I Am Madame X (25 page)

I had my own ideas of how I wanted to appear in the portrait, and our sessions often deteriorated into battles for control—exactly what Julie had warned me against. Sargent complained that I ignored his instructions about, say, not arching my back and raising my chin. We also argued about my toilette. One day I used a curling iron to twist my naturally wavy hair into ringlets, letting a few tendrils tumble around my face. I thought I looked like Madame Récamier as painted by Gérard. Sargent thought I looked “messy.” He wouldn’t continue until I had wetted my head down and redid my hair in its usual smooth roll.

As the days wore on, I began to despair that Sargent would ever settle on a pose. My patience wore thin. I was tired and distracted by the flurry of parties and dinners I was obliged to attend in nearby Dinard, where many of my Paris acquaintances had summer villas. It was hard to get up early to pose for Sargent when I had been out late the night before.

Then there was the heat. That summer of 1883 was unusually torrid for Brittany. During the middle of the day, with the sun pouring through the windows and tall French doors, the parlor was as hot as Parlange in August. Sweat dripped from my neck and armpits, and I had to take breaks to mop myself up.

The heat bothered Sargent, too. Though he started work every day wearing a waistcoat, by midmorning, he had removed it, folded it over a chair, and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

The boredom was unrelenting, and my body ached from trying to hold still for long periods of time. I began yawning through the sessions, and I’m sure Sargent thought I was hopelessly lazy. One day I actually nodded off, and the artist shook me awake. “Madame, sitting is a challenge to be met,” he said. “Persevere. I know you can rise to the occasion.”

He put a book on my lap and let me read while he sketched. But reading only made me more sleepy.

“I can’t keep my eyes open,” I said.

Sargent suggested I take a short break and catch some fresh air on the terrace. I got up, but before I stepped through the French doors, I heard Louise crying, her voice carrying from the second-floor nursery, down the staircase behind me. I turned quickly, pushing off with my hand from a round Empire table, and twisting and stretching my neck. One of my dress straps slid off my shoulder. I started for the staircase and Louise, but Sargent threw up his arms. “Hold that pose!” he shouted.

“What?”

“Don’t move a muscle.”

I heard footsteps scurrying across the floor upstairs—the nanny on her way to fetch Louise. A moment later, my daughter stopped crying. Louise was being tended to, so I obeyed the artist.

Sargent grabbed a sketch pad and some charcoal, carried his stool across the room, and sat directly in front of me. “Now let’s have a whack at this!” he said as he began to draw.

He quickly completed two sketches, then placed them on the easel and studied them for a moment. “I think I’ve got it now,” he said as I stood there, still twisted awkwardly.

Until then, Sargent had been determined to paint me in a languid, casual pose. Everyone who knows me well knows the sketches he did of me in this manner reflect my personality far better than the formal portrait. In the sketches, I’m sensual and a touch melancholy. But Sargent wasn’t interested in that. He wanted something else, a cooler, more iconic image. I wanted my beauty reflected back to me. I wanted the painting to render me immortal—the eternally adored woman. Sargent wanted to personify elegance.

He did not know me, after all. He was a man who lived in a world of lines, forms, colors—a visual world, not an emotional one. He had expended his nerve force staring at me for hours, but he had never engaged me. I’ll admit, he had a gift for finding a subject’s personality in the physical elements. In countless casual sketches, he had approached that success with me. But he had never really paid enough attention to me—to what existed behind the lines and forms and colors—to understand what he was working with.

Perhaps, over the years, I’ve only come to fool myself, but I suspect that Sargent, in his shy, closed way, had accepted the common scandal-sheet characterizations of me as brazen and wanton. They weren’t true—or, at best, they were true only at moments. I was a hopeless show-off in those days. But so was Sargent. His strutting, however, was confined to the canvas. He was intrigued by my self-display. Perhaps he even admired it because it was so far from his own reserved nature.

In any case, seeing me standing twisted before the door, he had been struck by the sinuous lines of my figure, the boldness of my gaze. In that accidental moment, his idea of me aligned with my pose. He had found his portrait.

After lunch, Sargent unwrapped the large canvas he had had delivered from Paris and put it on his easel. He moved the round table into the center of the parlor. Then he had me stand next to it and arranged my arms and torso in the exact pose I had struck earlier, complete with fallen shoulder strap. He ran to the back of the room and studied me for a minute.

“It needs…something,” he said. His eyes darted around the room and settled on my black fan, which was lying on a chair. Sargent seized it and tucked it into my left hand. “Could you gather up a piece of your skirt, please?”

I obeyed.

“Perfect!”

Sargent wheeled his easel next to me so he could see both me and the canvas in exactly the same light. He leaned over his palette and dipped his brush in a hill of raw umber paint. With great sweeping movements, he outlined my figure. Then he wiped it down and started again. Over the next week, he changed the pose in the picture several times, adjusting my arms and the angle of my head until he had exactly what he wanted.

To achieve his dramatic effect, Sargent pushed reality to the brink. That was the genius of the painting’s design. It was just realistic enough to be alive, and just bizarre enough to fascinate.

Over the following weeks, as I looked at the painting during our breaks, I saw that he had made one side of my body as curvy as he possibly could, and the other side nearly straight. He had pushed in my waist, turned my head as far as it would go, and elongated my left arm.

After Sargent had blocked in the general areas of light and dark, he spent several weeks on my right arm alone. One day he thought it was too close to my body, and he had me hold it farther out. But when he repainted it, it stuck out too far, so he scraped the paint down and started again.

That’s how it went, day after day, week after week. Painting and scraping, painting and scraping. Sargent worked with amazing speed. He’d look at me a second, then dash a few brush strokes onto his canvas and glance at me again. From time to time, he’d dart to the back of the room so he could see how the light played on my figure from a distance. He’d squint at me for a few moments before running forward to apply more paint to the canvas.

For me, the ordeal was almost unbearable. My twisted right arm felt as if it would fall off. My back ached from standing for hours, and my eyes burned from staring out the windows into the full sunlight, which I had to do to keep my profile to Sargent.

On most days, I posed for three hours, from ten to one. In the afternoons, I took walks in the woods with Louise to collect wildflowers. Sargent usually used this time to paint the portrait’s background. One day, as my daughter and I sat on a log by a stream, Sargent strolled by. In one hand, he carried a large butterfly net, and, in the other, a metal box, where he placed the creatures he caught after carefully asphyxiating them with the smoke from his cigar.

I often felt like one of those butterflies caught in Sargent’s net. During my posing sessions, he let me take a break for only fifteen minutes every hour. Usually at this time I played the piano. Though Sargent himself was an accomplished musician, he told me I played better than he did, so he’d relax by letting me entertain him. Often I played Beethoven, sometimes Haydn and Chopin. Once, I made the mistake of playing a sonata by Mozart, a composer Sargent disliked.

“Really, Madame, you should learn some Wagner,” he said.

“I don’t care for Wagner.”

“You should. Through its harmonic complexity, his music captures what is deepest about the human condition.”

“And what is most unmellifluous.”

Sargent looked annoyed. Richard Wagner was one of his musical gods. While I was socializing in Dinard that summer, the artist spent many evenings playing
Tristan, Die Walküre,
and
Parsifal
at the home of Judith Gautier, a writer and Wagner devotee who lived in a seaside house in Saint-Enogat, a short carriage ride away. Madame Gautier was the daughter of Théophile Gautier, and the estranged wife of Catulle Mendès, a writer and critic. I met Judith Gautier once at a Pasdeloup concert in Paris. Dressed in a huge caftan, she was overweight and shapeless, but her face was beautiful, as pale and shimmery as the moon. Her friends called her “the white elephant.” In her thinner days, Madame Gautier was rumored to have been the lover of Victor Hugo and Wagner himself. I thought there was something sexless about her, as indeed there was about Sargent.

He was a priest of art, as celibate as a monk. Though the only nude drawings I saw in his studio were of men, I don’t think he was an invert. I’m sure the idea of sleeping with a man would have been as horrifying to him as the idea of sleeping with a woman. Perhaps more so.

I never felt for a moment that Sargent desired me. He didn’t see me as a human being, only as elements of his art. He was fascinated by my blue-white skin, the kind of skin Colette once described as milk in shadow. But he was having great difficulty capturing it.

“I’m painting paint!” he complained one day. “And the paint I’m painting keeps changing. One day you’re the color of the blotting paper at Guiton’s papeterie. The next, you’re a chlorate-of-potash lozenge. If you’re going to mix your own powder, I wish you’d keep it the same color.”

“So when you look at me, you think of paying bills and gargling?”

He didn’t answer. He was absorbed in studying me. “Maybe I’d have better luck if I could see your natural color. Could you try removing your makeup?” he asked.

I was reluctant. I wanted to decide the face I’d present in the portrait. Why should I let this artist see every vein and pore in my skin?

“I’ll scrub it off, if you promise not to portray me without powder,” I said.

“First, let me see your face,” he insisted.

Grumpily, I retired to my room and wiped a wet cloth over my face, neck, chest, and arms.

When I returned, Sargent took a long look at me. “I’ve never seen such white skin,” he said.

“When I was a girl, my mother took me to a doctor who gave me a concoction mixed with arsenic to make me even whiter.”

“He gave you poison?”

“I know. It made me sick, so I refused to take it.”

Sargent strolled to the table where he had set up his supplies and began mixing colors.

“You promised you wouldn’t paint me without makeup,” I protested.

“I know, Madame. I think I have a clearer idea what to do. You can reapply your powder now.”

With my face redone, we began working again. But after twenty minutes, Sargent threw his brush down. He flopped into a chair and held his face in his hands. “Damn,” he said, using the only swear word he allowed himself. “I can’t do it. You’re unpaintable.”

Sargent decided he needed to get away, to take a vacation from my portrait. The next day, he left for Paris, then a brief trip to the Netherlands. But the excursion did little to settle him. When he returned, he was more agitated than ever. Studying portraits by Frans Hals in the Haarlem museum only made him despair of ever painting a masterpiece himself.

To add to his vexations, Mama had arrived for a visit, and she insisted on attending my sittings. She was full of complaints about the portrait. She didn’t like the dark, plain background, the pose, the skin color. Above all, she objected to the fallen shoulder strap.

“You must paint it in place!” she insisted.

“Oh, Madame, a trifle like that you can do yourself when you get the canvas home.” Sargent winked at me.

Mama glared at us. “And what makes you think I’d ever hang this picture in my house?” Her voice was shrill. “Look at the skin tone. She looks dead, two-dimensional. Can’t you put some color in besides that sickly purple-white?”

“Mama, this isn’t a commissioned portrait. Will you leave Monsieur Sargent alone?”

Sargent sighed heavily and put down his brush. “I’m working on the color,” he wearily told her. “The picture is far from finished, Madame Avegno. You must wait to pass judgment until you see the completed work.”

“I’ll feel the same then,” she snapped. With a great swish of her silk taffeta skirt, she strode out of the room.

Sargent dipped his brush into a hill of brown paint. “I’m beginning to regret you have a mother,” he confessed.

“I regretted it a long time ago.”

That evening, Sargent went to Saint-Enogat to visit Judith Gautier. At nine, just as the sky was turning from orangy-pink to deep blue, the maids lit the paraffin lamps in the dining room and Mama, Madame Gautreau, Millicent, and I took our places around the long polished wood table. A moment later, the footmen brought in the first course,
soupe de cresson.

“I like it when Monsieur Sargent isn’t here, because then there’s more food for the rest of us,” Millicent chirped. It was true. Sargent had a gargantuan appetite. I’ve never seen anyone, even Gambetta, consume so much at one sitting, though at this point in his life he remained slim. At meals, Sargent looked lovingly at the food as it was brought in, and began to attack it as soon as it was placed in front of him.

Just as the maids cleared the second course, a delicious
suprême de volaille,
one of the footmen announced Sargent. The artist walked into the dining room carrying a small wood panel in one arm and a paint box in the other.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, addressing Pierre’s mother. “For some reason, I feel inspired tonight. Madame Gautier and I dined on the terrace; perhaps the sea breeze blew some fresh ideas through my head. Would you mind if I made an oil sketch of your daughter-in-law while you enjoy dessert?”