Strapless (12 page)

At first, Pozzi and Bernhardt restricted themselves to friendship. But they were two passionate people: a love affair was inevitable. The adoring young doctor and his diva often dined together at her home. Bernhardt usually dressed provocatively in black lace, with dramatic touches like accordion-pleated gloves that stretched to her shoulders. One night, after her son, Maurice, and his tutor had gone to bed, Bernhardt led Pozzi to her sumptuous coffin for their first amorous encounter.

Bernhardt was astonished by her lover: she called him “Dr. Dieu,” Dr. God. Once, when Pozzi had to cancel a date because he faced an important medical exam, a distraught Bernhardt raced to his apartment and kept him entertained in the bedroom for sixteen hours. Pozzi’s punishment for missing his exam was the odious assignment of translating a long scientific treatise by Darwin. Bernhardt wittily commemorated the evening by naming her new pet, a chimpanzee, Darwin.

Despite his handsomeness and his amorous reputation, Pozzi was not a frivolous man. Dedicated to his work, he was renowned in international circles for his achievements in medicine and science. Pozzi was a perfectionist: he always wore white cover-alls when he operated, to demonstrate to his students that it was possible to perform surgery without incurring the stain of even a drop of blood. He invented the bimanual manipulation, the method of performing an internal examination still used by gynecologists today. He maintained an active private practice as both gynecologist and general surgeon, did charity work at Paris hospitals, and found the time to write, among other books,
A Treatise on Gynaecology, Clinical and Operative,
the nineteenth century’s definitive textbook about women’s health.

Pozzi was considered an excellent catch when, in 1879, he married Thérèse Loth, a railroad heiress with a considerable fortune, but far plainer looks than her husband’s. The Pozzis moved into a spacious apartment at 10 Place Vendôme, a few doors from where Chopin had once lived. They were attended by a fleet of servants, including a chef and a footman. Their luxurious apartment was filled with objets d’art, valuable books, rare coins, and the beginnings of a significant art collection. They traveled often to resort towns such as St.-Malo. The only discord in their lives was the doctor’s complaint that his wife was far too devoted to her mother, a possessive and opinionated widow who was a constant presence, and to their children, Catherine and, later, Jean.

As time passed, the discord between the doctor and his wife grew more serious. When pressed to choose between her husband and her mother, Thérèse would always side with her mother. Pozzi was unaccustomed to rejection, especially from a woman, and his unhappy marriage was his first experience with failure. He consoled himself with the fact that Thérèse’s preoccupation with family matters gave him considerable freedom to move in intellectual and artistic circles—and to spend time with women who were not his wife. Bernhardt was not the only one who responded to Pozzi’s charms: famous and infamous women alike welcomed this intensely desirable man into their arms, and as he was their doctor, they did so without arousing the curiosity or the wrath of their husbands and lovers.

By 1881, Pozzi could have any mistress he wanted; he became drawn to the stunning new face in town, “La Belle Gautreau.” With her husband and child on hand to maintain an aura of respectability, Amélie traveled in the fast group of wealthy politicians and businessmen who owned the new Paris. She was their favorite ornament, and they provided her with a welcome distraction from her moneyed but unexciting marriage.

Amélie’s name was frequently linked to that of Léon Gambetta, a political force in Paris in the 1880s. It is likely that he had met Amélie when she was a child, during the dramatic days of the Franco-Prussian War. They had many opportunities to be in each other’s company at the home of Amélie’s uncle Jean-Bernard Avegno. Gambetta exuded the kind of raw magnetism that often accompanies political power, and his wartime heroism would have impressed a girl Amélie’s age. When an older Amélie entered society as a married woman, she attended political dinners where Gambetta was a guest, held his arm at public events, and, according to rumor, met him for private tête-à-têtes. Gossips speculated that she was the “Madame X” the newspapers referred to as Gambetta’s secret mistress. But Amélie’s reputation was protected by his long association with her relatives—he could feign familial interest in his beautiful young companion even as he was secretly making love to her.

Amélie was seen also in the company of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the diplomat who masterminded the Suez Canal. Often portrayed as the secret admirer of Napoleon III’s wife, the Empress Eugénie (who was his cousin), Lesseps was a flashy and important figure in the Second Empire and the Third Republic. His comings and goings were reported in the newspapers, and the woman on his arm always attracted interest. Despite the tremendous difference in age (he was in his seventies, while Amélie was not long out of her teens), Lesseps was a distinguished escort, and would have been an impressive choice for a lover as well.

Of all Amélie’s reputed paramours, the most discussed was her gynecologist. According to one tale that spread rapidly throughout Paris after her wedding, Amélie’s husband was so obsessed with the virginal young Amélie that he had agreed to a
mariage blanc
—a sexless marriage—to persuade her to be his wife. Pedro Gautreau upheld his end of the bargain by not forcing her to fulfill her wifely duties. Mysteriously, only a few months into their marriage, Amélie began to show unmistakable signs of pregnancy. She was shocked by her condition and insisted that she was still a virgin. Her gynecologist examined her and confirmed her innocence. The doctor assured the irate Monsieur Gautreau that his young wife was not pregnant. He explained that she was carrying her own vestigial twin; the condition, he said, was easily remedied with modern medicine. He quickly came up with a surgical solution to the potentially scandalous situation, and all was well in the Gautreau household.

The first part of the story is wonderfully implausible. There wasn’t much time for a
mariage blanc,
given the apparent rapidity with which Louise was conceived after Pedro and Amélie’s wedding. Implausibility notwithstanding, Amélie did in fact have a gynecologist, none other than Samuel-Jean Pozzi. But he was not content to be Amélie’s doctor.

One day, he invited Amélie to afternoon tea at his Place Vendôme apartment. When she accepted, Pozzi dashed off a few words on a calling card to his friend and confidant Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac. There was a definite tone of victory in his note: “Dear and extremely rare friend . . . Madame Gautreau of the swan’s neck will be taking tea at my house the day after to-morrow, Tuesday the 5th. If you want to see her again, come.”

Pozzi’s tea with Amélie would lead inevitably to private assignations. Whenever he became enchanted with a woman, Pozzi would mount an elaborate campaign, wooing her with passionate letters, expressing his deepest emotions and most profound thoughts. “I like to be loved,” he wrote in one such letter, and confessed that he enjoyed exploring the “alchemy of the heart.” It is believed that he saved his mistresses’ replies, but these revealing souvenirs of his love affairs seem to have been suppressed out of respect for his family.

Sargent was familiar with the Pozzi folklore—everyone in Paris was—and had heard that the doctor was, understandably, vain about his looks. During a visit to Place Vendôme in the company of Carolus-Duran, Sargent admired a charming painting of Thérèse Pozzi, and pointedly expressed regret that there was no portrait of her handsome husband in their salon. It was an ingenious move on Sargent’s part. Appealing to Pozzi’s vanity, he planted the idea that there should be a portrait of him and that he, Sargent, should be the one to paint it.

 

Sargent’s audacity—right under the nose of Carolus-Duran, no less—won him the job. Pozzi responded enthusiastically to the suggestion and agreed to sit for Sargent. With this important commission from the doctor, whom Sargent later called “a very brilliant creature,” the artist had secured his entry to the coveted inner circle.

Buttoned up and businesslike in his customary suit, in the late summer of 1881, Sargent set up his easel in Pozzi’s apartment, ready to find a pose for his subject. His admiration of Thérèse Pozzi’s portrait—a sweet depiction of a young woman holding a basket of flowers, by an artist named Blanchard—led his hostess to expect an equally conservative rendering of her husband. But as Sargent observed Pozzi in the flesh, he abandoned any ideas of a conventional portrait of the successful doctor. He wanted to show Pozzi as he really was, a man so flamboyant and dazzling that Sargent, like the most interesting people in Paris, was drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

Searching for the image that would best convey his subject, Sargent turned his eye on the seductive world the doctor ruled like a high priest. The painter discovered that while Pozzi and his socially prominent friends were relentlessly creative—writing, painting, debating aesthetic issues—their greatest preoccupation was sex. If they weren’t doing it, they were talking about it with an abandon that was unfamiliar to Sargent, a man who seems to have had little sexual experience.

Sargent, who encouraged his sitters to receive visitors while they posed, because they were likely to be more relaxed in the company of friends, had many occasions to witness Pozzi in action. At the time, the doctor and Amélie were at the height of their affair. Pozzi’s portrait sessions afforded the pair the chance to flirt while ostensibly chaperoned. Given the intensity of the rumors about their relationship, they must have generated a palpable undercurrent of passion when they were together. But Thérèse, busy with her mother and her own social engagements, continued to overlook her husband’s extramarital activities.

While working on the portrait, Sargent also saw a lot of Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, Pozzi’s friend and frequent dining companion, and a nineteenth-century version of a cool hunter. Called the “Prince of the Aesthetes,” the outrageous Montesquiou started new fads every time he did something daring. When, for example, he painted the walls of his drawing room gray and displayed flowers that matched, the rest of Paris followed suit. He pinned a nosegay of violets at his neck to serve as a tie, and wore a ring that contained a single human teardrop. Having decided that his pet tortoise looked too drab on his carpet, he had the animal’s shell embellished with gold and jewels. He wrote a little, painted a little, and spent the rest of his time seeking pleasure. Montesquiou’s self-indulgence inspired Joris-Karl Huysmans, the author of
À Rebours
(
Against Nature
), to create des Esseintes, among the more decadent characters in literature.

There was talk about Montesquiou’s sexuality: supposedly, he was homosexual and had been confirmed as such by a wild moment with Sarah Bernhardt—he found it so distasteful that he vomited for twenty-four hours afterward. He loved women as idea and even as ideal, but not as flesh-and-blood reality. His affection for Pozzi, though, was tinged with unbridled lust. Their notes to each other—Montesquiou’s written in lavender ink—were playfully erotic, with Pozzi indulging his friend’s tendency to turn the most mundane communication into an impassioned declaration of love. They addressed each other as “my dear, sick soul,” and signed their letters “I am all yours, very yours.”

Judith Gautier, also a visible figure of the period, was another intimate of Pozzi’s whom Sargent came to know at this time. A respected writer and critic, she was fascinated by Oriental culture and habitually incorporated elements from this exotic world into her life. She wrote about Asia in her stories and plays, and she regularly wore kimonos. Gautier traveled in lofty artistic circles, where she developed a reputation for being something like a groupie, a woman who gave herself body and soul to the artists she admired.

Gautier had entered the creative world at birth through her father, the writer Théophile Gautier. She grew up in the company of intellectuals such as Baudelaire and embraced their bohemian lifestyles with a vengeance. As a girl, Gautier was extremely precocious and was given much more freedom than other children her age. Her father, who asserted his own independence by never marrying Gautier’s mother, encouraged his daughter to read progressive writers and to make unconventional life choices. Gautier demonstrated what a freethinker she was when she married Catulle Mendès, a devilishly attractive avant-garde writer.

Mendès was a member of Paris’s new generation of poets, self-absorbed young men who wore their hair long and played at being romantic heroes. It was rumored that he had made up his name, selecting those of the Roman author of libidinous verse, and the Egyptian god with the head of an ox, but his family name really was Mendès. Women found his edgy looks irresistible; he was “as beautiful as a bad angel.” His poetry—laced with pornographic references—was judged obscene, and he served time in prison for offending public morals with it. He made no secret of the fact that he was a philanderer who enjoyed Paris’s demi-monde of prostitutes and criminals. He was said to have contracted a vicious venereal disease from one of his many mistresses.