I Am Madame X

by Gioia Diliberto

  I hadn’t seen him since Julie’s suicide attempt, when he had come to the house to fit her with her steel back brace. He had grown stouter and balder, and the few hairs he had left on his head were now snowy white.

  “How long has she been like this?” Dr. Porter asked. He hooked his thick spectacles over his ears and peered into Valentine’s face. Mama recounted the morning’s events and Dr. Porter took Valentine’s temperature and felt her pulse. He moved his small hands, which had black tufts at the knuckles, over the glands in Valentine’s neck and armpits, and he lifted her gown to examine her flesh, which was smooth but now had a sickly gray tinge. He pulled a syringe from his bag, filled it with silver nitrate, and jabbed it into Valentine’s limp arm. She gasped and rose a bit as the needle went in, then sank back against the pillow, her tangled curls startlingly red against the white linen sheets embroidered with purple anemones.

  “It’s typhoid for certain. I saw four cases just this morning,” Dr. Porter said. He unhinged his spectacles and slid them into his pocket. He snapped shut his black case and stood facing Mama.

  “Will she be all right?” Mama asked. Her voice came out in a gulpy whisper.

  “It’ll be all right, Virginie,” the doctor said. He squeezed Mama’s shoulder. “I’ll come back this afternoon to bleed her.”

  Dr. Porter returned at four carrying a strange metal contraption the size of a jewelry box. He placed it on the floor and sat at the edge of the bed. He tapped the length of Valentine’s spine with his hands. I sat on the opposite side of the bed and held my sister’s head as Dr. Porter placed the contraption on Valentine’s back and pulled a lever to release a dozen tiny knives into the child’s flesh. She yelped feebly, and I rubbed my cheek against hers in an effort to console her.

  Dr. Porter removed the contraption and placed suction cups on Valentine’s wounds. She cried out again as the blood was drawn out. Then she lay crumpled in the bed, moaning.

  Dr. Porter returned every afternoon to reopen the gashes in Valentine’s back and bleed her. The child’s bed was soaked with blood, and I helped Alzea change and wash the sheets. Mama never left Valentine’s side. She slept in a chair and said the Rosary over her every hour. But Valentine did not get better. Every day, she grew thinner and weaker.

  One of my earliest memories is of the funeral of a little girl, a victim of scarlet fever, who lived on a neighboring plantation. I remember her small white face as she lay in her coffin, and how, when the pallbearers shut the lid, the child’s sister, a much older girl, screamed and threw herself on the pine box. Her parents had to pull her away. It was my first experience of death, and it terrified me.

  I couldn’t bear to think of Valentine buried in the ground in a box. I tried to shake the image from my mind, but it kept sneaking in. It gave me nightmares. Ten days after Valentine first became ill, I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of someone wailing. At first, I thought I was dreaming about the dead little girl. Then I realized the sound was real. Without lighting a candle, I ran down the black hallway to my sister’s room. Mama, Grandmère, Julie, Alzea, and Charles were weeping around the small form in bed. Valentine was dead.

  My knees buckled, and I collapsed on the floor. My sobs mingled with the others. “My baby sister! My baby sister!” I shrieked, over and over. I prayed to God to take me, too. I didn’t care if I never grew up. Valentine and I would be happy children together for eternity in heaven.

  Charles carried Mama out of the room. Then he returned and softly said to me, “Come, Mimi, Dr. Porter left something to help us sleep.”

  I took the medicine and awoke the following morning groggy and disoriented. I staggered to Valentine’s room. Her bed was empty, stripped of all linens. Nearby, on three chairs pushed together and draped with white sheets, lay the body of my sister, dressed in a lace nightgown. While I wept at her side, Alzea slipped into the room and quietly tucked some greenery from the yard around the body.

  The next day, Mama, Julie, and I took Valentine to New Orleans to be buried with Papa in the Avegno crypt at St. Louis Cemetery. Grandmère and Charles stayed behind to work in the sugarhouse. The weather was gray, rainy, and bleak, rare for a New Orleans fall. At the dock, men and women wore heavy wool clothes. The roses climbing the fences around the gates of Jackson Square and the leaves on the trees looked pathetic and limp.

  Valentine was laid out for two days at the Maison du Mortuaire on Rampart Street. A stream of mourners, friends of my parents and grandparents, and my Avegno relatives filed past her tiny body, which was surrounded by white chrysanthemums. Rochilieu, who had come up from his plantation in Plaquemine, stood close to the casket with his arm around Mama. Once, a large glob of candle wax fell onto Valentine’s forehead, and Rochilieu tenderly scraped it away with his fingers. Just before the mortician closed Valentine’s casket, I placed the rosary Sister Emily-Jean had given me in my sister’s cold, lifeless hands.

  By the time we returned to Parlange two weeks later, the last cane stalks had been cut and ground, and the sugar had been packed into hogsheads. To save freight charges, Grandmère had arranged for a speculator from Cincinnati to buy the sugar directly from her. Still, the crop did not yield a sufficient price to cover the plantation’s expenses. She had long ago sold her jewels and spent the money she had hidden in metal chests in the garden. After Grandmère paid the workers, there was little left. She had no choice but to ask Mama for a five-thousand-dollar loan, which Grandmère used to buy seed cane, repair the sugarhouse, and pay taxes.

  No sooner was the last hogshead sold than Charles and Grandmère set to work repairing the ditches and fences, and laying the seed cane for next year’s crop. I helped in the mornings, listlessly pushing myself through the motions of hammering and hoeing—all the while dreaming of a reunion with Valentine in heaven.

  In the afternoons, I sat for Julie. She was painting a portrait of Valentine, working from a daguerreotype that had been taken in Paris. I posed for the coloring of flesh, hair, and clothes. Every day after lunch, we went to Julie’s bedroom, which she had turned into a studio. Paints and brushes cluttered the dressing table; empty canvases leaned against the walls. Julie had removed the curtains so that light poured in, giving the mahogany furniture and gray walls a golden glow.

  Julie posed me on a toile-covered fauteuil, wearing an old white chiffon dress of Mama’s that Alzea had cut down to fit me. With a palette in one hand and a brush in the other, Julie perched at the end of her chair and painted briskly with long, vigorous sweeps. Sometimes she’d take up her crutches and hobble around the room to see how the light looked from different perspectives.

  My limbs ached from holding them immobile for long stretches, but I tried not to complain. We took breaks every hour, and sometimes we talked as Julie painted. I told her about Farnsworth, about Aurélie’s departure, about Mama’s bizarre concern that my skin was darkening, about Dr. Chomel and his Solution. I had used up my last jars before we left Paris, and my face had returned to its former luster.

  “Mimi, you have the most beautiful skin. The way the light catches it—sometimes casting a pink glow and at other times a blue shadow—is just extraordinary,” said Julie. She held out a brushful of flesh-toned paint and squinted at me.

  “Turn your head to the right, please. Ahh. Such a distinctive profile. You are a great beauty, chérie.”

  I knew I wasn’t pretty like Mama and Valentine. My nose was too long, my chin too pointed, my forehead too high, my lips too thin. Yet, even at eleven, I was starting to sense I had something better than mere loveliness. By some strange alchemy, my features had combined into a face of extraordinary interest. That was why men stared at me, why Aurélie and Julie called me beautiful.

  It took Julie two months to complete Valentine’s portrait. When it was finished, Grandmère hung it over the parlor mantel—the first of Julie’s pictures to be displayed. Valentine is frozen for all time in front of a window overlooking the garden. Dappled sunlight filters in, casting lavender a
nd gray shadows in the folds of her frothy white dress. The blue ribbon around her neck echoes the color of the sky, and pink roses—Julie had painted them from memory—flash impressionistically in the background.

  Mama loved the portrait. She created a little shrine on the mantel below it with flowers and candles, and moved the prie-dieu from her room in front of the fireplace. Every day, she prayed here for several hours, her head bent low over her rosary beads. Her tears fell silently, wetting the needlepoint hearth rug.

  Mama had not mentioned Paris since Valentine’s death, so I was surprised when she told me one morning in December that she had booked passage to France and we would be leaving in a week.

  “I don’t want to go,” I protested.

  “I can’t stay at Parlange,” she said. “Everything reminds me of Valentine.”

  Mama had no plans beyond using part of her inheritance to buy a house in a fashionable neighborhood and launching herself in society, which, she said, meant getting to know the best people and being invited to their parties. It seemed like a waste of time to me.

  The thought of leaving Parlange filled me with distress. I had settled in so happily that now I couldn’t imagine life off the plantation. What would I do without fields to roam in and a garden to play in? What would I do without Julie?

  I’ll never forget how quiet the house was on the cool, sunny Sunday morning when we left. Mama and I ate breakfast alone in the dining room while Julie, Grandmère, and Charles went to town for services at St. Joseph’s Church. Our metal trunks, lying next to each other in the dim hall, looked like coffins. I thought of Papa and Valentine and gulped back a large sob.

  From the dining room windows, I saw the buggy rattle up to the house. Charles helped Grandmère and Julie to the front gallery, where they settled themselves in wicker chairs. Then he loaded our trunks into the buggy and strode into the dining room.

  “We better get going, ladies, if you want to make that one o’clock steamer.”

  We rose from the table and went to the gallery. Grandmère and Julie stood to embrace us. Julie was leaning on her canes. “Take care of Valentine’s portrait for me,” Mama said.

  At the mention of Valentine’s name, Grandmère began to sob. I had only seen her cry twice before. The first time was when we left Parlange, during the war, and the second time was at Valentine’s deathbed. Then she had wept quietly, modestly. Now her tears came in a great, noisy torrent.

  She had survived so much—the deaths of her husbands and two of her children, the war. Those tragedies had somehow hardened her will to endure. But she was an old woman now, with creaky joints and liver spots on her cheeks. She thought of Parlange as a refuge, a nest in which her family could gather for comfort and protection. Valentine’s death had shattered her.

  Mama and I climbed into the buggy next to Charles. He snapped the reins, and the two brown mares trotted off. Grandmère leaned against the railing, her chest heaving, her face contorted with sobs. Turning and waving, I watched Grandmère as the buggy rattled down the alley of oaks, until she disappeared into a blurry dark form between the gallery’s tall white posts.

  Four

  Following an uneventful crossing to Le Havre, Mama and I boarded a train for Paris, arriving on a cold night at Gare Montparnasse. We took a cab to a small Right Bank hotel, the Albion, left our trunks with the concierge, and went to the dining room, where a fire crackled in an enormous stone hearth. Settling ourselves at a table by the window, we ordered the bouillabaise and ate silently.

  Our room on the third floor was a cramped space just big enough for a chair and a small four-poster. That night, Mama and I slept side by side under a heavy, flowered cotton quilt. The next morning, we awoke refreshed, donned clean frocks and warm jackets, and set off for a walk along the boulevards.

  It was a frigid day, though clear and sunny, and after a half hour our toes and fingers stung with numbness. At the Palais Royal, we ducked into a restaurant for coffee and croissants and visited several shops. Mama bought each of us a wool shawl and herself a fox-fur pelisse. Then we boarded an omnibus headed in the direction of the Couvent des Dames Anglaises.

  We were on our way to talk to Mother Superior about my reenrollment. At first, Mama had insisted I attend Sacré-Coeur, the most fashionable girls’ school in Paris. She thought hobnobbing with the mothers of little nobles would make her more elegant. But I had put up such a storm of protest at the idea of a new school that she finally agreed to send me back to the English nuns.

  The omnibus clattered along the new asphalt boulevards, past the old, crooked side streets with their small shops and high shuttered houses. Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor. We stepped to the curb and walked a block north. My eyes darted up and down the street in search of the convent’s entrance. Gone. In place of the dear old buildings was a vast triangular lot filled with rubble. Next to it, at the spot I gauged to have been the nuns’ mint garden, was a circular pit—what I later learned was the ruins of an ancient arena, the Arènes de Lutèce. The site had been buried for twelve centuries; no one knew it existed until the convent was destroyed.

  I ran toward a group of men who were bowed under heavy coats, their breath steaming in the cold. They stood in the rubble, consulting a long scroll.

  “What happened to the convent?” I cried.

  “It was razed last month on orders from Baron Haussmann,” said one man. “We’re putting a street through here.”

  “Where are the nuns?”

  “I’m not sure,” said the man through his ice-spangled mustache. “I heard they were relocated outside Paris.”

  The thought of never seeing Sister Emily-Jean again, of never playing in the lovely garden with the old wishing well and the statue of the Virgin, triggered a fresh sorrow, and tears sprang from my eyes. As I stumbled away, a shard of red glass flashed in the rubble beneath my feet—a piece of one of the chapel windows. I picked it up and put it in my jacket pocket.

  Mama was standing on the corner with her small fists digging into her hips. “Well, I guess you’re going to Sacré-Coeur after all,” she said triumphantly.

  “I’m not!” I shouted.

  “You will do as I say, Mademoiselle.”

  “I will not. You can’t force me.”

  I ran toward the tree-dotted place de la Contrescarpe, past the flower sellers and the dingy cafés. I ran and ran, down the steep pitch of the rue Mouffetard, dodging pedestrians and baby prams. Two stocky matrons who were walking with linked arms cried, “Mon Dieu!” as I sped toward them, and they swooped apart to let me pass.

  “Mimi! Mimi!” Mama called after me. I turned and saw her about a block behind. She was running, holding her skirt up with one hand while she held on to her feathered hat with the other. I picked up my pace but tripped on my hem and stumbled in front of Plessy’s tobacco shop. A second later, Mama caught up to me and grabbed my jacket sleeve. She slapped me hard across the face. I slapped her back.

  A few passersby, appalled at the sight of a mother and daughter publicly fighting, stopped and whispered to one another behind gloved hands. A tear rolled down one of the red stripes that blotched Mama’s left cheek. Her eyes burned into mine, and she spat her words: “I used to have a daughter.”

  Over the next few weeks, Mama and I saw little of each other. Most days, I would stay in our tiny room, reading and writing letters to the family at Parlange. Mama wandered Paris in search of a permanent home for us. Eventually she settled on a large, elegant three-story house—a hôtel particulier—at 44, rue de Luxembourg, in the heart of the faubourg Saint-Honoré, a gleaming neighborhood of freshly paved streets, new stone buildings, and trimmed trees, not far from the Madeleine.

  The double parlor and dining room had trompe l’oeil ceilings painted with dancing cherubs, and elaborate paneling carved with garlands and birds. Mama filled the house with red-and-blue velvet upholstery, billowing taffeta draperies, gilt mirrors, crystal chandeliers, china, silver, and marble busts—
a sumptuous decor that used up a great deal of her inheritance. Indeed, after buying and decorating the house—a fit setting, she believed, from which to launch herself into French society—we had left an income of thirty thousand francs a year, about what a bourgeois doctor earned.

  Servants were cheap—a month’s wages for a maid was equivalent to the price of a bottle of table wine—so Mama was able to hire a staff: two footmen who boarded out, a driver who bunked in a room in the carriage house, and three maids who lived in cramped rooms under the eaves. But our budget for clothes, food, and entertaining would be tight.

  After considering her finances, Mama decided I didn’t need to go to Sacré-Coeur after all, or, in fact, any other school. At my age—eleven—she announced at breakfast one morning, “a girl has all the education she needs.”

  I was ecstatic at the thought of no more school. What child wouldn’t be? I envisioned a life of sleeping late, reading romances, and wandering Paris whenever I wanted. The fact that not going to school would mean I’d have little chance to meet friends my own age, or that it would push me into adult activities before I was ready, didn’t occur to me. When I did think of friends, of course, I thought of Aurélie, and always with deep regret. I wondered what had become of her, and I longed to see her again.

  Since I had musical talent, Mama decided I should continue piano lessons, and she hired as my teacher a middle-aged man named Edward Vaury. He showed up for my first lesson on a Wednesday morning. I was waiting for him in the main parlor, and a minute after I heard the bell ring, the maid brought me his card. Monsieur Vaury turned out to be a short, round man dressed in an ill-fitting black suit that was shiny with age. “Bonjour, Mademoiselle, I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said, bending stiffly at the waist.