I Am Madame X (32 page)

A week later, a plain beige envelope arrived here by balloon post from London. It smelled faintly of cigar tobacco, and my name and address were dashed across the center in a bold, confident hand. I sliced open the envelope and pulled out the letter inside. It was from Sargent. He wrote that he would consider my suggestion, though he didn’t consider the strap’s placement to be of grave importance. “No matter where it is,” he wrote in a salute I was delighted to receive after all these years, “your portrait is still the best thing I have done.”

I Am Madame X
is a novel, though it is based on real people and events. The main character, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, was a gorgeous Parisian celebrity, notorious in the late nineteenth century for her bold dress, her passion for self-display, and her reputation for promiscuity. As the subject of John Singer Sargent’s 1884 painting,
Madame X,
she also was at the center of a great fin-de-siècle art scandal.

I fell in love with the painting the moment I first saw it seventeen years ago. At the time, I was living in Manhattan, working on my first book,
Debutante,
the story of pre–World War II New York café society as told through the eyes of Brenda Frazier, a celebrated beauty much like Virginie Gautreau. I spent many days doing research at the New York Society Library on East Seventy-ninth Street, and on my way home to the West Side, I often stopped at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at
Madame X.
The woman in the painting seemed so alive, radiant with a mysterious, timeless beauty. Though Sargent had painted her in a previous century, she struck me as extraordinarily modern.

I decided to write a nonfiction book about the painting. But scant biographical material was available about Virginie Gautreau herself. I could find no letters, diaries, or memoirs that would enable me to recreate her personality, so I abandoned the idea.

Still, I remained fascinated by her image. After I moved to Chicago with my husband and son in 1991, I continued to visit the
Madame
on my trips to New York, and my interest in her never waned. Three years ago, after my third biography was published, I found myself thinking more intensely about the painting, and I decided to try my hand at a historical novel.
I Am Madame X
is the result.

In fashioning my story, I’ve used the sketchy facts of Virginie Gautreau’s life as a blueprint. I’ve tried to stay faithful to the spirit of the truth—insofar as it can be determined—but I’ve taken a novelist’s liberty in compressing time, altering dates, creating characters, conjuring scenes, and putting words into the mouths of historical figures.

Among the fictional characters inspired by real people are Filomena Seguette, who is loosely based on the artist Rosa Bonheur, and Etincelle, which was the pen name of a popular nineteenth-century Parisian journalist. The character of Julie de Ternant is based on Virginie Gautreau’s maternal aunt. According to family legend, Mademoiselle de Ternant committed suicide on her wedding day rather than marry a man she didn’t love. Actually, she died unmarried and insane.

What is known of Virginie Gautreau’s life can be found in archives in Louisiana, Paris, and Paramé, France. She was born on January 29, 1859, in New Orleans, the daughter of a man and woman who belonged to prominent Creole families. In the novel, I made her four years older to enable her to comment on her childhood during the Civil War.

As a young girl, Virginie spent time at Parlange, her maternal grandmother’s plantation in New Roads, Louisiana. Parlange, which looks today much as it did a hundred and fifty years ago, still grows cane and produces sugar, and the charming green-shuttered house built by Virginie’s great-grandfather is still inhabited by her descendants.

The personalities of Virginie’s grandmother and mother and the relationships between the women are invented. However, hints of severe family tensions can be found in the records of old Louisiana lawsuits.

Once, after Madame Parlange failed to repay $5,612 her daughter lent her to run the plantation, Madame Avegno filed suit in the 7th District Court in Pointe Coupée. Madame Parlange claimed that since the money was used to further the planting partnership of herself and her daughters, she should be allowed to keep the money. The court disagreed, ordering Virginie’s grandmother to repay the loan, plus 8 percent interest for two years.

The family’s most sensational court case involved Virginie’s parents. In December 1860, Virginie’s mother filed for divorce from her husband, Anatole, citing his mental cruelty and physical abuse. The divorce was never granted. Four months later, the Civil War broke out. Anatole joined the Confederacy and died in 1862 from wounds received at the Battle of Shiloh.

Playing the role of grieving widow, Madame Avegno fled with her daughters to Paris, where they joined a community of expatriate Southerners. In 1866, they returned to New Orleans, where Valentine died on March 11, at age five, probably from one of the many typhoid or cholera epidemics that periodically swept Louisiana.

At some point following Valentine’s funeral, Virginie and her mother settled permanently in France in a house on rue de Luxembourg, which after 1879 was renamed rue Cambon. For the sake of clarity, I’ve referred to it throughout the novel as rue de Luxembourg. The family’s descendants believe Virginie attended a convent school, though it could not have been the one I use in the book, the Couvent des Dames Anglaises, as that venerable convent was razed in 1860 to make way for a new street, the rue Monge. I placed Virginie there because, of all the nineteenth-century Parisian convent schools, it was the only one for which detailed information existed in English translation. For my account of the school, I’ve relied heavily on
The Story of My Life,
the autobiography of George Sand, who lived with the English nuns in the early 1800s.

Little is known of Madame Gautreau’s personality, though there are references to her notoriety and regular appearances in the scandal sheets in a few extant journal and newspaper clippings, several of which I quote. She is barely mentioned in the memoirs of the time: the only one that discusses her in some depth,
Trente ans de dîners en ville,
by Gabriel-Louis Pringue, was published in France in 1948. Pringue, a friend of the Gautreaus’ daughter, Louise Jallu, portrays Madame Gautreau (whose name he misspells) as a cold, stiff narcissist of great vanity and little conversation. I see in Sargent’s painting a very different person—one who was vain, of course, but also sexy and high-spirited. It is this vision of the real woman that inspired the fictional character.

Nor does anyone know what the grown-up Virginie actually looked like from a straight-ahead view. The only artists’ images of her are in profile. With the exception of one full-faced picture of her as a child, in the “Madame X” files at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and another of her adult profile in a private collection, there are no photographs of her.

It is not known when Virginie married Pierre Gautreau, though it most likely was before 1879, as their daughter was born on August 20 of that year. The marriage was widely rumored to have been unhappy, and Madame Gautreau was believed to have taken many lovers, including Léon Gambetta, the Republican leader, and Dr. Samuel-Jean Pozzi, a favorite surgeon of the
haute bourgeoisie.
Dr. Pozzi, an avid art collector, was friendly with many of the most colorful people of his day, including the poet Robert de Montesquiou, Sargent, and Marcel Proust, who immortalized Pozzi as Dr. Cottard in
Remembrance of Things Past.

Aside from the rumors at the time, there is no hard evidence of these affairs. The best clue that Madame Gautreau and Dr. Pozzi were lovers lies in his ownership of Sargent’s
Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast,
the small oil painting that the artist inscribed to Virginie’s mother. How Dr. Pozzi came to possess it is a mystery. It seems unlikely that Madame Avegno—who died in 1910, five years before her daughter—would have given the painting to her married daughter’s married lover. Perhaps Madame Avegno gave it to her daughter, who gave it to Dr. Pozzi. In any case, Pozzi was murdered in 1918 by a deranged patient, and Isabella Stewart Gardner bought the painting from his estate. It hangs in the Boston museum bearing her name.

It is not certain how Madame Gautreau met Sargent. The artist painted Dr. Pozzi in 1881, and it’s possible that Virginie attended one of the sittings. Or she might have met the artist through her cousin Ben del Castillo, who was a childhood friend of Sargent’s. In 1882, Sargent wrote Castillo, “I have a great desire to paint [Madame Gautreau’s] portrait and have reason to think that she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty. If you are ‘bien avec elle’ and will see her in Paris you might tell her that I am a man of
prodigious talent.
”

At the time, Madame Gautreau was twenty-three and the mother of a three-year-old child. Her exotic beauty, daring toilettes, and reputation for taking lovers had made her a favorite ornament and focus of the scandal sheets. Sargent was twenty-six and had been exhibiting his work at the Paris Salon since 1877, when he was just twenty-one. But there was prejudice against him as an American, and he was having trouble attracting business from members of the French
haut monde,
whom he was most eager to paint. He was searching for a subject who would give him a masterpiece, a portrait so wondrous that every woman in Paris would clamor to be painted by him. No doubt Madame Gautreau hoped the portrait would be her own apotheosis, the fulfillment of her (and her mother’s) ardent social ambitions.

Sargent’s struggle to capture Madame Gautreau in paint is well documented. On February 10, 1883, soon after Virginie began sitting for him, he wrote to his friend Vernon Lee, “In a few days I shall be back in Paris tackling my other ‘envoi,’ the portrait of a great beauty. Do you object to people who are
fardées
to the extent of being uniform lavender or blotting paper color all over? If so, you would not care for my sitter. But she has the most beautiful lines and if the lavender or chlorate-of-potash lozenge color be pretty in itself I shall be more than pleased.”

That same year, Sargent also was working on a portrait of Margaret (Daisy) Stuyvesant Rutherford White, the lovely wife of the American diplomat Henry White, which the couple had commissioned. Apparently, Sargent initially had the idea of sending his portraits of both Madame Gautreau and Mrs. White to the Salon. But by March 15, 1883, the deadline for submissions, he wasn’t satisfied with either painting. “This is the evening of the postal sending in day & I have sent nothing in,” he wrote Mrs. White. “Neither you nor Mme Gautreau were finished. I have been brushing away at both of you for the last three weeks in a horrid state of anxiety…. Well, the questionis settled, and I am beaten.”

The following year, 1884, he sent in only his portrait of Madame Gautreau. As the May 1 opening approached, Sargent grew nervous. His teacher, Carolus-Duran, had visited Sargent’s studio to view the painting and had told him, “You can send it to the Salon with confidence.” But Sargent doubted Carolus-Duran’s judgment and wrote to Ben del Castillo, “I’ve made up my mind to be refused.”

As a previous medal winner, Sargent didn’t have to go through the jury process. He could submit anything he wanted, and it had to be taken—unless the picture was judged obscene.

Sargent knew he had painted a masterpiece, but he also sensed that the picture was way ahead of its time. Though he had no trouble getting it past the Salon committee, he couldn’t shake a strong presentiment of disaster.

The novel’s depiction of the 1884 Salon
vernissage
closely follows the historical facts. No sooner had the doors of the Palais de l’Industrie opened than a jeering crowd gathered in front of Sargent’s picture. In a letter to his parents, Sargent’s close friend Ralph Curtis described the crowd’s reaction to the artist’s work:

The critics were no kinder. The next morning and in the following weeks, a storm of vitriol rained on Sargent and his painting. All the reviews quoted in the novel, except by the fictional Etincelle, are authentic.

There’s been much speculation over the years as to the painting’s impact on Sargent’s career. Some art historians have argued that it was the reason he fled Paris and moved to London. Actually, he had planned to spend the summer of 1884 in England long before the debacle of
Madame X.
He did not settle permanently in London until1886.