Céleste’s illness gained unwanted press attention. Newspaper jackals swarmed with the thought that she might be dying since coal-gas mishaps had taken many lives. She was pestered by inquisitive visitors and the odd journalist, who wanted to see Mogador or check if she would survive. Yet in this case any publicity was good publicity. It revived interest in a celebrity author, who had slipped from view over recent years. But it did not help her sell another play. Her finances were running low and now at sixty, she did not have the contacts or benefactors of previous decades, which had helped her to somehow find the resources to keep doing what she wanted. After leaving the nursing home she sold Chalet des Fleurs and retreated to the bedsit in Passage de l’Opéra. Illness on illness had worn down her physical and mental resilience and she thought it might be time to enter a retirement home. On the advice of Dumas Jr, she applied for admission to the home run by the Society of Dramatic Authors. Dumas Jr, French poet and playwright Camille Doucet and Michel Lévy at Calmann-Lévy sponsored her. The society’s secretary invited her to a meeting.
‘There’s no doubt, Madame, you have had a verifiable career of some distinction,’ he said.
‘And there have been no complaints or legal proceedings against me.’
‘This is true. For most this would be sufficient accreditation. Nevertheless, there is your past.’
The dead hand of the Chabrillans was evident as ever. But this time not due to pressure from a lawyer’s visit. For a secretary who had never written anything, and who would never understand the writer’s life, Céleste’s past would just not do for the elite society. It was not about to dispense largesse to Mogador, despite her literary output.
‘Monsieur,’ Céleste said to him, ‘I thought that even murderers condemned in penal servitude were sometimes reprieved after thirty years.’
‘Insolence does not aid your cause, Madame.’
‘Insolence? Your probes have been both insolent and insulting!’
Céleste would wait for the society’s verdict. Predictably, she was turned down. Dumas Jr was surprised and irritated. He wrote telling her how brave and worthy she was. But he observed that people like the secretary and the society’s board were blind to everything she had achieved and done except what she had written in her memoirs.
‘It appears that today, lying and hypocrisy are small faults,’ he said, ‘but that frankness is a crime.’
Céleste struggled on and managed in 1885 to put on her play Pierre Pascal at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu. She was now a curio for journalists a generation younger who had only read about the risqué period during the mid-nineteenth century. One was the talented critic, essayist and satirist Charles Chincholle, a noted contributor to the newspaper Le Figaro.
He wrote a biographical colour piece. It was balanced but predictably dwelt on her background.
‘This evening towards midnight at the Ambigu,’ he wrote, ‘an actor will stand in front of the prompter’s box to announce: “Ladies and gentlemen, the play that we have had the honour of presenting to you was by Madame La Countess Lionel de Chabrillan.”
‘Who bears this name? All Parisians know this is the former dancer of Bal Mabille. It is Mogador. What has become of Mogador? How does she live? This is less well known . . . her hair is now white and she is always simply dressed.’
The journalist noted that her marriage in England would not have had much validity if the Count de Chabrillan, ‘in his passion’, had not had it registered at the Chancellery of France.
‘There is no need to speak here of her errors between her girlhood and marriage. They can be read in the Memoirs of Mogador. It’s more important to remember that the young countess resolved to bear her husband’s name with dignity. In order to insult her today, one must go back to her past. She does not conceal it . . . For more than thirty years the countess has been trying to kill Mogador. She never succeeded.’
Michel Lévy, who’d shown great loyalty as publisher and friend to Céleste throughout her career, consoled her for being rejected by the society, saying she was far too vibrant and productive to fade away in the old writers’ home. Lévy said that he would publish her in the future if she kept working. He encouraged her to do another volume of her Mémoires. She took up the offer and went to the offices of Calmann-Lévy to borrow all her manuscripts to help with research for the new volume. She noted in her diary that it was 12 July 1895 when she bumped into Dumas Jr at the counter in the foyer. He was fifteen days short of his seventy-first birthday, and she was seventy. Céleste was shocked. His appearance had deteriorated. Noticing her reaction, he said, ‘I have changed a great deal.’
‘Oh no!’ she replied.
‘You’ve become short-sighted,’ Dumas Jr said.
He remarked that he had heard Calmann-Lévy might be publishing the last volume of her memoirs. Was it true?
‘It’s not certain,’ Céleste responded. ‘I’m going to read my books and diaries and then reflect before I commit.’
‘You’re not overly enthused?’
‘I don’t wish to go through the long battles again, like the ones I had over the earlier volumes. On the other hand, a fresh volume would give me the chance to right all the wrongs; to put the record straight once and for all.’ She paused and added ruefully, ‘And I could do with the advance.’
‘I advise against it,’ Dumas Jr said. ‘Guy de Maupassant regretted doing his final memoirs.’
‘But if I’m compelled to write them . . .?’
‘By all means put them on paper, then destroy the manuscript.’
‘Why?’
‘For the sake of those that you name.’
‘Most of them are dead.’
‘I’m here, too, to collect all my manuscripts, books and plays so I can research it all and write a final manuscript. I’ll call it La Route de Thebes. I’m doing it only for my own personal pleasure. Then I’ll destroy it.’1
‘I don’t think I could put such effort into a book and then throw it away. But now you’ve told me what you’ll do . . .’
‘We shall not have the courage,’ he said with a laugh. ‘You won’t burn the manuscript of your Mémoires; nor will I that of my La Route de Thebes.’
They collected their weighty parcels and left together by carriage, chatting.
‘You’ve taken good care not to be forgotten,’ he said. ‘I’ve never known another woman who has been talked about as much as you.’
‘Mostly badly,’ Céleste said drily.
‘Not always. Your devilish willpower is still quite amazing, but I have none left anymore.’
‘Take a rest before you write the last one.’
‘I can’t. Even in my sleep I’m haunted by the thought of the work I cannot finish.’
The carriage clattered on for a few minutes before he spoke, ‘I don’t believe in the afterlife. Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But surely with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution . . .’
‘Oh, please! You’re going with the chatter of the intellectual classes. Atheism is popular at the moment. Just a theory.’
‘You believe in heaven?’ he asked sceptically.
‘I believe in a better world and that kind of distraction prevents it. Belief is a consolation for all human beings, since we’re all condemned to die.’
‘So thought of the afterlife is a comfort for you?’
‘It is.’
‘But it’s not necessarily reality.’
‘I prefer to avoid it.’
Dumas died four months later, on 27 November 1895, and never finished his final book. Céleste was devastated. She went to his home to pay her respects, placing in front of the coffin a bunch of red roses and white lilacs, the same flowers he had sent her when she came out of the nursing home. After praying for Dumas Jr, she was about to leave when she had a shock. Facing her was a man who was the image of Dumas Sr. She wondered if she was seeing a ghost, but soon learned that the man was one of Dumas Sr’s several illegitimate children.
‘My heart,’ she told her diary when she returned to her bedsit, ‘is like a cemetery in which there is no longer room to erect anymore crosses.’