Strapless

by Deborah Davis

  But bad news seemed to follow the Gautreaus. Pedro’s second attempt in local politics failed. According to the area newspaper Le Salut, the contest was a heated one, and Pedro was rebuffed by the voters of Paramé after he “placed himself everywhere.” Because St.-Malo and Dinard were vacation spots for many of the same people who were gossiping about Madame X in Paris, Amélie kept a low profile in order to avoid unpleasant encounters. Her name was not mentioned in the coverage of the casino ball in St.-Malo, nor did she make an appearance at the races that season.

  The outbreak of cholera in southern Europe that summer occasioned Amélie’s first really public appearance: a September charity concert to raise money for victims of the epidemic. Amélie herself organized the event; its success proved that her name and social standing, while tarnished, still had cachet.

  Amélie enjoyed being out in society and had no intention of hiding forever. But like Sargent, she needed a strategy for dealing with the effects of the scandal. The gossip would subside if she gave people something else to talk about. It was time to hold her head high, step into the spotlight, and unveil a new image.

  Amélie returned to Paris with a mission. She would plunge into the new social season, accept all the usual invitations to dinners, opening nights, and charity balls, and blithely behave as if Madame X had never happened. Luckily, the painting was locked up in Sargent’s studio, and her hope was that it would stay there so people would forget about it. Meanwhile, her instincts—the same ones that previously had served her well—were telling her to entrust her image to another painter, someone who would create an accurate, and more flattering, tribute to her beauty. It would not be quick or painless—portraits took months, sometimes years, to complete—yet she was willing to be patient, to get it right this time.

  She found an artist whose name is lost to us, but who could follow directions without worrying about proving his originality. She asked him to paint her in a manner reminiscent of Thomas Gainsborough, the eighteenth-century English painter whose formal depictions of the aristocracy in such works as The Blue Boy defined portraiture in his day. In this portrait of Amélie, painted probably in 1885 or 1886, she stands in a jaunty riding habit, her hair spilling from a feathered derby, one hand clasped to her breast. Her nose, always identifiable, dominates her face. Her jacket and shirt, buttoned and ribboned at the neck, are proper to the point of being prim. The undistinguished artist failed to come up with one seductive brushstroke.

  No surprise, then, that this unremarkable painting—and its creator—dropped into obscurity. It did no service to Amélie either, failing to attract attention as she had intended. The critics had nothing to say, and there was no mention of the painting in the gossip columns.

  Before Madame X, Amélie’s arrival at a party could cause a near-riot in the streets and produce inches of copy in newspapers. And immediately after Madame X, she had become used to seeing volumes of negative publicity about herself and the portrait. But the absence of any public reaction to her latest portrait was Amélie’s worst nightmare: people were starting to forget her.

  A Woman of a Certain Age

  For the three years directly following the 1884 Salon, Amélie sought to keep herself in the public eye. She went wherever it was important to be seen, rarely missing a premiere, a political reception, or a charity gala. But she knew that her look, once her surest claim to fame, did not have the same effect on people as before. Perdican and other columnists were less enthusiastic about her activities, allotting her the same terse lines they gave to other society women.

  Worse still, Amélie’s thirtieth birthday was approaching—the dividing line between youthful desirability and dreaded middle age. How could she reclaim her celebrity and make Paris notice her once again?

  Unveiling yet another new portrait, Amélie concluded, would be the most effective way to call attention to herself. She had learned an important lesson from her last experience. A portrait painted in the style of Gainsborough, for instance, was out of the question. Anything conventional would be ignored, when what she wanted was to provoke the opposite reaction.

  Before she could settle on a style, a concept, or a pose, she had to find an artist. She needed someone who could create the unexpected; this ruled out established portrait painters like Carolus-Duran or Charles Chaplin. She selected instead Gustave Courtois, an artist in search of a big-idea portrait to display at the Salon. The situation recalls that of some years earlier, when Amélie and Sargent collaborated on the ambitious idea for his 1884 Salon submission. Now, however, Amélie was determined to stage-manage the sittings for her own purposes.

  She dressed carefully for her first session with Courtois, outfitting herself in virginal white instead of black. Her gown, a confection of soft organza and lace, molded itself to her curvaceous body at the same time it drifted around her like a cloud. She held a wispy shawl in her hands, and one wrist was encircled by a multi-strand pearl bracelet with a jeweled clasp. She posed with her head in profile, just as she had in Madame X, but this time she turned her face to her right. Her neck was long, her nose prominent, and her hair swept up into a loose chignon.

  Inarguably, Amélie was very pretty in Courtois’s portrait. It could elicit no nasty comments about her corpselike skin or haughty gaze. But she had to accomplish more than merely appear attractive. She had to do something to make viewers look twice. So, incredibly, she slipped the left strap of her gown off her shoulder and let it hang. The fallen strap, a deliberate reference to Madame X, made her seem even more undressed in this painting than she had seemed in the Sargent.

  In his portrait, Sargent had made it appear as if Amélie’s shoulder strap had slipped accidentally. But here the effect came across as calculated, as if Amélie and Courtois were trying to instigate a response by showing an instantly familiar, but prettier and more sensual, version of her former self. This time, the fallen strap was Amélie’s cry for attention. Immediately after the 1884 Salon, she had wished that everyone would stop talking about her. Now she believed that anything was better than being ignored, even if she had to drop her strap to be noticed.

  The painting was exhibited at the 1891 Salon under the title Portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau, Wife of the Banker. One critic called it “a faithful image,” but it was not discussed at length—favorably or unfavorably. This year Amélie was just another picture on the wall. She must have been disappointed by the absence of an impact, a disturbing signal that not even her daring display of flesh could make her headline news once again.

  Amélie’s social life too reflected her change in status. She still preferred the company of famous men to that of her unremarkable spouse when she went out into society. But lately her escorts were not as exciting as they had once been. She was seen at events with elderly diplomats, like Baron Mohrenheim, the Russian ambassador, and Henri Brisson, former president of the Council of Ministers. To call them “distinguished” is being kind. They were bald, grizzled, and wrinkled, not handsome and sexy, like Pozzi, or charismatic, like Gambetta.

  Celebrities and socialites flocked to the studio of the master photographer Nadar to have their pictures taken. But Amélie, it seems, avoided the camera: only one photograph of her, the date unknown, has been found. Despite her famous profile, prominent nose and all, the absence of color makes her look flat and ordinary. (Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

  There were nights when Amélie had to resort to younger fans for company. In 1892, she appeared at the opera with fifteen-year-old Gabriel Pringue, a friend of her daughter’s. Pringue had been at St.-Malo as a child of four, when Amélie was there as a young woman of twenty-one. Pringue’s governess refused Amélie’s invitation on his behalf because she knew Madame Gautreau had a reputation and it might be unseemly for the boy to appear alone with her.

  After the teenage Pringue had complained bitterly enough, the governess agreed to chaperone them. The three set out in Amélie’s carriage; she wore a white gown with simple lines and her diamond crescent
in her hair. People stared as the trio walked up the grand staircase, and whispered about Amélie’s skin, her hair, her décolletage. Women raised their opera glasses for a closer look and confirmed her identity to their companions. The fact that they had to use glasses indicated that Amélie was right to worry about her standing. When she was at the height of her popularity, no one would have needed binoculars to know she was in the opera hall: a mounting commotion would have announced her presence.

  In 1897, Amélie was ready for another portrait. She commissioned Antonio de la Gandara, who specialized in portraits of society women and celebrities including Sarah Bernhardt, Paul Verlaine, and Robert de Montesquiou. Gandara was familiar with Madame X—he had exhibited at the 1884 Salon—and he had seen the Courtois. But he had no intention of evoking either of these paintings in his portrait. He studied his sitter with great concentration, determined to find a fresh way of portraying her.

  After much thought, Gandara posed his thirty-eight-year-old subject in profile. Unlike Sargent and Courtois, who had emphasized her bosom, he tactfully made her back central to his painting, thus avoiding the question of whether or not her figure was all that it used to be. She wore an opulent white gown, which fell seductively from her bare shoulders and draped her waist with folds of satin. In her right hand was a large feathered fan. Her neck and upper arms, among the first parts of the body to show signs of age, were made to appear firm. Her hair was arranged in a chignon that somehow made her nose seem less prominent. The portrait was understated and elegant. The Gautreaus preferred it to all the others and hung it in their home on the Rue Jouffroy.

  Antonio de la Gandara, Madame Pierre Gautreau, 1897

  Amélie loved Gandara’s elegant, romantic, and extremely flattering depiction of her. After his wife’s death, Pierre Gautreau sent the portrait and the fan she holds to her American cousins. (Private collection)

  As Amélie turned forty in 1899, the world around her was changing dramatically, bursting with new sights, new inventions, and new pastimes. The Eiffel Tower dominated Paris’s landscape. Automobiles cruised Haussmann’s boulevards. The Lumière brothers dazzled audiences with their first motion pictures.

  But there was nothing new about Amélie. Her copper-colored hair required a henna rinse to keep it that hue. Her aristocratic chin was softening. Her slender body had filled out and looked substantial and overripe. Montesquiou, who had been so enchanted with Amélie when she entered society as an alluring young bride, was one of the first to ridicule her when she showed signs of age. “To keep her figure she is now obliged to force it,” he mocked, “Not to the mold of Canova but a corset.” The sculptor Antonio Canova was known for his exquisite marble representations of shapely women.

  In “Venus,” a satirical poem dedicated to Amélie, Montesquiou found other grounds upon which to ridicule her.

  Since she has pink tendrils, a nose that knows no limit,

  The portrait by Sargent, the unicorn’s profile,

  And at night, she sleeps beneath the high four-poster canopy,

  With a resounding pillow in Morocco leather,

  In order to be warned in time, of a mauve hair

  Just getting ready to come through, on her temple, and it is saved

  Since she has the golden trowel, decorated with enamel

  To coat her face, with exquisite workmanship,

  Of scented and smooth mortars,

  She still walks around, a fine-looking wreck,

  And her famous curves leave each night,

  Gaining in Caran d’Ache and losing some of their Canova.

  Caran d’Ache was the assumed name of Emmanuel Poiré, a Russian who moved to France and gained fame with his satirical cartoons. By mentioning Caran d’Ache and Canova, Montesquiou was commenting that Amélie had lost her figure and was a more appropriate subject for caricatures than compliments. With his barbed reference to her “golden trowel,” he was accusing her of putting on her makeup with a shovel.

  Perhaps Amélie did have a heavy hand when it came to her toilette. But she was trying to compensate for age, and for the fact that she was the mother of a grown woman. Her daughter Louise, at twenty-two, was as beautiful as her mother had been at the same age, and much more animated. No one ever described Louise as resembling a statue.

  Louise’s combination of good looks and lively personality attracted the interest of Olivier Jallu, a lawyer who was rising in French politics. They were married in 1901. Amélie apparently did not attend the wedding—her signature is nowhere to be found on the marriage certificate. Yet her absence on this significant day seems not to have affected her relationship with her daughter: Amélie and Louise remained close, and continued to summer together at Les Chênes every year.

  After Louise left home to live with her husband in Paris, Amélie and Pedro examined their relationship, which for both had always been a union of convenience. They had had small estrangements over the years, first spending evenings apart, then taking separate vacations. Amélie routinely traveled to Nice and other fashionable destinations in France, while Pedro retained his taste for South America. He traveled often to Chile, and even wrote a monograph on Franco-Chilean arbitrage, an important study that established him as an expert in the field.

  The Gautreaus decided that their separate lives dictated separate residences. In the new arrangement, Pedro remained on the Rue Jouffroy, while Amélie moved into an apartment building on the Rue de la Tour, a narrow street leading to the Eiffel Tower. Her new address was not as prestigious as the previous: the building had an undeniable bourgeois air about it, with its utilitarian entrance and unadorned façade. But there was one good feature—a large courtyard and garden that perhaps reminded Amélie of the Avegno residence in New Orleans.

  Essentially single, a woman of a certain age, and the mother of a married daughter who was poised to have her own children, Amélie seemed condemned to the unfortunate status of forgotten matron. More than a decade would pass before she received an unexpected reprieve. In 1905, after refusing many requests to exhibit Madame X over the past twenty years, Sargent had finally been persuaded to show the painting at the Carfax Gallery in London. The news reached Amélie, and although she had no plans to attend the show, she must have experienced conflicting emotions when she imagined the public showing: she worried that there might be another controversy, yet at the same time she desired the attention the portrait would bring her.

  Madame X had developed a cult following over the years, its reputation promoted by insiders who had seen the portrait in Sargent’s studio and by the 1903 publication of a book of photogravures of Sargent’s works. The Carfax exhibition generated fresh interest in the painting, inspiring a new generation of critics to approach it without the prejudices of the academy or the hypocrisy of the previous years. Roger Fry, reviewing the show for Athenaeum, called the portrait a masterpiece.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II saw the exhibition and pronounced Madame X his favorite painting. He knew Amélie from diplomatic circles and asked her whether she could use her influence to persuade Sargent to send the painting to Berlin for a special exhibition. She and Sargent had not been in touch over the years, and she had no influence over him, but Amélie agreed to make the request, thrilled to be in league with a head of state.

  Amélie wrote to Sargent, explaining that the Kaiser, who was “such a dear,” thought Sargent’s portrait of her “the most fascinating woman’s likeness he has ever seen.” She hoped Sargent would recognize the importance of the request and make this portrait, as well as other selected paintings, available for an exhibition in Germany.

  Sargent replied that he was “abroad and couldn’t manage it.” But he confessed to a friend that it was simply too much trouble and that Berlin held no attraction for him. Amélie was sorely disappointed that she could not deliver the favor the Kaiser wanted. When she realized that the portrait was coming to be both acclaimed and in great demand, she may have understood that not purchasing it in 1884 was a mistake. If she owned Mad
ame X, she would not have to depend on Sargent’s largesse, but would be free to send it to the Kaiser or anyone else who wanted to display it.

  Perhaps it was the renewed interest in the painting that inspired Amélie to invite two more artists, and two more portraits, into her life. She arranged to sit for Édouard Sain and Pierre Carrier-Belleuse. Sain, a minor artist who generally did landscapes, painted a charming if conventional portrait, showing Amélie in daytime dress and flowered hat. He posed her looking straight ahead, so her nose was not the identifiable one of previous portraits. The overall effect of Sain’s painting was demure but unimpressive. Amélie looked like any attractive Parisian matron; there was little evidence of the arresting beauty.

  Instead of painting her, Carrier-Belleuse chose to draw Amélie with pastels, softening her features almost to unrecognizability. The artist was being kind in blurring the lines. By the time his portrait was finished, in 1908, Amélie was almost fifty and needed the help. Femina, a French newspaper, used this very drawing to illustrate an article about women aging gracefully—a slap in the face to Amélie, who did not want to acknowledge that she was aging at all.

  Amélie realized the portraits were a mistake. The earlier ones, the Sargent and the Courtois, would remind the world of her glorious, youthful self. The later ones, the nondescript Sain and Carrier-Belleuse’s hazy pastel, would show all too clearly how she had changed. Either way, the portraits mocked her. With those images in circulation, she would always be competing with herself.

  The ultimate insult came when Amélie was vacationing in Cannes. While strolling on the beach, she overheard a conversation between two women who had been watching her for some time. One loudly observed to the other that Amélie’s “physical splendor had totally disappeared.” The words shook her more than any insult ever had. She was probably stunned at first, then sad and wounded. Amélie retreated into her carriage, lowered the shades, and returned to her hotel. She ordered her maid to pack her bags and hired a private car on a train to transport her to Paris.