Alexandre Dumas fils, a famous Parisian figure, lived a gilded bohemian life as a dandy. Although he once said of the author of Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo): "My father was a big baby who I had when I was very young,” he nevertheless showed great admiration for his elder throughout his life. A portraitist of Paris’s demi-monde, the theatre in particular brought him fame and fortune. With La Dame aux camélias, ra novel published in 1848 and adapted for the stage in 1852, he made a stunning entrance on the literary scene, all the more so in that the plot immediately inspired Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, La Traviata, which premiered in 1853 at Venice’s La Fenice. Nadar inserted him into his Nadar’s Contemporaries series (Le Journal amusant, January 29 1859) and caricatured him – as a flower seller, of course – in Les Binettes Contemporaines.