselves into a life of sin (this she clearly does later in the novel). But God is impassible. We cannot change God that way. In the 1982 film with Domingo we have a more forceful Armand/Alfredo which I wish he also was in the novel. I very much enjoy Violetta, I have a harder time with Marguerite and her friend Prudence, they are all business. But Marguerite really changed, “Our love is not like other loves, my Armand. You love me as if I had never belonged to another, and I tremble lest later on, repenting of your love, and accusing me of my past, you should let me fall back into that life from which you have taken me. I think that now that I have tasted of another life, I should die if I went back to the old one. Tell me that you will never leave me!” Armand is treating Marguerite in a way now that he could not do at the beginning, and she wants to pay her debts, put the past behind her, and not drag Armand into it. Her character is really painted anew, very beautifully. She cannot even fathom the thought of returning to her former life. 

Armand Duval is in the novel very much consumed with his love for Marguerite, just like Alfredo in the opera. I know this love very well. Sometimes I wonder if all love is so consuming or if just some love is. I do not really know, but I start to think that when a love is so cold and calculating or when it is all-consuming, there must be something wrong; it will never end well. 

Every time we read in Scripture about such all-consuming love it ends awful. We have Dina and Shechem, were Shechem is consumed with love or desire towards Dina, and he rapes her, and wants to marry her, and her brothers Simeon and Levi avenge her by putting all of them to death (Genesis 34). We also have the story of Tamar and her half-brother Amnon who loves her, and he is consumed with his love and lust for her so that he cannot do anything, it consumed his whole life. By cunning and feigning to be sick he lures her to his home and rapes her, but after is he repulsed by her and thrust her out. The King James Bible says that, “Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. And Amnon said unto her, Arise, be gone” (2 Samuel 13). To note, this is happening after God’s judgement on David for his sin of adultery and murder where God is saying that David is forgiven, else he would have been condemned to death, still did God have to punish him for his sins (2 Samuel 12), our sin will always find us out. We cannot hide from its consequences anywhere. 

Sometimes does film and TV describe love in this all-consuming way, like this love is the only love that is real, all-consuming love, or love with a desire so strong that nothing can stand in the way. Is this love? Is it not madness instead? If love consumes our thoughts, our life, our feelings, and completely takes over a person is it not madness? Like we can hear in the ending of the first act of La Traviata, that the love Violetta feels must be madness. No one can love her in that way, no one can love her for her, no, Alfredo is only shadow she will lose at daybreak, and she will be consumed with heartbrak and sorrow, it is madness. But that love is not at all madness, it might be unattainable but not madness. Love is not always answered in the way we like, we know it can end in heartbreak, or it can end in realisation, and in happiness and great joy.

Here we find out that the novel and opera differ. Armand's father comes to him and begs him to leave Marguerite, for the honour of the family, “Is it honourable for you to live like husband and wife with a woman whom everybody has had?” the father asks. “What does it matter, father, if no one will any more? What does it matter, if this woman loves me, if her whole life is changed through the love which she has for me and the love which I have for her? What does it matter, if she has become a different woman?” This is a little like Hosea, he completely accepts Marguerite as she is. Not every man is able to do that. If we ever are forgiven in that way by any one let us be very thankful, and show great humbleness because of it. Let us read from Hosea, “And the LORD said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord. So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; which conceived, and bare him a son” (Hosea 1:2–3). Hosea had to live with the memory of his wife’s past lovers, and her adultery, and still he loved her, still he redeemed her for “fifteen pieces of silver, and for an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley” (Hosea 3:2). I believe that Hosea was given this gift from God to love Gomer in this inexplainable way. Armand had only to forget her past lovers, which he does, and Marguerite was truly faithful to Armand (after her chosen commitment), who was unable to leave her. 

A little later in the novel does Marguerite leave Armand in secret, the reader not knowing why, and he is devastated and receives a letter that states, “By the time you read this letter, Armand, I shall be the mistress of another man. All is over between us. Go back to your father, my friend, and to your sister, and there, by the side of a pure young girl, ignorant of all our miseries, you will soon forget what you would have suffered through that lost creature who is called Marguerite Gautier, whom you have loved for an instant, and who owes to you the only happy moments of a life which, she hopes, will not be very long now.” He returns home but is driven by hate back to Paris to punish Marguerite, and he does it in a very effective way. He does not know that she has left him out of love, “No, my friend; circumstances were stronger than my will. I obeyed, not the instincts of a light woman, as you seem to say, but a serious necessity, and reasons which you will know one day, and which will make you forgive me,” and she knows that she has not long to live. And seeing his reproach, and reviling causes great sorrow in her life, and she is deteriorating quickly. “Marguerite herself, whether she guessed my motive or was deceived like everybody else, preserved a perfect dignity in response to the insults which I heaped upon her daily. Only, she seemed to suffer, for whenever I met her she was more and more pale, more and more sad. My love for her, carried to the point at which it was transformed into hatred, rejoiced at the sight of her daily sorrow. Often, when my cruelty toward her became infamous, Marguerite lifted upon me such appealing eyes that I blushed for the part I was playing, and was ready to implore her forgiveness.“ I believe many that have been rejected, or have been loved and forsaken can recognise themselves. But they are here reconciled, but do not continue together, Armand still not knowing about the father’s meddling. 

Armand leaves the country, in the opera does Alfredo also leave the country after a duel with the baron, and he returns in time to take farewell of Violetta in a heartbreaking scene, in the novel, on the other hand, he receives a letter from Marguerite where she tells him of how his father came to her, as we see in the opera, were he asks her to leave Armand because of his pure daughter that is getting married, but will not get married if this sordid relationship continues. She says in the letter to Armand, “I wept silently, my friend, at all these reflections which I had so often made, and which, in the mouth of your father, took a yet more serious reality. I said to myself all that your father dared not say to me, though it had come to his lips twenty times: that I was, after all, only a kept woman, and that whatever excuse I gave for our liaison, it would always look like calculation on my part; that my past life left me no right to dream of such a future, and that I was accepting responsibilities for which my habits and reputation were far from giving any guarantee. In short, I loved you, Armand. The paternal way in which M. Duval had spoken to me; the pure memories that he awakened in me; the respect of this old man, which I would gain; yours, which I was sure of gaining later on: all that called up in my heart thoughts which raised me in my own eyes with a sort of holy pride, unknown till then. When I thought that one day this old man, who was now imploring me for the future of his son, would bid his daughter mingle my name with her prayers, as the name of a mysterious friend, I seemed to become transformed, and I felt a pride in myself.” And she left Armand, and she returned to the only life she has ever known, to be a kept woman, but her coldness and calculation are gone. She is changed in a way.

I still believe with all my heart that Violetta in the opera prays for true forgiveness, in the novel instead Marguerite has this notion, “Your father embraced me once more. I felt two grateful tears on my forehead, like the baptism of my past faults, and at the moment when I consented to give myself up to another man I glowed with pride at the thought of what I was redeeming by this new fault.” This is an enormous lie that she is telling herself: That she by one sin redeems her from her former sins, even if that act might look that way. In the opera when the father asks what she will do, she says that if he knew he would have hindered her. And she tries to kill herself through all these excesses, and she describes herself, “I became a body without a soul, a thing without a thought; I lived for some time in that automatic way; then I returned to Paris, and asked after you; I heard then that you were gone on a long voyage. There was nothing left to hold me to life.” And she prepares to die in her impoverishment, where she meets a Catholic priest and confesses, we never hear her confession in the novel, unfortunately. And then Marguerite dies in great pain without her Armand. 

In the opera is Violetta surrounded by Alfredo, his father, and her Annina, and the doctor, and she releases Alfredo, she wants him to marry a young girl if she gives her heart to him, and from heaven shall she pray for both of them. This is a picture of a redeemed soul, and she receives full peace before she dies. 

It was indeed a sorrowful novel to read. It awoke many memories, and many questions about sin and redemption. In the opera we can hear Violetta’s cry that even if God has completely forgiven her are men implacable, and still hold her captive in her sins, still regard her as a sinner. This contrary to our great God, that says that he “remember their iniquity, and visit their sins” (Hosea 8:13), God will visit our sins which we have not left and repented of, he will not forget them, but he also says, “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, And will not remember thy sins” (Isaiah 43:25), he will no more remember our sins if we have left and repented of them. We neither should hold forgiven sinners captive in their former sins if they truly have repented and left them, nor be implacable towards them, but share their joy because every sinner that is forgiven is a great miracle wrought by our God through the atonement that the Godhead has accomplished.

The opera is very sad but has a light that the novel does not have, which I am thankful for, but at the same time we should also read the novel to gain insight and background to this the most beautiful opera created.

In my quest to understand Alfredo and Violetta, I have only the film *Camille* left. And again, it is hard to find a good recording of La Traviata regarding quality of recording and singing, but these two films.