I Am Madame X

by Gioia Diliberto Narrated by Lorna Raver

Overview

Madame X, John Singer Sargent's most famous and scandalous portrait, caused an immediate furor when Sargent unveiled it at the 1884 Paris Salon. The subject's bold pose, provocative dress, and decadent pallor shocked the public, and the critics panned the picture, smashing Sargent's dream of a Paris career.

Even before Sargent painted her portrait, Virginie Gautreau's reputation for promiscuity and showy self-display made her the subject of vicious Paris gossip. In this remarkable novel, the author tells Virginie's story, drawing on the sketchy facts of the notorious beauty's life to recreate her tempestuous personality, the captivating milieu of Belle Epoch Paris, and the struggle between artist and model to control the painting that would change their lives and affect the course of art history.

Editorial Reviews

The woman in the title is Virginie Gatreau, the alluring real-life subject of John Singer Sargent's scandalous 1884 painting Portrait of Madame X. In her first novel, biographer Gioia Diliberto presents the Louisiana-born beauty in all her sensuality and aloofness. Sargent's bare-shouldered siren is transformed into a flesh-and-blood woman whose life shredded up by gossip and innuendo; a woman who is victimized by the very painting that immortalizes her. A stunning historical novel about a willful icon.

The New Yorker

Belle Époque Paris may have greeted John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Madame X with derision, but the luminously pale model he captured has become an icon. Deborah Davis sets out to revive the woman behind the image in Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X. She depicts Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, “Paris’s hottest ‘it’ girl,” as a narcissistic socialite whose greatest fear was to be ignored. Davis speculates that Sargent, as a result of his infatuation and sexual confusion, conflated Gautreau’s profile and that of a young artist, Albert de Belleroche, into a single object of desire in sketches and paintings. Though the portrait’s poor reception at the 1884 Salon proved only a temporary setback for the artist’s career, Gautreau’s social reputation never recovered from her association with the painting, and she was further obscured by its anonymous title. “Was Sargent trying to punish Amélie in some way?” wonders Davis. “By removing her name from ‘Madame X,’ he robbed her of a claim to immortality.”

In Gioia Diliberto’s novel, I Am Madame X, Gautreau reasserts her place in history, recounting her days as a celebrated beauty, fawned over by society columnists and coveted by men. Her provocative sartorial choices—including the famous black dress—and brazen love affairs earned her a prominent position in the scandal sheets. But in Diliberto’s imagination, it is Gautreau’s devotion to her daughter that produced the unusual posture of the portrait: “I heard Louise crying. . . . I turned quickly, pushing off with my hand from a round Empire table, and twisting and stretching my neck. One of my dress straps slid off my shoulder. . . . ‘Hold that pose!’ he shouted.” (Andrea Thompson)

Publishers Weekly

Paris gasped and gossiped when John Singer Sargent's portrait of Madame X was first exhibited in 1884. Everyone knew the subject was the notorious Virginie Gatreau, and Sargent's shocking depiction-posed in profile, the woman boasts bare shoulders, deep decolletage and an exotically pale complexion-intimately suggested her vanity, arrogance and sexuality. In her first novel (after biographies of Jane Addams, Hadley Hemingway and Brenda Frazier), Diliberto competently imagines Gatreau's controversial life. During the Civil War, six-year-old Virginie, her younger sister and her widowed mother flee the Union soldiers approaching her grandmother's sugar plantation in Louisiana. As an expatriate in Paris, Virginie (or Mimi, as she is called) becomes a "professional beauty," someone who is "received in the best society but ha[s] no other occupation, no other ambition than to be beautiful." At 15, she begins trysting with a married doctor. Pregnant, she hastily marries social climber Pierre Gatreau (and then suffers a miscarriage). Later, she has an affair with French Republican leader Leon Gambetta. Her life is filled with tragedy: the shame of pregnancy, the death of her sister from typhoid and her emotional isolation. Her only trustworthy relative is her Aunt Julie, who refuses to marry and becomes a professional artist; Virginie's narcissistic mother uses her daughter to get into the top echelons of society. This fast scroll through history (the Civil War, the fall of the French Second Empire, the belle epoque, etc.) against a backdrop of parties, salons, operas, artists' studios and sexual escapades is inviting for its wealth of well-researched period details, but limited by its narrator's sensibility. In this evocation, Virginie Gatreau never becomes anything more than a shallow object of beauty. (Mar.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

John Singer Sargent's provocative portrait of aloof and alluring Virginie Gautreau scandalized the Paris Salon in 1884. In it, the artist offset his subject's luminous white skin with a revealing black evening gown. Captivated by the enigmatic Virginie, biographer Diliberto (A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams) decided to research her. While she didn't collect enough information to write a biography, she teased and tantalized the scant findings into a compelling novel. From New Orleans, where she was born and raised on her grandmother's Creole plantation, Virginie moved to France to escape the Civil War. In Paris, she married a banker and became a "professional beauty" known for her ostentatiousness. Diliberto's writing brings Virginie to life in a way that Sargent's portrait does not, creating a complex woman who recognizes that her beauty is her most precious commodity. The author uses evocative images and sharp descriptions of both people and places to create a word-picture of Parisian society at the turn of the century. Her characters are well imagined, revealing strengths and weakness that explain both who they are and what they have become. Highly recommended.-Caroline Hallsworth, Greater Sudbury P.L., ON Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Biographer Diliberto makes a credible fiction debut with the "memoir" of the woman whose portrait by John Singer Sargent scandalized the 1884 Paris Salon. Virginie Avegno Gautreau actually existed but left behind too little documentary material for a biography, says Diliberto (A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams, 1999, etc.). So she took the scant sources and fleshed them out into a plausible self-portrait of the Louisiana-born beauty immortalized by Sargent in a formfitting black dress with jeweled straps, her self-possession and pale skin suggesting a sexuality both overt and aloof. Diliberto’s heroine is the child of a Civil War widow who flees to Paris in 1862, when Virginie is seven, and begins using her daughter’s looks to gain entry into high society before she’s even hit puberty. In 1871, the 16-year-old is seduced and made pregnant by a handsome doctor. She enters a platonic marriage with wealthy Pierre Gautreau and takes a number of lovers, though now she distrusts all men. Her real job, she informs us, is "professional beauty. . . I learned the art of making a grand entrance [and] never went anywhere without full makeup and an impeccable toilette." After the Parisian scandal sheets have made her famous, Sargent is drawn to her beauty and notoriety. But the boldness of Gautreau’s sexuality and of Sargent’s technique in Portrait of Madame X outrage both the bourgeois public and the art critics; the painting’s exhibition is both the apotheosis of Virginie’s celebrity and the beginning of its degradation. Diliberto offers nothing terribly exciting in her readable narrative, though she does provide insight into the artistic process (the preliminary sketches "reflect mypersonality far better than the formal portrait," Virginie notes. "But Sargent wasn’t interested in that. He wanted something else, a cooler, more iconic image"). Agreeable entertainment along the lines of Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Passion of Artemesia.

From the Publisher

Los Angeles Times Diliberto fills in the blanks of Virginie's life with vivid brush strokes. What ensues is a complex and often incredibly fun portrait...[a] handsomely imagined story.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune Diliberto does not make the mistake of imagining a coherent biographical trajectory for her protagonist, but instead presents the messiness and difficulty of real life. In other words, her novelistic portrait of a real person turns out to have more psychological truth than many a biography.

Booklist Lively and provocative...Diliberto has created a heroine who is as capricious and vain and as compelling and seductive as [Sargent's] portrait suggests.

Chicago Tribune a Chicago Tribune Best Book of 2003 A romping good read.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169576191
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	02/01/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Foreword

New York, 1915

Perhaps you've heard her name, Virginie Gautreau. You recall it like an old melody echoing yet from a long-ago party, or as a kind of epithet whispered harshly under the breath. Maybe you've even seen her picture -- seen the picture. God knows, there are a few out there who truly have, though once all Paris claimed to have viewed it and recoiled at the insolence, the vulgarity, the unmuted sex. "Monstrous," one critic said. "A singular failure," sniffed another. John Singer Sargent's career nearly derailed, though he's famous now, living in England and making a fortune painting bored aristocrats.

He kept the picture in his studio for twenty years, exhibiting it only a handful of times, always in small shows in Europe. Until last year, I thought no one in America would ever see it. Then I heard that Sargent was sending the picture to San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. I was in Paris on business, so I called Virginie with the news.

We had first met at a party in 1880, when I was a junior curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and traveled frequently to Paris. For several years, we dined together whenever I was in town; then we lost touch. When I reached Virginie on the telephone, she seemed delighted to hear from me, and she invited me to tea the next day at 123, rue la Cour, where she was living alone in a grand eighteenth-century apartment.

I arrived at four, as a soft afternoon light filtered through the tops of the chestnut trees. A young maid answered the bell and showed me into a huge parlor with tall windows facing the street. Several groupings of settees and chairs were arranged on an immense Turkish carpet, and four sparkling crystal chandeliers illuminated the room.

Virginie kept me waiting, as she always used to. She appeared after twenty minutes, wearing a green silk dress that matched her eyes, and her auburn hair -- the same exact shade of burnished copper it had always been -- was twisted into a long roll at the back of her head, her signature style. Though her figure had become matronly, her finely lined faced was still beautiful.

As she made her entrance, walking gracefully on high heels, whiffs of perfume preceding her, I was studying a picture on the wall -- a sketch Sargent had made of her in the gorgeous black gown she had worn for her notorious portrait.

"Richard, my dear," she said. She embraced me with long white arms and kissed me quickly and chastely on both cheeks. She had noticed me staring at the sketch, and she tilted her head toward it. "I don't think I've seen you since -- then."

I'm sure she was thinking back, as I was, to 1884 and the jeering crowds at the Palais de l'Industrie. It was the opening of the Paris Fine Arts Salon, an annual exhibition that was the premier social event of the era. To have a portrait championed at the Salon usually meant instant success for the artist and overnight fame for the sitter. Sargent, an American who had been raised abroad, had begun to establish a name for himself in Parisian art circles, and he had high hopes that his painting of Virginie would push him to the top.

At the time, she was one of the most famous women in Paris. A favorite ornament of the scandal sheets, Virginie flaunted her sexuality through exotic makeup, hennaed hair, and revealing clothes. She penciled her eyebrows, rouged her ears, and dusted her skin with blanc de perle powder. To whiten it further, people murmured, she ingested arsenic.

Sargent's portrait brilliantly captured her wanton sensuality. But it was too far in advance of its time. Instead of admiring the artist's achievement, the public was appalled by it. The portrait seemed to confirm French prejudices against Americans, proved that we were pushy, overeager, lacking any limits or refinement.

Like Sargent, Virginie was widely known to be American. She had been born in New Orleans to two of Louisiana's finest Creole families. During the Civil War, her mother had fled Louisiana, taking Virginie, who was a child, and her baby sister. The family settled in Paris in a Right Bank enclave of expatriate Southerners. Trading on their French ancestry and knowledge of French culture, they hoped to insinuate themselves into French society.

Virginie's looks and charm were her tickets into the haut monde. She was trained from the cradle to make a brilliant marriage. She preferred to make a brilliant show, and she never lost her ardor for dangerous liaisons. The day I had tea with her, she was expecting a new lover, a married lawyer named Henri Beauquesne, whom she had recently met on a train. He was handsome and rich, she told me, and nearly twenty years her junior.

I still think Sargent's portrait of Virginie was his best painting, and I told her so that day. "You know, I'd love to have it for the Metropolitan, Mimi," I said, using her nickname.

"Make Sargent a generous offer, and maybe you can," she said brightly as a maid wheeled in a cart holding a silver tea service and a plate of small fruit tarts. Virginie poured our tea into two gold-rimmed Limoges cups.

"Darling," I told her, "Edward Robinson, the head of the Met, has been after it for years, ever since he worked at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. But so far, Sargent has refused to sell. He's hardly let it out of his house. When he does exhibit it, he never identifies you. He still calls it Portrait of Madame ***, just as it was titled at the Salon, or simply, Portrait. And he always requests that your name not be communicated to the newspapers. Isn't that amusing?"

Virginie wasn't amused at all. In fact, she was furious. "Don't I have a name?" she cried, rising out of her chair. She strode across the room to a wall of windows and pivoted to face me. "If Sargent had any honor, he would call my picture Portrait of Virginie Avegno Gautreau. After all, it is my picture as much as his."

She stared fiercely at me. "This was not a commissioned work," she continued, more composed. "Sargent begged me to sit for him. He stalked me like a hunter does a deer, staring at me at parties and getting his friends to pester me -- 'Please, Madame Gautreau, let John pay this homage to your great beauty.' And so on. That so-called artist Ralph Curtis came to see me, then bombarded me with letters. I saved one."

She marched to an antique secretary, rummaged through a drawer, and pulled out a blue envelope. "My dear Madame Gautreau," she read from the letter inside. "We both know John is a genius. But the work he's done so far is somehow lacking in completeness and depth. He needs a great subject to unleash the full power of his brilliance. He needs you."

She folded the letter and returned it to the envelope. "I was the one who sat for hours on end, giving up an entire summer. I was the one who provided the magnificent profile, the willowy body, the white marble skin that 'unleashed his brilliance.' I was the inspiration for Sargent's masterpiece -- the only one he's got." She tossed her head dismissively, provocatively, the way I had seen her do so many years ago. "Just compare my portrait with his stuffy pictures of horsey Englishwomen. Or that midget Mrs. Carl Meyer or that washed-out blonde, Mrs. George Swinton. I've seen their portraits and plenty of others over the years. I've kept my eye on Sargent's exhibits, and I want to ask you: Where are the bold lines in those pictures? Where is the mystery, the tension, the allure?" She dropped into a chair covered with cream damask and folded her arms across her chest. "Of course, I know exactly why Sargent won't attach my name to the portrait. He's a cowardly fussbudget, and he's still livid about the ruckus my mother made."

Obviously, the trauma of the Salon debacle still pained her. Seeing her now, her beauty turning brittle, her natural hauteur hardened into a lonely defensiveness, I could see how she had mourned the loss of her renown, and I felt shamed that I had stopped calling on her so many years before.

We chatted for several more hours, and the golden light outside the tall French windows fell to darkness. At eight, I rose to leave, but Virginie urged me to stay. "Please have dinner with Henri and me," she said, her eyes shining. I was curious to meet Beauquesne, her new young lover, but I had already made plans with friends.

"Mimi, it's been wonderful to see you again; now I must run," I said. She showed me to the door and kissed me again on both cheeks. "Good-bye, Richard, my dear. You've brought back so many memories."

I heard nothing from her for months. Then one day she sent me a package containing several hundred typed pages. Inspired by my visit, she had dictated a memoir to one of her maids. She wanted history to remember who Madame X was.

Two weeks later, before I had done more than glance at the manuscript, I got a transatlantic cable from Beauquesne. Virginie had died in her sleep. He hoped that I still had her memoir, as it was the only copy, and he wondered if I would help him find a publisher for it.

Thus, I make her story available here, in my own translation from the original French. As you read it, you will be lifted back to a time before this terrible war, a time when painting was a powerful indice of reality, and Virginie Gautreau was, as Le Figaro once put it, "a living work of art."

I can still see her as she looked then, on the night I first met her. She was tall and slim, her green eyes glittering in that porcelain face, and her silvery laughter floating across the table as she reached for a champagne flute with a long, shapely arm.

How could anyone forget?

Richard Merriweather
Curator of American Painting
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, 1915

Copyright © 2003 by Gioia Diliberto

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