The Fashioning of <i>La Dame aux camélias</i> : The Creation and Celebrity of Eugénie Doche’s Marguerite Gautier
Bibliographic record
Abstract
La Lia nous dit le beau mot que lui dit Doche après la mort de Rachel: ‘Ça m’ôte le goût de jouer… Il n’y a plus de lutte pour moi!’1 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt According to the Goncourt brothers’ journal of 1859, Eugénie Doche (1821–1900) considered the premature death of the celebrated tragic actor Rachel (1858) to have robbed her of her only professional rival. While we need not take Doche entirely at her word, the fact that Rachel’s sister Lia Félix reportedly relayed this claim to the Goncourts, who in turn recorded it without their usual critical commentary, gives Doche’s words some currency.2 The previous year, the brothers had narrated another such anecdote in which Doche had equated herself to Rachel, without further remark.3 Certainly, such a pairing encourages a re-evaluation of the scholarly status quo: while Rachel’s celebrity lives on, and has received much academic attention, Doche has been almost entirely overlooked.4 This, I would argue, is largely due to the institutions and genres in which the stars made their names: Rachel first acquired fame through her performance of classical tragedies at Paris’s Comédie-Française, whereas Doche built her reputation in the hybrid musical forms of vaudeville and pièces mêlées de chant at the Théâtre du Vaudeville. At the time, Parisian theatres were subject to regulations based on genre dating as far back as 1806 and 1807, which divided the theatrical landscape in two: high-status primary theatres (‘grands théâtres’) like the Comédie-Française — France’s premier theatre for high comedy and tragedy — and lower-status secondary theatres (‘théâtres secondaires’) such as the Théâtre du Vaudeville — a popular musical theatre.5 Although the changing political regimes throughout the first half of the century updated and expanded these regulations, the official binary division did not disappear altogether until 1864, and its hierarchies continue to influence scholarly approaches. But how might a study of performers like Doche — the celebrities of Paris’s lower-status stages — nuance our current understandings of celebrity?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".