I Am Madame X (16 page)

My knees buckled, and dropping to the floor, I began to sob. Dr. Pozzi saw me and ran to my side. Taking my elbows, he pulled me up and held me to his chest. Then he led me out to the hall and sat with me on a red velvet bench. I couldn’t stop crying.

“Mimi, I’m going to get something to calm you down,” he said. He walked back to the ward and returned a few minutes later with a syringe. A few tendrils of hair had escaped from the hastily arranged roll at the back of my head, and Dr. Pozzi tenderly brushed them away from my face. Pushing my ruffled sleeve to my shoulder, he jabbed the syringe into my arm and held it there for a moment. Then he removed it and wiped my skin with a cloth. “Now, you lie down, dear,” he said.

I slept the entire day. When I awoke, it was dark outside, and Dr. Pozzi was standing over me. “Mimi, the Communards have burned down the Tuileries Palace, and the entire quarter is in flames. You can’t possibly go home. You’ll have to spend the night here.”

“What time is it?” I said, sitting up. My head felt as heavy as a steel ball.

“Ten o’clock. You slept for fifteen hours.”

Taking my hand, Dr. Pozzi led me through a tunnel of empty galleries as long and as wide as tracks in a train station, then up a service stairwell to a dark paneled room—an administrative office that had been turned into his bedroom. Dr. Pozzi’s black medical bag sat on the floor next to a mahogany table stacked with books. A skeleton hung on a hook from the wardrobe. In an alcove by the window, a bed had been made up with pillows and blue satin sheets.

The skeleton intrigued me, and I started to walk toward it, but Dr. Pozzi placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him. Looking at me with melting eyes, he kissed me. I felt the soft bristles of his mustache, and a current of excitement spread through my legs and arms. Wordlessly, confidently, he began unfastening the buttons of my bodice. When he had it unhooked, he yanked it off my shoulders and arms and threw it aside. Then he pulled my skirt over my head and started unlacing my corset. That came off, too, followed by petticoats, chemise, and drawers. I was naked except for my silk stockings. Kneeling on the floor, Dr. Pozzi took my right stocking in his hands and gently slid it over my leg as he kissed my inner thigh. Ripples of desire shot to my ears. When he had my left stocking off, he carried me to the bed and placed me on the satin sheets. In a moment, he had torn off his own clothes and was lying beside me.

The night was a thrilling discovery. I didn’t think of Mama or Julie or poor Georges Bourdin. I thought only of this new intimacy. At dawn, Dr. Pozzi fell asleep, and I lay close to him, listening to the soft rattle of his breathing.

He awoke a few hours later, sat up, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. In the fan of sunlight slanting through the window, he looked white and luminous, like a painting of a medieval saint.

“Mimi, I think I should send you home,” he said as he pulled on his trousers. “Your family must be very worried. And I have work to do.”

“I want to stay here with you.” I sat up, letting the sheets fall from my breasts, and placed my hand on Dr. Pozzi’s sleeve. He leaned out of the light and, losing his ethereal glow, bent over to kiss my right nipple.

“You have to go, darling.”

“Sam, please, let me stay.”

His face tightened, and he looked at me severely. “You must never call me Sam,” he said, his voice tinged with annoyance. “And you must never
tutoyer
me.” During the night, I had addressed him with “
tu,
” the familiar form of “you.”

“But we’re lovers. Lovers always
tutoyer.
”

“Not always, darling. It’s better to keep the
vous.
”

“Even in bed?”

“Yes. That way you won’t slip when we’re around other people.”

He walked to his armoire and retrieved a fresh white shirt.

“When will I see you again? Tomorrow?”

“I’m not sure about tomorrow. But soon.”

After Dr. Pozzi left, I dressed and took a look at myself in the mirrored armoire. My cheeks were blotched and roughened, and tiny red bumps had erupted around my mouth—the result of Dr. Pozzi’s bearded kisses. I splashed water on my face from the basin and arranged my hair. Then I made my way through the empty halls to the staircase and the first floor.

Pierre Gautreau, his face gray and drawn, his fine black jacket creased with wrinkles, stood talking to one of the nurses in the doorway of the main exhibition hall.

“Mimi!” he cried as I entered the gallery. His smile lifted the ends of his mustache and crinkled his tired eyes.

I ran to him and threw my arms around his neck.

“Are Mama and Julie all right?”

“They’re fine, except they’re frantic about you. But you did the right thing spending the night here. The quarter was an inferno.” Pierre looked at me with concern glimmering across his brow.

“What happened to your face, dear?”

“I slept on a horsehair blanket in one of the offices upstairs,” I lied. “It must have caused an irritation.”

“Well, I’m just glad you’re safe.” Pierre cupped my elbow and led me toward the door. Looking back over my shoulder, I searched for Dr. Pozzi among the white-coated doctors milling about the cots. Finally I spotted him in a corner talking to a pretty blond woman who was sorting medicine bottles. Dr. Pozzi’s arms were crossed against his chest, and he chuckled at something the pretty woman said. My body tensed with jealousy.

“Mimi, let’s go,” said Pierre softly.

I stopped in my tracks to watch Dr. Pozzi, and Pierre began exerting pressure on my elbow. I took a few steps, still looking over my shoulder until Pierre and I had walked through the door and Dr. Pozzi had dropped from sight.

Outside, the air smelled of burning plaster, and smoke filled the cloudless blue sky. Pierre and I followed the yellow sanded pathways past the long row of plane trees and the place de la Concorde, to the Tuileries Palace, which was now a smoldering, blackened ruin. Dodging an army of rubber-coated workers who trained hose pipes on the immense roofless shell, we crossed the rue de Rivoli and turned onto rue de Luxembourg. A few houses opposite ours had been damaged by fire, but our
hôtel
was untouched. Pierre and I entered the courtyard through the iron gate and pulled the bell. From within, we heard feminine voices and rustling skirts. A moment later, Mama and Julie opened the door.

“Oh, Mimi, thank God you’re safe!” Mama wailed. She clasped me in her arms and hugged me tightly.

“I’d have died if anything had happened to you,
chérie,
” said Julie. She knuckled tears from the corners of her eyes and reached over to kiss me hard on the cheek.

Both women seemed to have aged overnight. The lines running from the sides of Mama’s nose to the corners of her mouth looked deeper than I had remembered them, and dark circles rimmed her eyes. Julie’s hair sprouted a trail of gray across the top of her head that I had never noticed before. Bent slightly over her horn-tipped cane, she looked stiff and arthritic.

With our arms encircling each other’s waists, and with Pierre following, we moved to the main parlor. One of the maids had set a tea service on a table in front of the fireplace, and Mama and Julie sat on chairs facing each other across the table. Pierre stood by Mama, his right arm resting on the mantel, while I hung back at the front of the room near the piano. Mama poured tea into a rose-patterned china cup and held it out to me. “Come here, Mimi, this will do you good,” she said.

I shook my head. “I’m exhausted. Would you mind if I went to bed?”

“Please, dear, have one cup.”

“Let her go, Virginie,” said Pierre. “The child had a long night.”

“Very well,” sighed Mama. She set the cup and saucer on the table. “Try to sleep.”

Wearily, I climbed the curving staircase to my suite. Sitting at my writing table, I pulled a sheet of blue stationery from a lacquered box and wrote, “Dear Dr. Pozzi.” I couldn’t go further. I wanted to tell him that I loved him and hoped that he loved me, but I couldn’t think of how to express myself without sounding hopelessly schoolgirlish. I chewed on my pen and stared out the window. Three starlings perched in the chestnut tree outside, their chirping drowned by the hissing hose pipes from the Tuileries. Suddenly a unit of
cuirassiers
charged down the street on horseback and turned into their barracks on the Place Vendôme. A moment later, a young couple strolled by, arm in arm. They stopped directly under my window, and as if to mock me, the man lifted his sweetheart’s veil and kissed her lips. I crushed the paper in my hands, ran to the next room, and hurled myself on my bed. I lay there and slept fitfully for the rest of the day.

Over the next week, in a burst of brutal fighting, the French army won Paris back from the Communards. By June, the last of the insurgents had been struck down and either executed by the soldiers or imprisoned. The city began to recover.

My pain, however, had only begun. I wish I could say I forgot Dr. Pozzi, that my normal life resumed once I returned to the safe haven of home. But that did not happen. As the months wore on and I heard nothing from him, I grew listless, cried easily, and had trouble eating and sleeping. Mama and Julie misread my malaise as boredom and loneliness for friends my own age. Sometimes they invited young men and women—the children of their acquaintances—to dinner, but I had no interest in these strangers and never started friendships with them.

Music was my only solace. I spent most of my time shut up in my sitting room, practicing the piano. By now I had mastered most of Beethoven’s and Mozart’s sonatas, and usually I performed a few pieces at Mama’s Mondays.

Her salon, like countless others across the city, resumed in June with the season’s normal round of receptions, dinners, theater openings, and balls. It was amazing how quickly gaiety returned to Paris. Emperor Napoléon may have been gone, but the rich were still rich, and Parisians were as fond of pleasure as before the Prussian siege. Restaurants, shops, theaters, and designers’ ateliers overflowed with patrons, and construction of a grand new opera house was underway. The city’s devastation was even turned into a source for fresh amusement. A guidebook,
Ruines de Paris,
was rushed into print, and tourists flocked to the city to see the burnt-out shells of the Tuileries, the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture of Police, and the Hôtel de Ville.

The monarchy’s demise had loosened social barriers, however, and Mama saw a golden chance for our advancement. She accepted every invitation that arrived at the house, and she insisted I join her in the social whirl. “You can’t just sit around the house, Mimi,” Mama said whenever I balked at attending some dull minister’s reception or old dowager’s dinner party. “You’ll feel better if you start going out and meeting new people.”

That summer, we were invited for the first time to the annual Fourth of July fête at the home of Dr. Thomas Evans, an American dentist who had been an intimate of the Emperor and Empress, both of whom had bad teeth and suffered from agonizing toothaches. After the Empire collapsed, Dr. Evans saved Eugénie from prison (and possibly the guillotine) by smuggling her out of the Tuileries and escorting her to safety in England, where she now lived with the ex-Emperor. Dr. Evans was the chief link between the expatriate community and what was left of Napoleonic royalty in France. Mama had met Dr. Evans at the Marine Ministry’s “Four Continents” ball, and she had recently seen him again at the funeral of Mathilde Slidell, who had suffered a fatal heart attack while on vacation in Brighton. Mama was eager to become part of his coterie.

On July Fourth, Mama and I arrived in midafternoon at Bella Rosa, Dr. Evans’s estate at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Named for its fragrant rose gardens, Bella Rosa sat in a lovely park with ponds, stables, a greenhouse, and an aviary for exotic birds. Carriages lined the circular drive in front of the lozenge-shaped stone mansion, the first home in Paris to have central heating, while a gaggle of drivers smoked under the hickory and walnut trees imported from Pennsylvania.

Mama and I entered the cavernous foyer with its bright paintings, mostly of American landscapes and heroes: a view of Niagara Falls; large, flag-bedecked portraits of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Lafayette. A butler directed us past the leather-walled library, the pastel salons, and the gilt-mirrored ballroom to French doors opening onto a clipped green lawn. At the center stood a huge white tent with an American flag waving from a pole on top.

We ducked under the flaps and entered. The air was close, oppressive with perfume and sweat. Dr. Evans, tall and middle-aged with copious brown side whiskers, stood on a chair, a champagne flute in his right hand lifted to the canvas ceiling, as he toasted the country of his birth: “And so I say to you, the flag of our fathers is never so beautiful or so glorious as when raised on foreign soil!” Polite clapping rippled through the tent.

I scanned the room. Most of the guests looked French, and I recognized a few, including Etincelle. Dressed in blue silk, notebook and pen in hand, she strode toward Mama and me, trailed by an emaciated young man with pocked, dough-colored skin and a nose like a purple gourd.

“Here comes Etincelle,” Mama whispered. Crinkling her eyes, she studied the young man. “Why, that’s the duc de Cheverny!”

“Who’s he?”

“Only the scion of one of the oldest and richest families in France!”

A moment later, Etincelle and the young man were standing in front of us.

“Madame Avegno! Mademoiselle Avegno!” Etincelle cried. “Please let me present you to Monsieur le duc de Cheverny.”

The gangly duke, his heavily oiled brown hair combed over his narrow skull, bowed dramatically. He took Mama’s hand in his and touched it with his thin lips. Then he turned to me.

“Why, it’s Pauline Bonaparte, back from the dead!” he cried, referring to Napoléon’s favorite sister, who was revered as the most beautiful woman of the First Empire.

“Mademoiselle Avegno is much more beautiful than any of the Bonapartes,” Etincelle said brightly. “Look at these lines.” The well-dressed columnist reached out and took me by the chin, turning my head to present the duke with my profile. “Pauline’s ears were so ugly they confounded Canova. Mademoiselle Avegno’s ears are perfect.”

“Indeed, they are,” enthused the duke. “And so is her skin. So smooth, like a rose petal.”

Why were they discussing me as if I were a statue, as if I weren’t there? And what made this ugly man an authority on beauty? I felt my face grow hot.

The orchestra burst into a Strauss waltz, and a few couples twirled onto the dance floor.

“Would you care to dance, Mademoiselle Avegno?” the duke said.

“Thank you, sir. But I’m not feeling too well. I was on my way outside for some fresh air.”

His narrow countenance registered a slight hardening. “Perhaps another time, then.” The duke bowed, even more dramatically now. He took Etincelle by the arm and led her away.

When they were out of earshot, Mama hissed, “Why wouldn’t you dance with him? He’s worth thirty million francs!”

“What good are thirty million francs if you look like a corpse?”

“He doesn’t look like a corpse. He’s young. Well, maybe not young, but no older than Pierre Gautreau.”

“Do you really want me to start a friendship with the duc de Cheverny?”

“I just want you to know the best people.”

“If the duc de Cheverny is the best people, I hate to see what the worst people look like.”

Mama scowled into her champagne. I fled the tent and took one of the gravel paths that meandered past the rose gardens to a little pond full of gliding swans. Faint strains of Strauss’s waltz wafted through the trees. Regarding my wobbly reflection in the gray pools of water, I imagined myself dancing with Dr. Pozzi. He held my waist and stared into my eyes with an expression of dazed adoration.

“Mimi!” Mama’s voice broke my reverie. I couldn’t see her, but I heard her leather shoes scrunching the gravel. She appeared from behind the hedges at the edge of the pond.

“I just ran into Fanny Reed,” she said, fluttering her white lace fan. “You remember her. She’s from Boston and operates a boarding school for American girls.”

“I’ve never met her, Mama.”

“Well, anyway, she’s just charming. She’s having a young people’s luncheon tomorrow to introduce her girls to some Frenchmen. She’s invited you. Isn’t that nice?”

“What Frenchmen? The duc de Cheverny, I suppose.”

“Probably. But other young men will be there, too.”

“I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

“Well, at least you could try to enjoy
this
party.” Mama turned irritably and headed up the path to the house. A buffet supper of fried chicken and corn on the cob was set out on the terrace. Mama and I sat at a white iron table with Etincelle and the duc de Cheverny. The horrid aristocrat stared at me throughout the meal. Etincelle, meanwhile, nattered on about a new category of English women called PB’s, or “professional beauties.” “The
Whitehall Review
has been writing about them. These are the women who are received in the best society but have no other occupation, no other ambition than to be beautiful,” she said, holding a corncob in her long fingers. She looked at me with glittering eyes. “Now, Mimi,” she said. “You keep up your music, so you don’t end up a dull, dumb PB.”

Etincelle placed her corncob on her plate and shifted her gaze beyond the terrace. “Maybe I should do a story on PB’s. I’ve got to write
something
for tomorrow’s column.”

She reached in her purse, pulled out her pen and notebook, and started scribbling. Mama and I excused ourselves, called for our carriage, and returned home.

The next morning, Etincelle’s column appeared on the front page of
Le Figaro.
The last line read, “Mademoiselle Virginie Amélie Avegno, the young American dazzler who lives with her charming mother near the Madeleine, is more beautiful than any PB I’ve seen here or abroad.”

I imagined Dr. Pozzi reading Etincelle’s words and, being reminded of my beauty and charm, realizing he needed to see me. That fantasy put me in a sociable mood, so I decided to go to Fanny Reed’s luncheon after all.

It was a beautiful day, clear and sunny but not too warm. I walked to the rue de Rivoli and hailed a cab. We followed a route to Miss Reed’s house on the rue de Nancy that took us past the place du Châtelet and the boulevard Sébastopol, the wide, straight east-west axis of the Grande Croisée that stretches to the Gare de l’Est through a bustling business district.

At the corner of the rue Réaumur, the street was blocked to traffic, and a crowd of hatless men and parasol-toting women lined the pavement. All eyes watched a strange cavalcade moving up the boulevard.

At first, I thought it was a military parade. Then I noticed the men were not soldiers; they were medical orderlies in white coats with red armbands and caps emblazoned with red crosses. They were carrying stretchers full of medical instruments—knives, bottles, scalpels, and steel clamps. Two men at the end carried a wood operating table with four leather straps for immobilizing a patient’s arms and legs.

“What’s going on here?” I asked the driver.

“One of the surgeons of the Central Bureau of Consultations is on his way to a hospital in the First Arrondissement to perform an operation. This happens several times a week.”

Suddenly, in the third row, I saw the erect form of Dr. Pozzi. Marching with a loose-jointed athleticism between two short orderlies with jutting paunches, he held his head high and stared straight ahead.

Quickly, I paid the driver and stepped to the street. As the procession passed, I followed it up the pavement. The men walked slowly, and it was easy to keep up with them despite the layers of petticoats I wore in those days. Forty minutes later, the curious parade reached its destination, the Lariboisière Hospital, where they stopped outside the iron gate to speak to a guard.