Strapless (5 page)

Marriage offered independence to Pedro as well, who at the time of his engagement to Amélie still lived in his family’s apartment in Paris. He had waited until middle age to marry, possibly, in part, because of his formidable mother, Louise La Chambre Gautreau, who came from one of Brittany’s most important and wealthy families. The La Chambres were from St.-Malo, a walled city on the Atlantic, seemingly at the edge of the world, in an area whose magnificent beaches and unusually temperate climate have earned it the name “Emerald Coast.” A ripe location for attack from enemies because it was exposed to the sea, St.-Malo endured centuries of invasions by the English, and was almost completely destroyed by German bombers during World War II. On a more romantic note, St.-Malo has had a very colorful population, including corsairs, seafaring adventurers licensed by the king to “confiscate” booty from English ships. An ideal departure point for ships sailing west and south, the city was home to noted explorers, among them Jacques Cartier, the sailor who discovered Canada.

The ocean is a powerful presence in St.-Malo. When the tide is low—and it is low frequently within each twenty-four-hour period—boats sit askew in the harbor mud, looking as if they had been plucked from the water by a drunken giant and placed haphazardly on land. In nearby Cancale, low tide reveals vast expanses of oyster beds in unexpected geometric patterns.

When the tide rushes in, the view changes dramatically. The ocean is higher in the bay of St.-Malo than anywhere else on the European coast. The waves are enormous, sometimes as high as forty feet and more, and have been known to reach into the streets of the town and pull people to their deaths. Residents boast that the air in St.-Malo is unique too in that it contains high levels of ozone.

Ozone or no, visitors sense the city’s intoxicating atmosphere instantly. St.-Malo has always been considered a wild place, its unpredictable beauty inspiring figures such as François-René de Chateaubriand, whose melancholy novels introduced nineteenth-century readers to the concept of Romanticism. Here, far from the stuffy and superficially correct Paris salons, anything could happen. St.-Malo was not uncivilized—the city’s lively social season was reported extensively in the Parisian newspapers—but the air was definitely conducive to recreation, especially in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Everyone who had money, or who pretended to, would flee the heat of Paris in June, as soon as the races at Longchamps were over. St.-Malo was a favorite destination, even more so with the new railroads, which shortened to mere hours trips that used to take days and weeks. Energetic travelers could take trips within trips: some owners of châteaus and country houses would keep those plush summer residences for a while, then abandon them to vacation at spas and hotels elsewhere, such as Nice and Deauville. With enough servants to pack their voluminous luggage, and baggage cars to transport it, anything was possible. Brittany, a comfortable train ride from Paris, was a very desirable place to have a summer home.

Pedro Gautreau was born in St.-Malo and grew up on an estate in nearby Paramé. The estate was known as Les Chênes (the oaks) because the spacious park surrounding its château was filled with oak trees. Pedro’s mother, Madame Louise, had inherited the property from her father; a more magnificent estate, La Briantais, was occupied by her brother Charles-Émile. The differences in financial circumstances always irritated the money-conscious Gautreaus, and may well have been the source of an ongoing feud between the families.

Indeed, a constant awareness of sibling inequity may have lain behind Madame Louise’s extreme money-consciousness. She was known to never forget where a penny—or more appropriately, a centime—came from, or where it went, and she recorded every detail of her family’s financial activities in a large multicolumn ledger. Although it consists mainly of terse entries, the ledger is revealing, as between the lines is a great deal of attitude. Madame Louise kept her son on a short leash, conscientiously listing the cost of having his pants cleaned and the price of a new chamber pot for his room. She entered every minute expense with the apparent satisfaction of one who thinks she is saving money even as she spends it.

 

According to her monthly calculations, Pedro worked his way through very little of the Gautreau fortune during his bachelor years—until the fateful day in June 1878, when, according to the ledger, he purchased the all-important book that indicated his readiness to marry and start a family of his own. Called the
livre mariage,
this served as the official record of a marriage, as well as of the births and deaths within a family.

When lovely nineteen-year-old Amélie Avegno entered his life, Pedro’s expenses skyrocketed. In August 1878, the month of his wedding, Madame Louise enthusiastically took on the role of judgmental mother-in-law, communicating intense disapproval with every slash of her pen as she totaled the escalating expenses. Carefully noted in her ledger: 80 francs for Amélie’s wedding bouquet; 503 francs for her gown; 187 francs for a bracelet Pedro bought for his mother-in-law; and miscellaneous fees for the photographer and the notary. Louise’s debit columns grew and grew. There is no hint of maternal pleasure, pride, or celebration in this mean-spirited accounting of the Avegno-Gautreau nuptials.

Amélie and Pedro’s wedding required the preparation of extensive legal documents, including a long and specific marriage contract. Bride and groom elected to keep their respective property separate, in a
régime dotal,
by which each of them would continue to own anything they individually brought to the marriage. They would instead share anything that came to them as a result of “the profits and earnings made during the marriage.” Pedro’s holdings, principally real estate and business investments, were valued at 1,750,000 francs. Amélie’s, consisting of New Orleans real estate inherited from her father and her sister, was evaluated at 166,000 francs; her clothing, jewelry, and piano—her most important possessions—were valued at an additional 15,500.

The marriage contract was signed on June 19 in Paris. Friends and family members, among them Amélie’s and Pedro’s mothers, attended the signing ceremony. Amélie’s sixty-year-old grandmother, Virginie Parlange, had made the trans-Atlantic journey with her son Charles. The signatures of these three women were high up on the document, an indication of great respect.

Sandwiched between the signatures of the two Virginies—Ternant Avegno and Parlange—is that of Amélie Avegno. Her letters are clear, even, and well formed, yet there is something girlish and romantic about their slant, as if she had practiced to give her signature a certain flourish. She added an accent over the third letter of her last name to match that over the third letter of her first name, perhaps for a symmetrical effect. Virginie, the first name she was given at birth and her most obvious connection to her mother and grandmother and her New Orleans heritage, had disappeared.

 

After the signing of the contract came the wedding itself. Records indicate that Amélie and Pedro were married on August 1, but no location is specified. The church in St.-Malo would have been a likely choice at that time of year, when the summer season in Brittany was at its height. Amélie’s couture wedding gown was made of velvet. She wore expensive jewels, purchased by her fiancé for the occasion, and carried a large bouquet of flowers. Her uncle Charles escorted her down the aisle. He had spent much of the summer in France and Italy studying beekeeping, a business he hoped to import to Parlange plantation.

The newlyweds traveled to Belgium for their honeymoon, then returned to Paris to enter society as a couple. They felt themselves most welcomed among the politicians and self-made businessmen who were the rising stars of the Third Republic. Established families—moth-eaten aristocrats who lived in the faubourgs, the old neighborhoods reserved for high society—tried to close ranks against parvenus like the Gautreaus. But in the new order, these older families were rapidly becoming social dinosaurs. Instead of looking back to ancestry and antique conventions, the members of the new society looked to the future, and to establishing their own rules.

Paris was expanding west, to the suburbs surrounding the Parc Monceau, where recently landscaped boulevards offered spacious and spanking-new maisonettes and apartments. The Gautreaus moved into a stately private four-story home on the fashionable Rue Jouffroy, perfect for introducing a respectable, married beauty and her husband into the glittering Parisian beau monde. Wide, lined with trees, and punctuated by graceful traffic circles, the Rue Jouffroy was an ideal residential location: close enough to be convenient to the center of Paris, but far enough to avoid the unsavory aspects of the old city. The air was cleaner, the views better, and Paris’s unsightly poor safely distant.

Immediately after the wedding, a telling line appeared in the Gautreau ledger. The entry
“toilette de Madame”
informed of Amélie’s 200-to-300-franc monthly allowance without mentioning her name, her identity reduced to the title “Madame,” as John Singer Sargent would use years later. Pedro’s mother referred to the other members of the family by their given names.

 

With her allowance and the charge accounts she established at stylish stores in Paris, Amélie embarked on outfitting her new home. She purchased rugs of all sizes to cover her floors. She ordered a dining room table and chairs, bookcases, accessories such as bronze candelabra, paintings, and selected
japonaiserie,
including crockery and a brass incense burner. Anything that evoked Japan was in vogue at the time, in part because of Edmond de Goncourt, whose passion for Japanese design inspired a fad embraced by retailers and customers seeking something foreign, different, in their ordinary lives.

In her home decor, Amélie combined smart contemporary details with touches of the past, creating a splendid stage on which to make her debut as a married woman. She had reached an exciting new period in her life. Though she was still a teenager, her marital status had brought her into adulthood. Her mother, who had guarded her until now, was reduced to a background presence instead of a force. Amélie had stepped into the limelight.

Pedro too was experiencing a taste of liberation. The new mansion was the first residence he did not share with his mother and some of his grown siblings, who all lived together in an apartment in Paris and on their estate in Brittany. After being the dutiful son for decades, he was finding it an adventure to have a young, beautiful wife and a home of his own.