It was at this time she took the name Marie Duplessis (the “Du” prefix connotes a noble family, an honor she felt her mother’s ancestry entitled her to) and wisely invested in tutors who taught her not only to read and write, but also educated her in history, geography and other subjects she needed to converse intelligently with men of the ruling class. Her exceptional beauty and charm won her a devoted following, and at 16 she attracted her first important client: Agénor de Guiche, later one of Napoleon III’s ministers. The gypsies took her to Paris and put her to work in a dress shop, but by fifteen she discovered that prostitution was far more lucrative and allowed her to pay off her indenture in less than a year (many “trafficked” women still make the same choice for exactly the same reason today). Yes, this is her actual story, stranger than the fiction by which most modern people know her, and as you will see it only gets better. She was born Alphonsine Plessis on January 15 th, 1824 to a ne’er-do-well Norman father and a mother who was the last of an impoverished noble family which had been reduced to servility her mother died when she was six and her father raised her alone until she was fourteen, when he sold her to a band of gypsies. Such a woman was Marie Duplessis, whose real story was far more interesting than the romantic legend later created from it. – from her obituaryĪs we have seen before, it’s not unusual for the lives of whores to become the stuff of legend, often to the point where the real woman is either lost under the embellishment or people forget there was ever a real woman in the first place. The most elegant of women, having the most aristocratic taste and the most exquisite tact: she set the tone for a whole area of society.
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