I Am Madame X (21 page)

Julie had offered to provide the art, and she invited me to her atelier one December afternoon to select three paintings from a group of canvases she had completed the previous summer in Provence. I was shocked when I saw them, so different were they from her typical work. Dark brown, black, sienna, and ocher had vanished from her palette, replaced by brilliant color—blue, violet, green, yellow, and orange. The previous April, Julie had attended the first exhibition of the so-called Impressionists, and she had been greatly influenced by their light-filled paintings. At the opening, she met many of the painters themselves, including Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, and Morisot, and she had fallen in love not only with their work but also with their philosophy of art.

After viewing the Impressionist exhibition, with its relaxed brushwork and contemporary scenes, Julie began to chafe at painting still lifes and studio portraits. She wanted to render only what she saw and felt, “
en plein air,
like Monet,” she told me.

The art establishment and the public remained largely hostile to the new art. So did Filomena and Sophie, who tended to follow Filomena’s lead in all things artistic. I got a whiff of their disdain for Julie’s new calling the day I selected my paintings. When I arrived at the atelier, the women were crowded around an easel in the middle of the room, arguing about Julie’s painting of a young woman in a white dress, strolling through a garden. Julie wanted to send it to the next Salon, a move Filomena strongly opposed.

“You’ll never get it past the jury,” she barked. “It’s exactly the kind of thing they hate.”

“I think she’s right,” echoed Sophie. “The colors are too shrill.”

“It’s no good, no good at all,” said Filomena, shaking her head. “It’s lazy, sloppy. Look at that mouth.” She pointed to the canvas. “You did those lips in two brush strokes.”

Julie scowled. “Stand back a few feet,” she ordered. “You can’t see it properly with your noses in the canvas.”

Filomena strode to the center of the room. “No better,” she announced.

“Why don’t you send that wonderful picture of Saint Claire kneeling before a cross?” offered Sophie.

“I can’t bear that picture!” said Julie, her voice rising. “I’m never painting a saint again. Or a knight or a nymph or a king or an angel.”

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” Filomena called from across the room. “Why do you like the Impressionists so much? All they do is slap color on the canvas. It’s child’s play, not art. For art, you must have careful drawing, you must have control.”

Filomena looked crushed. Like many seemingly cold, distant people, she occasionally exposed bursts of emotion. She took personally Julie’s enthusiasm for the new art. In rejecting the old methods, she felt, Julie was rejecting her.

Unlike Filomena, I loved the luminous magic of Julie’s new pictures. Looking at them was like stepping into a sunny summer day. Perhaps one could not get as deeply into this kind of work as in traditional “finished” pictures, those that had been completed slowly, laboriously, with every detail fully, photographically articulated. But to me, the buoyant impulsiveness of Impressionism was its chief charm.

I chose three pictures that day—the portrait of the girl in white, another of the same model drinking tea, and a landscape of Provence.

Now, as Pierre led me into the two large rooms overlooking a small garden, I was pleased to see that the paintings had been beautifully framed and hung away from the windows. The packers had thoughtfully arranged my clothes in armoires and bureaus. A piano had been moved into the sitting room, and my music was stored on a bamboo étagère. It was almost like home.

“I hope you’ll be happy here,” said Pierre. Then he left the boudoir and closed the door behind him. While I undressed, I heard a carriage pull up to the house and the gate slam. The front door opened, and someone scurried up the stairs. I cracked my door and looked down the hall just as a woman wrapped in a sable-trimmed cape dashed into Pierre’s room. Madame Jeuland.

I went to bed that night feeling disappointed and vaguely jealous. The next morning, I woke up with a headache and felt a stab of melancholy when I realized I was not at rue de Luxembourg. I passed the next weeks in a stupor of lethargy. I did a little reading and shopping and visited Julie in her atelier. Mama called from time to time, but mostly I stayed alone in the house, feeling sorry for myself.

I hardly ever saw my husband, except occasionally at breakfast and at the regular Thursday dinners we hosted at rue Jouffroy for Pierre’s business associates and their wives. Every Monday morning, Pierre gave me his schedule for the week and told me those evenings during which he required my presence to accompany him to a reception or a party. In any given month, we spent only a handful of evenings together. The rest of the time, I was free to do as I pleased.

One morning, the maid brought my breakfast tray with a plain beige envelope tucked under the coffee cup. I sliced open the envelope and was astonished to see that the letter was from Léon Gambetta, the fiery Republican leader who was one of the chief architects of France’s new democracy. He had been in the crowd at the opening of the Nouvel Opéra the month before and learned my address from our neighbor, the Prefect of Police. In those days, it was not unusual for me to get notes from strange men. Often, at parties, valets slipped me messages from their masters, and sometimes, after a story about me appeared in the newspaper, I’d get a bundle of letters from admirers. But this was the first time I had received a letter from someone as important and distinguished as a national leader.

“Dear Madame Gautreau,” Gambetta began. “I couldn’t help noticing during the opening of the Nouvel Opéra that you were one of the few people in the theater who actually was listening to the music. The Prefect of Police, in whose box I had the pleasure of sitting, tells me that you are a musician yourself, an exquisite interpreter of Beethoven in particular. I am writing to invite you to the Pasdeloup concert next Sunday, where the orchestra will perform, among other works, Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto. Perhaps we could have dinner afterward. If you consent to grant me the honor of your company, I will pick you up in my carriage at three. Most sincerely, Léon Gambetta.”

I’d never seen Gambetta before, but I had heard much about him. The son of a grocer in Cahors, Gambetta had come to Paris as a young man to study law, and he quickly became involved in radical politics. As a member of the Corps Législatif, to which he had been elected in 1869, he was a passionate opponent of Louis-Napoléon. His speeches calling for the demise of the monarchy were said to be so thunderously eloquent that they made the windows of the National Assembly tremble.

When the Empire fell, Gambetta was named Minister of the Interior of the new provisional government. He escaped Paris in a dramatic balloon flight and oversaw the war effort from the provinces. Since then, he had worked tirelessly to establish a democratic French Republic.

I never answered letters sent to me by strangers. Most of the men who wrote to me were old wealthy gentlemen who had little to do but read the papers at their clubs and chase younger women. But Gambetta was different. He was young—only thirty-seven in 1875—and a celebrity in his own right. There was talk in the press that he might actually be president one day. I wouldn’t mind getting to know him, I thought. I was ready for a romantic adventure.

Gambetta must have heard about my arrangement with Pierre through the Prefect of Police. Otherwise I don’t think he would have been so bold as to invite me to dine alone with him in his rooms. Looking back at that time from the distance of age, I’m amazed at my wantonness. I was hardly the only woman in Paris who went out with men other than her husband. But I must have been among the most indiscreet. Yet, at the time, I didn’t care about anything but my own pleasure.

I sent Gambetta a
petit bleu
saying that I’d be delighted to join him. At exactly three o’clock on the appointed day, the bell rang, and a moment later the maid brought me Léon Gambetta’s card. It took me twenty minutes to finish my toilette; then I descended the stairs to the salon.

Standing at the window, looking down into the street, was a short, badly dressed man with long brown hair flowing from his huge head. His truncated arms gave him the appearance of an overgrown dwarf. His right eye was glass—he had lost the eye in a childhood accident. The glass stared opaquely at me while his good eye glittered. Needless to say, I was disappointed by his appearance. But as soon as Gambetta opened his mouth, I was charmed.

“Ah, Madame Gautreau,” he said, bowing slightly as I entered the room. “How lovely of you to join me this afternoon. You know, these concerts are my only diversion, for work is the cruel goddess who rules my destiny.”

“You must take time for leisure, sir, or your health will suffer.”

“My health
has
suffered. In the assembly, I’m fighting all sorts of monarchists who’d actually like to put the Bourbons back on the throne. They’ll be the death of me.” He tossed his hair with the back of his hand.

“I’m surprised you can bear to sit through a concerto named ‘Emperor,’” I said.

Gambetta laughed softly. “Ah, Madame, you are as witty as you are beautiful. Seriously, I don’t hold the concerto’s title against the composer. Now, we must dash or we’ll miss the beginning.”

In the carriage on the way to the concert, Gambetta talked of his recent struggles to amend the French constitution so that presidents would be elected every seven years by a majority vote of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. A group of legislators who wanted to restore the monarchy were fiercely opposing him. “We must put a new shirt on France. Ever since September 4, 1870, people have obstinately allowed the country to wear its old linen, all spotted and stained with the blood and dirt of former governments!” he exclaimed.

We arrived at boulevard des Filles du Calvaire, and the carriage pulled to a stop in front of the Cirque d’Hiver, the five-thousand-seat arena that the conductor Jules Pasdeloup borrowed for his popular Sunday concert series. Gambetta continued talking as we took our seats in the third row. Sun filtered through the windows, sharply defining the black-coated musicians. As Pasdeloup took the podium, three clowns, who had been rehearsing in their dressing room, wandered in and sat solemnly in the back row.

Gambetta continued talking until the orchestra began to play. Soon he fell asleep. I poked him in the ribs several times and got him to open his eyes once or twice; otherwise he slept through the entire concert.

Afterward we drove to his apartment at 53, rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, in a modest eighteenth-century building that housed the offices of
La République Française,
the newspaper Gambetta had bought several years before to give him a daily forum for his opinions.

Gambetta unlocked a door at the side of the building and led me up two flights of stairs to a small apartment. The Republican leader’s attention to decor had not advanced past his bohemian student days in the Latin Quarter. The rooms were furnished with scarred secondhand settees and chairs. Framed political cartoons that had been cut from newspapers hung on the discolored, cracked walls. As we ate the dinner brought in from the restaurant next door, the portly orator talked on and on about politics, his thundering voice drowning out the loud clanks and thuds drifting up through the pipes from the rotary press downstairs.

The food was superb—a steaming pot-au-feu accompanied by bread,
haricots verts,
and an expensive wine. Gambetta ate two servings of everything and consumed his dessert—a large slice of apple tart smothered in
crème fraîche—
in two bites. Then he pushed his bulk from the table and crossed to my side. He pulled me to my feet and kissed me on the mouth. “Shall we retire?” he said. He took my hand and led me to the bedroom.

Until that moment, I had been undecided about whether or not I’d sleep with him. His appearance hardly made me swoon. Still, I found him extremely attractive. His eloquent voice, the deep intelligence radiating from his good eye, the childish way he tossed his hair—all delighted me. What finally swayed me, however, was his kiss—romantic and tender, with a hint of unleashed passion.

When we were inside his bedroom, Gambetta closed the door, enveloped me with his short arms, and pressed me against his massive chest. He covered my neck with kisses, then pushed his tongue into my mouth as he fumbled with my clothes. He managed to get my bodice undone, and moved his hands over my breasts. When he had removed my skirt and petticoats, he maneuvered me onto the bed. He finished undressing me, took off his trousers, and, gently parting my legs, slid his bulk on top of me.

Despite the promise of his kiss, Gambetta wasn’t much of a lover. He seemed eager to get it over with so he could get back to his real passion—talking. He finished quickly, rolled off, and immediately started gabbing. “Madame, I feel inexpressibly comforted to have received your consoling tenderness,” he said as he lay by my side, staring at the ceiling. “What delicious repose I’m enjoying now, what delightful peace! I feel carried away to dream and to enjoy. It is like drifting down a river and letting myself be guided by the current.”

He turned on his side to face me. “This will help me bear the irritating obstacles I’m sure I’ll face in the assembly tomorrow.” He smiled contentedly, then launched into a long catalog of those obstacles. I dozed off, and when I awoke an hour later, Gambetta was still talking—practicing a speech he planned to give the next day. Finally, at ten, I told him I had to leave, and he sent me home in his carriage.

The following morning, the first post brought a letter from him. “You are the most incomparable little charmer that nature’s hands ever fashioned,” Gambetta wrote, “and I feel myself overwhelmed with gratitude to fate for choosing me to witness last night’s dazzling fairy tale of grace and enchantment.” This glorification of our brief, sweaty exertions made me laugh out loud.

“What’s this sublime new world we suddenly visited yesterday?” the letter continued. “Is it the lost Atlantis of the ancients, where, as the Golden Legend tells us, sister souls meet and love for eternity? How can I tell? I feel as if I were swimming in pure, ethereal light. Words seem too vulgar and clumsy to express the delicate and almost fluid sensations I feel in this upper world into which you have led me. On entering these hitherto unexplored regions, one ought to invent a new language that has never been used by human mouth.”