Strapless (6 page)

The couple made their official social debut in the fall of 1878, when fashionable Parisians, back from their summer sojourns in the country, were ready to devote themselves to the next few months of dinners, operas, and balls. Armed with Pedro’s income, the new title of Madame, and the Ternant-Avegno legacy of beauty and ambition, Amélie Gautreau set forth to conquer the City of Light.

The social and economic changes that had transformed Paris in the 1870s made the city a more welcoming place for a beautiful upstart like Amélie, who represented the new French-woman, and more specifically the
parisienne.
Urbane, spirited, and independent, the modern Parisian woman enjoyed increased freedom of movement in a city that offered safe, pleasant destinations such as parks, stores, and tearooms. She was eager to try challenging new inventions, such as the bicycle. And she was ambitiously climbing the social ladder, capitalizing on the fact that republican society promoted upward mobility and encouraged the moneyed and upper classes to blend.

It was their preoccupation with beauty that made modern Frenchwomen famous around the world. Known for her “genius for grooming” and the “fragrance of sensuality that rises from her bosom and falls from her skirts,” the
parisienne
was a model to be copied by other women. In New York, London, and New Orleans, women patronized French designers and slavishly adopted French beauty rituals, hoping to make themselves as alluring as their continental counterparts.

Parisian women grew so experienced at perfecting their sophisticated look that, paradoxically, they made it seem effortless. In truth, they had to spend long hours at their dressing tables to accomplish that air of easy elegance. Fashion magazines, the most timely how-to guides then available to women, were popular sources of advice and instruction.
La Mode Parisienne,
a favorite ladies’ publication, offered head-to-toe suggestions for colors, fabrics, hemlines, bustles, corsets, and other sartorial concerns. The magazines presented fashion forecasts with detailed illustrations of models wearing the latest designs. These illustrations, often created by women, were printed from engraved plates, and thus the term “fashion plate” to describe a person with style.

“In Paris, half the female population lives off fashion, while the other half lives for fashion,” wrote Emmeline Raymond, a social observer. Ladies with social aspirations were expected to be constantly careful about their appearance and their comportment, and to follow strict rules regarding dress. Morning outings called for a dark outfit and a heavy veil. Luncheon, unless it was a family occasion, required a change of dress, as did receiving days at home, when gloves had to be worn. Dinner and the opera allowed, even dictated, a low-cut dress.

Books about beauty were immensely popular. Women were given step-by-step guidance to navigate the complicated toilette, including instruction about makeup, hairdressing, and hygiene. Doctors and journalists wrote advice books that provided scientific data and emphasized health. But the most popular beauty books were written by aristocrats, or women pretending to be aristocrats; it was thought that advice from a “royal” would carry more weight with socially ambitious readers. Despite the new Republican government, readers believed that women with titles were more experienced in the ways of beauty.

In one such book, translated as
My Lady’s Dressing Room,
a Baroness Staffe dispensed practical advice to women for effective and up-to-the-minute beauty routines. The baroness encouraged women to employ artifice to hide their imperfections: “There is no falsehood in it,” she wrote. “What is life, what is love, without illusion?” She counseled her readers to set up two dressing tables in a well-lighted room, one for washing, the other for styling hair and applying makeup. To combat wrinkles, women should spend one entire day a week in bed and apply various creams and treatments to every part of the body. Bathe and bathe and bathe again, the baroness admonished, ignoring the fact that in most households a hot bath was difficult to come by, that tubs of steaming water had to be ordered from door-to-door vendors. As laid out in the baroness’s long and detailed directions, beauty was a full-time job.

With the pursuit of beauty a national pastime, nineteenth-century French writers and artists were fascinated by the subject and were constantly analyzing it in their works. One major question was whether beauty was enhanced or diminished by artifice of the type advocated by Baroness Staffe. Should women use cosmetics, or should they rely on what nature gave them? The prolific essayist Octave Uzanne wrote passionately about Frenchwomen and this issue. His literary style was a combination of philosophy, observation, and just plain dishing. Uzanne explained why modern women should want be beautiful and commented on the lengths they had to go to in order to get that way. He profiled a range of women, from aristocrats to prostitutes, but wrote most tellingly about the moneyed bourgeoisie, whom he saw as brilliant butterflies who believed their sole purpose in life was “to be seen and to shine.”

Uzanne maintained that women should use cosmetics to enhance their looks, and improve on nature whenever possible. He liked the way rice powder “spiritualized” the flesh and the way carmine made the lips enticing, as epitomized in the paintings of Frans Hals, the seventeenth-century Dutch artist whose richly colored works were recently in vogue. Uzanne likened women painting their flesh to artists painting their canvases.

Nineteenth-century moralists condemned cosmetics, which they associated with the face paint of actresses and prostitutes.
Godey’s Lady’s Book,
an American magazine, stressed that proper young women should look clean and natural. But the poet Charles Baudelaire praised cosmetics, explaining that a woman “is even accomplishing a kind of duty when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored.” Like Uzanne, he endorsed the use of rice powder, observing that it had been “anathematized” by misguided Arcadian philosophers who failed to see that nature, especially in the form of a blemish, can and should be improved by artful maquillage.

As the cult of beauty was celebrated by some for aesthetic reasons, others stressed more practical concerns when advocating self-enhancement: Uzanne, for one, saw the beauty industry as a cornerstone of the Parisian economy. He did the numbers, estimating what a great lady would spend on maintaining her appearance. For the dressmaker, the tailor, the milliner, and the hairdresser (the jeweler was omitted in this accounting), a woman in Amélie’s class could expect to spend as much as 40,000 francs a year (more than $100,000 today), or perhaps a little less if she was famous and was extended a discount for the publicity she generated by wearing a designer’s clothing. “The combined business done each year by dressmakers, bootmakers, glovemakers, hairdressers, jewelers, makers of underclothing, tailors, furriers, and perfumers,” Uzanne reported, “is reckoned at more than a thousand million francs”—about $3 billion in today’s terms. However frivolous all this attention to appearances might seem to some, the very economy of Paris would have been jeopardized if its nineteenth-century women had not cultivated their beauty with such dedication.

Among those who endorsed the use of cosmetics for women, opinions differed on specific procedures, such as skin lightening, a common, but much-debated, practice throughout the century. Many how-to writers—though not Baroness Staffe, who feared that rice powder blocked the pores—offered recipes for “whitewashes” that would give skin a look of milky perfection. Women (and some beauty-conscious men) who desired a superior pearly countenance visited professionals who painted, even enameled, their skin. One problem with enamel was that it was highly unstable: a single crack could ruin the entire finish, reducing a face to an unattractive web of artificial lines and chips. A more serious problem was that enamel paint contained lead. Stories circulated about unfortunate women who suffered facial paralysis and blood poisoning as a result of enameling. Indeed, blood poisoning from excessive enameling sometimes led to painful death.

In a world of fluctuating opinions, where lines were drawn between nature and artifice, Amélie had to choose one camp or the other. She knew that her look, perhaps more than her money or her position, would be the key to her success in society. She therefore invested a great deal of intelligence into her launch. When she was on the market for a good match, Amélie had presented herself as quiet and virginal. Now she needed to make a splash. With her husband’s good name to protect her reputation, she could be flamboyant—stand out, not blend in.

Amélie chose artifice over nature. Since white skin attracted attention, Amélie saw to it that her skin was the whitest. Her makeup was more daring and original than that of other women, who simply reddened their lips and cheeks. Not only did she use lipstick and rouge, she added a touch of red to the tips of her ears and outlined her eyebrows with a mahogany pencil. The effect was an almost painterly study in contrasts, the occasional stroke of color that much more dramatic against her pale flesh.

Amélie’s wardrobe choices were similarly contrived. She emphasized her shapely figure by wearing slight and simple neoclassical gowns rather than the often ungainly and upholstered creations of designers such as Charles Worth. She was inspired by fashions reserved for late afternoon, the “four-to-five,” the widely accepted hour of infidelity. During this time, respectable men would connive to see their mistresses, and respectable women would steal moments with their lovers. Such rendezvous might begin with passion, but would frequently end in confusion, as an intricately coiffed and corseted woman tried to pull herself together post coitus. The process of dressing was complicated, with hoops, bustles, corsets, and petticoats, and some women insisted that their lovers provide on-site hairdressers and maids to repair the damage. A famous cartoon from the naughty contemporary newspaper
La Vie Parisienne
showed a husband staring in bafflement at his wife’s corset, wondering how the bows he had tied that morning could look so different that night. One reason corset-makers switched from ribbons to hooks and eyes was, supposedly, to protect unfaithful wives from detection.

For women who could contrive to receive lovers in their own homes during the four-to-five, a special costume was available. The
robe d’intérieur,
a tea gown, was originally a bathrobe-like garment worn by married women. Loose and diaphanous, it was meant to offer a pleasant escape from the restrictive corsets women wore at other times. The tea gown, easy to put on and take off before one’s husband came home from his own afternoon peccadilloes, quickly became synonymous with seduction. It announced that the woman wearing it was sexually experienced.

Amélie realized that she looked adorable, enticing, downright sexy in her at-home dishabille. And she had no intention of reserving the undressed look for her husband or restricting it to her home: she incorporated it into her public apparel, calling attention to her soft white shoulders, swan neck, and womanly curves with gowns that outlined her body. The inventive strategy worked. At her debut as Madame Gautreau, Amélie made a stunning impression on Parisian society. During this time, wrote Gabriel Pringue, “women wore high coiffures with false curls. They also padded their breasts, wore balloon sleeves, ample dresses”; their endless trains were often caught in doorways, they upset armchairs and footstools. Then, into this “effervescence of silk, lace and velvet,” a door opened “to let enter an antique statue, auburn hair with gold reflections, thrown back and tied in a Grecian knot, freeing a proud forehead, and admirable face of absolute regularity of feature, without the slightest defect, with the transparency of alabaster, set on a long neck, magnificently placed on perfectly rounded shoulders . . . dressed in a white Grecian cloth which molded her superb figure.” Slender yet full-bosomed, and with her singular face, nineteen-year-old Amélie Avegno Gautreau was the bold new era’s bold new ideal of female beauty.

She completed her look with a diamond crescent in her hair, like a tiara, to make her look royal. It also served as a memento of her overseas birthplace, the Crescent City.

In October 1878, exquisitely costumed and coiffed, Amélie began making the rounds of dinner parties, balls, and charity affairs, captivating the men and women in her own set and winning the attention of the public as well. She accepted invitations to teas, dinners, and the Japanese-themed receptions popular at the time. Before long, she had become a celebrity. Her public appearances turned into spectacles: not only did her peers notice her at balls and the opera, but when she rode in a carriage in the park or on the boulevards, crowds would push and shove, stand on benches, and even cause traffic jams, to catch a glimpse of “La Belle Gautreau.”

In the late fall of the year, Amélie became pregnant. She was able to conceal her condition for several months, and continued participating in the social season; she then retreated into the customary period of confinement once her pregnancy became more noticeable. She moved to Les Chênes, where she spent the quiet spring and summer months resting, playing the piano, and faithfully reading
Le Figaro
to keep up with the society news.

In August 1879, Amélie and Pedro’s child, a daughter, was born. They named her Louise, after Pedro’s mother, who had died earlier in the year.

For little Louise’s baptism, the new parents hosted an elaborate fête, complete with ham, oysters, and champagne. They dressed Louise in a fashionable layette ordered from the Bon Marché. Her proud father was more generous with money than his mother had been. Amélie’s allowance was raised substantially, to 1,000 to 3,200 francs a month; she also received a one-time payment of 40,000 francs, possibly for having given birth. Although she took pleasure in the celebrating and shopping entailed in having a child, Amélie was eager to resume her Parisian society life. Pedro’s secretary, who had taken over the ledger from Madame Louise, made note of “Madame’s” purchases during and after her confinement, including white rice powder for her face and black satin for a gown.