The Lady of the Camellias

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Marguerite Gautier is the most sought-after courtesan in Paris, kept in flowers and opera boxes by a rotating cast of wealthy admirers, and dying, slowly and in plain sight, of consumption. Armand Duval is a young man of modest means who has loved her from a distance for two years without her noticing him once. When he finally gets his chance, she laughs at his devotion — and then, almost against her own judgment, believes it.

What follows is a year in the countryside outside Paris, paid for by selling off the possessions Marguerite no longer wants and concealed from Armand as long as she can manage it: a season of happiness neither of them was supposed to be allowed. It ends when Armand's father arrives to ask, quietly and reasonably, what Marguerite's love is going to cost his son's sister her marriage and his family its name — and Marguerite has to decide what she is willing to give up to protect a man who does not know she is giving up anything.

Published in 1848, when its author was only twenty-four, The Lady of the Camellias drew directly on Dumas fils's own affair with a courtesan who had died the year before, and it scandalized and moved Paris in equal measure. It became the basis for Verdi's La Traviata and defined the archetype of the courtesan with a conscience for a century of fiction after it. This new translation keeps its narrator's mixture of tenderness and clear-eyed irony intact.