Strapless (22 page)

With the season closed after the last equestrian events and other celebrations, Amélie returned to Brittany for another summer at Les Chênes. She hoped for a retreat from Paris and the humiliation she had suffered there.

But bad news seemed to follow the Gautreaus. Pedro’s second attempt in local politics failed. According to the area newspaper
Le Salut,
the contest was a heated one, and Pedro was rebuffed by the voters of Paramé after he “placed himself everywhere.” Because St.-Malo and Dinard were vacation spots for many of the same people who were gossiping about
Madame X
in Paris, Amélie kept a low profile in order to avoid unpleasant encounters. Her name was not mentioned in the coverage of the casino ball in St.-Malo, nor did she make an appearance at the races that season.

The outbreak of cholera in southern Europe that summer occasioned Amélie’s first really public appearance: a September charity concert to raise money for victims of the epidemic. Amélie herself organized the event; its success proved that her name and social standing, while tarnished, still had cachet.

Amélie enjoyed being out in society and had no intention of hiding forever. But like Sargent, she needed a strategy for dealing with the effects of the scandal. The gossip would subside if she gave people something else to talk about. It was time to hold her head high, step into the spotlight, and unveil a new image.

Amélie returned to Paris with a mission. She would plunge into the new social season, accept all the usual invitations to dinners, opening nights, and charity balls, and blithely behave as if
Madame X
had never happened. Luckily, the painting was locked up in Sargent’s studio, and her hope was that it would stay there so people would forget about it. Meanwhile, her instincts—the same ones that previously had served her well—were telling her to entrust her image to another painter, someone who would create an accurate, and more flattering, tribute to her beauty. It would not be quick or painless—portraits took months, sometimes years, to complete—yet she was willing to be patient, to get it right this time.

She found an artist whose name is lost to us, but who could follow directions without worrying about proving his originality. She asked him to paint her in a manner reminiscent of Thomas Gainsborough, the eighteenth-century English painter whose formal depictions of the aristocracy in such works as
The Blue Boy
defined portraiture in his day. In this portrait of Amélie, painted probably in 1885 or 1886, she stands in a jaunty riding habit, her hair spilling from a feathered derby, one hand clasped to her breast. Her nose, always identifiable, dominates her face. Her jacket and shirt, buttoned and ribboned at the neck, are proper to the point of being prim. The undistinguished artist failed to come up with one seductive brushstroke.

No surprise, then, that this unremarkable painting—and its creator—dropped into obscurity. It did no service to Amélie either, failing to attract attention as she had intended. The critics had nothing to say, and there was no mention of the painting in the gossip columns.

Before
Madame X,
Amélie’s arrival at a party could cause a near-riot in the streets and produce inches of copy in newspapers. And immediately after
Madame X,
she had become used to seeing volumes of negative publicity about herself and the portrait. But the absence of any public reaction to her latest portrait was Amélie’s worst nightmare: people were starting to forget her.

For the three years directly following the 1884 Salon, Amélie sought to keep herself in the public eye. She went wherever it was important to be seen, rarely missing a premiere, a political reception, or a charity gala. But she knew that her look, once her surest claim to fame, did not have the same effect on people as before. Perdican and other columnists were less enthusiastic about her activities, allotting her the same terse lines they gave to other society women.

Worse still, Amélie’s thirtieth birthday was approaching—the dividing line between youthful desirability and dreaded middle age. How could she reclaim her celebrity and make Paris notice her once again?

Unveiling yet another new portrait, Amélie concluded, would be the most effective way to call attention to herself. She had learned an important lesson from her last experience. A portrait painted in the style of Gainsborough, for instance, was out of the question. Anything conventional would be ignored, when what she wanted was to provoke the opposite reaction.

Before she could settle on a style, a concept, or a pose, she had to find an artist. She needed someone who could create the unexpected; this ruled out established portrait painters like Carolus-Duran or Charles Chaplin. She selected instead Gustave Courtois, an artist in search of a big-idea portrait to display at the Salon. The situation recalls that of some years earlier, when Amélie and Sargent collaborated on the ambitious idea for his 1884 Salon submission. Now, however, Amélie was determined to stage-manage the sittings for her own purposes.

She dressed carefully for her first session with Courtois, outfitting herself in virginal white instead of black. Her gown, a confection of soft organza and lace, molded itself to her curvaceous body at the same time it drifted around her like a cloud. She held a wispy shawl in her hands, and one wrist was encircled by a multi-strand pearl bracelet with a jeweled clasp. She posed with her head in profile, just as she had in
Madame X,
but this time she turned her face to her right. Her neck was long, her nose prominent, and her hair swept up into a loose chignon.

Inarguably, Amélie was very pretty in Courtois’s portrait. It could elicit no nasty comments about her corpselike skin or haughty gaze. But she had to accomplish more than merely appear attractive. She had to do something to make viewers look twice. So, incredibly, she slipped the left strap of her gown off her shoulder and let it hang. The fallen strap, a deliberate reference to
Madame X,
made her seem even more undressed in this painting than she had seemed in the Sargent.

In his portrait, Sargent had made it appear as if Amélie’s shoulder strap had slipped accidentally. But here the effect came across as calculated, as if Amélie and Courtois were trying to instigate a response by showing an instantly familiar, but prettier and more sensual, version of her former self. This time, the fallen strap was Amélie’s cry for attention. Immediately after the 1884 Salon, she had wished that everyone would stop talking about her. Now she believed that anything was better than being ignored, even if she had to drop her strap to be noticed.

The painting was exhibited at the 1891 Salon under the title
Portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau, Wife of the Banker.
One critic called it “a faithful image,” but it was not discussed at length—favorably or unfavorably. This year Amélie was just another picture on the wall. She must have been disappointed by the absence of an impact, a disturbing signal that not even her daring display of flesh could make her headline news once again.

Amélie’s social life too reflected her change in status. She still preferred the company of famous men to that of her unremarkable spouse when she went out into society. But lately her escorts were not as exciting as they had once been. She was seen at events with elderly diplomats, like Baron Mohrenheim, the Russian ambassador, and Henri Brisson, former president of the Council of Ministers. To call them “distinguished” is being kind. They were bald, grizzled, and wrinkled, not handsome and sexy, like Pozzi, or charismatic, like Gambetta.

 

There were nights when Amélie had to resort to younger fans for company. In 1892, she appeared at the opera with fifteen-year-old Gabriel Pringue, a friend of her daughter’s. Pringue had been at St.-Malo as a child of four, when Amélie was there as a young woman of twenty-one. Pringue’s governess refused Amélie’s invitation on his behalf because she knew Madame Gautreau had a reputation and it might be unseemly for the boy to appear alone with her.

After the teenage Pringue had complained bitterly enough, the governess agreed to chaperone them. The three set out in Amélie’s carriage; she wore a white gown with simple lines and her diamond crescent in her hair. People stared as the trio walked up the grand staircase, and whispered about Amélie’s skin, her hair, her décolletage. Women raised their opera glasses for a closer look and confirmed her identity to their companions. The fact that they had to use glasses indicated that Amélie was right to worry about her standing. When she was at the height of her popularity, no one would have needed binoculars to know she was in the opera hall: a mounting commotion would have announced her presence.

In 1897, Amélie was ready for another portrait. She commissioned Antonio de la Gandara, who specialized in portraits of society women and celebrities including Sarah Bernhardt, Paul Verlaine, and Robert de Montesquiou. Gandara was familiar with
Madame X
—he had exhibited at the 1884 Salon—and he had seen the Courtois. But he had no intention of evoking either of these paintings in his portrait. He studied his sitter with great concentration, determined to find a fresh way of portraying her.

After much thought, Gandara posed his thirty-eight-year-old subject in profile. Unlike Sargent and Courtois, who had emphasized her bosom, he tactfully made her back central to his painting, thus avoiding the question of whether or not her figure was all that it used to be. She wore an opulent white gown, which fell seductively from her bare shoulders and draped her waist with folds of satin. In her right hand was a large feathered fan. Her neck and upper arms, among the first parts of the body to show signs of age, were made to appear firm. Her hair was arranged in a chignon that somehow made her nose seem less prominent. The portrait was understated and elegant. The Gautreaus preferred it to all the others and hung it in their home on the Rue Jouffroy.

 

As Amélie turned forty in 1899, the world around her was changing dramatically, bursting with new sights, new inventions, and new pastimes. The Eiffel Tower dominated Paris’s landscape. Automobiles cruised Haussmann’s boulevards. The Lumière brothers dazzled audiences with their first motion pictures.

But there was nothing new about Amélie. Her copper-colored hair required a henna rinse to keep it that hue. Her aristocratic chin was softening. Her slender body had filled out and looked substantial and overripe. Montesquiou, who had been so enchanted with Amélie when she entered society as an alluring young bride, was one of the first to ridicule her when she showed signs of age. “To keep her figure she is now obliged to force it,” he mocked, “Not to the mold of Canova but a corset.” The sculptor Antonio Canova was known for his exquisite marble representations of shapely women.

In “Venus,” a satirical poem dedicated to Amélie, Montesquiou found other grounds upon which to ridicule her.