I Am Madame X (29 page)

I stopped swimming and floated for a moment as I considered turning back. Then I became aware of a man furiously swimming toward me. Perhaps he was a peasant who had spotted me from the shore and thought I needed to be rescued.

But there was something about the man’s frantic pace that unsettled me. My heart began to pound. I turned away from the shore and swam as fast as I could, farther and farther out. A wind stirred up, and the waves grew as tall as walls. Though I swam as hard as I could, I sensed the stranger gaining on me.

Suddenly a thick arm grabbed me around the waist. “I’ve caught a sea siren!” the man shouted. I couldn’t see his face, but I could smell whiskey on his breath. His arm was bare and covered with black hair. “I want to see your marble shoulders!” he bellowed and pulled on my tunic with his free arm.

I flailed my arms and tried to push him away, but he grabbed both of my wrists in one hand while clasping my waist with the other. I began kicking. I aimed for his stomach and groin, but my legs thrashed uselessly. I lost my right shoe, then my left. The man ripped my tunic and was pulling it away from my body. I struggled for as long as I could. My head bobbed up and down in the water. I went under and came up again. I gasped for air and felt all the strength flow from my limbs. Then I blacked out.

When I awoke, I was lying under my white cape on top of a blanket in the sand. A policeman in a stiff cap and blue serge jacket hovered over me, while nearby several of his colleagues held a crowd of onlookers at bay. “Madame Gautreau, can you hear me?” he asked.

“What happened? Where’s my daughter?” I tried to sit up but didn’t have the strength to raise my head. My drenched clothes clung to me, and I felt chilled to the bone.

“We sent Mademoiselle Louise home with your driver and the nanny. She’s fine,” said the policeman. He carried me to his wagon. After placing me across the backseat, he climbed in himself. Then the wagon rolled across the sands to the road.

When we arrived at Château des Chênes, my mother-in-law, Millicent, and a gaggle of servants ran out. One of the maids took my arm and led me upstairs to my room. I sprawled across the bed and promptly fell asleep.

The next day, I learned what had happened from Louise’s nanny, who’d had a long conversation with one of the officers on the scene. During my swim, a barefoot man in laborer’s clothes suddenly appeared a few yards down the beach and began running toward the water, tearing off his jacket and shirt. He jumped in and swam furiously toward me. A peasant on the beach recognized him as a local fisherman and notorious drunkard who had been arrested many times for fighting in Saint-Malo taverns. The police were fetched from the gendarmerie at Paramé. Meanwhile, two youths who happened to stroll by dove in and rescued me.

As it turned out, my attacker had been drinking since morning at a tavern outside the ramparts. The bartender there had tacked up a picture of my portrait, torn from an illustrated magazine, and as the drunk fisherman stared at it, the other patrons began teasing him. “If you go down to the beach at La Hoguette, you can see the real woman,” one man taunted. “If you catch her, I’ll give you two louis,” promised another. With that, the fisherman stumbled out of the tavern. At the beach, he saw a flash of red-gold hair bobbing in the sea, surmised it was me, and dove in to get a better look.

He ended up in the prison at Combourg for his gambit, but I never again went swimming that summer. The attack only confirmed my feeling that Sargent had stolen my life. Everything was changed since the world had seen my portrait. Even swimming, my one solace, had been taken from me.

Day after day, I lay listlessly in the hammock in the garden. After lunch, the nanny took Louise on walks in the woods to search for wildflowers under the gnarled oaks. Sometimes they went without me to the beach, though now Louise hunted for shells at a spot farther down the coast, out of sight of the hanging post of La Hoguette. The police kept curious onlookers away, and no one bothered them.

On Sundays, I usually roused myself to go to church, sometimes taking Louise to Mass in Saint-Malo at the Cathedral of Saint Vincent. Holding candles to light our prayer books, we knelt side by side with aged peasants and sailors and their wives. Afterward we strolled along the ramparts, then through the old cobbled streets. Occasionally we’d make our way across the narrow causeway to the islet of Grand Bé to attend a fair. I’d give Louise a few coins to buy candy from the vendors who set up canvas stalls on the sands. Once we saw a puppet show and a performance by the famous fire-eater of Dieppe. In my weakened state, these excursions left me exhausted, and often I had to spend the next day in bed.

Just when I thought my world couldn’t get blacker, on the first Wednesday of August, a gale hit the region and raged for several days. Torrents of rain lashed the countryside. The windows of the château rattled constantly from the roaring wind; the roads were impassable due to mud and fallen trees.

When it ended, many of our workers were left destitute, their homes damaged and their livestock killed. The priest suggested to Pierre’s mother that she hold a
kermesse,
a charity fete for the victims on the grounds of the château. After grumbling for a few days about the expense and trouble of hosting such a gathering, she finally agreed.

On the day of the party, long tables were set up in the garden. The servants worked around the clock to prepare a feast of chickens, hams, potatoes, and bread. Jars of preserved fruit and bottles of wine, some of which had languished underground for generations and were coated with thick dust, were brought up from the cellar. The day was chilly and overcast, and the wind flapped about, blowing leaves and twigs onto the terrace. The peasant families began arriving at five, dressed in their best clothes. They came on foot or in simple horse-drawn wagons—old couples bent over walking sticks, parents with young children in tow, lanky youths, and pretty girls.

Millicent and I stood on either side of Pierre’s mother as she presided from her chair. Since I did not know the laborers well, and since Madame Gautreau’s manner was hopelessly ornery, the job of greeting chiefly fell to Millicent. Over the years, she had come to know all the families who lived on the château grounds, and she took the responsibilities of hostess with grave seriousness. She spoke to each person with exaggerated concern, parroting phrases she must have heard on the rare occasions when she herself ventured into society. “Hello, Madame Gaudel. How is your dear mother?” she asked a plump middle-aged woman who had brought her four young children. And to a couple with gray, wrinkled faces, “Monsieur and Madame Halou, have you heard from your daughter in Bordeaux?” A small boy with a round face and snub nose appeared in line, and Millicent knelt to his level. “Master Tanguy!” she said brightly. “If you like, I’ll show you my rabbits later.”

The peasants spoke respectfully to my mother-in-law. They seemed amused by Millicent, smiling kindly at her and shaking her hand warmly. They looked at me with awe. Many of them must have seen woodcut illustrations of my portrait in the newspapers and read about the Salon scandal.

After the last guests had passed through the receiving line, I strolled out to the garden. The wind had died down, though it still stirred the treetops, and the air was chilly. Men, women, and children lined up at the buffet, filled their plates, then sat down to eat. Louise played hoops with some of the peasant children under an old oak. The gardener strummed his guitar on the terrace, and a few couples danced.

When they had finished eating, the peasants drifted onto the lawn and chatted in small groups. The orchard overseer, a tall, muscular man in his thirties, climbed on a chair and raised a glass to the sky. “I would like to toast the women of Château des Chênes for their wonderful generosity,” he said, and the peasants clapped politely. Just then, I heard loud scrunching on the gravel path at the side of the house. A moment later, two men appeared carting a heavy frame covered in muslin. They moved slowly and seemed to be shielding someone behind the frame. When they reached the garden, they stood the frame on the lawn in front of me. Then, with quick flicks of their wrists, they snapped off the fabric. There, on the damp grass, was my portrait come to life—a striking tableau vivant of Sargent’s painting.

A lovely girl was dressed in a black gown similar to mine—though not as décolleté—with sparkly straps. She struck a profile pose with her right hand leaning on a round table (borrowed from the house, I learned later). Her virginal freshness, her bright face and supple body, reminded me of a young version of myself. She had gone to considerable trouble to look like me. Her hair was hennaed, and she was heavily powdered. She had even whited out her eyebrows and drawn new ones higher on her brow with mahogany pencil.

The peasants gasped. A few approached the tableau to get a better look. A small boy poked the model in the stomach. The young woman, who looked about sixteen, flinched momentarily but held her pose.

Since
vernissage,
thoughts of my Salon embarrassment had never been far from my mind. Now my memories of the jeering crowd were quickly drowned out by the pleasant murmurings around me. The peasants laughed and gushed compliments. None seemed to realize the pain the portrait had caused me.

For the next two hours, a stream of men and women congratulated me on the painting. “You are famous! The Breton Mona Lisa!” said one old man. “We are extremely proud to be living in the shadow of
your
château,” added his wife.

As dusk fell, the first guests began to leave, and the model dropped her pose. The air was growing cooler, and the girl’s father, a carpenter who had made the frame for the tableau, draped a shawl over her shoulders. As they walked to the gates, I raced to them and put a gold coin in her hands.

“Oh, Madame, thank you so much!” she cried. “This will get us through the fall.”

One thing I’ve learned over the past thirty years is to not anticipate the future—life has a way of turning out quite differently than you’ve planned. Those who have a cool attitude to the world, an emotional remoteness from the twists and turns of fate, are lucky. Accepting life’s unpredictability, I’ve observed, is the best antidote to despair.

My mood began to improve after the
kermesse
in Paramé. When I got back to Paris, I discovered that, far from causing me to become an outcast as Mama feared, Sargent’s portrait had transformed me into an international celebrity. After 1884, I was more in demand than ever. Aristocrats across Europe, even a few royals who had viewed the picture, clamored to meet me. Over time, their memories of the painting faded, but their interest in me never did.

Once, the Bavarian king traveled to Paris just to see me in the flesh (as his secretary told the Prefect of Police, who told Pierre). On opening night at the opera, the king parked himself in a loge opposite mine and stared at me throughout the performance.

Soon afterward, at a ball at the Duchess d’Orly’s, Empress Elizabeth of Austria asked to be introduced to me. When I curtsied to her, she took my hands in both of hers and said, “My dear, you have no idea how delighted I am to meet a living statue.”

I took the compliment as an opportunity to invite her to tea. The Empress accepted and showed up at our house with her entourage at four the next day. I included Mama in the gathering and later teased her endlessly that she never would have met the Empress of Austria if I hadn’t been painted by Sargent.

My portrait did not kill Mama, despite her predictions. She lives on in her rue de Luxembourg
hôtel,
entertaining on Monday afternoons as she always has, and often regaling her guests with tales of her final meeting with Sargent. Through the years, she has embellished the facts and concocted details to make the story more dramatic. I once heard her tell a friend that on the night of
vernissage,
she stood for hours in the pouring rain outside Sargent’s door. Another time, she said that Sargent threw his shoe at her during their argument.

But her anger toward the artist had a happy effect closer to home: it took the edge off her resentment toward me, and our relationship improved. For the first time in my adult life, we could be together for more than a half hour without fighting.

The French are wildly chauvinistic about painting. They can never accept that an American artist is as talented as a French one. Perhaps that’s why, over the years, practically every artist in Paris wanted to paint me: they all thought they could do a better job than Sargent. I agreed to sit for a few of them, including Lucie Chatillon, a friend of Julie’s and one of the most popular woman painters in Paris. She posed me in profile, as everyone did, wearing a fur coat over a white gown and a five-strand pearl choker. In 1891, I sat for Gustave Courtois. In the three-quarter-length profile view, I’m wearing a frothy white chiffon dress, and one of my shoulder straps has fallen, just like in Sargent’s picture.

People can’t believe I allowed myself to be painted again in this manner after the brouhaha of 1884. But to tell you the truth, I really didn’t care. Most of my evening dresses had shoulder straps, and they were always falling. I could never keep them up. What was more startling was how blatantly Courtois copied Sargent, though it’s only a poor imitation, as conventional and boring as Sargent’s picture is bold and striking. Yet Courtois’s painting was a great success. It was shown at the Paris Salon of 1891, which by that time had moved to the Champ de Mars. Two years later, the portrait traveled to Chicago, where it was exhibited at the World Columbian Exposition. Now it hangs in the Musée du Luxembourg.

Courtois will probably sue me for writing this, but I don’t think he has much talent. He’s a good technician who has learned to paint in the highly finished—and lifeless—academic style that is so prized by the French art establishment. That’s why Courtois’s view of me is hanging in a major museum and Sargent’s picture had been gathering dust in his studio.

A few years later, I sat for Antonio de la Gandara. A handsome man with flashing gray eyes and black hair rippling back from a broad forehead, La Gandara was a popular man about town and celebrated painter of fashionable women and historical subjects. He pursued me even more avidly than Sargent had, writing me notes, sending me flowers, calling on me nearly every afternoon to plead his case. Finally, in 1898, I agreed to pose for him. The completed portrait shows me dressed in a shimmering white satin gown, standing in strong light against a dark background, my face in profile, my back to the viewer. I’m holding an ostrich-plume fan, and my hair is twisted into a high, complicated knot. You can’t see much of my face, and the figure is unremarkable. As a work of art, it doesn’t amount to much. Yet it’s stylish, and the creamy colors coordinated with our decor. Pierre liked the portrait enormously and had no trouble convincing La Gandara to sell it to him. My husband joked that it was “the white Madame X” and hung it over our parlor mantel.

To celebrate his completion of my portrait, La Gandara took me to dinner at Taudière’s, which at the time was the most expensive and pretentious restaurant in town. Before dining on
canard à l’orange,
the waiter brought us a parchment document that listed the ancestors of the bird we were about to eat and the names of the luminaries who had consumed them.

Throughout the meal, La Gandara spoke passionately about his work. “Painting should appeal to the higher emotions, but beyond all else, it is the art of the senses,” he said as he gazed deep into my face with those flashing gray eyes. “It should touch the eyes by a kinship with flesh and blood.” Perhaps because I was moved by his words, or perhaps because I had consumed a duck that was descended from one eaten by Blanche d’Antigny, a famous courtesan, I agreed to go to a hotel with La Gandara after dinner. It was the start of an affair that lasted several months.

Though La Gandara was gentle and kind when we were together, he gossiped about our romance to his friends and acquaintances, which led to acute embarrassment for Pierre and a fresh batch of negative articles about me in the scandal sheets. One night after I had been seen dining out several nights consecutively with La Gandara, Pierre stormed into my boudoir and demanded an interview.

“People are gossiping about you. You must behave yourself,” he fumed as I sat at my dressing table and brushed my hair.

“You’re one to talk. You’re out every night with Madame Jeuland,” I shouted and threw my brush on the mirrored table. Since the death of her husband, Madame Jeuland had moved back to Paris, and she and Pierre had become inseparable.

“Not in public,” Pierre snapped. “Anyway, that’s different. Madame Jeuland and I have an enduring arrangement.” He glared at me, then fled the room.

At the time, Pierre had just lost a bid for a seat representing Paramé in the lower house of Parliament. The office had been held for decades by the Gautreau family and was suddenly made available by the death of Pierre’s uncle. Pierre’s friends urged him to run. My husband quickly embraced the idea and spent all his spare time giving speeches and distributing pamphlets outlining his views on taxes and Breton agricultural issues. But from the start of his campaign, hardly a day went by that the Paris newspapers didn’t mock him for being married to me. Even the Breton press chided him about it. On the day before the vote,
L’Evénément,
a paper that supported Pierre’s opponent, ran this poem:

The opponent won 75 percent of the vote. Pierre never said anything, but I know he blamed me.

After La Gandara, I became more discreet about men. I took a string of lovers, including a couple of dukes and a few foreign dignitaries, but I was careful not to be seen with them in public. It wasn’t only Pierre’s feelings I was concerned about. Louise was growing up, and I wanted to protect her from my private life.

Dear, sweet Louise. Almost overnight, it seemed, she had become a young woman. At twenty, she looked much more like my side of the family than Pierre’s, and much more like the Ternants than the Avegnos. Indeed, she closely resembled Julie, with her straight dark hair, her small figure, her large brown eyes, and her full, rosy mouth. She favored Julie in temperament, too. Louise was serious, intellectual. As a child, she had been tutored at home, and she had taken passionately to her studies, spending long hours reading. By age ten, she had gone through all the books in our library, so I began taking her to the bookstore every week to buy a new volume. She has never given me a moment of sadness, and we are as close as two people could be. With Louise, I broke the cycle of mother-daughter hostility that had plagued our family—my proudest accomplishment.

Throughout her adolescence, Louise and I often traveled together, and every summer we spent a week at Baden-Baden. One day, as we sat and sipped iced tea on the terrace of our hotel, we struck up a conversation with a handsome young man at the next table. He introduced himself as Olivier Jallu and said he was on vacation from his law practice in Dijon. Immediately, he was smitten with Louise, and she with him. They were inseparable for the rest of our stay, and as soon as we returned to Paris, Olivier began bombarding Louise with letters. Then he started showing up in person. For a while, he traveled to Paris every weekend. It was clear he and Louise were deeply in love, and it came as no surprise when they asked Pierre’s permission to marry in the spring of 1900.

Their June wedding was at Saint-Sulpice, and the reception following at Mama’s
hôtel
was a large, elegant affair. Finally my mother got to stage the grand society wedding of her dreams.

After a brief trip to Italy, Olivier took Louise to live in Dijon. I was thrilled that my daughter was happy, but I missed her terribly. The house seemed like a mausoleum without her. I was so lonely I could barely stand to be home. So I decided to embark on that favored antidote to melancholy—a trip abroad.

For years, Julie and I had dreamed of returning to America, particularly to see Parlange. This was the occasion. We booked passage on a new luxury liner, the
France,
sailed on July 10, 1900, and arrived in New Orleans ten days later.

As the ship pulled into the slip, the familiar screech of the steam whistle brought forth a flood of memories. A terrible sense of loss came over me, and I thought of Parlange with a stab of longing. I began to wish I had never left this country of magnolias and Spanish moss, of languid days and soft, warm nights. There’s something to be said for staying where you were born and placed by God. I believe my life would have been easier if we hadn’t moved to France.

On the dock, we pushed our way through the clusters of Negro fruit peddlers and stepped aside as wagons piled high with cotton bales clattered by. Church bells pealed, drowning the hoarse cries of the tallyman as he directed the wagonloads of cotton to the spots on the wharves where they’d rest until sold.

We hired a cab and directed the driver to 528 Esplanade, where Charles Parlange, my uncle and childhood companion, now lived with his wife and four children. The carriage stopped in front of a white house with an ornate Italianate cornice, tall windows, and an intricate cast-iron balcony. A tall, bald Negro answered the door. I handed him our cards, and we stepped into a large, sunny parlor. Two little boys hovered near the long, curving staircase in the adjacent hall and stared at us with wide eyes. I heard a commotion on the second floor, and a moment later two more children, both girls, bounded down the stairs, followed by a petite blond woman and a portly gray-haired man, Charles.

Had I met my uncle on the street, I doubt I could have discerned the slender black-haired youth I had known years earlier. It was only when he spoke, in his deep, major-key voice, that I recognized him. He smiled broadly, and taking Julie and me into his powerful arms, crushed us to his chest. “My God, it’s good to see you,” he cried.

After he introduced us to his wife, Lulu, and their children, we passed to the parlor and caught up on each other’s lives. So much had happened in the long years since we had been together, and Charles had kept in touch only periodically through letters. After Grandmère’s death in 1870, he had stayed on at Parlange and tried single-handedly to keep the sugar operation going, despite floods that destroyed the crop during several years and a steadily declining supply of laborers. For a while, he worked alone, plowing the fields himself. To make ends meet, he raised bees in the
pigeonniers
and sold honey. He made enough from that business to put himself through Centenary College in Jackson, Louisiana; then he read for the law and was admitted to the bar in 1873. His career had been a string of successes. In 1885, he was appointed U.S. attorney for New Orleans, and in 1890, he was elected to the state senate. Two years later, he became lieutenant governor of Louisiana and, the next year, a state supreme court judge.

Charles had married Lulu, the daughter of a planter in Pointe Coupée, in 1882. Like most New Orleanian Creoles, they clung ferociously to their French heritage and to the culture that was the last remaining tie to the prewar life they had once known. They spoke nothing but French at home and sent their children to schools where the lessons were in French. The boys also were learning English, and Charles was distraught that they had discovered the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. “Now all they want to read about are cowboys and Indians,” he said with a great sigh. “They won’t have anything to do with Hugo and Molière.”