The Lady of the Camellias Author:Alexandre Dumas The Lady of the Camellias By Alexandre Dumas, first published in 1848, and subsequently adapted for the stage. The lead heroine is Marguerite Gautier, a young beautiful courtesan who is a "kept woman" by counts and dukes -- men of "Fashionable Society." She meets a young middle class lover Armand Duval who does the unpardonable thing of falling ... more »jealously in love with her and breaking all convention of what's expected between a courtesan and her admirers. He, of course, has no way of sustaining the standard of living which she is accustom. Marguerite, despite her past is rendered virtuous by her love for Armand, and the suffering of the two lovers is rendered touchingly. "One of the greatest love stories of all time," according to Henry James, and the inspiration for Verdi's opera La Traviata, the Oscar-winning musical Moulin Rouge!, and numerous ballets, stage plays (starring Lillian Gish, Eleonora Duse, Tallulah Bankhead, and Sarah Bernhardt, and films (starring Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Rudolph Valentino, Isabelle Huppert, and Colin Firth), The Lady of the Camellias itself was inspired by the real-life nineteeth-century courtesan Marie Duplessis, the lover of the novel's author, Alexander Dumas fils« less