I Am Madame X (22 page)

What did he mean by “hitherto unexplored regions”? I had adventured a lot further in bed with Dr. Pozzi than I had with Gambetta, and I was sure he had explored the regions of many other women.

I knew (as did all of Paris) that Gambetta had a longtime lover, an army officer’s daughter who called herself Madame Léonie Léon. At the time of my affair with Gambetta, they were on hiatus. Gambetta had wanted to marry her, but Léonie, a devout Catholic, refused unless the Republican leader agreed to a church wedding. Gambetta was an ardent atheist who couldn’t bring himself to enter a church, and Léonie had broken with her paramour, though eventually they reconciled. Years later, long after both of them had died, Gambetta’s letters to Léonie were published. Some of them were nearly identical to those he had written me.

I saw Gambetta one or two evenings a week. If Pierre knew about it, he never said anything. Usually I met the Republican leader in his rooms, though occasionally we’d have dinner in a restaurant or attend a concert. I was not in love with him, as I had been with Dr. Pozzi. Indeed, I never lost my heart in that way again. But I genuinely liked Gambetta, and I learned a great deal from him. His knowledge of history and literature was astounding. He could recite by heart long passages from Shakespeare and Victor Hugo. If he hadn’t gone into politics, he might have been a stage actor. Appalled at my lack of education, he gave me books to read and spent hours discussing them with me. He told me I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he liked the idea that, on my father’s side, I was descended from Italians, as was he. “Your face and figure are reminiscent of the glories of ancient Rome,” he said.

The physical side of love has always been important to me, and Gambetta’s deficiency in this area proved deeply frustrating. Part of the problem was his terrible health. He was already showing signs of the physical deterioration that would contribute to his early death. He suffered from chronic bronchitis and couldn’t climb a flight of stairs without gasping for breath. He had gotten into a pattern of working himself to exhaustion and then escaping to a spa for a week of rest and exercise. After he returned to Paris, he’d feel better for a few days. Then the cycle of overwork and illness would begin again.

He frequently urged me to travel with him to take this or that cure, or simply to rest for a few days at a country inn. As I was hostess at Pierre’s Thursday dinners, and I still regularly attended Mama’s Mondays, it was difficult to get away.

In the summer of 1877, after we had been together for a year and a half, I arranged my schedule so I could take a balloon trip with Gambetta to Normandy. We had to reschedule the trip twice because of inclement weather. Finally, one warm, sunny Friday, we decided to fly. I arrived at the Jardin des Tuileries, the launch site, at ten. The balloon had already been inflated and was being held to the ground by thick ropes wound around iron stakes. Gambetta helped me climb into the basket, and a moment later the pilot cried, “Let go!”

The men standing by the stakes unraveled the ropes, and the balloon slowly rose to the northwest. I had been terror-stricken, but now I had the delicious feeling of being carried along like a feather in the breeze. I looked down. The earth receded, and as we rose higher, Paris looked more and more like a toy village.

Within minutes, Gambetta had unfurled a tricolor.
“Vive la France!”
he shouted into the clouds.

A half hour into the trip, it started to rain, and the air turned cold. The pilot had trouble adjusting to the changed temperature, and the balloon rose up and down like an elevator. Gambetta grew agitated. “The weather, like everything else, is going to the dogs,” he grumbled. “I’ve never seen such a summer! One would think that words had changed their meanings and that summer was only another term for winter.” His face was bright red, and sweat poured from his brow, despite the cold air.

In midafternoon, we approached an open field near a forest. The pilot released the pressure valve, and with the gas whistling, we began our descent. As we picked up speed, the pilot shouted, “To anchor,” and the crewmen threw ropes, with anchors attached, overboard.

“Bend your knees and grab the side of the basket,” Gambetta ordered.

I obeyed, and a moment later we hit the ground with a hard thud.

Gambetta and I set off by foot along a dusty road to a country inn where he had made reservations. Fifteen minutes later, we came upon a dilapidated building that looked like a barn. Chickens scratched in the yard, and flies buzzed around an old woman who was sitting on the stoop, shelling peas.

“I can’t possibly stay in this hovel,” I said.

“I’m afraid there isn’t any other place around,” answered Gambetta.

“Can’t we go into Rouen?”

“I suppose we could. But I like it here. Don’t you find the country beautiful?”

“No.”

“Open your eyes, Mimi! Nature has dressed herself in all her finery in our honor.”

“Well, she forgot to outfit this inn.”

Scowling, Gambetta led me inside to the dining room, where we sat at a small wood table with a group of rough-looking workmen and their haggard wives. A sullen girl served us steaming bowls of beef stew and red table wine, which Gambetta consumed greedily. I was too angry to eat a morsel.

Our room was low-ceilinged and suffocatingly hot. One small window looked out into the brown yard. The bedding smelled as if it had been in the cellar for a year.

“You don’t really expect me to sleep here?” I asked.

Gambetta looked embarrassed. “Let’s take a walk. We’ll talk about it.”

We strolled through the village, where a festival was in full swing. Groups of men sat on benches, drinking beer and talking loudly. Under the stone roof of an ancient market, a few couples danced to a sentimental waltz played by a little band.

Soon Gambetta was recognized. People began clapping, and a few men raised their glasses in the air in toasts. Then the band struck up the “Marseillaise.” Smiling broadly, Gambetta left my side and strode through the crowd, shaking hands.

Disgusted, I walked toward the edge of the village square, where a man in laborer’s clothes leaned against a rickety carriage.

“How far is it to the train station?” I asked.

“About an hour.”

“Do you know when the next train leaves for Paris?”

“The next and the last. At ten. If you leave now, you can make it.”

“I’ll give you thirty francs to take me.”

“What about Monsieur Gambetta?”

“When you get back, you can tell him I’ve returned to Paris.”

“It’s none of my business, Madame, but won’t he be awfully angry?”

“You’re right, Monsieur. It’s none of your business. Please, let’s go.”

The carriage driver was right: Gambetta was furious. When he got back to Paris, he wrote me a letter ending our relationship. “I had been looking forward to one of those divine nights of ours, which seem to me like the memory of some supernatural happiness,” he began. “Instead you gave me the slip. I will not be played for a fool, Madame. Good-bye.”

If I had tried, I’m certain I could have won him back. But I had grown tired of his ill health, his shabby apartment, his endless monologues, his indifferent lovemaking. I never saw Gambetta again. Poor man, he died five years later from a massive infection after accidentally shooting himself in the hand with a loaded revolver. At least that was the official story. Madame Léonie Léon was with him at the time, and rumors flew around Paris that it was
she
who had shot him, in a jealous rage over another woman.

Mama suspected I had had an affair with the Republican leader—a friend of hers had seen us dining at a restaurant—and one day after Gambetta and I broke up, she confronted me. “Since when have you and Léon Gambetta become so close?” she asked. It was a Monday evening, following Mama’s regular salon. The guests had left, and we were alone in the parlor, sipping tea.

“What do you mean?”

“Madame Hubert saw you with him at Bignon’s, looking very cozy.”

“How nice of her to tell you about it,” I snapped. “Actually, Pierre and I met Monsieur Gambetta at a ball at the foreign ministry. He invited us to dinner. Pierre was busy, so I went alone.” It was a lie, of course, and Mama saw through it.

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Why not?”

Mama put her teacup down and glared at me. “You’re a foolish, foolish girl. You’re going to end up in the street like a common whore.”

“It’s over with Gambetta, if you must know,” I shouted. “But to tell you the truth, I hope someone else comes along. I’m too young to stay alone like a dried-up old lady.” I almost added, “like you,” but I stopped myself.

“If you had any sense, you’d try to win your husband’s affection instead of falling into the arms of strangers. Pierre is a wonderful man.” Mama stood up. She looked like she wanted to slap me. Instead she threw her handkerchief at me and stomped out of the room.

As it turned out, Pierre and I did begin spending more time together. Madame Jeuland unexpectedly moved to London with her husband, and suddenly Pierre was bored and looking for entertainment. We started going out to restaurants and parties several times a week. One evening on the way home from a dinner at the American Embassy, where we had both drunk too much champagne, Pierre kissed me passionately in our carriage. I expected him to invite me to sleep with him, and I decided to accept. I had enjoyed his kisses, and I was curious about what kind of lover he’d be. But when we entered our house and climbed the stairs to the second floor, Pierre said good night to me on the landing, as was his custom, and turned to walk down the hall to his bedroom.

I was annoyed. Why hadn’t he followed up on what he’d started in the carriage? Didn’t he want me? I went to my boudoir, undressed, and donned a peignoir. Then I walked down the hall to Pierre’s room and knocked on the door.

“Yes?” he called from within.

“It’s Mimi. I must see you.”

I had disturbed him in the middle of undressing, and he answered the door in his shirt and stockings. “What’s wrong, dear?” he said. He looked worried.

I stepped into the middle of the room and dropped my peignoir.

“What’s this?” His eyes grew wide.

I walked toward him and began undoing the buttons on his shirt. “Are you sure this is what you want?” he said softly.

“Yes.”

No sooner had I uttered the word than Pierre’s hands and mouth were all over my body. We made love on the carpet and, a half hour later, on the bed. The next day, a Sunday, we hardly left his bedroom.

Pierre was a gentle, tender lover, far superior to Léon Gambetta, but he was hardly as exciting as Sam Pozzi. For one thing, he was rather old—well over forty. Also, he was far less handsome than Pozzi. Pierre wasn’t unattractive, but he had a soft little paunch around his middle, skinny bow legs, and a flat, droopy backside that made me laugh every time I saw it.

Still, he knew how to please me, and for a month we had a grand affair. Then it ended as abruptly as it had begun. Perhaps living together as intimately as we had for so long without the ultimate intimacy prevented us from sustaining passion. Perhaps we simply ran out of it. One night, my husband stopped visiting me in my bedroom, and I soon discovered he was traveling to London regularly to see Madame Jeuland. We never slept together again, except once after a dinner at home after we had shared two bottles of Château Lafitte.

That’s how we got our daughter, Louise. She was born on August 20, 1879, at Château des Chênes, where I had spent the last weeks of my confinement. Louise was a perfectly formed, beautiful little girl with black hair and a delicate little face. Pierre and I adored her with an intensity neither of us could have imagined before her birth. To celebrate Louise’s arrival, Pierre gave me a diamond crescent for my hair, the symbol of Diana, the chaste Greek goddess of the hunt who, paradoxically, was worshiped in Roman religion as a symbol of fertility. A reporter once compared my “elegant litheness” to Diana’s, and Pierre thought my body resembled the statues of Diana at the Louvre.

We had a nanny who slept with Louise in the nursery and took care of most of her needs, but Pierre and I spent more time with our baby than was typical of parents in our circle. Every morning after breakfast, we pushed her perambulator around Parc Monceau. We kept a cradle in the parlor so she could be with us after dinner, while Pierre read the papers and I played the piano.

Mama was thrilled to have a grandchild. Still, she worried that I had taken a new lover and that Louise wasn’t really a Gautreau. She scrutinized the baby’s face whenever she got a chance, and finally, on the day of Louise’s christening, she exclaimed, “This infant looks nothing like Pierre!”

Mama and I were walking down the stone steps of Saint-Sulpice following the ceremony. Louise lay bundled in my arms in a white lace christening gown. Julie and Pierre followed behind us, out of earshot. It was a beautiful fall day, cool and sunny, and children romped around the huge jetting fountain in the square in front of us.

“Mama, Pierre is a middle-aged man with an enormous mustache,” I said. “Louise is a tiny baby girl.”

“You must tell me. Is this your husband’s child?”

“Yes,” I hissed. Mama didn’t look convinced, so I added, “I swear it. On Louise’s life.”

My mother wasn’t the only one who questioned Louise’s paternity—speculation even turned up in the press. Most of it centered on Gambetta, with whom I had been seen in restaurants and at concerts. A reporter for
Frou Frou,
who claimed to have spotted Louise with her nanny in Parc Monceau, wrote that the baby looked just like the famous orator.
Gil Blas
ran a cartoon of Gambetta, Louise, and me leaving Paris in a balloon, and
La Vérité
claimed to have seen the three of us at Baden-Baden.

The reporters thought I was still sleeping with the hero of French Republicanism, and it infuriated them. Though Paris had adopted a cosmopolitan spirit after the Franco-Prussian War—foreign imports, from Russian novels to English aesthetic ideas, were suddenly celebrated—latent hostility toward foreigners bubbled up from time to time. Americans in particular were resented for their wealth, and the press loved to attack us for being vulgar, pushy, and overambitious. “Beware this people that grows ever larger,” the society columnist for
L’Illustration
warned. “Uncle Sam threatens with his gnarled, industrious hands over our commerce, our agriculture, and our stables.” I was sometimes singled out as the epitome of American crassness, and vilified in print for wearing makeup, dyeing my hair, and dressing provocatively.

The most outrageous stories about me had nothing to do with Gambetta.
La Vérité,
for example, claimed that I kept slaves at rue Jouffroy, and that I bathed in the nude at Paramé while a giant mulatto stood on the beach holding an armload of fluffy towels.

Pierre was too elegant and above it all to care what some reporter riffraff wrote about me in the scandal sheets. But Mama was hysterical over it. She actually visited the offices of the offending journals and demanded retractions. When none were printed, she urged me to sue for libel.

But the stories didn’t really trouble me. No one in my circle paid attention to the scandal press. Many of the mainstream columnists still wrote glowing items about me. As I pointed out to Mama one day when she was nattering on about the negative publicity, “No scurrilous piece in
Gil Blas
is as bad as being ignored by Etincelle.” That shut her up.

In those days, I took very seriously Théophile Gautier’s dictum, “A woman’s first duty is to be beautiful.” I considered it my job to be stunning, and believe me, it took fortitude to endure the endless fittings, coiffeur appointments, the dieting and the costume changes of a professional beauty. I learned the art of making a grand entrance. At the theater and opera, I always arrived twenty minutes late. As soon as I reached my box, I’d drop my coat dramatically to give the audience a view of my shoulders, which were famous for their whiteness and exquisite shape. I never went anywhere—not even for a short walk—without full makeup and an impeccable toilette, without the maid spraying me with perfume as I twirled on a little stool, so the scent would be evenly distributed.

During the day, I paid calls, attended exhibitions, and visited shops and the dressmaker. Several evenings a week, I went out to a dinner, a reception, the theater, or a ball. I was part of
Tout-Paris
society, that chorus of bustled ladies and tailcoated gentlemen who went everywhere, knew everyone, and talked endlessly about art, politics, and literature. The crowd included faubourg aristocrats, celebrities, and the very, very rich (defined by one wag as anyone who could afford to pay a hundred louis d’or for a fan). I had entrée into this world because of my looks and notoriety, but I never was totally accepted by it. I remained an outsider, an American arriviste with a flimsy pedigree. Despite my frenetic socializing, I had only one true woman friend, Julie.

Though I had little time to spend with her, I visited Julie’s atelier as often as I could. Sometimes I had lunch with her at Lavenue’s, a restaurant opposite Gare Montparnasse that was popular with artists. One fall afternoon as Julie and I sat at a table near the window and were scanning the menu, I spotted a chestnut-haired man with a neatly trimmed beard, sitting across the room with a group of painters in baggy pants and loose smocks. I always manage to find the most attractive man in any room, and this fellow was obviously a cut above the rest of Lavenue’s scruffy patrons. Dressed in brown worsted trousers, coat, waistcoat, and cravat, he looked like a banker or a lawyer.

“Who is that bearded fellow in the waistcoat?” I asked Julie. She put down her menu and turned around. Suddenly she straightened her back, and her face lit up. “That’s John Sargent, the American artist! You’ve heard of him. His drawings are like Old Masters, and his painting is breathtaking.”

John Singer Sargent had been the toast of the Paris Salon ever since he first exhibited his work there in 1877, when he was just twenty-one. With their dazzling brushwork, astonishing vitality, and showy, brilliant likenesses, his pictures blurred everything around them. The other painters, including his teacher, Carolus-Duran, were said to be deeply envious of him. Yet the young artist was so amiable and generous that they couldn’t help liking him. No one begrudged Sargent his singular success.

“Do you know him?” I asked Julie.

“Yes, though not well. Carolus brought him to my studio a few times, and I visited Sargent’s studio once with Sophie and Filomena.”

The artist looked in our direction. He waved to Julie and, raising his chin and narrowing his eyes, appeared to study me. Then he rose from the table and walked toward us.

I liked John Singer Sargent the moment Julie introduced us. Tall, pale, and blue-eyed, with a soft body that already showed signs of future portliness, he had a pleasant, intelligent face and a charming, self-deprecating manner.

He pulled a chair up to our table and sat down.

“Julie tells me you’re American,” I said.

“My parents are. I’m an expatriate mongrel, born in Florence,” he answered. Sargent’s French was impeccable, with hardly a trace of an accent. “I didn’t even visit America until I was twenty,” the artist continued. He gazed through the window to the boulevard. Outside, a soft breeze swirled the leaves of the young plane trees, planted in 1873 to replace the ancient ones cut for firewood during the Prussian siege. “I must say, this delightful weather makes me homesick for the palm trees and fig orchards in Nice where I played as a child,” he continued. “I’d fancy going to the country to sketch this afternoon. But don’t you know, I’m chained to my studio.”

“Who’s sitting for you these days?” Julie asked.

“A very brilliant creature named Dr. Samuel-Jean Pozzi.”

My face burned. I could never hear Pozzi’s name without feeling waves of anxiety. Before Sargent could say anything else, a waitress stepped to the table with a steaming platter of
escalopes de veau.
Sargent eyed the food greedily. “That looks delicious,” he said as he stood. “I had better get back to
my
lunch. It was lovely to meet you, Madame Gautreau.” He nodded to me, then crossed the room to rejoin his friends.

Throughout the meal, I stole glances at Sargent. Once, I caught him staring at me, and I quickly turned away. Julie and I finished eating and paid the bill. As we walked out of the restaurant, I felt Sargent’s eyes on me. When we were on the street, I asked Julie, “Is Monsieur Sargent married?”

“Oh, no. All he thinks about is work.”

The temperature had dropped, and a cool wind blew debris across the wide boulevard. A handbill announcing a lingerie sale at Bon Marché clung to my skirt, and I peeled it off. “Doesn’t he have a
petite amie
?” I asked.