Cora noticed my dismay and said, “There isn’t much furniture here, but at least we’ve got some beds for you to sleep in. I’ve put you in the back corner room. Folks say it’s the only place in the house where the she-ghost doesn’t bother anyone.”
“What she-ghost?” I asked.
Cora stood perfectly still and lowered her voice. “The lady that died here on her wedding day. She jumped from the gallery, they say, because she didn’t want to leave her beautiful home. Now she comes back and wanders around. She doesn’t hurt anybody, but she’s scared a few folks, that’s for sure.”
“I know. I saw that ghost once,” said Julie.
Cora’s round eyes grew rounder. “Lord! Don’t tell me such things!”
“Oh, it was long ago—before the war ended. It was in the middle of a very hot night. I couldn’t sleep, so I went out to the gallery for some fresh air, and I saw the ghost flapping around.”
“What did she look like?” asked Cora, almost in a whisper.
“I couldn’t see her face well,” said Julie. “Her head was covered in a veil.”
I held my candle stub to Julie’s face and stared at her in amused surprise. Then I turned to Cora.
“It’s just a lot of nonsense,” I said. “You shouldn’t be scared.”
“I’m not scared. As long as I’ve got the water buckets on the porch. That’s what the voodoos do to get rid of restless spirits.”
Cora opened the door to one of the back bedrooms and motioned for us to go inside. She followed us in and lit two candles on the table in the center of the room.
“Here you are, ladies. I’ll have supper ready in no time.”
After Cora had left and closed the door behind her with a loud click, I berated Julie, “Why did you do that to her? Don’t you think we should tell Cora there’s no ghost, that you’re the bride who jumped off the gallery?”
“She’d never believe it,” said Julie wearily. “Anyway, I suspect she likes dabbling in voodoo. It makes her feel important. Who knows what other gris-gris she’s got stashed around.”
Julie opened her carpetbag and began to remove a few items, then stopped and sighed deeply. “You know, chérie, the distance from the gallery to the ground wasn’t high enough to kill me. I only realized it today when I was climbing the steps. I’m so stupid.”
This was the first time Julie had mentioned her suicide attempt since the day I had asked her about it as a child.
“Perhaps, in a way, you knew that,” I said. “You didn’t really want to die.”
“Perhaps. Of course, now I’m glad to be alive. But at the time, I did want to end it all. Can you see me married to Rochilieu?”
“I can’t see you married to anyone.”
“Neither can I.” Julie hobbled over to the armoire, opened the door, and hung up a dress inside it. “I won’t say I’m sorry I did it. But I’d sure like to be rid of this limp.”
Julie and I stayed at Parlange a week. On several mornings, we took the carriage for a ride through the fields. The large wedge of land fanning out from the house was now divided into thirty tenant farms leased under contract with Charles. The farmers lived in the former slave cabins and sent their children to a school that had been erected on the site of the old sugarhouse. A new mill for processing cane had been built a mile away. Everything was changed.
It was only late on warm evenings, as I sat on the gallery, with the crickets buzzing in the grass, the scent of magnolia filling the air, and the pearly moon rising above False River, that I felt transported back to my childhood. Then it was easy for me to imagine Valentine romping in the garden and Charles feeding his pet bear outside the barn. I could see Grandmère stomping around in her men’s boots, swearing at the workers, and Alzea bent over the kitchenhouse stove. Now Alzea, too, was long dead, buried, as she had requested, in one of Grandmère’s dresses, under a cypress tree in the garden.
That weekend, Julie and I returned to New Orleans, and after a last, brief visit with Charles and his family, we sailed for France. The day after we arrived home, I went to the Galerie Demont to view a La Gandara exhibit. Pierre had lent the artist’s portrait of me to the show. When I walked in, the poet Robert de Montesquiou was holding court in front of my picture. He pointed to my image with a mauve-gloved hand and improvised:
To keep her figure, she is now obliged to force it
Not to the mold of Canova, but a corset
It was true. In middle age, I had begun putting on weight, as had my Avegno aunts. People who hadn’t seen me in a long time were astonished by how matronly I had become.
I used to love showing myself off in public. I lived for being seen and admired. But it wasn’t fun when I was no longer the most beautiful woman in the room. Even before my trip to America, I had started going out less. Now I hardly went anywhere. There were stories in the press that I had become a recluse, that I only ventured out swathed in opaque veils, with the windows of my carriage drawn; that I had all the mirrors in my house removed, for fear I’d catch a glimpse of my fading beauty. It was nonsense.
I had simply retired from the limelight. And, in fact, I enjoyed the quiet life. I returned to the piano, practicing all day sometimes. I played less Beethoven and more Debussy, modern music being one of the few things I admired about the twentieth century. Like many people my age, I felt I had little place in this new world of accelerating change. For one thing, I could never get used to the telephone and motorcars. To this day, I keep a carriage and horses, and though I had a telephone installed, I rarely use it, preferring instead to send petits bleus.
In the years after our visit to Parlange, I spent long hours playing the piano at Julie’s atelier. She worked there alone now. Filomena Seguette had died years before, and Sophie Tranchevent had long ago given up art to marry and raise a family. In the still afternoons, especially in the stifling heat of summer, I imagined myself at the keys of the old Pleyel at Parlange, and a deep sense of contentment enveloped me.
I hardly ever saw Pierre, and we only spent time together when Louise and Olivier visited from Dijon. Still, it was a shock when the big brown envelope from my husband’s lawyer’s office arrived one day, containing papers for a legal separation.
Divorce became legal in France in 1884, the year of my portrait, and ever since, the number of families broken apart had been rising steadily. After Madame Jeuland’s husband died, she began pressuring Pierre to leave me and marry her. Finally, years later, he agreed. As I write this, however, we are not yet divorced. Despite his advanced taste in art and design, Pierre was in many ways an old-fashioned man. He hasn’t been able to bring himself to end our marriage.
For me, the saddest part of the separation was moving out of 80, rue Jouffroy, which had been my home for nearly thirty years. Pierre had offered me the house, but it had been his long before he met me, and it would have felt strange living there alone. Instead he bought me an apartment at 123, rue la Cour, on the second floor of an eighteenth-century building. It has elegant high ceilings and rooms large enough to waltz in. Pierre let me take as much of our furniture, china, and silver as I wanted. We divided up our art: Pierre kept La Gandara’s portrait; I took the Sargent sketches and the oil painting the artist had inscribed to Mama. (She was so angry at Sargent after the 1884 Salon that she couldn’t bear to look at it, and she gave it to me.)
A month after I moved in, I was astounded to receive a letter from Sam Pozzi. I had had no communication with him since that long-ago day when Julie and I had visited him in his apartment. Without alluding to our tortured history, he wrote that he wanted to talk to me about an upcoming exhibition of his private art collection at the Galerie Georges Petit. Pozzi explained that his cache of Egyptian and classical sculpture, textiles, and ceramics, and works by Tiepolo, Guardi, and Sargent was so impressive that “my friends convinced me it should see a wider audience.” He added that he was including a few outside pieces to complement his own, and he very much wanted to borrow Sargent’s painting of me of
fering a toast. “I understand from John that he gave it to your mother,” Pozzi wrote. “I’m hoping you’ll speak to her on my behalf, as I’d love to show it next to the portrait Sargent did of me. The two paintings, I believe, give an excellent sense of the artist’s Paris period.”
Pozzi’s audacity stunned me. Did he actually believe I’d respond to his letter? He was so arrogant that he probably believed I was still in love with him and that I had been pining for him all these years. To be truthful, I never thought about him anymore. Too much time had passed for me to remain angry and hurt over what had happened between us. I was curious to see him, though, so I invited him to tea.
He arrived at four on a cool, sunny afternoon. Had the maid not announced him, I would not have recognized him. The handsome young doctor I had been so in love with was totally subsumed by a thick, coarse-featured, middle-aged man dressed in an ordinary wrinkled coat and trousers. His beard and mustache were white. His gray-speckled hair reeked of oil.
I later learned from Pierre, who sometimes saw Pozzi at his club, that my old paramour was the head of surgery at Hospital Broca, where he often invited his friends to witness his gynecological operations. The favorite physician of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie, Pozzi treated both men and women, but he was best known as an expert on female diseases. He lectured frequently on the topic and was widely published in medical journals. A pincer he invented for examining the uterus had been adopted by doctors throughout the world.
Apparently, age had not diminished his ardor for romantic escapades, though over time, if Pierre was to be believed, Pozzi’s tastes had become exceedingly decadent. How my husband knew about it, I don’t know, but Pierre claimed that Pozzi was the founder of a secret sex society, the League of the Rose, which met periodically in a private home, where couples acted out their fantasies on the parlor rug. Looking at Pozzi’s round paunch and stiff legs, it was hard to imagine him frolicking on the floor with nubile beauties.
He took a seat opposite me in front of the fireplace. “It’s good to see you, Mimi,” he said, stealing a glance at himself in the mirror on the wall behind me.
“Congratulations on your success. I hear you’re chief surgeon at Hospital Broca. Frankly, I wouldn’t let you cut my toenails,” I said. That was rude. I looked directly into Pozzi’s still-beautiful brown eyes. But his face registered no emotion.
“I hope you’ll never need a surgeon,” he said quietly.
Averting my eyes from his, I changed the subject. “You want to borrow my Sargent.”
“I’d be most grateful. Besides my own portrait, I have two other works by him. Ralph Curtis and a few others are lending me their pictures. I’ll have a nice wall of Sargents for my little exhibition.”
“Why should I do you a favor?” I asked.
“Because I introduced you to love.” Pozzi smiled broadly, but his expression quickly changed to one of serious concern. “You know, I’m separated from my wife,” he said, leaning his head against the high back of the settee.
“So I heard.”
After tolerating his affairs for years, Thérèse Pozzi had finally thrown her husband out. Now he lived alone in a hôtel on avenue d’Iena.
“I heard you’re separated, too,” he said. Pozzi moved his weight forward and looked deeply into my face. I noticed with irritation that his hair oil had stained the upholstery.
“Neither of us is well suited for marriage,” I said.
I like to flatter myself that Pozzi was flirting with me, perhaps even warming up for seduction. At the moment, I did not have a lover, and I felt a twitch of desire as I remembered our trysts in boulevard Saint-Germain. Quickly, though, I realized I did not want to sleep with this pompous white-bearded man.
I stood abruptly, back stiffened and hands folded primly in front of me. “Would you like to see the painting?” I asked.
“It’s here? Sargent said your mother had it.”
“She gave it to me.”
I led Pozzi to the dining room, where the picture hung over the sideboard. He studied it closely for several minutes. “It’s stunning,” he said.
“I’ll make arrangements to have it crated and sent to you.”
“Thank you.” Dr. Pozzi bowed formally and brushed my hand with his mustache. A few minutes later, the maid handed him his hat and coat, and he left.
A month later, I received an invitation to Pozzi’s exhibition. I declined. Several weeks passed, and the exhibition closed, but Pozzi failed to return my painting. I sent him a letter, and he wrote back that the picture had been slightly damaged as it was being removed from the gallery—a clumsy worker had inadvertently kicked it with his boot, and some of the paint in the lower right-hand corner was chipped. Pozzi claimed he was having it restored. That was several years ago, and he’s yet to return it.
When I moved to rue la Cour, I urged Julie to join me. I had never lived alone before, and I thought the two of us could make a nice home. But Julie declined my invitation. She lived in her atelier now, and though it was far from luxurious, she enjoyed being surrounded by her work and being able to paint whenever she wanted. Still, we saw a great deal of each other. Julie often dined with me, and we frequently traveled together. Soon after my separation from Pierre, we took a trip to Berlin. On our first night in town, we went to the opera to hear Wagner, a composer whose genius I still struggled to appreciate.
During the interval, a courtier approached us in the corridor and announced that Kaiser Wilhelm II wished to see us. The courtier led us to the royal box, where a severe-looking man with a ferocious mustache and a withered left arm sat in a blue plush chair.
Julie and I curtsied deeply. “You are John Singer Sargent’s Madame X,” the Kaiser said, the words falling halfway between a statement and a question.
“I am.” I was flattered. Someone had told him I was here.
“I remember seeing your portrait at the Paris Salon a long time ago and being absolutely swept away by it,” the Kaiser continued. “It’s the most fascinating woman’s likeness I’ve ever seen. As a rule, I can’t stand contemporary painting. But I do like Sargent’s work.”
“He’s the master portrait artist of our time,” Julie said.
“I’d like to organize a Sargent exhibition here,” the Kaiser continued, addressing me. “But only, of course, if I can show your portrait. Do you have any influence with the artist?”
“I haven’t spoken to him in more than twenty years,” I confessed. “But I’d be happy to write to him.”
“That would be wonderful!” The Kaiser nodded to Julie and me and dismissed us with a wave of his good hand.
The idea of a Sargent exhibit intrigued me. In fact, I was eager to see my portrait again, to test its power against my pained memories. I even had the confidence to put it before the public. Times had changed. Now, I was sure, people would appreciate it. Or perhaps my feelings had grown dull with age and experience, and I no longer cared what people thought. But I did care, I realized as I considered the matter further. And I suppose that a small piece of me hoped to remind the world of an earlier, glorious time, when I sat on the throne of Beauty.
I hadn’t seen Sargent since the 1884 Salon, of course, and I hadn’t talked to him since Pierre and I visited his studio the winter before. In all the years since, there had never been any communication between us—not even a letter. Julie and others had been happy to keep me apprised of his doings, however, even though he had virtually disappeared from the French art scene.
In 1886, Sargent moved permanently to London and quickly rose to become the city’s premier portrait artist. Every day a steady stream of rich women and important men poured into his elegant studio at 33 Tite Street, where—I was told by some Parisian acquaintances who had been there—my portrait hung prominently on the wall. So valued was Sargent’s work in his adopted home that King Edward offered him a knighthood. Sargent turned it down, as he did not want to give up his U.S. citizenship. In America, he was perhaps even more revered than in En
gland. Many illustrious Americans, including writers and presidents, were painted by him on his occasional trips to his parents’ native land. Other rich and celebrated Americans crossed the Channel to sit for him.
In France, however, his reputation has plummeted. Sargent never exhibits here anymore, and you can count on your left hand the paintings by him in French museums.
Still, I wrote to Sargent and told him about meeting the Kaiser, and of the Kaiser’s desire to mount a Sargent exhibition in Berlin. “He’s only interested,” I added proudly, “if my portrait is included.”
Weeks passed, and I heard nothing from the artist. I wrote to him again, and this time received a reply. “My dear Madame Gautreau,” Sargent began:
I am so sorry you felt crushed at my not responding to your first letter, but if you knew what a profoundly unsociable old crank I have become in the last twenty years, you would not take it as a personal matter. I am not proud of my epistolary tardiness, but neither am I proud of a bald head and other changes you will notice if we ever meet again.
As far as an exhibit of my paintings is concerned, I’m afraid I’m traveling abroad and so couldn’t possibly manage at this moment to organize it. But to tell you the truth, I’m not keen to do it. It’s a tremendous trouble for me to induce a lot of unwilling people to lend me their “pauthraits,” as the London ladies would say.
In fact, the whole business of “pauthraits” has come to bore me to tears. At present, I’m thoroughly engaged in a set of commissioned murals for the Boston Public Library, and I’m thinking of shutting up shop altogether in the portrait line. I’ve come to hate doing them. Ask me to paint your gates, your fences, your barns, which I should gladly do, but please, not the human face.
Yours sincerely,
I Am Madame X Page 27