Camille (La Dame aux Camélias)

Marguerite Gautier is the most celebrated courtesan in Paris, beautiful, extravagant, dying slowly of consumption, and adored by men who can afford her and forgotten by them the moment they can't. Armand Duval can't afford her at all; he simply loves her, jealously and completely, and against every rule of her world, Marguerite lets herself love him back. What their happiness costs, and who arrives to demand payment, gives the novel its devastating central turn, a sacrifice made in secret, and misread as betrayal.

Dumas fils wrote it at twenty-three, drawing on his own affair with a real Parisian courtesan, and the book became a phenomenon: the source of the play, of Verdi's La Traviata, and of a century of doomed-romance descendants. Framed as a story told after Marguerite's death, it is unabashedly a tearjerker, but an honest one, angry on behalf of a woman her whole society used and then judged.

At roughly 63,900 words, Camille (La Dame aux Camélias) runs about 7 hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

Camille (La Dame aux Camélias) is in the public domain, so the complete text is free on Project Gutenberg and LoudReader has the entire Project Gutenberg catalog built in. To listen:

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