I Am Madame X (7 page)

One evening, as I approached the chapel entrance, Sister Emily-Jean was blocking the door. “Go play with the other girls,” she insisted.

I walked into the garden. A silvery light slanted through the bare trees, and a cool wind churned the air. Most of the girls were playing prisoner’s base, laughing and chasing each other around the courtyard. A tall, dark-haired girl had climbed the chestnut tree in the corner and, having pushed aside the branches, was spying on the Scottish boys next door. She, too, reminded me of Aurélie. My heart sank. I walked back into the convent, mounted the creaky stairway to the dormitory, and went to bed.

The next day, Sister Emily-Jean told me I’d been chosen for the starring role in the Christmas pageant. I was to play a silent and motionless Madonna in a tableau vivant of Jesus’ birth. “You’re a perfect choice!” she said brightly. Of course, I knew why I’d been given this honor—Sister Emily-Jean had pestered the teacher in charge to give me the role, hoping it would cheer me up.

A little before 2
P
.
M
. on the second Saturday of December, the students’ families—somberly dressed men and women with small children in tow—began filling the auditorium. I saw Mama, Valentine, and Rochilieu enter and take seats in the rear. Then the boys from the Scottish school trooped in, the younger ones in short pants, the older ones dressed in dark frock coats and starched white collars.

A priest led the audience in prayer, and the program began. The choir sang, followed by a piano soloist. Then a group of dancers performed a sequence choreographed by Monsieur Lermont, and two juniors, dressed like shepherds, read from the Gospels.

The curtain closed for a brief intermission. I took my place on the stage while a maid wrapped me in an emerald silk shawl. Several girls who were dressed as angels, in white choir robes, knelt nearby. The willowy senior who played Joseph stood behind me with her hair pulled under a wool cap and a yarn beard glued to her chin. Paresseux, Madame Smithy’s most placid cat, lay swaddled in a blanket in a makeshift manger.

When at last we were assembled, Sister Emily-Jean called from the wings. “Poses, everyone!” I arranged my arms with palms pointing heavenward and tried to fix my face in an expression of deep religious ecstasy. Sister Emily-Jean pulled two thick ropes and the velvet curtain parted.

A loud “Ahh” arose from the audience. Suddenly a five-year-old named Isolde, who was always sick with a runny nose and whose nocturnal shrieks for her parents kept the convent up at night, bounded out of her seat in the third row and rushed the stage. Falling to her knees in front of me, she cried, “Mother Mary! Mother Mary!”

“Formidable!”
a man in the second row exclaimed. “A Botticelli Madonna! Look at that wondrous hair!” cried a woman. But I didn’t dare look up. I held my pose, gazing beatifically at Paresseux asleep in the manger and soaking up the crowd’s adulation. I didn’t want it ever to end.

After she found out Aurélie was a Negro, Mama became obsessed with the color of
my
skin, as if Aurélie’s hidden blackness had been contagious and I might have caught a touch of it. Whenever she saw me, she stared at me with furrowed brow and complained that I was losing my “bloom.” To protect me from the sun, she gave me a parasol to carry when I went out with her, and a straw hat to wear in the convent garden. Still, she worried.

“I don’t like the way you look,” she said to me one Sunday in March. “You’re turning brown.” We were sitting in the parlor with Rochilieu, drinking tea and reading the papers while Valentine sat on the floor playing with her doll. The clatter of carriages floated up from the street through the open windows. Dusty sunlight formed stripes on the worn blue carpet.

“I’m not dark, Mama. I’m only a little bronze from playing outside,” I said. It had been an early, warm spring and the nuns had let us spend more time than usual in the garden.

“Well, why haven’t you been wearing your hat?” she huffed.

Rochilieu, who usually ignored our bickering, now folded his newspaper and looked hard at me. Then, scowling, he turned his gaze to Mama. “Really, Virginie, I don’t see any change in Mimi at all,” he said impatiently. “I wish you’d stop inventing troubles to worry over.”

“I’m not imagining it! The child’s color is changing.” Sighing loudly, Mama sprang from her chair and strode off to the bedroom to sulk.

The next day, she made an appointment for me with Dr. Marcel Chomel, who had been recommended by Mathilde Slidell. Mama got special permission from Mother Superior to take me out of school on a Friday morning. We took a cab to the doctor’s office at 42, rue de l’Echiquier, arriving just as Duchess Laure Castellian, a famous hostess and frequent focus of the society pages, was gliding through the front door under an enormous white hat. Mama stared directly at the blond duchess’s creamy face, but Laure Castellian looked past us with large lilac eyes. “I wonder why
she
needs a doctor,” Mama said.

A maid greeted us in the marble-floored vestibule and showed us into a large book-lined office. Dr. Chomel, slim and impeccably dressed in a gray morning coat and red silk tie with white dots, was standing behind a cluttered mahogany desk. He had a white mustache and wispy white hair that barely covered the large metal plate on the side of his head, a souvenir of a dueling wound. Dr. Chomel treated the most fashionable women of Paris in the early days of the Second Empire, when honor was paramount, when the tiniest insult was reason enough to pack one’s pistols and take a morning carriage ride to the dueling oaks in the Bois de Boulogne.

The cemeteries were filled with tombstones inscribed,
VICTIME DE SON HONNEUR
and
MORT POUR GARDER INTACT LE NOM DE LA FAMILLE
. Dr. Chomel had been challenged by the grieving husband of a young woman who had died under his care. She had suffered from the starving disease and had simply wasted away. Her husband thought Dr. Chomel was to blame, and insisted he defend himself at the dueling oaks. They met on a damp September dawn. Dr. Chomel’s shot missed its target and lodged in a tree; his opponent managed to graze the side of the doctor’s head.

“What brings you here?” Dr. Chomel asked, after we introduced ourselves and settled into chairs in his office.

“My daughter’s skin seems to be darkening,” Mama said. “It turns duskier every time I see her, and she has more and more spots all the time.” She pointed to the spray of apricot freckles across my cheekbones.

“Why would that be? Is she exposing herself to the sun?” Dr. Chomel asked. His voice was low and clotted—an old smoker’s voice.

“Perhaps. A little.” Mama shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

Dr. Chomel stepped from behind his desk. His legs were extremely short and did not match the normal proportion of the rest of his body. He strode up to me and took hold of my chin with a sturdy, thick-fingered hand. Narrowing his cool gray eyes, he lifted my face toward his and examined my skin. Then he released my face, ambled across the Turkish carpet, and leaned against his desk.

“Complexion changes are quite normal at this age,” he said. “I don’t see anything serious here. Is the child in good health?”

“Yes,” Mama answered.

“Then I recommend my special compound, Chomel’s Solution, to whiten the face and fade the freckles. I’ve had great success with it. Your daughter has some small eruptions on her forehead, and those will clear up, too.”

I ran my hand across the cluster of tiny, hard bumps near my hairline. “What’s Chomel’s Solution?” I asked.

“It’s arsenic-based, flavored slightly with oil of lavender and cinnamon.”

“Arsenic! That’s poison!” I cried.

“My dear girl, all medicine is poison. Now, enough questions. You come with me.”

He led me into the hall, down a short corridor, and into an examining room. The white walls were lined with glass-front cabinets. A wooden table with a white sheet over it stood in the center. Dr. Chomel pointed to a footstool in front of the table. “Step up, please,” he instructed.

He turned his back and fussed with some bottles in one of the cabinets. When he faced me again, he was holding a jar of cloudy blue liquid and a large silver spoon.

“I don’t want any medicine,” I said.

Dr. Chomel ignored me. Using the knobby middle fingers of his right hand, he pried my mouth open and poured in a spoonful of the cold, tangy liquid. I gulped and immediately felt sick to my stomach.

“That’s it, Mademoiselle Avegno,” he said. He placed the jar and spoon on a counter and looked deeply into my face, as if he’d just noticed me for the first time. “My, you are a little beauty, aren’t you?” he said, smiling through his mustache, showing a row of tiny pointed teeth.

“That medicine tasted horrible,” I said.

Dr. Chomel’s smile disappeared. “Did you think I was giving you candy?” he grumbled. He led me back to his office, where he handed Mama a jar of Chomel’s Solution and a small bottle with a label reading
BLOOM OF YOUTH
.

“Your daughter should take one teaspoonful of the Chomel’s every night and apply two fingertips of the cream to her face. I’m sure the effect will be agreeable to you. Bring her back in a month,” he ordered.

At the convent, Mama handed Mother Superior the bottles and told her I was to be given them every night before bed.

“What’s this medicine for?” the old nun asked.

I started to explain, but Mama cut me off. “Virginie has some stomach trouble,” she explained.

I took the medicine that evening and every evening afterward for three weeks. Almost overnight, I lost my tan and my freckles. My skin became smoother and more translucent, with a clear, bluish tinge from the veins showing through.

Then, almost as suddenly as the medicine had worked its magic to whiten me, it began to make me ill. I became overwhelmingly tired, I lost my appetite, and I suffered from an insistent, violent trembling on the right side of my face—typical symptoms I know now of the first stage of arsenic poisoning. What’s more, my freckles reappeared. Soon, they had darkened and run together and suddenly my face was very brown indeed. I looked a lot like the red-haired slave girl in Grandpère Avegno’s house, the one everyone gawked at because the black and white blood in her was so oddly mixed.

“My God, what’s happened to you!” Mama cried when she picked me up at the convent on a warm April afternoon for my scheduled rendezvous with Dr. Chomel. She hustled me through the courtyard and into a cab. When we reached rue de l’Echiquier, she yanked me to the pavement in front of Dr. Chomel’s building and scurried to pull the bell. We found the distinguished man in his office, standing on a ladder and searching for a book on a high shelf. “Look at my daughter!” Mama shrieked.

Dr. Chomel descended the ladder slowly and walked over to me. He leaned his face into mine and studied my skin. “This happens sometimes,” he said, straightening abruptly. “A complete reversal of the expected effect.” He shrugged his shoulders. “So we reduce the dose.”

“I don’t want any more medicine,” I protested.

“Now, now, my dear, wise little girls listen to their doctors.”

Dr. Chomel left his office and padded down the hall. A few minutes later he returned, carrying two jars, which he handed to Mama. “Let’s see how she does with these,” he said.

When we got to the convent, Rochilieu was waiting at the curb, glancing anxiously through a newspaper. He was pale and his forehead was slick with sweat.

“What’s he doing here?” Mama whispered as the cab creaked to a halt under the skinny iron arm of a towering lamppost. Rochilieu ran over and opened the door.

“It’s over!” he cried as Mama and I stepped to the pavement. “General Lee has surrendered!” Rochilieu embraced Mama, and they both wept.

Neither of them had expected the Confederates to lose. Living in Paris and cut off from the grimmest news about the war, they did not realize how hopeless the Rebel cause had become, nor the extent of the fighting’s devastation to the South.

“The Negroes will own us now,” Mama said bitterly. She pulled from her purse a black-bordered handkerchief—the one she’d carried since Papa’s death—and lifted her veil to wipe the tears from her cheeks.

No one at the convent talked about the end of the war. Everyone continued to be much more interested in my face. Mostly, the nuns and the girls stared at me silently. But once Isolde, who at five was the convent’s youngest student, ran up to me during recreation. “Are you turning into a Negro?” she asked. Sister Emily-Jean overheard her and rushed to defend me. “Isolde, Mimi is taking some medicine that makes her dark. When she stops using it, her skin will be white again,” she said.

Later, though, Sister Emily-Jean whispered to me, “Mimi, I want to talk to you tonight about your skin treatments. Come see me after chapel.”

That evening, while the girls were dressing for bed in the dormitory, I slipped downstairs to the nuns’ corridor. The door of Sister Emily-Jean’s cell was ajar, so I pushed it open and stepped inside. The lovely nun was sitting on her bed, weeping. A copy of
Le Figaro
lay on the cold stone floor.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I thought perhaps she was crying over my skin, and I planned to enlist her help in convincing Mama to take me off Chomel’s Solution.

“Oh, Mimi, one of the greatest men in the world has died.”

“Not Victor Hugo!”

“No, no. Your President. Mr. Lincoln.”

He wasn’t
my
President, but I didn’t want to upset Sister Emily-Jean further by contradicting her.

“He was murdered,” she continued, struggling to speak through her tears. “Shot by an actor as he and Mrs. Lincoln watched a play.”

Lincoln had died ten days earlier, but the news of his assassination had reached France only that afternoon.

“Don’t you want to talk to me about my skin?” I asked.

“Not now, dear. Maybe tomorrow.”

I left Sister Emily-Jean’s cell, tiptoed down the corridor, and mounted the stairs to the dormitory.

On my next visit home, Mama announced that we would be leaving Paris and returning to Louisiana with Rochilieu. He had booked passage to New Orleans on a French ship, the
Trésor.
But we would not be sailing for several months—Rochilieu needed time to get his affairs in order. Now that the war was over, he was eager to reclaim his plantation in Plaquemine and his townhouse in the French Quarter. Without his support, Mama, Valentine, and I could not afford to stay in France.

I was ambivalent about returning to Parlange. On the one hand, I couldn’t wait to see Julie, Charles, and Grandmère again. But I had grown accustomed to the convent. The thought of leaving Sister Emily-Jean, in particular, filled me with sadness.

Mama wanted to leave Paris for only one reason: she expected to find riches awaiting her in America. Before the war started, Papa had told her that Grandpère Avegno had hidden several trunks of gold in the yard of one of the houses he owned in the Tremé district, an enclave of free blacks and mulattoes north of the Vieux Carré. This gold was all that was left of the once-magnificent Avegno fortune. Much of the dead patriarch’s property had been confiscated by the Federals and his money lost, having been invested in the Bank of New Orleans, which sent its gold to the Confederacy in exchange for now-worthless Rebel notes. Mama planned to enlist help from her in-laws in tracking down the trunks, which she was convinced would turn up. Then, with our share of the gold, we would return to France—this time in style.

The next months at the convent passed uneventfully, until my last week. Six days before we were to leave Paris, I had a final skirmish with Farnsworth. I’m proud to say it was a battle I won triumphantly, and which, to my childish heart, compensated a bit for the tragic defeat of the Confederacy.

It started during a routine geography lesson. We were studying the American capital cities, and I had worked hard to learn every one. Indeed, I was applying myself in all my subjects, so determined was I to leave the convent with good marks.

“Mademoiselle Avegno, what is the capital of New York?” Farnsworth asked me at the start of class.

“Albany,” I answered.

“And the capital of Maryland?”

“Annapolis.”

Farnsworth looked furious. I was depriving her of the pleasure of punishing me.

“All right, Mademoiselle. What is the capital of Kentucky?”

“Frankfort.” I felt a grin coming on and covered my mouth with my hand. Too late.

“You think you’re so smart. Are you mocking me?” The old teacher’s face turned red; a fiery blush spread to her ears and neck.

“No, Madame, I’m simply answering your questions.”

“I’ll teach you to be so impertinent.”

Farnsworth slammed a ruler on her desk, sending a pile of papers fluttering to the floor. She strode toward me, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me to the open window. Rage gave her astounding strength. Lifting me off the ground with her fat sausage arms, she pushed my head and torso out the window. Clasping my ankles, she lowered me all the way outside so that I was dangling in midair over one of the convent’s low-slung annexes.