I Am Madame X

by Gioia Diliberto

  Mama wanted her party to be perfect, and she began preparations months in advance. She spent lavishly and scrutinized every detail, making life miserable for the maids, the driver, the gardener, and the upholsterer. She hired the most expensive florist in town, Vaillant-Roseau, to erect trellises pinned with pink and red roses in the parlor. The carpets were rolled up, and the floor was strewn with petals. Mama had the glass removed from the floor-to-ceiling windows so guests could step directly from the faux garden into the real one, where she arranged to hide a small orchestra behind a wall of palm trees that were potted in gigantic ceramic tubs.

  Bignon’s prepared a buffet for 150 people. On the morning of the party, the restaurant’s manager came to the house to set up two long tables that were soon laden with turkeys, roast beef, wheels of cheese, colorful fruit molds, and mounds of pastries. He brought with him an army of waiters, whom Mama outfitted in her pink-and-black livery.

  The night before the party, I stayed at rue de Luxembourg and slept in my old room. Mama claimed she wanted me around to keep an eye on me, to make sure I’d be on time to her party. But I think she was so excited and eager that she really just wanted the company. That morning, while the staff worked downstairs, Mama and I got dressed in our white morning gowns and sat upstairs in her sitting room, sipping coffee and reading the papers. With the doors shut tight, we heard none of the commotion downstairs, only the occasional faint clomping of horse hooves wafting through the window from the street below.

  Mama looked serene, happier than I had seen her in a long time. Tonight meant so much to her. I had vowed not to argue with her and to be charming to her friends at the party.

  By now, I, too, was starting to feel more serene. I let myself imagine my portrait on a wall of the Salon, at the center of a large light-filled gallery, surrounded by admirers. I was in the middle of this pleasant reverie when Mama gasped.

  “Is this some kind of a joke?” she whispered, clutching the newspaper.

  “What?”

  “Look at Etincelle’s column.”

  I grabbed the paper and read out loud: “The party scheduled for this evening at Madame Virginie de Ternant Avegno’s in celebration of John Singer Sargent’s portrait of her daughter, Madame Virginie Gautreau, which will be exhibited at this season’s Salon, has been canceled.”

  “Canceled? What is Etincelle talking about?”

  “Get dressed. We’re going to see her immediately.”

  Mama and I dressed hurriedly, roused the driver, and set off in the carriage. Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at rue Beaujon, where Etincelle’s hôtel rose from the center of the street like a miniature medieval castle with crenellated towers and the Peronny coat of arms carved in stone above the front door.

  A butler greeted us, and we crossed a vast foyer decorated with marble busts of Etincelle’s husband’s ancestors. We entered a rectangular salon. The room was decorated with spindly chairs that were covered in white plush threaded with gold; carved wood tables; and an enormous mantelpiece supported by two marble statues. Ancient tapestries hung on the bright-blue walls.

  Soon Etincelle burst into the room, her intelligent dark eyes bright with curiosity. In her haste to complete her toilette, she had forgotten to secure two of the buttons on her bodice. A yellow satin ribbon had escaped her camisole and lay across her bosom.

  “Bonjour, Mesdames. To what do I owe this pleasant surprise?”

  Mama’s face was flushed, her eyes blazing. She waved a folded copy of Le Figaro in the air. “Why did you cancel our party?”

  Etincelle looked bewildered. She glanced at me, then at Mama, then at me again. “Because you asked me to.”

  “I did no such thing.” Mama’s voice jangled. “You know I’ve been preparing for this party for months. Why would I cancel it?”

  “But you sent me a letter. It arrived yesterday.”

  “What letter?”

  “I’ll get it. Just a minute.”

  Etincelle flew out of the room, leaving a trace of violet scent. Moments later, she returned with a sheet of white stationery bordered in blue that I recognized as Mama’s. “Here.”

  Mama snatched it from her and began reading out loud as I looked over her shoulder. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to imitate Mama’s delicate handwriting.

  “Dear Madame de Peronny,” the letter began.

  The pressures and tensions of the season have put an enormous strain on my daughter, Virginie Gautreau, who, as you know, is the subject of John Singer Sargent’s Salon entry this year. She came down with a high fever last night, and if she doesn’t rest, I fear she will not make it out of bed for vernissage. Owing to her condition, I am forced to cancel my party tomorrow evening. I would be most grateful if you would announce it in your column.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Virginie de Ternant Avegno

  “It’s a forgery!” Mama screamed.

  “Who would have done such a thing?” wondered Etincelle. She looked at me, scrunching her brow. “Do you have enemies, dear?”

  “None that I know of.”

  I ransacked my memory to recall any disgruntled servants or others whom Mama and I might have offended. Of course, our lives were spiced with petty misunderstandings and disputes. But nothing I could think of came close to inviting a retaliation this large, this horrifying. Even the festering grumbles about the fact that I was an American were just grumbles, as far as I could tell—not the kind of rage that would lead someone to strike back with cruelty like this.

  Dozens of tradesmen had had access to Mama’s house in recent months. Any of them could have stolen a sheet of her stationery. But why? Once again, I had the unsettling sense that I had lost control of what was happening to me.

  “I’m so sorry, Madame Avegno,” Etincelle said. I could tell she was genuinely chagrined.

  Back at rue de Luxembourg, Mama and I set to work notifying the 150 guests that the newspaper column was a hoax and that the party was still on. Working at the dining room table with a box of stationery and several bottles of ink, we wrote furiously until five. Julie and Pierre joined us after lunch. Even with their help, we got through only half the guest list, and Mama’s driver managed to deliver just a handful of those letters. Thanks to the mobs of tourists who had flooded the city to attend the Salon, the streets were virtually impassable.

  The party was to begin at eight. At six, it was time to dress. I donned a new lilac silk gown and, an hour later, met Mama, Julie, and Pierre in the parlor. Mama was dressed in blue satin, Julie in gray taffeta. Pierre wore a black tailcoat with a lilac rose in his buttonhole, and a lilac tie in the same fabric as my dress.

  An army of footmen stood behind the buffet and wandered around the house carrying trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres. The small orchestra tuned up in the garden for an audience of two cats, while Madame Lebel, the pigeon-bosomed singer Mama had hired to perform, sat on a folding chair reading a magazine.

  Two hours went by. Finally we heard a carriage clatter to a halt in front of the house, and a moment later the bell rang. A footman announced Etincelle.

  Dressed in a black silk gown embroidered with silver roses, pearls threaded through the thick bun on top of her head, she greeted us with a wan smile and scanned the empty parlor. “I see everyone reads my column,” she said.

  “How nice for you,” I snarled.

  “Don’t be rude, Mimi,” scolded Pierre. “It’s unbecoming.”

  “I don’t blame her, the poor child,” said Etincelle. She looked at me with pity as she took a glass of champagne that was offered to her by a waiter. “Tonight was to be her big night. Well, think of tomorrow, my dear. In a few short hours, you’ll be the toast of Paris.” She raised her glass to me and smiled.

  Over the next few hours, perhaps twenty people showed up, including a few business associates of Pierre’s and some women who frequented Mama’s Monday salons. I was particularly disappointed that Sargent never appeared, though Mama’s driver had manag
ed to get word to him that the party was on. At midnight, after everyone had gone home, the manager of Bignon’s packed up the uneaten food, and the orchestra members trooped out the front door, carrying their instruments in coffinlike black cases. The waiters followed.

  Mama, Julie, Pierre, and I sat in the parlor, still struggling to figure out who might have canceled our party. I suspected Sam Pozzi’s wife, Thérèse, or Léonie Léon, the former lover of Gambetta, but I felt too uncomfortable to mention their names in front of Pierre. Julie and my husband thought the culprit might be the xenophobic art critic Henri Houssaye, who had been feuding with Sargent.

  Mama insisted it had to be a servant. “No one else would have had access to my stationery or a sample of my handwriting,” she said. Yet the only worker she could think of who was disgruntled enough to seek revenge—a laundress whom she had fired a year ago—had moved to Toulouse.

  “What about one of the guests at your Mondays?” I asked.

  “That’s impossible!” Mama gasped. “Those people love me.”

  We went to bed, no closer to solving the mystery than we had been that morning. As I undressed, I had a strong presentiment of escalating disaster, a sense that more terrible things were about to happen. Sleep was impossible. I lay in the blackness, tossing and turning, as the clock in the tower of a nearby church struck the hours.

  At nine in the morning, one of the maids brought in my breakfast tray. I drank a cup of coffee and began to dress. Exhausted, wretched, I pushed myself through the rituals of my toilette. I washed, applied my makeup, and stepped into a new gown Félix Poussineau had designed for the occasion. As light and covered as the dress in my portrait was dark and décolletée, it had a high-necked white silk bodice with tight white sleeves and a slim white skirt overlaid with lace. I pinned on a jaunty felt hat with two ostrich plumes rising from the top, and pulled a pair of creamy kid gloves over my freshly manicured hands. The maid sprayed me with perfume and handed me a little gold purse. Then I descended the stairs, crossed the foyer, and stepped outside.

  The weather was glorious, a perfect Paris spring day, mild and sunny with a cloudless blue sky. On the sidewalk, gentlemen tipped their straw boaters to the passing ladies, who twirled colorful silk parasols. The chestnut trees were in full bloom, and their large creamy blossoms filled the air with a fresh, sweet scent.

  Mama and Julie waited in the carriage. Pierre stood on the pavement and held the door for me. As I stepped up from the curb, a nail in the carriage door caught the hem of my dress and caused a tiny rip—another bad omen, I thought.

  At the Palais de l’Industrie on the Champs-Elysées, a ribbon of men and women filed under the massive entry arch. Inside, crowds of people mobbed the vast marble foyer and the grand staircase leading to the second-floor galleries. I recognized many celebrities, including the aristocrat-poet Robert de Montesquiou and Sarah Bernhardt, who was surrounded by a cabal of mincing, mustachioed courtiers. Princess Mathilde, now old and fat and swathed in black lace, stood near the entrance, looking like a waxen replica of herself.

  The catalog told us that my portrait was number 2150 and that we would find it in Gallery 31. To get there, we had to walk a half mile, past hundreds of paintings displayed one on top of another on the walls. As always, bad art dominated. There were sentimental landscapes, hideous portraits, and the same stiff scenes from the Bible, history, and mythology that reappeared every year. Nudes and corpses figured prominently. Every wall seemed to display at least one bloody crucifixion or massacre and several naked women, whose bare bodies were somehow acceptable because they represented allegorical subjects like Spring and Dawn.

  “Why is this stuff allowed in?” complained Pierre. “It’s all so tedious. There’s no fresh vision anywhere.”

  “If you want fresh vision, you have to go to an Impressionist exhibition,” Julie told him. “That’s where most of the talent is these days.”

  “Why hasn’t Sargent exhibited with them?” asked Pierre.

  “He could if he wanted to. But he’d rather be a success with the haut monde than starve with the avant-garde likes of Cézanne and Sisley.”

  “I don’t blame him,” said Pierre. “Life is too short to be poor.”

  As we approached the “S” gallery, my heart raced. The room was packed, and the air was moist with sweat. As I scanned the pictures closest to me, my eyes fell on what had to be some of the most insipid canvases in the entire Salon. One depicted a group of ships bobbing in a harbor. Another, called The Convalescent, showed a pallid, droopy-eyed young woman, head nestled in a fluffy pillow, looking out the window of her country bedroom. In another picture, a curly-haired little boy in a sailor suit relaxed with his hoop and stick on the seashore.

  Then I saw my portrait. It had pride of place “on line” in the middle of the back wall, and a large crowd had gathered in front of it. At that instant, I saw the painting fresh, as if for the first time, saw its boldness and energy, an effect so powerful that it muted the pictures on either side (a view of the port at Boulogne and a portrait of Saint Jérôme). The color still bothered me, and the pose still seemed bizarre. But there was no question that it was much more alive than anything else in the room.

  I was in the middle of this thought when suddenly, through the jumble of bobbing bonnets and top hats, I glimpsed the mocking grin on the face of a blond middle-aged woman who was studying the portrait carefully. “Quelle horreur!” the woman said. “She looks like a clown in a pantomime!” More ugly comments rose up from the men and women around her. “I recognize that harlot! It’s Madame Gautreau!” “Oh, look. She forgot her chemise!”

  My body tightened. My chest felt as if it were about to explode. Julie had heard the remarks, too; she leaned close to me and whispered in my ear, “Pay no attention to these philistines, chérie. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Trust me, it’s a very grand work.”

  Pierre harrumphed but quickly recovered. “You’ll see, Mimi, the critics will recognize its worth. We must wait for the reviews before we get upset,” he said.

  Mama, though, had turned white, her mouth a grim slit. I sensed at that moment that she would have given anything for a chance to cut the picture from the wall and tear it apart.

  We were standing behind the crowd immediately around the painting. Someone recognized me, and people began to turn around and stare. I caught the eye of a man I had danced with the month before at a foreign ministers’ ball, and his gaze seemed to fall somewhere between pity and contempt.

  “Please, get me out of here,” I whispered. Julie and Pierre each held one of my elbows, and we pushed our way through the crowd. In the doorway, I heard a woman with a catalog in her hand ask her husband, “Where is the portrait of Gautreau?” The man pointed to my picture with the end of his cane and hissed sarcastically, “Ah, voilà! La belle!”

  We made our way to the morgue, a small, dim gallery where the works judged to be of the lowest quality were hung. It was empty and offered us a chance to catch our breath. I flopped onto a red banquette, and Julie and Pierre sat on either side of me. Mama paced before us.

  “I knew it would be a disaster as soon as I saw the dress you posed in!” she raged. “And the color. Oh, this is terrible.” She started to cry, her thin shoulders shaking. Pierre, with his brow furrowed, studied a sparrow that was flying near the skylight. Julie had removed her gloves and was examining the fingernails on her right hand. We knew it was useless to interrupt Mama’s explosion.

  “You’re the laughingstock of Paris! I can’t bear it. I won’t be able to show my face again,” moaned Mama.

  “Be quiet!” I screamed, finally. Mama stopped pacing and glared at me. In a wounded tone, she said, “You have the nerve to yell at me? You’re a disgrace to the entire family.”

  “All right, enough,” said Pierre. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  “How can you think of food at a time like this?” Mama hissed.

  “He’s French. He’s always thinking about food
,” I snapped.

  “Cheer up, Virginie,” Pierre said to Mama. “You’ll see. After lunch, the tide will turn.”

  We made our way through the galleries, down the stairs, and outside to Ledoyen’s, a restaurant on the vast lawn next to the Palais. We found a table in the shade and sat on folding chairs. Soon Carolus-Duran came by with a group of friends.

  “Your portrait is gorgeous, Madame Gautreau,” he said.

  “The crowd doesn’t think so,” I told him. “Didn’t you hear the jeers?”

  “It means nothing!” Carolus-Duran waved a hand in the air and shook his graying curls. “The ordinary man always looks for a painting to hate. It’s human nature. People need to vent negative emotions. The critics will appreciate Sargent’s work, I’m sure of it.”

  He had a point. At nearly every Salon, the public singled out one or two pictures to revile. It was almost a sport. Some years, the outcry was fierce. In 1865, scorn poured down on Olympia, Edouard Manet’s painting of the nude model Victorine Meurent. Now, nineteen years later, Olympia was considered a national treasure.

  After lunch, we decided to take another look. The “S” gallery was even more crowded than before, and again the gawkers had bunched in front of my picture. The mood had not changed.

  “It’s a copy,” I heard one man say.

  “How is it a copy?” asked his companion.

  “A painting made after another piece of painting is a copy,” the man responded, setting off a chorus of cruel laughs.

  “That’s right! She’s a painted American hussy,” cried an old woman.

  A portly, professorial-looking man with a round face and a monocle was holding an impromptu class to the side of the picture. “This is abominable color, just horrendous,” he said, pointing his umbrella at the image of my chest. A group of bustled ladies hung on his words. Meanwhile, two adolescent boys posed in front of the canvas in exaggerated imitation of the portrait, waiting for the reactions of girls passing by.