I Am Madame X (33 page)
Far from ruining Madame Gautreau, as she and her mother feared, the scandal turned her into an international celebrity. Throughout the Belle Epoque, she continued to be sought after as an artist’s model, and as the novel describes, she was painted by several successful artists: Gustave Courtois, Antonio de la Gandara, and Mademoiselle Lucie Chatillon. The Courtois portrait originally hung at the Musée du Luxembourg and was moved to the Louvre in 1933. It has hung at the Musée d’Orsay since 1981. The La Gandara and Chatillon portraits are in private collections.
At the time of her death on July 25, 1915, at age fifty-six, Virginie Gautreau was separated from her husband, though they were never officially divorced. In the municipal archives in Paramé, France, Virginie’s name is crossed out of the ledger in a list of owners of Château des Chênes, though she is buried in the Gautreau family crypt. According to her will, which was filed in the Pointe Coupée Courthouse in New Roads, Louisiana, she left all her possessions and her share in Parlange to a married French tax collector named Henri Favalelli. The nature of their relationship is unknown.
Less than a year after Madame Gautreau died, Sargent offered his portrait of her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “I suppose it is the best thing I have done,” he wrote to Edward Robinson, the museum’s director, on January 8, 1916. The Met bought the picture for a thousand pounds. Sargent asked Robinson not to use Virginie Gautreau’s name in the painting’s title. “By the way,” the artist wrote, “I should prefer, on account of the row I had with the lady years ago, that the picture should not be called by her name, at any rate for the present, and that her name not be communicated to the newspapers.”
Robinson complied, and history remembers Virginie Gautreau as Madame X.
G.D.
In writing
I Am Madame X,
I have relied heavily on historical sources. I’ve borrowed atmospherics and anecdotes from some of the books I consulted (a selected bibliography follows). I’ve also used the actual texts of reviews of Sargent’s painting and items about Madame Gautreau that appeared in
The New York Herald
and
L’Illustration.
The characters who are based on historical figures sometimes say what their counterparts in real life wrote, or what they were quoted saying in biographies and articles. When using the letters of John Singer Sargent and Léon Gambetta, I’ve often combined phrases and sentences from several letters, and, occasionally, taken sentences from the letters to use in dialogue.
I’ve also relied on the help of many people. First of all, I would like to thank Charles L. Crawford, a tireless researcher who is a descendant of Virginie Gautreau’s paternal uncle Jean Bernard Avegno. Charlie has spent more than a decade researching the history of his family, and he generously shared his files with me. During the past two years, Charlie and I spoke on the phone frequently, trading information and theories about Madame X, our mutual obsession. Those conversations provided one of the many pleasures of working on this book.
The art historian Trevor Fairbrother, who has written brilliantly about Sargent in articles and books, patiently answered my queries, steered me to sources I would otherwise not have discovered, and corrected errors in the manuscript. Trevor was the first person to write about the real woman behind Sargent’s
Madame X,
in a 1981 article in
Arts Magazine,
which also published for the first time since the nineteenth century a photograph of the painting in its original one-strap-off-the-shoulder state.
My debt to Richard Ormond, Sargent’s great-nephew, is considerable. Richard is the author of several books about Sargent, including, with Elaine Kilmurray, the definitive catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work. Richard told me about the existence of Sargent’s
Landscape: A Dale in the Neighborhood of Château des Chênes,
graciously shared his insights about Sargent’s art, answered my queries, and corrected errors in the manuscript.
My wonderful researchers—in Paris: Camille Goujon and Régine Cavallaro; in Paramé, France: Marie-Christine Ruellan—turned up a wealth of information I never could have found on my own. My son’s French teacher, Fannie Clonch, corrected the spelling of French words and phrases in the manuscript.
I would also like to thank Christina Vella, for getting me started on my research in New Orleans; Lucy Parlange, for giving me a tour of her family’s plantation; and the librarians at the Historic New Orleans Collection, Tulane University, the University of New Orleans, the New Orleans Public Library, and the New Orleans Notarial Archives Research Center, for guiding me through their collections.
My dear friend, the journalist and novelist Dinitia Smith, read the manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions. Another dear friend, Sara Stern, was my cheerleader on blue Mondays.
Everyone at Scribner has been a delight to work with. I am especially thankful to Lisa Drew for helping me make the transition from nonfiction to fiction, and for so carefully shepherding the manuscript through the publication process. Over the course of twenty years, my agent, Rhoda Weyr, has provided encouragement and unfailingly astute advice.
As always, my husband, Richard Babcock, was there at every stage of the project, spending long hours and days discussing the material with me, helping me shape it, and editing the manuscript during its various revisions. I am eternally grateful to him for his intelligence, his hard work, his skill with a red pencil, and, of course, his all-enabling love.
B
OOKS
A
BOUT
S
ARGENT
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Kilmurray, Elaine, and Richard Ormond.
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———, editors.
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Ratcliff, Carter.
Sargent.
New York: Abbeville Press, 1982.
Simpson, Marc, with Richard Ormond and H. Barbara Weinberg.
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THER
Baldick, Robert, editor and translator.
Pages from the Goncourt Journal.
London: The Folio Society, 1980.
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Bierman, John.
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Cable, George Washington.
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New York: Penguin, 1988.
———.
Strange, True Stores of Louisiana.
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Carson, Gerald.
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Coleman, Elizabeth Ann.
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Gheusi, P. B.
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Girouard, Mark.
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Hambourg, Maria Morris, Françoise Heilbrun, and Philippe Neagu.
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Hegerman-Lindencrone, Lillie de.
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Jullian, Philippe.
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Painter, George E.
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———.
Marcel Proust.
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Peiss, Kathy.
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Rice, Ann.
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Richardson, Joanna.
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———.
Judith Gautier.
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Sitterson, J. Carlyle.
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Vella, Christina.
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Wade, Michael G.
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Weinberg, H. Barbara.
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Willson, Beckles.
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Zola, Emile.
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RTICLES
Audebrand, “Courrier de Paris,”
L’llustration,
February 15, 1879, p. 98. Bouyer, Raymond, “A. de la Gandara et Son Oeuvre,” special edition of
La Plume,
1902.
Bowles, Hamish, “The Madame X Files,”
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Fairbrother, Trevor, “The Shock of John Singer Sargent’s Madame Gautreau,”
Arts Magazine,
January 1981, pp. 90–97.
Fourcaud, L., “Le Salon de 1884 (Deuxième Article),”
Gazette des
Beaux-Arts
29, no. 6 (June 1884): 482–84.
Gautier, Judith,
Le Rappel,
May 1, 1884, p.1.
Houssaye, Henri, “Le Salon de 1884,”
Revue des Deux Mondes
63, no. 3 (June 1, 1884): 589.
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Minchin, Hamilton, “Some Early Recollections of Sargent,”
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Olian, Joanne, “Charles Frederick Worth: The Founder of Haute Couture,”
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Perdican, “Courrier de Paris,”
L’llustration:
June 18, 1881, p. 412; February 11, 1882, p. 86; May 27, 1882, p. 342–43; June 16, 1883, p. 371; August 11, 1883, p. 83; March 22, 1884, p. 182.
Sharp, William, “The Paris Salon,”
Art Journal
(1884): 179–80.
Sidlauskas, Susan, “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s Madame X,”
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(Fall 2001): 9–33.
L’Illustration,
The Salon Issue, 1884
“In the Studio of Carolus-Duran,”
The Art Interchange,
July 28, 1888; August 11, 1888; and August 25, 1888.
“La Belle Americaine,” article by the Paris correspondent of
London Truth,
in
The New York Herald,
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“Eccentricities of French Art,”
Art Amateur
11, no. 30 (August 1884): 52.