I Am Madame X Page 5

  “Are you all right, Monsieur?” asked Harry.

  “Fine,” answered the ambassador as he folded his arms around his wife. Slidell’s daughters huddled behind them and cried into their handkerchiefs.

  “I know some of those fellows. They’re American Yankees. They go to school with me,” said Harry.

  “Well then, you can return this to them on Monday,” snapped Slidell. He threw the jacket at Harry’s chest.

  When we got to the convent, Mama kissed me distractedly in the visitors’ hall. The skirmish on rue de Marignan had frightened her, and I knew she wouldn’t get much sleep.

  The incident was one of the few times the war at home invaded my life in Paris. Mama and Rochilieu rarely talked about the war in front of me. At the convent, it was never mentioned. Letters from Parlange sparked floods of homesick tears, but Grandmère and Julie spared us the worst news of the war’s devastation. They filled their letters mostly with cheery items—news about Julie’s recovery (she was walking with canes) and Grandmère’s efforts with the sugar crop.

  I did receive one sad letter from Charles. His pet bear, Rossignol, who had grown huge and ferocious, one day broke his chain and lumbered into a worker’s yard. Rossignol was about to attack an old Negro when the overseer shot the bear and killed him.

  As the months passed and I settled into convent life, a surprising contentment enveloped me. My English became fluent through constant exposure (though I lost most of it after leaving the convent). I learned almost nothing of mathematics and history, but I discovered I had a talent for the piano. I had lessons twice a week with Madame Smithy, a thin, pale woman with a delicate face and silvery hair piled on her head. Madame Smithy was kind, but cats, not music, were her chief passion. Wherever she went, a trail of cats followed, and she always had a few with her during my lessons. It wasn’t unusual for the cats to crawl all over the piano while I was trying to play scales. This didn’t bother Madame Smithy. She laughed at their antics, called them “sweetheart” and “darling,” and hardly noticed I existed.

  Following piano, I joined the juniors for an hour of deportment and dancing. The ancient instructor, Monsieur Lermont, and the priest who heard our weekly confessions were the only two men allowed in the convent. Monsieur Lermont would have fit nicely in Marie-Antoinette’s ballroom at Versailles. He dressed in blue silk breeches and waistcoat, buckled slippers, and an absurd curled and powdered wig that released clouds of white dust whenever he moved his decrepit head. We met with him in Mother Superior’s office, where he taught us how to stifle a cough, carry a handkerchief, remove a glove, and open and close a fan. With elaborate formality, he also demonstrated how to bow on a sliding scale of deference to princes, dukes, marquesses, counts, viscounts, barons, knights, and mere heads of state.

  His class became the scene of one of my few triumphs as a convent girl. One day during my second year with the English nuns, Monsieur Lermont instructed us in the waltz, demonstrating with his violin as a partner. “Like this, Mesdemoiselles,” he said as he pranced stiffly in his buckled shoes on a square of wood floor in front of Mother Superior’s desk. We tried to imitate his steps with our partners, tripping over each other’s feet and giggling madly. “Silence, Mesdemoiselles!” Monsieur Lermont screeched.

  The spectacle of this clumsy old man teaching dance struck me as high farce. Impulsively, I stepped forward. Raising my arms, I embraced an imaginary partner and began waltzing around the room, aping Monsieur Lermont’s arthritic movements. The other girls looked on with wide eyes. Monsieur Lermont grimaced at me, and for a moment I thought he would strike me with the bow of his violin. Instead he smiled, his face wrinkling in all directions. “That’s it, Mademoiselle Avegno. Beautiful! Beautiful!” he cackled through a row of small brown teeth. “Now the rest of you try it.”

  Aurélie and I practiced most of our fun during evening recreation. Over time, we grew tired of searching for the secret door to the catacombs and redirected our explorations. Often, in nice weather, we’d climb through a window of our attic dormitory and run around on the red-tiled roof. It always smelled of mint from the garden below, where the nuns cultivated the plants for their distillery.

  From the roof we could see into the yard of the Scottish school next door. One evening, a group of boys were outside playing ball, and we decided to sit on the tiles and watch. One of the older boys, a brown-haired, muscular youth, was the first to notice us. He pointed out to his friends the spot where we were huddled on the sloping gable. For a few moments, their eyes flickered over us, and then they returned to their game. But the muscular boy continued to stand still, gazing upward, and I realized that he was fixated on my face. “Why is that boy staring at me?” I asked Aurélie.

  “Don’t you know, Mimi?” she said with sparkling eyes. “You’re beautiful. People will always stare at you.”

  At ten, I was skinny and flat-chested. I thought I was unattractive, especially compared to Aurélie, who was two years older than me and already had graceful hips and round breasts. But if Aurélie thought I was beautiful, it must be true.

  Aurélie and I were never caught prowling the roof, nor engaging in any of our other pranks—scattering melon rinds on the stairs, for example, or filling the pianos with chicken bones. Amazingly, considering how she taunted Farnsworth, Aurélie never had to wear the nightcap. I was punished with it only one more time. One day in my third year, during a particularly boring history lesson, I yawned vigorously, and Madame Farnsworth took the large cork from the ink bottle on her desk and thrust it into my mouth. I coughed and gagged, spurting blue ink over my books and desk, which further enraged the horrid teacher. “Nightcap!” Farnsworth thundered. She snatched the foul hat from the windowsill and slapped it on my head.

  Fortunately I had Sister Emily-Jean to comfort me. We were forbidden to disturb the nuns in their cells; most of them wanted nothing to do with us. But Sister Emily-Jean loved the girls, especially me, and often invited me to boil taffy on a small stove she hid under her bed, or to accept a piece of chocolate from the tin on her dresser. Many years later, giving in to her yearning for motherhood, she left the convent, married a tradesman from Bristol, where she had been raised, and at forty-two gave birth to a baby boy.

  Whenever I knocked on her door, Sister Emily-Jean greeted me warmly. Her tiny cell was furnished with a narrow cot, an old oak chair, and a little chest of drawers where she kept her few possessions, including a thick braid of silky, dark hair that she had cut from her own head shortly before taking her final vows. She showed it to me one day after I told her that I might like to become a nun.

  “It’s not a decision to be taken lightly. It’s not something you can dabble in,” she said. “In the first place, could you stand snipping off all your beautiful copper hair?”

  I told her I wouldn’t mind a bit. Then Sister Emily-Jean removed her veil and whimple. She was bald, except for a few coarse tufts on the top of her head. “Well, Mimi,” she said with a sigh, “if you want to be a nun, even for a few hours, you can’t have any hair at all.” With that, I gave up all thoughts of devoting myself to God.

  For several years I begged Mama to let me bring Aurélie home, but she always refused—she was embarrassed by our shabby apartment. Nor did Aurélie ever invite me to her house. Aurélie explained that her mother was an invalid and never entertained. Then one day, at the beginning of my third year at the convent, Mama said I could bring Aurélie to a Confederate reunion.

  On the appointed day, Aurélie and I woke early, ransacked our trunks for our prettiest frocks, and were dressed and waiting in the visitors’ hall long before Mama arrived at eleven that morning.

  When we entered Rebel headquarters, a lively party was in progress. We made our way into the sunny parlor, where a thatch of straw-colored hair rose above the chattering crowd. It was Harry Beauvais, at thirteen as tall as a man, standing in a corner, drinking red wine.

  “Bonjour, Virginie,” he called out, lifting his glass in the air. I saw Harry
at every reunion I attended, and he seemed to grow an inch each month. His feet and hands were huge. But the rest of him had not caught up. He still had a child’s skinny arms and legs, and his chest was concave.

  “Harry, this is my friend Aurélie from the convent,” I said. “She was born in Louisiana, like us.”

  “Hello, Harry,” said Aurélie.

  Harry studied her for a moment, then turned to me. “It’s boring here,” he grumbled. “Do you want to go to the park?”

  “Sure,” Aurélie and I answered at the same time.

  In the hallway, we donned our hats and coats and wrapped fringed shawls around our shoulders. As soon as the front door slammed behind us, we flew down the stairs and outside to the Champs-Elysées. Running past the wooden booths where vendors sold toys and candy, we arrived at a wide lawn. Harry watched Aurélie as she skipped toward a large marble fountain at the lawn’s center, her black curls springing around her shoulders. Without saying anything to me, he chased after her.

  When we were seated around the fountain, Harry asked Aurélie, “How long have you worn spectacles?”

  “Forever!” she answered. Aurélie scissored her legs under her blue taffeta dress and threw her head back, laughing. Harry stared into the distance and began reciting a poem in French:

  In a sweet indifference

  I lived, peaceful and content;

  To me love seemed without strength:

  Therefore, I often affronted it;

  But, the sweet pleasures of my life,

  Alas, they couldn’t last always,

  Since your beautiful eyes, Aurélie,

  Have interrupted the course.

  I recognized the poem (though in the original version the girl’s name is Amélie) as one by Michel St. Pierre, a Creole poet who was the most famous free man of color in New Orleans. The poem was contained in an anthology that Tante Julie used to read from.

  “Did you like that?” Harry asked Aurélie.

  “It’s lovely,” she answered, her eyes wide.

  “You’ve never heard it before?”

  “No.”

  Harry had never recited a poem to me, and I felt a twitch of jealousy. But it disappeared quickly as we set about playing in the park, laughing and running around. After several hours, just as the sky fell to black, we headed toward the rue de Marignan. Mama was waiting at the corner in a cab. “Au revoir, Harry!” Aurélie and I called out as the cab lurched forward toward the Seine. When we got to the convent, Mama kissed each of Aurélie’s cheeks and said she hoped to see her soon. “Thank you, so much, Madame Avegno,” Aurélie said. “I had a lovely time.”

  Two weeks later, on my next visit home, I went directly with Mama and Valentine to rue de Marignan for another Rebel reunion. When we arrived, Harry Beauvais was reading in the parlor. As soon as he saw me, he jumped up, throwing his book on a settee, and dashed into the foyer to help me with my coat.

  “No Aurélie this week?” he asked.

  “She’s home with her family. I miss her, though. She’s my best friend.”

  Harry handed my coat to a white-aproned maid and looked at me severely, his face hard and very white, his eyebrows a blond furry line above blue eyes. “Mimi, she’s a Negro.”

  “No!” I stared at him, astonished.

  Harry had been looking forward to this moment, and now his news tumbled out in a torrent. “My father knew Aurélie’s father, a white planter named Sébastian Grammont. He owned Laurence Plantation near Monroe, where his wife and children lived. Grammont also kept a cottage in New Orleans for his colored mistress and children, a boy and a girl—your Aurélie. When he died, Grammont left his colored family some money, and they moved to France. My mother met Aurélie’s mother once and says she looks African. I don’t know how she gets by here—probably never leaves the house unveiled. Obviously Aurélie passes for white.”

  “You’re wrong. Aurélie would have told me.”

  “Mimi, how can you be so stupid?”

  I knew from listening to the adults that free American blacks had been emigrating to France for several decades, and, if they were light-skinned enough, slipping quietly into the white race. But Aurélie? A Negro? I felt angry and confused. Among the slaves at Parlange, there were several mulatto children. One of my uncles had a black mistress, and I played with the couple’s children in New Orleans. I was fond of these Negro “cousins,” but I knew that an impenetrable wall divided us. I knew, too, that theirs were doomed lives.

  “Did you tell my mother?” I asked.

  “I’m sure someone did.”

  But Mama said nothing about it. That evening, we rode silently to the convent. Mama said good night to me in the visitors’ hall and kissed me perfunctorily.

  In the dormitory, Aurélie’s bed sat empty. It was still empty when I awoke the next morning. Aurélie did not appear for breakfast, nor Mass, nor for Madame Farnsworth’s class. I asked the other girls where she was. No one knew. “She never came back from her visit home,” one told me.

  By the end of the evening recreation period, I was frantic. As the girls marched inside, I slipped out of the line and hid in an alcove until they had passed. Then I crept to the stairway that led to the cloister cells. The nuns were walking slowly down the hall, chanting their prayers in Latin, as they did every night before retiring at eight-thirty. When they reached the plaster Madonna at the end—the one Aurélie and I thought looked exactly like Empress Eugénie—they crossed themselves, muttered one final prayer, and then disappeared to enter their cells for the night.

  I ran to Sister Emily-Jean’s door and knocked gently. When the lovely nun saw me, she put her fingers to her lips, pulled me into the room, and closed the door behind us. The tiny space was dark except for a shaft of moonlight slipping through a thin curtain. Sister Emily-Jean lit a small candle.

  “I know why you’re here,” she said.

  “Aurélie.”

  “Mimi, she’s been sent home.”

  In the silence, I could hear a nightingale’s song wafting up from the garden. “Why?”

  “Mother Superior thought it was the right thing to do.”

  I started to cry. I was certain I knew what had happened. Without saying anything to me, indeed, while pretending to like Aurélie, Mama had written Mother Superior to denounce Aurélie as a Negro. Sister Emily-Jean hugged me to her slender body, and my tears dampened the front of her habit.

  The next afternoon, she took me to Mother Superior’s office. The old nun was sitting behind her chunky walnut desk, a stack of letters in front of her. “Mademoiselle Avegno would like Aurélie Grammont’s address so she can write to her,” Sister Emily-Jean said, clasping my hand tightly.

  Mother Superior looked at me with her gluey brown eyes and spread her square hands on the desktop. “I don’t think your mother would like that,” she said. She leafed through her pile of letters and removed a blue envelope. She pulled the letter from inside and handed it to me. I recognized Mama’s round, spidery handwriting. But the words were English. Mama must have had someone—perhaps Rochilieu—dictate a translation. I began to read:

  It has come to my attention that a student in your junior class, Aurélie Grammont, is a Negro. I understand that she and her family are passing for white. I have asked around among my associates from Louisiana, where the girl was born, and I have it on good authority not only that her mother is fully African, but also that she is a woman of the loosest morals. Knowing the Negro’s reputation for mendacity and immorality, I’m sure you will share my concern for my daughter Virginie Amélie Avegno, as indeed for all your students. If Aurélie Grammont is not immediately sent home, I will have no choice but to withdraw Virginie from your school.

  Sincerely,

  Virginie de Ternant Avegno

  Too ashamed to say anything, I handed the letter to Mother Superior, who replaced it in its envelope and returned it to the pile on her desk. Sister Emily-Jean put her arm around my shoulder and led me out of the office.

 
Two weeks later, when Mama showed up at the convent to take me home for the day, I refused to see her. “Your mother is in the visitors’ hall and she is screaming at the nuns to let her upstairs,” one of the junior girls reported. Then an old nun with a rubbery face appeared at the dormitory door. “It’s a sin to keep your mother waiting,” she snarled.

  “I won’t go down,” I said, firmly planted on my cot, my feet crossed, and my arms folded across my chest. The nun grabbed my ear, but she couldn’t budge me and soon tottered off, mumbling that I was a “rotten, God-forsaken brat.”

  A few minutes later, she returned with Farnsworth.

  “I knew you were trouble the moment I saw you,” the old teacher lamented. “Girls like you go straight to hell.” She clasped my leg and tried to pull me from the bed. I broke loose, knocking her off balance, and dashed across the room and out the door. I tried to shut the door behind me, but it slammed flat into Farnsworth’s face. “Eeeow!” she screamed, clutching her nose. Then I ran to the end of the hall to a small window that opened onto the roof. With one leap, I was outside. I scrambled from gable to gable, chased by two of Madame Smithy’s cats, and found a place to hide behind a chimney. As I huddled against the cold brick, I began to feel like a martyr. I told myself I would never live with my mother again. Maybe I would become a nun like Sister Emily-Jean, a beautiful sufferer for Christ and the Holy Virgin.

  I stayed there for several hours. Eventually I fell asleep. When I awoke, it was dark. Frightened and hungry, I stumbled back to the window and crawled in. “It’s Virginie!” squealed the other girls, who were getting ready for bed when I appeared in the dormitory. Their shrieks brought Mother Superior. She doused me with Holy Water to drown the evil spirits lurking within me. “You broke Madame Farnsworth’s nose,” she groused, though I thought I detected a trace of satisfaction in her voice. Perhaps the girls weren’t the only members of the convent who were terrorized by the vile teacher. Mother Superior left me standing there, water streaming from my head in rivulets and puddling on the floor. “I’ll deal with you tomorrow,” she said.