I Am Madame X (31 page)

In the years after our visit to Parlange, I spent long hours playing the piano at Julie’s atelier. She worked there alone now. Filomena Seguette had died years before, and Sophie Tranchevent had long ago given up art to marry and raise a family. In the still afternoons, especially in the stifling heat of summer, I imagined myself at the keys of the old Pleyel at Parlange, and a deep sense of contentment enveloped me.

I hardly ever saw Pierre, and we only spent time together when Louise and Olivier visited from Dijon. Still, it was a shock when the big brown envelope from my husband’s lawyer’s office arrived one day, containing papers for a legal separation.

Divorce became legal in France in 1884, the year of my portrait, and ever since, the number of families broken apart had been rising steadily. After Madame Jeuland’s husband died, she began pressuring Pierre to leave me and marry her. Finally, years later, he agreed. As I write this, however, we are not yet divorced. Despite his advanced taste in art and design, Pierre was in many ways an old-fashioned man. He hasn’t been able to bring himself to end our marriage.

For me, the saddest part of the separation was moving out of 80, rue Jouffroy, which had been my home for nearly thirty years. Pierre had offered me the house, but it had been his long before he met me, and it would have felt strange living there alone. Instead he bought me an apartment at 123, rue la Cour, on the second floor of an eighteenth-century building. It has elegant high ceilings and rooms large enough to waltz in. Pierre let me take as much of our furniture, china, and silver as I wanted. We divided up our art: Pierre kept La Gandara’s portrait; I took the Sargent sketches and the oil painting the artist had inscribed to Mama. (She was so angry at Sargent after the 1884 Salon that she couldn’t bear to look at it, and she gave it to me.)

A month after I moved in, I was astounded to receive a letter from Sam Pozzi. I had had no communication with him since that long-ago day when Julie and I had visited him in his apartment. Without alluding to our tortured history, he wrote that he wanted to talk to me about an upcoming exhibition of his private art collection at the Galerie Georges Petit. Pozzi explained that his cache of Egyptian and classical sculpture, textiles, and ceramics, and works by Tiepolo, Guardi, and Sargent was so impressive that “my friends convinced me it should see a wider audience.” He added that he was including a few outside pieces to complement his own, and he very much wanted to borrow Sargent’s painting of me offering a toast. “I understand from John that he gave it to your mother,” Pozzi wrote. “I’m hoping you’ll speak to her on my behalf, as I’d love to show it next to the portrait Sargent did of me. The two paintings, I believe, give an excellent sense of the artist’s Paris period.”

Pozzi’s audacity stunned me. Did he actually believe I’d respond to his letter? He was so arrogant that he probably believed I was still in love with him and that I had been pining for him all these years. To be truthful, I never thought about him anymore. Too much time had passed for me to remain angry and hurt over what had happened between us. I was curious to see him, though, so I invited him to tea.

He arrived at four on a cool, sunny afternoon. Had the maid not announced him, I would not have recognized him. The handsome young doctor I had been so in love with was totally subsumed by a thick, coarse-featured, middle-aged man dressed in an ordinary wrinkled coat and trousers. His beard and mustache were white. His gray-speckled hair reeked of oil.

I later learned from Pierre, who sometimes saw Pozzi at his club, that my old paramour was the head of surgery at Hospital Broca, where he often invited his friends to witness his gynecological operations. The favorite physician of the Parisian
haute bourgeoisie,
Pozzi treated both men and women, but he was best known as an expert on female diseases. He lectured frequently on the topic and was widely published in medical journals. A pincer he invented for examining the uterus had been adopted by doctors throughout the world.

Apparently, age had not diminished his ardor for romantic escapades, though over time, if Pierre was to be believed, Pozzi’s tastes had become exceedingly decadent. How my husband knew about it, I don’t know, but Pierre claimed that Pozzi was the founder of a secret sex society, the League of the Rose, which met periodically in a private home, where couples acted out their fantasies on the parlor rug. Looking at Pozzi’s round paunch and stiff legs, it was hard to imagine him frolicking on the floor with nubile beauties.

He took a seat opposite me in front of the fireplace. “It’s good to see you, Mimi,” he said, stealing a glance at himself in the mirror on the wall behind me.

“Congratulations on your success. I hear you’re chief surgeon at Hospital Broca. Frankly, I wouldn’t let you cut my toenails,” I said. That was rude. I looked directly into Pozzi’s still-beautiful brown eyes. But his face registered no emotion.

“I hope you’ll never need a surgeon,” he said quietly.

Averting my eyes from his, I changed the subject. “You want to borrow my Sargent.”

“I’d be most grateful. Besides my own portrait, I have two other works by him. Ralph Curtis and a few others are lending me their pictures. I’ll have a nice wall of Sargents for my little exhibition.”

“Why should I do you a favor?” I asked.

“Because I introduced you to love.” Pozzi smiled broadly, but his expression quickly changed to one of serious concern. “You know, I’m separated from my wife,” he said, leaning his head against the high back of the settee.

“So I heard.”

After tolerating his affairs for years, Thérèse Pozzi had finally thrown her husband out. Now he lived alone in a
hôtel
on avenue d’Iena.

“I heard you’re separated, too,” he said. Pozzi moved his weight forward and looked deeply into my face. I noticed with irritation that his hair oil had stained the upholstery.

“Neither of us is well suited for marriage,” I said.

I like to flatter myself that Pozzi was flirting with me, perhaps even warming up for seduction. At the moment, I did not have a lover, and I felt a twitch of desire as I remembered our trysts in boulevard Saint-Germain. Quickly, though, I realized I did not want to sleep with this pompous white-bearded man.

I stood abruptly, back stiffened and hands folded primly in front of me. “Would you like to see the painting?” I asked.

“It’s here? Sargent said your mother had it.”

“She gave it to me.”

I led Pozzi to the dining room, where the picture hung over the sideboard. He studied it closely for several minutes. “It’s stunning,” he said.

“I’ll make arrangements to have it crated and sent to you.”

“Thank you.” Dr. Pozzi bowed formally and brushed my hand with his mustache. A few minutes later, the maid handed him his hat and coat, and he left.

A month later, I received an invitation to Pozzi’s exhibition. I declined. Several weeks passed, and the exhibition closed, but Pozzi failed to return my painting. I sent him a letter, and he wrote back that the picture had been slightly damaged as it was being removed from the gallery—a clumsy worker had inadvertently kicked it with his boot, and some of the paint in the lower right-hand corner was chipped. Pozzi claimed he was having it restored. That was several years ago, and he’s yet to return it.

When I moved to rue la Cour, I urged Julie to join me. I had never lived alone before, and I thought the two of us could make a nice home. But Julie declined my invitation. She lived in her atelier now, and though it was far from luxurious, she enjoyed being surrounded by her work and being able to paint whenever she wanted. Still, we saw a great deal of each other. Julie often dined with me, and we frequently traveled together. Soon after my separation from Pierre, we took a trip to Berlin. On our first night in town, we went to the opera to hear Wagner, a composer whose genius I still struggled to appreciate.

During the interval, a courtier approached us in the corridor and announced that Kaiser Wilhelm II wished to see us. The courtier led us to the royal box, where a severe-looking man with a ferocious mustache and a withered left arm sat in a blue plush chair.

Julie and I curtsied deeply. “You are John Singer Sargent’s Madame X,” the Kaiser said, the words falling halfway between a statement and a question.

“I am.” I was flattered. Someone had told him I was here.

“I remember seeing your portrait at the Paris Salon a long time ago and being absolutely swept away by it,” the Kaiser continued. “It’s the most fascinating woman’s likeness I’ve ever seen. As a rule, I can’t stand contemporary painting. But I do like Sargent’s work.”

“He’s the master portrait artist of our time,” Julie said.

“I’d like to organize a Sargent exhibition here,” the Kaiser continued, addressing me. “But only, of course, if I can show your portrait. Do you have any influence with the artist?”

“I haven’t spoken to him in more than twenty years,” I confessed. “But I’d be happy to write to him.”

“That would be wonderful!” The Kaiser nodded to Julie and me and dismissed us with a wave of his good hand.

The idea of a Sargent exhibit intrigued me. In fact, I was eager to see my portrait again, to test its power against my pained memories. I even had the confidence to put it before the public. Times had changed. Now, I was sure, people would appreciate it. Or perhaps my feelings had grown dull with age and experience, and I no longer cared what people thought. But I
did
care, I realized as I considered the matter further. And I suppose that a small piece of me hoped to remind the world of an earlier, glorious time, when I sat on the throne of Beauty.

I hadn’t seen Sargent since the 1884 Salon, of course, and I hadn’t talked to him since Pierre and I visited his studio the winter before. In all the years since, there had never been any communication between us—not even a letter. Julie and others had been happy to keep me apprised of his doings, however, even though he had virtually disappeared from the French art scene.

In 1886, Sargent moved permanently to London and quickly rose to become the city’s premier portrait artist. Every day a steady stream of rich women and important men poured into his elegant studio at 33 Tite Street, where—I was told by some Parisian acquaintances who had been there—my portrait hung prominently on the wall. So valued was Sargent’s work in his adopted home that King Edward offered him a knighthood. Sargent turned it down, as he did not want to give up his U.S. citizenship. In America, he was perhaps even more revered than in England. Many illustrious Americans, including writers and presidents, were painted by him on his occasional trips to his parents’ native land. Other rich and celebrated Americans crossed the Channel to sit for him.

In France, however, his reputation has plummeted. Sargent never exhibits here anymore, and you can count on your left hand the paintings by him in French museums.

Still, I wrote to Sargent and told him about meeting the Kaiser, and of the Kaiser’s desire to mount a Sargent exhibition in Berlin. “He’s only interested,” I added proudly, “if my portrait is included.”

Weeks passed, and I heard nothing from the artist. I wrote to him again, and this time received a reply. “My dear Madame Gautreau,” Sargent began:

The idea of Sargent giving up portraiture was incredible but true. Julie started asking around and heard many stories about him turning down commissions. He was said to have lost interest in painting rich aristocrats, and to feel that it showed in his recent pictures of them, which he complained were common and lifeless. What’s more, he was tired of pleasing his sitters, of satisfying their vanity at the expense of his artistic principles.

Around this time,
The Work of John S. Sargent, R.A.
(Royal Academician), a collection of sixty-two photogravures of the artist’s paintings, was published in London. Julie got hold of a copy and brought it over one afternoon. My portrait was the third plate. It was the first image I had seen of it in two decades, and it stunned me. As I studied the picture, something struck me as different than I remembered. It took me a minute to realize what it was: Sargent had repainted the right strap of my dress so that now it was in place on my shoulder. In 1884, after the first blast of revulsion toward the picture, he had pleaded with Salon officials to allow him to retouch it in exactly this manner. They had refused, so he must have done it as soon as he got the canvas home.

The new strap, I thought, diluted not only the sensual impact of the painting, but also the brilliance of its design. Before, the viewer’s eye was pulled to the left, beautifully counterbalancing the profile on the right of the canvas. Now the picture looked a little less interesting.

I wrote Sargent a letter gently suggesting that he repaint the strap in its former position. I pointed out that such a thing was no longer shocking. After all, Courtois’s portrait of me with a fallen strap was in the Musée du Luxembourg. Someday, I noted, Sargent might decide to sell the picture to a museum. In that event, he’d want the painting to represent his original and, in my view, superior vision.