Alexandre Dumas

Follows the life of Marguerite Gautier, the most sought-after courtesan in Paris, who casts aside her upper-class lifestyle for commoner Armand Duval, but their love is challenged by the constraints of society.

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.

She has already so completely absorbed my thoughts, my heart, and my life.

Dess.

Tiffany Fu-Voight

“Poor souls! If it is not right to love them, is it not well to pity them? You pity the blind man who has never seen the daylight, the deaf who has never heard the harmonies of nature, the dumb who has never found a voice for his soul, and, under a false cloak of shame, you will not pity this blindness of heart, this deafness of soul, this dumbness of conscience, which sets the poor afflicted creature beside herself and makes her, in spite of herself, incapable of seeing what is good, of hearing the Lord, and of speaking the pure language of love and faith.”

Lilia Fitipaldi

Alexandre Dumas fils

The landmark novel that inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata, in a sparkling new translation "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. Known to all as “the Lady of the Camellias” because she is never seen without her favorite flowers, Marguerite Gautier, the most beautiful, brazen, and expensive courtesan in all of Paris. But despite having many lovers, she has never really loved—until she meets Armand Duval, young, handsome, and hopelessly in love with her. “Marguerite and Armand are the kind of bright, self-destructive young things we still read about in magazines, watch on-screen, or brush up against today.” —Liesl Schillinger, from the Note on the Translation For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Lady of the Camellias

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