Strapless (4 page)

The
passage
was a good idea, but the department store was an even better one. Instead of one building with many different stores owned by many different people, the
grand magasin,
as the French department store was called, would have one roof, one owner, and many different “departments.” While Haussmann did not invent the department store, he gave developers both the inspiration and the opportunity for this retailing phenomenon. All over Paris, small and antiquated family businesses specializing in gloves, umbrellas, fabrics, and other merchandise were destroyed by Haussmann’s wrecking ball to make way for new streets, buildings, and monuments. Aristide Boucicaut, an imaginative entrepreneur, took a small endangered drapery shop and turned it into a big idea. He opened the Bon Marché department store, which eventually occupied an entire city block and aspired to sell absolutely everything. Boucicaut modeled the interior of his store after Haussmann’s boulevards, using wide aisles to lead shoppers from one department’s “neighborhood” to another.

Zola immortalized Boucicaut and his invention in his best-selling novel
Au Bonheur des Dames
(
The Ladies’ Paradise
), where he revealed the inner workings of the Bon Marché as a self-contained city. The men and women who worked there also lived there—eating, sleeping, and playing out their own dramas within the store, during and after hours.

Zola analyzed the interaction between the store and its customers, intuiting that this new form of retailing was really a form of seduction. Owners would cleverly entice customers by creating a relatively private and comfortable setting where women could spend time as well as money. Inside the department store, ladies could sip wine cordials at a buffet, or write letters in a large room stocked with paper and pens, and furnished with lounge chairs. Their notes, including clandestine communications to lovers, were quickly delivered by messengers while the women stayed in the store to await a reply. There were attendants for their children, counters where they could sample perfumes, and dressing rooms where they could try on the latest fashions. At the Bon Marché, and Le Louvre and Au Printemps and the other department stores that soon followed, women felt protected from the unpleasant realities of everyday life. These stores were splendid, self-contained universes created specifically for women, where their only obligation was to live out fantasies and spend money.

Customers were attracted to the stores by eye-catching window displays and merchandise from all over the world, and by affordable items that served as bait. While some people remained outside, window-shopping—“licking the windows,” as the French expression
leche-vitrines
would have it—those who ventured inside found a dreamworld of vast assortments of clothing, accessories, and home furnishings, all under one roof.

Shoppers in these stores did not need cash. They charged their purchases to a personal account and had them delivered to their homes—a practice that could encourage even the most parsimonious woman to overspend. And the prices were set: because department stores purchased their goods in bulk, they could undersell boutiques, thereby making shoppers feel prudent just as they were being most profligate. Shoppers enjoyed two other popular features as well: sales and a revolutionary returns policy. The Bon Marché dazzled Paris with its first white sale, a January event that provoked shoppers into a buying frenzy. The store advertised discount prices on all white-colored merchandise, knowing that the customers who came to take advantage of the sale would also make full-price purchases (a retailing concept equally valid, and practiced, today). Department stores devised their own calendar of sales throughout the year to move stock at a faster rate. When seasons changed, merchandise would change with it. And if shoppers had second thoughts about any purchase, they could bring it back for a refund. This unprecedented policy had a tremendous psychological effect on consumers. It encouraged them to buy more, because they knew they could always change their minds. Women who shopped just for the thrill of shopping were liberated from their consciences; they could tell themselves they would return the merchandise, even if deep down they knew they never would.

The
grands magasins
made for a heady, near-libertine mindset and a new social malady: kleptomania, or “department store thefts,” as they were labeled in 1883 by a psychiatrist, Henri Legrand du Saulle. Respectable women who would never consider breaking the law elsewhere were caught stealing from stores. When questioned, they claimed to have been overcome by dizziness and an almost sexual feeling. Incapable of resisting the impulse to take what they wanted from an overwhelming array of merchandise, they surrendered, despite knowing it was wrong. Such behavior would have been impossible in the smaller, old-style shops, where merchandise was not on view and the relationship between customers and attentive shop owners was much more personal and protected.

This Paris of department stores, massive apartment buildings, and tree-lined boulevards as far as the eye could see was where Marie Virginie and Amélie Avegno settled in 1867. With its considerable changes since her previous visit, the city was at once recognizable and strange to Marie Virginie. It helped that, just as in New Orleans, she was surrounded by relatives, including her brother-in-law Jean-Bernard and his family and relatives by marriage, and by other Creoles who had come to France to enjoy a lifestyle not available to them in the South during Reconstruction.

Marie Virginie, Amélie, and Julie occupied a series of apartments, among them the Parlange residence on the fashionable Rue Cambon, the new name Haussmann had given to the Rue Luxembourg. They lived in a kind of cocoon, Marie Virginie cultivating her daughter with the intention of having her emerge a beautiful butterfly, to be collected by a wealthy man. In their native city, legends had circulated about the
filles à la cassette,
French maidens who went to Louisiana in the 1720s under the supervision of Ursuline nuns to find husbands. Amélie had made the reverse journey. Her new world was the Old World, but her mission was the same: to find a husband and make an advantageous marriage.

Before the transplanted Avegnos could grow too cozy in their new surroundings, they found themselves in another war. In July 1870, after a series of territorial skirmishes, France declared war on Prussia. The French, utterly convinced of their military and moral superiority, discovered, however, that they were not invincible. They suffered one humiliating defeat after another, culminating in early September with the Prussian capture of Napoleon III and a hundred thousand of his men. Disenchanted with their emperor, the French replaced him with a provisional government headed by Léon Gambetta, a man of the people who was minister of the interior, together with General Louis Trochu, the military governor of Paris, and Jules Favre, a statesman and politician.

One colorful, though fanciful, story places the expatriate Avegnos near the center of this turbulence. Jean-Bernard had become very close to Gambetta, who, in contrast to the Second Empire’s thin-blooded aristocrats, was an earthy man famous for his appetites and his practical approach to politics and government. After Prussian armies cut off Paris in September 1870, Gambetta chose a singular way to escape his enemies. On October 7, high over the heads (and weapons) of the invaders, Gambetta and companions made a dramatic flight to safety in a hot-air balloon, the
Armand Barbès.
The flight took four hours, ending in Épineuse, some sixty miles from Paris.

Gambetta’s companions on the flight were never identified publicly. But the genealogist Robert de Berardinis believes that Jean-Bernard Avegno was one of them. There were rumors at the time that eleven-year-old Amélie was there as well.

The Prussian army surrounded Paris for more than four months, devastating the city and causing severe famine. The Franco-Prussian War ended abruptly, with the two sides signing an armistice in January 1871. The Prussians staged a victory march up the Champs-Élysées, angering Parisians so much that they gathered afterward to scrub the streets and remove all traces of the enemy. Beyond Paris, the rest of the country was shaken and insecure. Adolphe Thiers, a statesman who had opposed the war, was chosen to lead the government. Many citizens objected, claiming that he had negotiated a humiliating peace with the Germans. Mobs filled the streets, demanding a new leader.

Once again, Amélie and her family found themselves in a civil war, this one within Paris. The Commune was a brief but intense revolution. The Communards, as the dissidents were called, did more damage to Paris than had the Prussian invaders. In an attempt to wipe out the decadence of Napoleon III and his empire, they blocked Haussmann’s glorious boulevards with primitive barricades and set fire to hundreds of buildings, including the Tuileries palace and the City Hall.

The Commune ended in May 1871, after an especially bloody week of fighting. With the civil war over, Parisians turned their attention to rebuilding the city. A new French government, the Third Republic, was launched, along with a new social order. The aristocracy could flaunt their titles, but their influence was restricted to wedding announcements and guest lists in the society columns. Politicians and businessmen were the real corner-stones of the new economy.

Marie Virginie recognized that the social and political upheaval would work in her favor. Her American-born daughter had a better chance of a good match now that the rules governing society were more relaxed. Socially ambitious mothers had once scoured the aristocracy for the best husbands for their daughters, even though men with titles rarely married down. Now young women could hope for wealthy businessmen as potential suitors, with fortunes that could propel them into the best social circles. Businessmen were even more desirable than aristocrats, because they would not be as selective in choosing a wife. They had liabilities. Their bloodlines were not blue, their family histories were not distinguished, and they held no rank in the
Almanach de Gotha.

Every aspect of Amélie’s life was carefully controlled, according to the customs of the time. She attended a convent school, paid for by an uncle. It is doubtful that she was encouraged to learn much; young unmarried women were shielded from too much education in the hope of keeping their minds pure and uncorrupted. This may seem somewhat futile for the permissive Paris of the 1870s, but it should be pointed out that many newspapers and novels were forbidden to young women because they offered visions of life they should never see.

Chaperoned by her mother, Amélie was allowed to attend select parties, teas, and musical evenings, social gatherings that could expose her to the right sort of marriageable men. Jean-Bernard Avegno’s family and their cousins the del Castillos were excellent social contacts.

Marie Virginie, still attractive herself, assumed the role of the widow Avegno at these functions, investing her energy in the packaging and marketing of her daughter, who was becoming more and more beautiful, and therefore valuable. Amélie emerged from her cosseted adolescence not so much a butterfly as a swan. She was extremely curvaceous, with an ample upturned bosom and a narrow waist. Her upper body, with long, elegant neck and sculpted shoulders, suggested a Greek statue; her pure white skin looked more like marble than human flesh.

While her figure may have evoked a classical ideal of beauty, Amélie’s face was an original. The Avegno nose, a gift from her father, was impossibly long and dominated her face. This feature gave her no choice but to look haughty: she always had to look down her nose at the world. Her dark eyes were framed by emphatic brows, and her hair, also a testimony to the strength of the Avegno genes, was a coppery red.

The moment Amélie entered society, still a teenager but displaying signs of womanhood, potential suitors realized that she would be a magnificent trophy for a husband to display. Marriageable men and their mothers scrutinized the Ternant-Avegno gene pool, already wary of the girl’s American roots. Knowing that an emotionally unstable relative like Amélie’s aunt Julie would be a handicap, Marie Virginie had her moved to Burgundy to live with relatives of their stepfather, Charles Parlange. Sometime around 1876, Julie returned to Pointe Coupee Parish, where her mother had petitioned to have her committed to an asylum, subject as she was to “an habitual state of mental derangement, insanity, and madness.”

Although Marie Virginie had her hopes pinned on a spectacular match for her daughter, when Prince Charming showed up, he appeared more like a frog. At forty, Pierre-Louis Gautreau was more than twice Amélie’s age. He was somber, bearded, and unusually short: family members described him as resembling Toulouse-Lautrec, who was so small that he seemed to be sitting when he was standing. But Gautreau was a member of the Legion of Honor, a commander of the Order of Christ of Portugal, and a commanding captain of the Tenth Territorial Artillery Regiment of the French army. He had fought against the Prussians and later against the Communards. He had a solid reputation, plenty of money, and a handsome country house in Brittany.

One of the sources of his income was less than glamorous. The Gautreaus made their fortune in banking and shipping, but also in fertilizer, specifically bat guano, imported from Chile. Pierre and his brother Charles spent a great deal of time traveling to and from that distant part of the world. Pierre’s self-appointed nickname, Pedro, was intended to emphasize his South American connections and, perhaps, to add exoticism to a bland image. This is the name he used in business, in real estate, and in politics.

It is unlikely that the nineteen-year-old Amélie considered her suitor an especially romantic package. Yet she would have been prepared to accept the compromises that went with a wealthy husband. Money, and everything it could buy, would compensate for any girlish notions of love or attraction. And odd as it might sound, for Amélie a marriage to Pedro represented freedom. Once a young woman was safely married and protected by her husband’s good name, she could start breaking the rules that dictated absolute decorum for the bride-to-be. A woman could go anywhere if her husband accompanied her. She could flirt. She could wear revealing clothes. She could go out into society without a chaperone. She could even have affairs, if she did so discreetly. With marriage, Amélie’s years of preparation would be over and the fun would begin.