I Am Madame X (28 page)

“I won’t have people laughing at me for two whole months,” Mama insisted.

“They’re not laughing at
you,
Mama,” I pointed out grimly.

“Well, I’m going to talk to Sargent. He’s a gentleman. I’m sure he’ll listen to reason.” She jumped to her feet and rang the little bell on the mantel that summoned a servant—Mama had no qualms about treating my staff as her own. After instructing the maid to call the driver, she went to the foyer to wait for my carriage.

I felt sorry for Sargent when I thought of the tongue-lashing he was about to get from Mama. He was so shy, so nervous around women. It wasn’t his fault that the crowd hated my portrait. And perhaps Julie and Pierre were right. Perhaps the critics would appreciate it. A few favorable reviews from the right experts might turn public opinion. Yes, I told myself, it was too soon to talk about retiring the picture.

“Mama, I’m going with you,” I said as she stepped out the front door.

In the landau, Mama started to cry. “I can’t believe what a disaster this is,” she wailed. “We’ll never be asked anywhere again.”

“Oh, stop being so melodramatic,” I said.

She turned away, whimpering and sniffling the rest of the way there. When we reached 41, boulevard Berthier, I stepped out of the carriage and rang the bell. Sargent’s friend Ralph Curtis answered the door. “Bonjour, Mesdames,” he said. His voice was even, but his eyes looked anxious.

Mama fixed her tear-stained face on Curtis and handed him her card. “We’d like to see Monsieur Sargent,” she said, working hard to modulate her voice.

“I’m afraid he’s out.” Curtis casually examined the gold-embossed card. “He’s dining at the home of some American friends.”

“I don’t believe it. You’re hiding him,” Mama insisted.

“Mama, please, let’s go,” I said, gently putting my arm around her waist.

She pulled away from me, pushed past Curtis, and ran upstairs to Sargent’s large studio. I had never seen her move so quickly. She scooted around the room, looking behind the curtains and the canvases stacked against the walls. She even tried to pry open Sargent’s suit of Japanese armor, with the crazed idea that the painter might be hiding inside.

“Madame Avegno, please,” implored Curtis. He peeled Mama’s arms away from the armor, and she collapsed against his chest. Her whole body was trembling. “My daughter is lost. All Paris mocks her. She’ll die of chagrin,” she sobbed. Mama was the one about to die of chagrin.

Curtis looked at me helplessly, his thin, pale face sinking in dismay.

“Mama, let’s go,” I pleaded.

I put my arm around her shoulder and led her out of the studio and down to the foyer. “I’m very sorry for this interruption,” I told Curtis as I pushed Mama through the door.

“Think nothing of it,” he said, by now somewhat recovered. “I’m sure you’ve had a very trying day.”

My driver dropped Mama off at rue de Luxembourg, then took me home. I went to my sitting room and sat on a fauteuil, trying to understand why things had gone so wrong, why Sargent’s meticulous calculations about style and design had backfired so spectacularly. The only explanation that made sense to me was that Sargent had offended the public morality of bourgeois Paris. The painting suggested what most people who read the scandal sheets thought about me, and gave them an excuse to jeer. It didn’t help that everyone knew that Sargent and I were Americans; and the picture, in its boldness and ambition, seemed to spotlight what the French disliked about our countrymen.

I played a few scales on the piano. I hadn’t practiced much recently, and my fingers were as stiff as an old woman’s. I wanted to lose myself in the deep, affirming chords of Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, I wanted the Cantabile to fill the air, redeeming me, making me forget my wretchedness. But I couldn’t get the piano to do anything. The sonata sounded choppy and tinny. I gave up and lay down. Mercifully, I fell asleep quickly.

At ten, the bell rang, and the maid announced Mama. I splashed some cold water on my face and went downstairs. She paced in front of the mantel in the salon, her face creased with anxiety. She looked old and tired. “Monsieur Sargent won’t do a thing, not a thing,” she moaned.

“You saw him?”

“Yes. After you dropped me off, I went back to boulevard Berthier in my carriage and waited for him on his stoop.”

“Mama, what’s wrong with you?”

“He was very surprised to see me,” she said, ignoring my distress. “But he invited me in. At first, he was sympathetic. He said there was no way the portrait could be removed, though he had petitioned Salon officials to repaint the strap onto your shoulder. He thought that would make it less objectionable. They have refused him. William Bouguereau, another Salon artist, told him he must learn the consequences of painting such inflammatory pictures.”

“I’m the one who’s learning the consequences,” I pointed out.

“Exactly. And I told Sargent he wasn’t doing enough to help. I guess I said some pretty unpleasant things, because he got very testy. He looked down his nose at me and insisted I had no right to complain. ‘I chronicle. I don’t judge,’ he said in this snooty voice. ‘I painted your daughter exactly as she looks.’”

“You’ve made things worse!” I cried.

“Me!” She held a white hand rippling with blue veins to her throat. “If you hadn’t worn that dress. If you weren’t so—”

“If I wasn’t so what?” I interrupted.

“Oh, never mind. It’s no use arguing. The fact remains, we’re ruined. You, me, the entire Avegno line. I’ll be amazed if this doesn’t kill me.”

I had had a slight headache since early afternoon. Now my temples throbbed. I put my fingers to the sides of my forehead and closed my eyes. “I’m going to bed, Mama, and you should, too.”

“Good night,” she huffed, slamming the front door on her way out.

The following morning, and every morning for the next few weeks, the maid left a stack of reviews on my breakfast tray. In an effort to be helpful, she went through the articles, underlining the sections about me without paying attention to what was being said.

The critic for
Art Amateur
wrote: “
Madame ***,
by John Singer Sargent, is simply offensive in its insolent ugliness and defiance of every rule of art. The drawing is bad, the color atrocious, the artistic ideal low. It is impossible to believe that it ever would have been accepted by the jury of admission had the artist’s previous successes not made him independent of their examination. It is depressing to look at this picture and to realize how Monsieur Sargent has abandoned true art to run after the Gods of notoriety and sensationalism.”

The review in
Art Journal
was no better. Critic William Sharp noted the “almost willful perversion of the artist’s knowledge of flesh painting. [It] has far too much blue in it [and] more resembles the flesh of a dead than a living body.”

As the days and weeks wore on, the notices grew more scathing. “The profile is pointed, the eye microscopic, the mouth imperceptible, the color pallid, the neck sinewy, the right arm lacks articulation, the hand is deboned,” wrote Henri Houssaye in
Revue des Deux Mondes.
“The décolletage of the bodice doesn’t make contact with the bust, it seems to flee any contact with the flesh.”

Then there were the caricatures. One by Jules Renard Draner in
Le Charivari
depicted me with a heavy jaw and a potato nose and the bodice of my Poussineau gown as a black heart. The caption read: “A new ace of heart model for playing cards.”

Occasionally there were a couple of mildly positive reviews. One from Sargent’s friend Judith Gautier in
Le Rappel
called the painting “the precise image of a modern woman scrupulously drawn by a painter who is the master of his art.” And Etincelle, in a feature article in
Le Figaro,
concentrated on my dress, saying it was “prophetic of future chic,” which I think was true.

I don’t like to torture myself, but I read the reviews over and over, dozens of times, as though if I read them enough, I’d become immune to them, or at least they’d lose their sting. But each new reading was as hurtful as the first.

The insults to my looks were the hardest to bear. I had been hearing all my life that I was beautiful. Now the world was being told I was ugly. Could it be true? I stared at myself for hours in the mirror, studying my face from every angle. I decided my lips
were
too thin, my nose too long, my chin too pointy. That I had been considered gorgeous was a terrible mistake. I was a fraud, and I had finally been found out!

After a couple of weeks, still wounded and listless, I decided to force myself out of my misery with a change—a new hairstyle, something to better accommodate my new sense of my features. I sent for my coiffeur, Emile.

“What would you like to do?” he asked when the maid showed him into my boudoir after lunch one day. Emile seemed to grow fatter every time I saw him. Three thick rolls of flesh bulged under his narrow waistcoat. His sparse black hair was lacquered closely to his head and made his round, jowly cheeks look huge.

“I’m not sure. I only know I need a change,” I told him.

As I sat at my dressing table, Emile removed the pins from my hair and brushed it out over my shoulders. Lifting sections of hair and pulling it through his wide manicured fingers, he said, “I have an idea.”

He parted my hair in the middle and pulled it into a loose chignon at the base of my head. While he worked, he chatted nonstop about the weather, politics, and our mutual acquaintances, leaving no space for me to talk. He never mentioned my portrait, though of course he knew about it.

“This is a lovely change,” said Emile as he sprayed my hair with a finishing lacquer. He seemed eager to leave and began packing up his supplies.

I studied myself closely in the dressing-table mirror. “You don’t think it makes me look old?” I asked him.

“Madame, you are the picture of youth.”

“My eyes don’t look puffy?”

“Madame,
I’m
the one who’s puffy.” Emile stuffed the last comb into his leather case, bowed slightly, and darted out the door.

After he left, I experimented with makeup and tried on every necklace and pair of earrings in my jewelry box. Then I went through my wardrobe and tried on all my gowns to see how they looked with the new hairstyle. Finally I went back to my dressing table and worked a bit more on my face. Pierre found me there when he came home at six.

“Mimi, stop fussing with yourself,” he said. He had invited some friends to the house for cocktails, and they were due to arrive at any moment.

“Nothing is right anymore,” I told him. “I hate the way I look.”

My husband stood behind me and studied my reflection in the glass. “I don’t like your hair,” he said. “It’s more becoming the old way.”

“I agree,” I said, miserably. “I’ll have Emile redo it tomorrow.”

“Isn’t there something you can do about it now?”

“Is it so awful that you don’t want your friends to see me?” I felt my eyes well up, and I blinked back tears.

“Now, darling, please. It was just a suggestion.”

The entire evening, I felt uncomfortable about my appearance. Pierre didn’t say another word about it, though his mood was dark. In a way, he was more upset about the reaction to my portrait than I was. In the days following the first reviews, he stormed around the house and railed against the critics. When an unflattering article about me appeared in
Frou Frou,
Pierre bellowed that he ought to challenge the reporter to a duel.

I should have been warmed by such ardent support. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that Pierre was less distraught over my feelings than he was over his own public humiliation. Though he’d never admit it, of course, he liked being married to an icon of beauty. He was enraged that my pedestal was toppling, just as he would have been enraged had someone destroyed his Japanese screens or expensive frock coats.

I had always felt in some deep, fundamental way that I could count on Pierre, but now I wasn’t so sure. It dawned on me that he was more interested in my fame than my happiness, and that made me terribly sad.

For the first month after the Salon opened, I passed the time mostly by practicing the piano and playing with Louise. Mama called every afternoon, sometimes with a group of friends who sat in my parlor sipping tea and heaping abuse on Sargent. I suppose they meant to comfort me, but their clucking only made me more agitated and depressed.

They told me my portrait had become the talk of the town, the subject of heated argument in shops, restaurants, private clubs, and theater lobbies. Julie said the artistic community had taken up the case as well, and that the merits of the picture were passionately discussed in ateliers across Paris.

People couldn’t decide whether the painting really looked like me, a question that generated more trouble. When I finally did venture outside, to go to the dressmaker, a group of gawkers ran beside my carriage, shouting, “Madame, over here! Look this way!” The next week, a young painter set up an easel on the pavement outside our gate and tried to create a portrait from the fleeting glimpses he got of me as I came and went.

One day I refused to leave the house because a small crowd of tourists had gathered outside our gate. “This will all stop when the Salon closes, and the painting is ours,” said Pierre.

The Salon would be open for nearly two months, until June 20, but Pierre wasted no time offering Sargent six thousand francs for my portrait—twice the artist’s typical fee. Pierre told me he was contemptuous of the public’s taste, that he adored the painting and wanted to own it. I think he also hoped to spare it from further scrutiny. He couldn’t bear the idea of my portrait in a museum or a fashionable home, where strangers would be constantly looking at it and mocking it.

Sargent, however, refused to sell. He told Pierre he feared that someone in my family (no doubt Mama) would destroy the painting. When Pierre asked him to name his price, Sargent held fast. “I wouldn’t sell it to you if you offered me the moon,” he said.

That must have taken incredible discipline, because Sargent was broke. At least that’s what Julie had heard from Carolus-Duran. “He hasn’t one commission,” she told me. “The word in the ateliers is that no woman in Paris will dare let him paint her, lest he turn her into a curiosity, as he did you.”

“What will he do?” I asked.

“Carolus says Sargent’s about to flee to England. He’s lined up some stuffy rich people who are willing to sit for him.”

I appreciated Sargent’s need to make a living. Still, I think he should have stayed in Paris and stood up for my picture. If he didn’t believe in it and stay around to defend it, who would? Running away was cowardly.

But who am I to talk? I left town, too, traveling to Château des Chênes with Louise and her nanny, while Pierre stayed in Paris to work. Even in Brittany, far from the Parisian crowds, with summer in bloom and the workers bustling in the orchards, I was hopelessly sad. Living with Millicent and Madame Gautreau didn’t help. At dinner the first night we arrived, my mother-in-law ignored me, and Millicent asked, “Is Pierre angry with you?”

“No. Why should he be?” I replied.

“Because you posed for that naughty portrait.” Millicent smiled idiotically. I didn’t know what Pierre had told his family about the Salon scandal, but they must have read about it in the Breton newspapers.

“It’s a work of art,” I said in a firm voice. “Everyone who knows anything about painting knows that.”

At the far end of the table, my mother-in-law cleared her throat loudly. I wasn’t sure whether she meant to express disdain for my comment or displeasure at the first course—an oversalted potato soup.

After dinner, Madame Gautreau went to bed. The maids lit the paraffin lamps in the parlor, and I sat reading in a chair by the French doors.

Millicent had fetched Louise from the nursery, and they entered the parlor, each carrying a box of paper dolls, which they spread out on the hearth rug.

“I’ll be the painting, and you be the people,” said Louise.

I snapped my head from my book and looked at my daughter. Millicent had given her an illustration of my portrait that had been clipped from a magazine. Louise held it up between her chubby hands while Pierre’s crazy cousin picked through a pile of paper cutouts of elegantly dressed men and women.

I rose from my chair and hurried across the room. “What’s wrong with you?” I shouted at Millicent. I grabbed the cutouts and crumpled them in my hands. Louise began to whimper.

“It’s all right, darling,” I said. “Nanny will make you some new ones tomorrow.”

I gave Millicent my harshest look. The purple moles on her face seemed to have grown larger and hairier since I had seen her last, and her lower lip quivered under her enormous nose. “I won’t let you play with Louise if you ever again mention my portrait to her,” I said.

“I’m s-s-s-sorry,” Millicent sputtered.

I left the poor woman slumped in front of the fireplace as I scooped up Louise in my arms and carried her to bed. Then I retired, too.

But I had trouble sleeping that night and the ones that followed. I kept replaying the Salon debacle in my mind, like an endless magic lantern show. The days were no better. I lost my appetite and grew so thin that my clothes hung loosely on my body. I had little energy to be a mother to Louise, and I left her mostly in the care of her nanny. The only time we spent together was on our daily trips to the beach to collect shells, Louise’s favorite summer pastime. At five, she had already amassed a large collection of oyster and snail shells and small conches, which she discovered while picking through the fringes of receding tides.

Starting the first day after we arrived at Paramé, we took the carriage to the beach that was closest to the château, a stretch of sand called the Sillon, which linked the mainland to Saint-Malo. We halted the carriage by a dirt path that led to the sands, and Louise tumbled out, dressed in a blue sailor suit and a straw hat, followed by her nanny, who was carrying the child’s bucket and shovel.

I walked toward the water, past a large dune called La Hoguette, on which stood four upright posts supporting a row of oak beams—an ancient hanging post for criminals. The stern ruin gave the beach a grim aspect, even on bright, sunny days.

To protect my skin from the sun and salt water, I wore what seems to me now a ridiculous costume—long white flannel pantaloons and, over them, a white, high-necked, long-sleeved tunic of the same fabric. White silk stockings and white buckskin shoes finished the outfit. My hair was gathered under a pearl-studded net, and I draped a hooded cashmere cape over my shoulders.

For the first week or so, I sat on a little folding chair on the sand under an enormous umbrella and watched Louise play. One day, however, when the weather turned unusually hot, I decided to swim. I strolled to the ocean’s edge, dropped my cape, and threw myself into the water. The cold was a shock. I forced my arms to rotate through it as I swam farther and farther out. Soon the water felt as tepid as a bath. As I swam, I imagined I was a child again, paddling myself through a muddy Louisiana river. When I looked up, though, I saw not the cypress-lined riverbanks of my girlhood home, but gulls flapping away from the ancient hanging post, and, in the distance, the blue-gray horizon.

I swam for about twenty minutes, and for the first time since the Salon opening, I began to feel calm and peaceful. When I stepped from the sea, the nanny held my cape out for me, and I wrapped myself in it.

For the next week, Louise, her nanny, and I went to the beach every afternoon at three. Usually, we were the only people there, though sometimes there would be one or two other swimmers.

One afternoon, I was so soothed by the water that I lost track of distance and swam out too far. The sounds from the shore faded, and all I heard were waves crashing on reefs and gulls fluttering above. Looking back, I could barely make out the figure of a woman—Louise’s nanny, I surmised—standing at water’s edge with a child, who must have been Louise, chasing an ebbing wave.