I Am Madame X (5 page)

“Fetch the nightcap, Miss Boirsot!” she roared to another student, her palm still pressing the back of my head. Then she pulled me up by the collar, dragged me to the front of the classroom, and plopped the cap on my head. It smelled like moldy bread.

I stumbled back to my seat and sat with my face burning. For the rest of the day, whenever the nuns passed me in the hall, they made the sign of the cross and murmured, “Shame! Shame!”

The dark paneling of the dining hall was covered with portraits of English kings. At dinner, I sat squeezed between two five-year-olds. Throughout the meal, they stared at the nightcap and giggled behind chubby hands. No one began eating until the nun at the head of the table dipped her spoon into the food—a tasteless chicken ragout served on badly chipped green crockery. When we had finished eating, a servant passed a large bowl around the table, and each girl washed her silverware in it and then put the items away in a drawer underneath the table.

Bedtime came as a relief. The girls slept on cots crammed close together in a cold dormitory under the attic roof. As soon as I was in my cot, I began to sob, burrowing my face in my pillow to muffle the sound. A moment later, I felt soft arms around me and heard a gentle voice. “Shush, Virginie, it’ll be all right.” It was Aurélie. She stroked my hair and held me until I fell asleep.

The next morning at six, two servants entered the dormitory and woke us by slamming the windows shut. We washed our faces and hands in tubs of freezing water, dressed by candlelight, and marched off to chapel for Mass, followed by a meager breakfast of dry bread and weak tea. We spent all day in class, divided into two groups—the juniors, ages five to twelve, and the seniors, thirteen to seventeen. Our teachers were lay women, most of whom were badly educated peasants from the English countryside. The nuns spent virtually all their time either praying or working in the convent distillery, where they produced mint cordial, their main source of income.

After my first day, I tried to lay low in Farnsworth’s class. But Aurélie, who didn’t fear her as I did, regularly provoked her. One morning, as the old teacher turned her back to point out the location of Greece on the map, Aurélie whispered in my ear, “Look at Farnsworth’s bottom. It’s almost as wide as her desk.”

Suddenly Farnsworth wheeled and marched toward us. Grabbing Aurélie and me by our ears, she dragged us out of the classroom. “Would you like to tell me what you girls were talking about?” she demanded. I felt faint, and my throat closed shut. Aurélie, though, remained calm. With perfect composure, she looked levelly at Farnsworth and explained, “Virginie was telling me about her grandfather who was a French marquis.”

Madame Farnsworth’s face softened. She was a snob in the most conventional sense—nothing impressed her like money and pedigree—and the thought that one of her students might have noble blood filled her with self-importance. She resisted the impulse to ask me for details and sent us back to the classroom with no further punishment.

Aurélie was the most clever girl in the class. She could memorize a poem after reading it twice, play a piano sonata after practicing it a few times. But what drew me to her was her warmth. I need to be cuddled. Mama and Grandmère were not demonstrative, but Papa had been. After he left for the war, I could always count on Tante Julie for hugs and kisses. Aurélie also was very affectionate. During my first homesick months at the convent, whenever I sobbed at night, she slipped into bed with me and held me until I fell asleep. In the morning, we brushed each other’s hair and sat together in chapel, holding hands under the folds of our uniforms.

We never dared hold hands openly. The nuns strictly forbade it, just as they outlawed hugging and kissing. We could not even walk around in pairs—it had to be in threes—so fearful were the nuns that we would form “unhealthy attachments,” as they put it. Once, in the garden, a nun slapped Aurélie and me for sitting too close on a swing.

But the nuns’ vigilance was spotty. For long periods, particularly in the evenings between dinner and bedtime, we were left largely unsupervised. The lay teachers had retired to their rooms, and the nuns were in chapel. Aurélie and I often used these hours to lead expeditions of four or five girls in search of the convent ghost—a female prisoner who died during the Revolution and was said to haunt the catacombs.

Armed with candles, we wandered the convent, tapping walls and following narrow corridors in search of a secret door that would lead to the catacombs (we never found it). After a half hour or so, we’d give up, scale the stairs to our top-floor dormitory, and fall exhausted into bed.

Every other Sunday, when the girls were allowed to go home for a visit, Mama picked me up in a hack and took me to the Avenue Montaigne apartment. Usually, we passed the time sitting in the parlor reading or taking a walk with Rochilieu. Afterward he’d dine with us in our rooms. Sometimes Mama and I went to Confederate reunions, lavish parties hosted twice a month by John Slidell, a former Louisiana senator who was the Confederate ambassador to France. As a deserter, Rochilieu never showed his face at these parties.

Mama had known John Slidell and his plump black-haired wife, Mathilde, in New Orleans, and she looked them up as soon as we got to Paris. As leaders of the expatriate community, the Slidells were doing their best to keep up the spirits of the American Southerners. They helped new arrivals find apartments, schools, doctors, and dressmakers. They lent them money and introduced them to other Rebels and their sympathizers.

Invitations to their reunions, held at Rebel headquarters in a vast apartment at 75, rue de Marignan, were sought after not only by American Southerners, but also by the French—politicians, writers, newspaper editors, and society hostesses sympathetic to the Southern cause. Mama waited anxiously for her first invitation, and it came in October, two months after we had arrived in Paris.

Mama and I lifted the ornate brass knocker outside 75, rue de Marignan, and a maid in a black dress and a white organdy apron answered the door. Madame Slidell was standing nearby and rushed over to greet Mama. “Virginie Avegno! Just the person I was hoping to see. We need at least one beautiful woman in the room. Natalie has a cold and won’t come.” Natalie was Natalie Benjamin, the estranged wife of Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State. She was a shapely, green-eyed blonde, famous for her many lovers.

Mrs. Slidell linked her arm through Mama’s and led us into the parlor. The walls were covered in blue satin, and the room was softly illuminated by pink crystal chandeliers. Elegant women in flounced, high-necked dresses and well-fed men in dark frock coats were gathered in small groups on the enormous Aubusson carpet. A young man sat at the piano playing
“La Bannière bleue,”
which included the plea,
“Aides-nous, Ô France aimée,”
a song from the Creole Confederate songbook. A group of pretty girls stood around the pianist and sang. Inone corner, two boys were bent over a chessboard. John Slidell himself—tall and thin, with long, straight gray hair and dark, hooded eyes—was leaning against the pocket doors that led to the dining room, deep in conversation with a fat gentleman who was smoking a pipe.

After about an hour, the singing and piano-playing stopped and Madame Slidell announced dinner. Twenty-five tables were set up in the cavernous dining room. I sat at the children’s table next to a freckle-faced boy with coarse blond hair who introduced himself as Harry Beauvais from New Orleans. He fled to Paris with his mother after his father’s death during the Yankee occupation of the city, and he was a student at the Lycée Condorcet.

The meal seemed to last all afternoon, with endless courses delivered on silver platters and carted away by servants wearing gray livery in honor of the Rebels at home. Finally, as the toothpicks and finger bowls were passed around, Mama came over to my table. “Virginie, we must leave,” she said. “If you’re not back by eight-thirty, you won’t get into the convent.”

Harry Beauvais escorted us to the street to wait for a cab. On the corner, a group of about twenty boys and young men stood bathed in the yellow light from a gas lamp. Several of them were carrying a banner emblazoned with the words “Down with Slidell the Slave-Driver!” The banner depicted a caricature of the ambassador dragging a black man in chains.

“I know some of those boys. They’re students at my lycée,” said Harry.

“French?” I asked.

“No, American. Yankees.”

Just then, the massive double doors at Number 75 opened and Slidell appeared on the sidewalk with his wife and daughters. Loud booing rose from the swarm of boys. As the Slidells walked in the opposite direction, the swarm followed, hissing and singing “Hang Jeff Davis from a Sour Apple Tree.” Several boys shot pea-shooters at the Slidells and wads of white paper bounced innocuously around the family. One boy, however, approached closely and aimed his shooter directly at Slidell’s face. A hard wad struck the ambassador in the right eye. Slidell grabbed the boy by the collar. Just as he was about to strike him across the face, the boy slipped out of his jacket and ran away, leaving Slidell holding the blue garment. The band of boys dispersed, and we ran toward the Slidells.

“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.”