I Am Madame X Read online

  Also by Gioia Diliberto

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  Hadley

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  A LISA DREW BOOK/SCRIBNER

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people, or real locales is used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Gioia Diliberto

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  A LISA DREW BOOK is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Set in American Garamond

  Designed by Colin Joh

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Diliberto, Gioia, 1950–

  I am Madame X: a novel / Gioia Diliberto

  p. cm.

  “A Lisa Drew book.”

  1. Gautreau, Virginie Avegno, 1859–1915—Fiction. 2. Sargent, John Singer, 1856–1925—Fiction. 3. Americans—France—Fiction. 4. Portrait painting—Fiction. 5. Paris (France)—Fiction. 6. Socialites—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.I45 I12 2003

  813’.54—dc21 2002026802

  ISBN 0-7432-4566-0

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  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For Joe Babcock

  Foreword

  New York, 1915

  Perhaps you’ve heard her name, Virginie Gautreau. You recall it like an old melody echoing yet from a long-ago party, or as a kind of epithet whispered harshly under the breath. Maybe you’ve even seen her picture—seen the picture. God knows, there are a few out there who truly have, though once all Paris claimed to have viewed it and recoiled at the insolence, the vulgarity, the unmuted sex. “Monstrous,” one critic said. “A singular failure,” sniffed another. John Singer Sargent’s career nearly derailed, though he’s famous now, living in England and making a fortune painting bored aristocrats.

  He kept the picture in his studio for twenty years, exhibiting it only a handful of times, always in small shows in Europe. Until last year, I thought no one in America would ever see it. Then I heard that Sargent was sending the picture to San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. I was in Paris on business, so I called Virginie with the news.

  We had first met at a party in 1880, when I was a junior curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and traveled frequently to Paris. For several years, we dined together whenever I was in town; then we lost touch. When I reached Virginie on the telephone, she seemed delighted to hear from me, and she invited me to tea the next day at 123, rue la Cour, where she was living alone in a grand eighteenth-century apartment.

  I arrived at four, as a soft afternoon light filtered through the tops of the chestnut trees. A young maid answered the bell and showed me into a huge parlor with tall windows facing the street. Several groupings of settees and chairs were arranged on an immense Turkish carpet, and four sparkling crystal chandeliers illuminated the room.

  Virginie kept me waiting, as she always used to. She appeared after twenty minutes, wearing a green silk dress that matched her eyes, and her auburn hair—the same exact shade of burnished copper it had always been—was twisted into a long roll at the back of her head, her signature style. Though her figure had become matronly, her finely lined faced was still beautiful.

  As she made her entrance, walking gracefully on high heels, whiffs of perfume preceding her, I was studying a picture on the wall—a sketch Sargent had made of her in the gorgeous black gown she had worn for her notorious portrait.

  “Richard, my dear,” she said. She embraced me with long white arms and kissed me quickly and chastely on both cheeks. She had noticed me staring at the sketch, and she tilted her head toward it. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since—then.”

  I’m sure she was thinking back, as I was, to 1884 and the jeering crowds at the Palais de l’Industrie. It was the opening of the Paris Fine Arts Salon, an annual exhibition that was the premier social event of the era. To have a portrait championed at the Salon usually meant instant success for the artist and overnight fame for the sitter. Sargent, an American who had been raised abroad, had begun to establish a name for himself in Parisian art circles, and he had high hopes that his painting of Virginie would push him to the top.

  At the time, she was one of the most famous women in Paris. A favorite ornament of the scandal sheets, Virginie flaunted her sexuality through exotic makeup, hennaed hair, and revealing clothes. She penciled her eyebrows, rouged her ears, and dusted her skin with blanc de perle powder. To whiten it further, people murmured, she ingested arsenic.

  Sargent’s portrait brilliantly captured her wanton sensuality. But it was too far in advance of its time. Instead of admiring the artist’s achievement, the public was appalled by it. The portrait seemed to confirm French prejudices against Americans, proved that we were pushy, overeager, lacking any limits or refinement.

  Like Sargent, Virginie was widely known to be American. She had been born in New Orleans to two of Louisiana’s finest Creole families. During the Civil War, her mother had fled Louisiana, taking Virginie, who was a child, and her baby sister. The family settled in Paris in a Right Bank enclave of expatriate Southerners. Trading on their French ancestry and knowledge of French culture, they hoped to insinuate themselves into French society.

  Virginie’s looks and charm were her tickets into the haut monde. She was trained from the cradle to make a brilliant marriage. She preferred to make a brilliant show, and she never lost her ardor for dangerous liaisons. The day I had tea with her, she was expecting a new lover, a married lawyer named Henri Beauquesne, whom she had recently met on a train. He was handsome and rich, she told me, and nearly twenty years her junior.

  I still think Sargent’s portrait of Virginie was his best painting, and I told her so that day. “You know, I’d love to have it for the Metropolitan, Mimi,” I said, using her nickname.

  “Make Sargent a generous offer, and maybe you can,” she said brightly as a maid wheeled in a cart holding a silver tea service and a plate of small fruit tarts. Virginie poured our tea into two gold-rimmed Limoges cups.

  “Darling,” I told her, “Edward Robinson, the head of the Met, has been after it for years, ever since he worked at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. But so far, Sargent has refused to sell. He’s hardly let it out of his house. When he does exhibit it, he never identifies you. He still calls it Portrait of Madame ***, just as it was titled at the Salon, or simply, Portrait. And he always requests that your name not be communicated to the newspapers. Isn’t that amusing?”

  Virginie wasn’t amused at all. In fact, she was furious. “Don’t I have a name?” she cried, rising out of her chair. She strode across the room to a wall of windows and pivoted to face me. “If Sargent had any honor, he would call my picture Portrait of Virginie Avegno Gautreau. After all, it is my picture as much as his.”

  She stared fiercely at me. “This was not a commissioned work,” she continued, more composed. “Sargent begged me to sit for him. He stalked me like a hunter does a deer, staring at me at parties and getting his friends to pester me—‘Please, Madame Gautreau, let John pay this homage to your great beauty.’ And so on. That so-called artist Ralph Curtis came to see me, then bombarded me with letters. I saved one.”

  She marched to an antique secretary, rummaged through a drawer, and pulled out a bl
ue envelope. “My dear Madame Gautreau,” she read from the letter inside. “We both know John is a genius. But the work he’s done so far is somehow lacking in completeness and depth. He needs a great subject to unleash the full power of his brilliance. He needs you.”

  She folded the letter and returned it to the envelope. “I was the one who sat for hours on end, giving up an entire summer. I was the one who provided the magnificent profile, the willowy body, the white marble skin that ‘unleashed his brilliance.’ I was the inspiration for Sargent’s masterpiece—the only one he’s got.” She tossed her head dismissively, provocatively, the way I had seen her do so many years ago. “Just compare my portrait with his stuffy pictures of horsey Englishwomen. Or that midget Mrs. Carl Meyer or that washed-out blonde, Mrs. George Swinton. I’ve seen their portraits and plenty of others over the years. I’ve kept my eye on Sargent’s exhibits, and I want to ask you: Where are the bold lines in those pictures? Where is the mystery, the tension, the allure?” She dropped into a chair covered with cream damask and folded her arms across her chest. “Of course, I know exactly why Sargent won’t attach my name to the portrait. He’s a cowardly fussbudget, and he’s still livid about the ruckus my mother made.”

  Obviously, the trauma of the Salon debacle still pained her. Seeing her now, her beauty turning brittle, her natural hauteur hardened into a lonely defensiveness, I could see how she had mourned the loss of her renown, and I felt shamed that I had stopped calling on her so many years before.

  We chatted for several more hours, and the golden light outside the tall French windows fell to darkness. At eight, I rose to leave, but Virginie urged me to stay. “Please have dinner with Henri and me,” she said, her eyes shining. I was curious to meet Beauquesne, her new young lover, but I had already made plans with friends.

  “Mimi, it’s been wonderful to see you again; now I must run,” I said. She showed me to the door and kissed me again on both cheeks. “Good-bye, Richard, my dear. You’ve brought back so many memories.”

  I heard nothing from her for months. Then one day she sent me a package containing several hundred typed pages. Inspired by my visit, she had dictated a memoir to one of her maids. She wanted history to remember who Madame X was.

  Two weeks later, before I had done more than glance at the manuscript, I got a transatlantic cable from Beauquesne. Virginie had died in her sleep. He hoped that I still had her memoir, as it was the only copy, and he wondered if I would help him find a publisher for it.

  Thus, I make her story available here, in my own translation from the original French. As you read it, you will be lifted back to a time before this terrible war, a time when painting was a powerful indice of reality, and Virginie Gautreau was, as Le Figaro once put it, “a living work of art.”

  I can still see her as she looked then, on the night I first met her. She was tall and slim, her green eyes glittering in that porcelain face, and her silvery laughter floating across the table as she reached for a champagne flute with a long, shapely arm.

  How could anyone forget?

  Richard Merriweather

  Curator of American Painting

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  New York, 1915

  One

  Recently, whenever I talk in my sleep—which has been quite often lately—I speak English. It’s odd, since I’ve only spoken the language occasionally in half a century. But just last week, I woke Henri with some nocturnal gibberish. He roused me and repeated my mumblings as best he could, and I realized I was singing a few lines from “Oft in the Stilly Night,” an old song Grandmère’s servant Alzea had taught me before we fled Parlange, our sugar plantation in Louisiana. Fully awake, I can still recall a verse:

  Oft in the stilly night,

  Ere slumber’s chain hath bound me,

  Fond memory brings the light

  Of other days around me,

  The smiles, the tears, of girlhood’s years,

  The words of love then spoken,

  The eyes that shone, now dimmed and gone,

  The cheerful hearts now broken!

  Thus, in the stilly night,

  Ere slumber’s chain hath bound me,

  Sad memory brings the light

  of other days around me.

  Dr. Freud is right. There really is an “unconscious” mind. Perhaps mine lives in the Old South.

  I’d been dreaming of Tante Julie’s wedding day, of watching her glide across the wide gallery at Parlange, her pale face streaked with sweat, the pink rosebuds braided through her hair turning limp and brown in the steaming heat. She was dressed in heavy cream satin—an old ball gown that Grandmère had dug out of a trunk the day before. Alzea had stayed up all night altering the sleeves and neckline, and I had sat beside her in the flickering candlelight of the kitchenhouse, sobbing like a baby.

  I did not want Tante Julie to marry. Her fiancé, Lieutenant Lucas Rochilieu, was a short, fat toad of a man, with an ugly mole on the tip of his nose and a bloody patch over one eye from a wound he had received when he accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun four months earlier. But I would have hated him even if he had been tall and handsome. He was stealing Tante Julie, the person I loved most in the world—more than my baby sister Valentine, more than Mama and Papa, I’m ashamed to say.

  It was August 1861, the first summer of the war. I was six. Papa, a lawyer in New Orleans, had left to fight with the mostly Creole Louisiana Regiment, and Mama, Valentine, and I had joined Grandmère at Parlange, thirty-five miles west of New Orleans on False River.

  Though the adults had strictly forbidden it, I slipped off to the fields after breakfast to cut myself an armload of sugarcane. For an hour, I sat on the front lawn in the gray shade of a magnolia, peeling and eating the sweet stalks as carriages rolled up the alley of oaks. A few guests had already gathered in the parlor, and I could see them through the tall French windows talking and sipping drinks under dark portraits of my ancestors.

  Most of Grandmère’s slaves had run off, and there was no time to make elaborate wedding preparations. Alzea had baked some cakes and hauled the last crates of wine and champagne up from the cellar. Mama and I fashioned bouquets from the few garden flowers that hadn’t shriveled in the scalding sun, and we arranged them in vases in the parlor.

  The air was heavy with smoke. Some of the neighbors had taken to burning their cotton to keep it out of enemy hands, and my head began to ache from the foul air and the heat. I decided to go to the gallery to cool off and talk to Julie.

  The gallery was my favorite place at Parlange. The wide porch surrounded the entire green-shuttered house and provided enough space to accommodate a small orchestra and twenty dancing couples on Saturday evenings. The back portion looked out on the colorful garden and beyond, to endless fields of waving cane. At night, the twanging notes of banjos wafted through the treetops from the Negro quarters, which were screened by a tall fence. The front gallery held a collection of wicker tables and chairs. Julie and I spent hours there talking and reading.

  Like all the women in our family, Julie was small and narrow-waisted. Her straight black hair hung like curtains from a center part and framed a gentle, oval face. At twenty-eight, she was two years younger than Mama, though she seemed closer to my age. It wasn’t only her uncoiffed hair. There was something childlike about her flat chest and stick arms. She had a lovely singing voice, and she painted beautifully, in a distinctive style marked by insightful realism. Years later, many artists would ask me—beg me—to pose for them. But Julie was the first to notice my potential. “Mimi, you have exquisite lines, and your hair! I’ve never seen such a glorious copper color, like the kitchenhouse kettles,” she told me. She did many studies of me—asleep on the brocade settee in the parlor, bathing in front of the fireplace in my room, on the swing in the garden—but she refused to display these pictures or any others that she did. She stashed her canvases under her bed, unsigned, and she scrawled on the back, “Not to be shown to anyone.”
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  Julie grew up at Parlange and never left. She was content with her quiet life and once told me she had no desire to marry, the chief point of a Creole woman’s existence.

  “Men are bothersome beings. I don’t want to spend my days worrying about one,” she said.

  “But don’t you want babies?” I asked.

  “Chérie, if I ever had a child, I’d want it to be exactly like you. In fact, I’d want it to come into the world exactly like you, a spirited little red-haired girl who reads and converses—and not a naked, screaming infant.”

  I don’t remember any beaux calling on Julie. So I was surprised one evening when a portly Rebel soldier ambled up the alley of oaks, then mounted the steps. “Is Miss de Ternant, Miss Julie de Ternant, receiving this afternoon?” he asked. It was Rochilieu. He had taken the steamboat from New Orleans and he smelled of the cigars and brandy he had enjoyed on the trip.

  That evening, I saw him sitting in the parlor with Grandmère and Julie. My aunt was perched stiffly on an armless “lady’s” chair with billowing skirts draped around her, while Rochilieu and Grandmère talked on and on. The next morning, Grandmère announced that the marriage would take place in two days.

  Now, as I approached the house, I saw that Julie was reciting her Rosary. She paced back and forth on the cypress floor of the second-floor gallery, twice stopping to lean against the railing, fifteen feet above the ground. She gazed off in the distance, over my head, as if expecting to see some far-off sail on False River. I’m certain she never noticed me. Suddenly she dropped her amber beads on the floor. Holding fistfuls of cream satin at her hips, she grabbed a white pillar and hoisted herself atop the railing. She posed there for a moment, like a ship’s caryatid, her eyes closed and her chin to the sky. I thought she had resigned herself to her marriage, and this was her way of saying good-bye to maidenhood. But suddenly she let go of the pillar and slowly tumbled forward, swanning, then flipping once in the air, her dress ballooning out above her knees. By the time I jerked forward, instinctively moving to catch her with my childish arms, she had hit the ground with a dull thud.