Strapless (3 page)

Amélie inherited the graceful Ternant form visible in family portraits, but her face was pure Avegno. She was her father’s daughter, with her copper-red hair, pale, creamy skin, and distinctive, compelling, Roman-coin nose.

In the summer of 1859, Marie Virginie and six-month-old Amélie—fondly called “Mimi” or “Mélie”—vacationed at Parlange, even with the enormous Avegno garden at their disposal in New Orleans. Marie Virginie wanted to escape the unbearable heat of the city and the health threats there. The only thing that improved during a New Orleans summer was the crime rate: it was simply too hot to break the law. Parlange may have been subject to extreme heat and mosquitoes, but the scenic False River fronting the plantation made the air fresh and consistently inviting.

In 1860, at forty-two, Virginie Parlange was worth $300,000 in land and $50,000 in personal property—in today’s money, a fortune of tens of millions of dollars. No other Pointe Coupee Parish family came close to equaling the Parlange wealth; Virginie was the richest and most powerful landowner in the area. She worked hard for every dollar, though. The plantation was a demanding business, whether it was producing cotton, indigo, or sugar cane, crops that changed over time to meet the shifting demands of the market. Most of the responsibility fell to Virginie, as Charles traveled frequently to New Orleans.

While Virginie ruled her property with an iron glove, she could not control her wild and irresponsible firstborn. Marius Claude Vincent Ternant died on January 14, 1861, only twenty-four years old. No cause of death was recorded, but it is likely that he died recklessly, in a duel or an accident. His half brother Charles Vincent Parlange kept to a more promising path. Charles demonstrated a passion for the plantation and paid close attention to its workings in preparation for one day assuming control.

In 1861, Marie Virginie and Anatole Avegno celebrated the birth of a second daughter, Valentine Marie. They appeared the perfect family, attractive, privileged, sheltered, and secure. Though it maintained its usual festive atmosphere, however, their community was being shaken by talk of war. When the southern states finally chose to fight to protect their slaveholding rights, New Orleans sent its newly enlisted soldiers off to battle with marching bands, parades, and sweethearts blowing kisses. “Dixie,” written in the North in 1859, became the South’s unofficial anthem when it was performed as a rousing finale to a performance at the Varieties theater in New Orleans in 1861. The audience went wild when local soldiers, Creoles dressed in colorful Zouave uniforms, marched onstage, keeping time to the music.

On May 26 of that year, the atmosphere in the city darkened. President Lincoln had sent the Union warship
Brooklyn
to blockade the port, and now New Orleans was effectively cut off from the rest of the world. Ships could neither enter nor leave, and the port, once busy with boats, sailors, passengers, and cargo, was silent. Trade was the lifeblood of New Orleans, and without it, the city came to a halt.

Anatole was eager to join in the fight to protect southern values, and on September 13 he left his law firm to enlist in the Thirteenth Louisiana Infantry. He and his brother Jean-Bernard were so enthusiastic about the Confederate army that they recruited an entire battalion, which was dubbed the “Avegno Zouaves.” Nervous southerners tried to convince themselves that the war would end soon and their men return unharmed; they held regular parades and celebrations to bolster their spirits. Marie Virginie, too, believed that her capable, commanding husband would come back to her. She moved her two daughters back and forth between her home in the Vieux Carré and Parlange, where it was rumored that Amélie’s still-beautiful grandmother Virginie could protect her precious home from destruction with an irresistible combination of fine food and superior conversation that would charm generals from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Virginie was also said to have hidden the family silver in deep transom casements above the doors and windows of the house. She buried money in the yard, only to forget later exactly where.

Some seven months after Anatole optimistically assumed command of Louisiana’s Thirteenth Infantry, the course of his life, and that of his family, was tragically altered. The Battle of Shiloh, now a famous moment in history, but then just another skirmish for the weary soldiers headed into it, commenced early on the morning of April 6, 1862. In his dispatches, Confederate captain E. M. Dubroca, an eyewitness, described heavy losses for Major Avegno’s “gallant little band” as they charged the enemy. Like so many on both the Confederate and the Union sides, these men were not trained soldiers. They were gentlemen, dedicated but ill-equipped for the hardships and deprivations of war. Anatole had developed acute laryngitis, and because he could not call out orders he transferred his command to another officer.

When he resumed control of his men on April 7, Anatole was wounded in the leg after a last charge on the enemy. Infection set in and his leg had to be amputated. Eleven days later, he was on his way home to recuperate. On the military train he lost consciousness: a journalist reported that he “rallied for a moment, smiled and dropped to sleep as gentle as a child.” In New Orleans, Marie Virginie waited for news. She knew that her husband had been wounded, but held out hope that he was recovering and returning to her. The train that arrived in New Orleans brought her Anatole’s corpse, not the strong, confident soldier she had said good-bye to months earlier. In an emotional obituary, the
Daily Delta
observed that Anatole had fallen “where the brave love to die, at his post of duty.”

Anatole’s death abruptly transformed Marie Virginie from young wife to young widow. In this she was not unusual. New Orleans counted a number of women whose married lives ended abruptly. Now alone responsible for her two daughters, Marie Virginie had to make important decisions about the future. Fortunately, there was money. Anatole had inherited considerable property from his father’s estate and had left it to his daughters, appointing their mother and a former law partner, George Binder, as their guardians.

 

Anatole’s death was not the only tragedy to befall Marie Virginie. Children in New Orleans were particularly fragile, subject to the diseases that devastated the city every few years. After the defeat of the Confederacy, they were even more vulnerable because medical supplies were limited. On March 11, 1866, five-year-old Valentine died suddenly, of a congestive fever. She was buried alongside her father in the family plot at Saint Louis Cemetery, blocks from the French Quarter homes she had shared with her mother in her short life, and from her grandparents’ Toulouse Street garden, where she had played with her sister.

Marie Virginie was ready for a change of scene, a new start. She chose to return to Paris, which would be fresh and at the same time familiar. Postwar Louisiana offered nothing but depression and instability compared with the city that had been Marie Virginie’s second home when she was growing up. Families whose fortunes were built on land values were now poor, the land worthless. The Parlanges, without the money they had enjoyed before the war, were forced to take out multiple loans to keep their plantation running. Marie Virginie must have felt that there was no future in New Orleans, only the sad and unbearable past.

In 1867 she and young Amélie sailed for France. They may have traveled with Jean-Bernard Avegno, Anatole’s older brother, and his family. Jean-Bernard had been an important figure in the Confederate government; he had signed Louisiana’s secession papers at the start of the war. Like other wealthy Creoles, he wanted to protect himself and what money he had left during the difficult period of reconstruction ahead. Paris was the perfect place to live while times were uncertain in New Orleans.

Marie Virginie had another family member as traveling companion, her sister Julie. Marius’s death had had a serious effect on Julie, who unsuccessfully sued her mother for control of his estate. Virginie, troubled by Julie’s unpredictable behavior and the rumors it inspired, found it easier to send her away than to live with her.

Marie Virginie’s move to Paris was more than just a change of setting. It was a brave first step toward a new life. The day she left New Orleans, she assumed a role that was unfamiliar and perhaps a little frightening: at age thirty, she became the matriarch of her own family. An ocean away from her domineering mother, she would be independent, free to make her own decisions and run her own household. It was time for Marie Virginie to concentrate on the future—and the future was Amélie.

A
mélie Avegno saw Paris for the first time when she was eight years old. The city had never looked more beautiful: unlike New Orleans, devastated by war, her new home had the unlike New Orleans, devastated by war, her new home had the bright and shiny veneer of a renovated metropolis.

Only a few decades previously, Paris had been a filthy eye-sore. There was no light in the “City of Light,” which was more medieval than modern. Ancient, dilapidated buildings toppled one onto another, blocking all hints of the sky. Thousands of people poured the contents of their chamber pots into the streets every day. Visitors from other cities were appalled by the stench and the filth that Parisians took for granted.

Emperor Napoleon III wanted a city that was cleaner, better organized, and more aesthetically pleasing. In 1853, he placed Baron Georges Haussmann in charge of one of the most elaborate urban renewal plans in history. Napoleon wisely identified Haussmann, a career bureaucrat from the suburbs with impeccable connections and tremendous ambition, as a man who had the ability to imagine a better Paris and the tenacity to get the job done.

Haussmann more than satisfied the emperor’s expectations. He and the men who worked in his department, the Prefecture of the Seine, carried out their herculean efforts with military precision, believing themselves “an army whose task was to go forth in the conquest of old Paris.”

During the twenty years Haussmann was in office, he and his staff conquered the city. Haussmann razed 19,722 buildings, mostly slums, and erected 43,777 new ones. He revolutionized transportation by turning warrens of streets into a series of boulevards that made it possible to move fluidly from one location to another. He saw to it that each boulevard served a purpose, leading to an impressive monument or building, such as the newly constructed Opéra. Most amazing, Haussmann added 4,500 acres of parks to a city that before had offered scant light, air, or recreational space to its inhabitants.

To his credit, Haussmann was just as concerned about the Paris that was not visible. He built new sewers (tourist attractions today) and sophisticated water delivery systems, to substitute the decaying underground tunnels that had carried disease and vermin. Some citizens complained bitterly that Haussmann had carelessly destroyed the charming parts of old Paris along with the rotten ones, yet even they had to appreciate the changes that improved the quality of their lives.

Haussmann had a dynamic effect on the private sector, supervising contractors who, following his strict guidelines, built modern apartment houses with multiple floors, spacious rooms, and separate sleeping quarters for servants. With his encouragement, developers updated the city’s already famous commercial districts. Shopping had always been key to Paris’s economic well-being. In the eighteenth century, Philippe d’Orléans, a down-and-out member of the French royal family, became a retailing visionary when he saw that he could make more money from one piece of property by building multiple floors of shops on the same site. He erected the first
grand passage,
a covered shopping arcade. Centrally located near the Palais Royal, it opened in 1781 and was an immediate success. Shoppers were drawn to its novel layout and its air of a Turkish bazaar.

Precursors to the shopping malls of the twentieth century, these arcades, or
passages,
offered modern shopping at its best—several stores under one roof, sheltered, comfortable, safe. The merchandise was diverse and abundant, since each
passage
housed a variety of boutiques, and the arcades even offered entertainment, in the form of guest appearances by popular writers of the day. Because these arcades extended from block to block, with brief interruptions for street crossings, shoppers could avoid the weather by strolling from one protected corridor to another. Beautifully appointed, some of them—the Galerie Vivienne, the Passage Jouffroy, and the Galerie Coulbert—featured such innovations as gas lighting and glass roofs.

In the first chapter of
Nana,
his scathing novel about the hopeless amorality of a self-absorbed courtesan, Émile Zola used the Passage des Panoramas, located next door to the theater where Nana performed, to expose her greed. When she walked through the corridor of colorful shops on her way to work, she was compelled to buy something,
anything,
to satisfy her desire for material goods. She was not alone. Parisian women were seduced by these jewel-box arcades, which introduced the concept of shopping as a leisure activity and became retail chapels for the idle rich, who had too much time and money on their hands.