I Am Madame X (11 page)

Above all, she aspired to the aristocratic society of old France. She wanted to be invited to dinner parties in the faubourg Saint-Germain, to have lunch with duchesses and vicomtesses, and to attend weekend parties at châteaux in the Loire Valley, where everyone’s name was in
Almanach de Gotha.

She had hoped that her grandfather’s title of marquis and the noble particle in her maiden name would give her entrée to the best homes. But it had been generations since the de Ternant name had been attached to a landed estate, and Mama’s ancestry no longer counted for anything in France.

Though the faubourg Saint-Germain was almost impossible for Americans to penetrate, Louis-Napoléon’s court at the Tuileries was not. He had staged a coup d’état that made him Emperor in 1852, four years after he had been elected President of France, and his rule was marked by a love of pleasure and display that was far more extravagant than anything the original Napoléon had countenanced fifty years earlier. This was the era of spectacular imperial balls, glorious hunting parties, grand military reviews, and huge universal exhibitions. The Emperor was perfectly happy to include Americans in court festivities—as long as they were either fabulously rich or celebrities. Mama was neither.

Still, she aspired to be invited to Princess Mathilde’s salon. A niece of Napoléon I and an intimate of the Emperor’s, Mathilde was the chief link between the faubourg and Louis-Napoléon’s court. At the Princess’s
hôtel
on rue de Courcelles, the old aristocracy mingled with the most famous celebrities and the best minds of France. At Mathilde’s salon, a guest might meet the composers Saint-Saëns and Gounod, the scientist Louis Pasteur, and the writers Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert. Sometimes the Emperor and Empress themselves showed up, as well as the brightest lights of the demimonde—actresses, actors, even occasionally a dazzling courtesan.

Once, while riding through the Bois de Boulogne, Mama and I saw Princess Mathilde. She drove past us in an open carriage, wearing a string of black pearls over her ample bosom. She wasn’t as old as I had expected, but she was short and fat with the same imperious dark-eyed face as her famous uncle’s.

That was the closest Mama would ever get to French nobility. Still, Mama’s beauty made her a sought-after guest in the homes of the wealthier American expatriates and the newly rich bankers and manufacturers who were our neighbors.

In this crowd, her social ascent had been swift. She had invitations to dinner and the theater several times a week, and her own receptions drew dozens of people. The first one was held on a warm Monday in June, three years after we moved into our
hôtel.
Carriages began lining up outside our door at four, and by five the street was clogged with landaus, victorias, fiacres, and coupés. Two wigged footmen in pink-and-black livery received Mama’s guests in the marbled foyer, which was filled with potted palms, and led them upstairs.

A garden had grown from the packet of Louisiana seeds I had planted in the small plot at the back of the house, and the scent of camellias, parmelee violets, and magnolias—the scents of Parlange—drifted in through the open French doors. Candles flickered in silver sconces, and the soft pearly light of a Parisian summer afternoon slanted in through the windows, infusing the room with a rosy glow.

Mama held court in a chair covered in pink silk that matched the footmen’s livery. I sat opposite her, in a gray satin dress trimmed with silver beads. A small fan of white feathers lay folded in my lap. I had put my hair up for the first time that day, twisting the heavy auburn mass into a roll and pinning it up at the back of my head. Mama had wanted me to add some fake curls at the temples, but I refused. I thought the simple twist looked elegant, and it set off the long white curve of my neck.

Soon our parlor was overflowing with bloated, blotched old men and their wrinkled wives, ugly in trailing dresses, their hair splashed with gold powder that unconvincingly covered the gray. Madame Slidell had brought two artists, minor painters who were skinny and badly dressed and who sat in the corner near the buffet table gobbling up Mama’s caviar.

One member of the nobility, Baroness Micaela de Pontalba, showed up—though actually she was an American from New Orleans. Old and reeking of patchouli, she had a two-fingered stump for a left hand, the result of a wound she had received in 1834, when her father-in-law, enraged because she had withheld her inheritance from his son, had tried to shoot her to death. Still, Mama fussed over her because she had a title. “You’re looking well, Baroness!” she enthused when the decrepit woman lumbered into the room, wearing a black crepe dress over an old-fashioned cage.

I was the accompanist for a pudgy brown-haired young tenor Mama had hired to perform. He sang William Tell’s “Sombre Forêt” and Schubert’s “Serenade” with one hand resting over his heart. Then I played two solos—a Chopin nocturne and a Mozart sonata.

Afterward I rose and took a bow with the singer. As I crossed the room to resume my perch near the fireplace, two puffy, perfumed dowagers eyed me enviously. “Don’t worry, she’ll fade someday,” I heard one whisper to her friend.

As I turned around to glare back at them, I bumped into a spindly table that held an expensive porcelain clock. The table shook, and the clock tumbled to the parquet and shattered. “Oh, no,” I groaned as one of the maids rushed to gather the jagged shards.

“Never mind, dear. It was a Louis, and a particularly ugly one at that.” I looked up to see a slender black-haired man tuning the right end of his enormous mustache. He was dressed immaculately in a gray topcoat and striped trousers, with a lavender cravat tied neatly against his white silk shirt.

“A what?”

“A Louis. An object inspired by the ancien régime. Never in the history of the world has there been such hideous taste.”

I was so used to Mama’s gilt mirrors, crystal chandeliers, and flounced poufs that it never occurred to me they might be hideous. But I sensed immediately that the man was right. Around the room, the curvy legs and clawed feet on the furniture, the tasseled taffeta draperies puddled on the floor, the bright textured upholstery, looked fatally fussy, like the parlor in my dollhouse at Parlange.

The man read my reaction and smiled. “I’m Pierre Gautreau,” he said.

“I’m Virginie Avegno. Would you like to show me what else you hate about our decor?”

“I’d be delighted.”

For the next half hour, I toured the house with Monsieur Gautreau. Occasionally he commented on a painting or a piece of furniture. But mostly he asked me about our life in Louisiana. And he told me about himself. He had been raised on a large estate in Paramé outside the ancient walled city of Saint-Malo on France’s northern coast. His mother belonged to a wealthy ship-owning family, and one of his uncles ran a lucrative business exporting guano from the islands off the coast of Chile. As a teenager, Monsieur Gautreau moved to Chile and grew rich working in his uncle’s export business. Recently he had returned to France and settled in Paris, where he established an investment firm. He lived in a small
hôtel
at 80, rue Jouffroy and presided over his family estate at Paramé, the Château des Chênes.

Over the next few months, Mama and I saw a great deal of the cooly elegant Pierre Gautreau. He came to all of our Mondays and was always the first to arrive, stepping from his carriage a few minutes before four, dressed exquisitely in a gray top hat and a cashmere coat, his ivory-topped walking cane cocked on his shoulder. Within no time, Mama was addressing him with the familiar “
tu,
” and we were both calling him Pierre.

At thirty-three, Pierre was a year younger than Mama, and they became instant friends. There was much to draw them together. Both had grown up in the country, yet loathed rural life. Both were materialistic and worldly. Both were ardent social climbers whose love of society was eclipsed only by their passion for house decoration.

Whereas Mama’s taste ran to the fashionable and pretentious, Pierre’s was sophisticated and well in advance of his time. He loved anything Oriental, an interest that perhaps was sparked by recent political events. A trove of Japanese furniture, china, fabric, and art showed up on the European market in 1868, after the Mikado, tired of being a mere figurehead emperor, seized power. The ensuing revolution ruined Japan’s old feudal families, many of whom were forced to sell off their treasures. Pierre was among the first in France to collect them.

He never liked anything inspired by the French Louis. He thought their style silly and frivolous (and also politically problematic). He soon persuaded Mama to sell her Louis XIV fauteuils, Louis XV chandeliers, and Louis XVI
boiseries.
He allowed her to keep only one Louis in the public rooms, a high-backed chair inspired by the relatively benign era of Louis XIII. Mama insisted that our boudoirs remain conventionally French. “I can’t go to sleep unless I see a bit of toile,” she said.

Pierre convinced Mama to put her money into japonaiseries, and within a year our house was transformed. Now, in the foyer, parlors, and dining room, instead of gilt mirrors, elaborately painted ceilings, heavily carved furniture, and sumptuous upholstery—a
“tous les Louis”
decor, as Pierre put it—we had bare ceilings, silk-covered walls, and Japanese screens, prints, and china.

Each room was dominated by a few exquisite pieces carefully chosen by Pierre. The entrance hall held an ancient Japanese incense bowl atop a round fourteenth-century table from a Tokyo palace. The salon featured a large harp and a collection of Oriental urns arranged on a tapestry-covered chest. The dining room walls were covered in jade silk, and standing in the four corners were painted screens of Japanese scenes.

Most of Mama’s friends, especially the old Creole expatriates, were shocked at the decor. But a few collectors with advanced taste who attended her salon praised the house extravagantly. Soon people clamored for invitations to Mama’s Mondays, eager to get a look. Even a few curious reporters showed up.

One Monday, after I had performed several piano pieces for Mama’s guests, a dark, birdlike woman, expensively clad in high-necked red satin, floated toward me carrying an open notebook and a gold pen that was encrusted with four fat diamonds. She had a long, bumpy nose and thin, colorless lips set in a narrow olive-skinned face. A nest of coarse black hair sat on her head over a thick fringe of bangs. Yet her eyes were beautiful, long-lashed and sparkly black, and they radiated intelligence and charm. I thought she was the most attractive ugly woman I had ever met.

Everyone called her Etincelle, and she wrote a popular column, “Carnet d’un Mondain,” that ran every Thursday on the front page of
Le Figaro.
Etincelle was one of those celebrities whose personality was so strong and distinctive that she needed only one name.

She had been born Henrietta-Marie Biard d’Aurnet to an old aristocratic family that owned an enormous crenellated château with vast lands in Burgundy. At seventeen, she had been married to the Vicomte de Perrony, whose aristocratic lineage was even older and more illustrious than hers. The vicomte died soon after the wedding, however, and Madame de Perrony never again showed an interest in men. She stayed on in Perrony’s grand
hôtel
on rue Beaujon and took up writing for the newspapers. In addition to her column for
Le Figaro,
she wrote for a gaggle of illustrated journals, under a variety of names—Marie Double, Bonne, Henriette d’Isle, and Georges de Letoière.

Now Etincelle was standing before me, holding her notebook opened, poised to write. “I enjoyed your playing very much, Mademoiselle. Who’s your teacher?”

“I don’t have one. I study on my own.”

“Such discipline in one so young and pretty!”

“Well, I’ve always studied on my own. Even when I was at school, I practiced a couple of hours every day.”

“What school was that, dear?”

“Le Couvent des Dames Anglaises, on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. It’s been torn down.”

“Oh, yes, another victim of Haussmannia. I lost half my garden to one of his boulevards. Such a shame.”

Etincelle scribbled in her notebook, then closed it shut and extended a thin, red satin arm. “I’m sure we will meet again, dear.”

The next morning at seven—four hours before I usually rose—Mama shook me awake. As I opened my eyes, she waved a folded copy of
Le Figaro
in front of me. “Look at this, Mimi,” she said excitedly, pointing to the fourth column on the front page. “It’s unbelievable. Etincelle never writes about Americans!”

“Yesterday at Madame Avegno’s,” the article said,

Etincelle returned to Mama’s salon the following Monday and every Monday after that, and she rarely failed to write about me in her “Carnet d’un Mondain.” It didn’t take long for the other society reporters in town to discover me, too. Soon they started showing up at Mama’s Mondays, and I became the ornament and focus of dozens of columns in the popular press. The stories were all about my unique, exquisite beauty. I can assure you, there were other girls in town far prettier than I. But once an influential reporter writes something about you, all the other reporters jump on the bandwagon. Etincelle anointed me
the
Parisian beauty, and suddenly everyone wanted to meet me. Invitations poured in, including a few from the old Faubourg families Mama wanted so desperately to know. She insisted I accept every one.

My mother saw me as her ticket to the top, and she pushed me relentlessly. It never occurred to me to resist. I became caught up in an endless round of teas, lunches, dinners, receptions, parties, and balls. I was too busy to notice that I had no friends my age. Most of the people I met were old and boring, but somehow it didn’t matter, because I was the center of attention. At fourteen, it’s a heady experience to be told constantly how beautiful you are, to have men fawning over you and women eying you jealously. I loved it, and I began to expect it.