I Am Madame X (24 page)

I arrived at Nadar’s studio on rue d’Anjou at noon on a cold, sunny morning. A plump middle-aged woman showed me into a spacious waiting room. On one wall hung a collection of paintings by Manet, Monet, Sisley, and Degas—Nadar had been among the first to champion the Impressionists. The opposite wall held caricatures drawn by the photographer during his days working at the satirical
Journal Pour Rire.
This wall also featured framed photographs of some of the famous people Nadar had photographed: Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Sarah Bernhardt, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola.

In one corner, a man sat on a folding stool painting in oils over a blown-up photograph of a lovely young woman. This was Nadar’s in-house artist. The studio charged four thousand francs to transform a print into an oil painting, a service that provided a large part of Nadar’s income.

I had been waiting thirty minutes when the assistant called my name and led me to the second floor and down a long corridor, past the laboratories for developing negatives and the rooms for printing, toning, and retouching.

At the end of the corridor, we entered a large rectangular room that was lit from above by an enormous skylight. A tall young man with reddish hair, Nadar’s son, Paul, was adjusting muslin curtains on a rolling screen used for backdrops. Nadar himself was buried under a black hood behind a rosewood camera perched on a tripod.

“Madame Gautreau, how lovely to meet you,” said Paul Nadar as I entered the room. He looked to be in his early twenties.

A muffled cough emanated from under the black hood, and a moment later a tall, gangly man dressed in a white cashmere coat and blue silk cravat emerged. At sixty-two, Nadar’s flaming-red hair had turned gray, and his face was deeply lined. “Ah, Madame Gautreau,” he said, taking my hand and kissing the knuckles lightly. “I hardly spend any time here anymore. But when I saw your name in the appointment book, I knew I wanted to photograph you myself.”

Nadar had been born Félix Tournachon. As a teenager, his biting wit prompted his friends to call him Tournadard (
dard
means sting), which, over time, metamorphosed into Nadar. After a varied career as a journalist, novelist, and illustrator, he took some photography lessons, and by 1855 he had set himself up as a photographer, one of the first in Paris. Now he was semiretired, and his son ran the business.

While Nadar fussed behind the camera, adjusting knobs and moving glass plates, Paul posed me sitting in a chair before the screen and looking directly into the lens.

Nadar moved the tripod to about six feet in front of me and disappeared under the black hood. “You won’t be sorry you’ve come to us,” he said, his voice barely audible under the heavy cloth. “So many hacks have set up shop on the boulevards. I’m sure you’ve seen their dreary, cardboard work. For a likeness of the most intimate and happy kind, a speaking likeness, you need Nadar!”

He slipped out from under the hood and smiled at me. “Yes, a speaking likeness.” Then he turned to his son and said, “That’s what we’re after, isn’t it, Paul?”

“You’re right, as always, Papa,” said Paul, nodding.

Nadar ducked under the hood again, removed the camera’s lens cap, and slid open the back of the rosewood box. He raised his right arm and waved his long freckled fingers in the air. “Look at my hand, Madame,” he ordered.

I obeyed. I heard a loud pop, then the fumbling of glass plates and lens caps. This went on for about an hour. Finally Nadar handed the plates to an assistant. “We’re finished,” he said. “We’ll deliver the prints to you within ten days.”

I left the studio feeling optimistic. The session seemed to have gone well. I liked Nadar, and his photographs had a kind of formal, timeless beauty—even his portrait of the jowly, mannish George Sand.

The following week, a box from rue d’Anjou arrived, and I opened it with great anticipation. Nadar had sent seven different prints, which I carefully took out and laid on the dining room table. They were hideous! Each full-faced view was uglier than the next. My nose looked huge, my eyes looked like dull coins, my mouth was nothing but a mean slit. I ripped up the prints and never again allowed anyone to photograph me.

I had thought photography could reflect the truth of a woman’s beauty. But after seeing these horrible prints, I decided it was an imperfect art, impossible for the photographer and sitter to control. Painting, on the other hand, I began to believe, could reveal something greater than reality. In the right hands, with the right chemistry between artist and sitter, painting could illuminate a higher truth. More to the point, it had the power to immortalize. A beautiful woman captured on canvas is eternally youthful, eternally adored. I thought of Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”

Later in the week, I sent a
petit bleu
to Sargent, telling him that I’d sit for him. He wrote back asking if he could come to rue Jouffroy the following Monday, and requested that I choose a dress or two to show him.

I selected two new gowns, a dark-blue satin with a white sash and a silvery-green silk, both of which I modeled for Sargent when he came to the house. He liked the blue satin. After I had changed into it, the artist posed me in the parlor—where he had decided the light was best. I was draped languidly on a settee, my face in profile against a background of dark-green curtains. Perched stiffly on the settee, I watched Sargent out of the corner of my eye. As he worked, I felt a constant urge to question him, to ask him what he saw, what he was doing. But I restrained myself, as Julie had advised. “Leave him alone,
chérie,
” she had told me. “Don’t compete with him; don’t try to control the portrait. You have one job and one job alone: to be quiet and look gorgeous.”

I strove for indifference, but all I could think about was the painting. Sitting for hours on end, numbed, fatigued, and bored, I distracted myself with thoughts of a Salon triumph. I imagined the glowing articles that would be written about me, the exciting invitations that would pour in, the fascinating men who would pursue me. I dreamed about the pleasure of seeing my image reproduced in the popular journals and on calendars and chocolate tins, of Guerlain offering to invent a scent in my honor. The portrait would be my revenge on Dr. Pozzi and every other man who dared to reject me.

At first, most of the sittings were at my house, but as the spring wore on, we began working more and more at Sargent’s studio, where there was more privacy.

“You are a wonderful subject,” Sargent told me one morning. “I’ve had some very dull, unattractive clients recently, and it’s almost impossible to turn them into interesting pictures. Women don’t ask me outright to make them beautiful, but I can feel them wanting me to do so all the time.”

“How do you manage it?” I asked.

Sargent nodded toward a battered wood screen near the piano. “If I can’t stand my sitter, I go behind that screen and stick my tongue out at them. Then I feel better, and I can paint.”

One morning when I arrived for my scheduled appointment, Sargent was working not on my picture but on a portrait of another woman, Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherford White, the wife of the American chargé d’affaires in Paris. Her picture was as conventional and light as mine was dark and exotic. Sargent had pictured Daisy White, as she was known, dressed for a fashionable evening out. Staring directly out of the canvas, she was swathed in billowy cream silk and pearls. In one hand she held a fan; in the other, opera glasses.

I had seen Daisy White at parties and receptions. She was pretty enough. But Sargent had transformed her, without sacrificing anything in the way of likeness, into the very image of dignified, modern beauty. He had taken what was best about her looks and character, heightened and polished those qualities, and then preserved them in paint.

A shot of jealousy snaked through me. “So, you’re planning to send
both
of us to the Salon?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I thought
I
was the only one.”

“I never told you that.”

“Well, your friends led me to believe it.”

“I can’t speak for my friends.”

“You’ve been telling everyone in town how much you wanted me to sit for you, that you needed me to give you your masterpiece.”

“That’s true. Don’t you know, Mrs. White is a
commissioned
work.”

He spoke quietly and looked at me with gentle eyes. I felt a bit reassured. But the sitting didn’t go well. I couldn’t wipe the tension from my face, and Sargent’s concentration was broken. After an hour, he said, “Maybe you should come back tomorrow.” I gathered my things and left.

The next morning, when I rang the bell outside Sargent’s studio, it took him longer than usual to answer. Finally I heard his heels clicking on the creaking floor, and he answered the door. “Good morning, Madame Gautreau,” he said, his voice edged with despair. His eyes were bloodshot, his face pale.

I glanced at my portrait sitting on the easel next to the window and recoiled in horror. It had been slashed! A long gash ran from the upper right hand corner through the middle of my face, then cleaved my body in two and continued to the edge of the canvas.

“Who did this?” I could barely breathe. My voice came out in a whisper.

Sargent looked at me gravely. “I did.”

“Are you crazy?”

“It wasn’t right. It wasn’t
alive.
” He shook his head from side to side.

“
I
thought it was alive.”

“A woman can’t judge her own portrait.”

I was furious. I had devoted several months to the painting, posing for three hours every day. I felt like slapping him. “You had no right, no right,” I shouted as I dashed for the door.

Sargent ran after me and grabbed my arm. “I know you so well now. I’m sure if you stick with me, I can paint something splendid and true.”

I stared at him.

“Don’t you know,” he said, “that’s Plato’s definition of beauty: the ‘splendor of the true.’” He smiled and looked so boyish and earnest that my anger melted away.

“But there’s no time to start over and make this year’s Salon,” I protested. “You’ll send Daisy White.”

“Her picture isn’t done either,” Sargent said glumly.

“What will you do?”

“I have something else. The four daughters of a Boston expatriate named Edward Boit. But I’m counting on you for next year.”

It seemed a long way off, especially since I was hoping to be this year’s Salon Queen.

“I’m willing to continue,” I said. “But I need to take a break. Next month, I’m going to the country with my daughter. You can join us there, if you like.”

Sargent’s face brightened, and he smiled broadly. “Wonderful!”

As I walked through the door, he called to me, “I’m not happy with the blue dress. Why don’t you pack something black.”

I spent several hours the next day trying on gowns in the room at the back of my boudoir suite, where I kept my clothes in four large armoires. Sargent had suggested I wear black, yet everything that had been made for me in the past year was jewel-toned—there were several emerald satins, a ruby velvet, a sapphire silk, and a pearly satin overlaid with tulle. I had several black afternoon dresses, but nothing stunning enough for a portrait.

By noon I had gone through my current wardrobe and started in on gowns from previous seasons. Usually I gave my outfits to the maids after wearing them once or twice, but I always kept a few pieces of which I was especially fond. At four, just when I was thinking I’d have to have something new made, I came upon a box on top of the walnut armoire. Inside was the Poussineau gown I had worn to the opening of the Nouvel Opéra in 1875. The maid buttoned me into the velvet bodice and helped me step into the satin skirt. I looked in the mirrored doors of one of the armoires. The dress still fit perfectly.

As I admired the white curves of my shoulders and arms against the black fabric, I remembered the stir the dress had caused at the opera—the men’s admiring glances, the women’s eyes hard with envy. That was exactly the response I wanted from Sargent’s portrait.

On the first day of June, Louise and I boarded a train for Brittany, accompanied by the nanny and a maid. We arrived at Saint-Malo in early evening. Old Madame Gautreau showed little interest in her grandchild, but Millicent loved Louise and begged to take care of her. I allowed the nanny, a stout Scotswoman, to let Millicent dress and feed Louise, but only if the nanny was present. I made her swear she’d never leave the little girl alone with Pierre’s dotty cousin.

The following morning, Sargent showed up at the château and was given a room on the top floor. After breakfast, I changed into my black gown while the artist waited with his sketch pad in the parlor.

Pierre had written his mother, extolling Sargent’s talents and explaining that it was an honor for a member of our family to be painted by him. But the old lady was not happy about turning her parlor into an atelier littered with messy paints, brushes, palettes, and jars of turpentine. It didn’t help that Sargent was American, a breed my mother-in-law loathed.

When I came downstairs in my black gown, I found her sitting in her favorite chair, glaring at Sargent as he awkwardly tried to make conversation. As soon as she saw me, she forgot about the artist.

“You can’t wear that dress! It’s indecent,” she cried.

“I think it’s gorgeous,” Sargent said, addressing my mother-in-law. “It will look exquisite in the painting, I assure you.”

“I doubt it,” the old lady grumbled. She had seen enough. She signaled to one of the footmen, who escorted her out to the garden.

Sargent clapped his hands and did a little jig. “Your gown is just the thing!” he enthused. “I’d like to get started at once, the light is perfect this morning.”

Sargent knew he wanted me in profile, but otherwise he couldn’t decide how to pose me. He arranged my arms and my dress and ordered me to twist this way and that. Working in pencil, charcoal, and sometimes watercolor, he sketched me sitting, standing, and half reclining on a divan. Nothing satisfied him.