I Am Madame X (4 page)

The next month passed in a blur of humid, rainy days. Grandmère convinced Mama she’d feel better if she got busy, so Mama began tending to Valentine and even helping Alzea a bit with the housework—something I had never seen her do before. Charles spent much of his time walking through the house, looking out the windows and watching the sky for climatic changes. Julie and I read and reread every book in the library. Sometimes neighbors called, sitting in the parlor on chairs pushed against the walls. Alzea would distribute palmetto fans, and people would fan themselves and chat over red wine and cornmeal cake.

Meanwhile, Grandmère worked nonstop. Though the war had caused land values to plummet, and the blockaded ports meant she couldn’t sell her sugar, she was determined to keep Parlange going. She was up every morning before dawn and pacing the back gallery and reciting her Rosary, her thick heels clomping on the cypress floors. Sometimes she’d stop and curse loudly at one of the slaves who had stayed on the plantation; then she’d clasp her beads and start pacing again. Afterward she’d pin her skirt up to her knees, don a pair of men’s cowhide boots, and tromp out to the fields to supervise the workers. In the evening, she balanced the ledgers by candlelight in her “office,” a corner of the back gallery where she had set up an old table as her desk. She hired laborers—poor bedraggled white men—to replace the slaves who had left, and every Saturday morning they came to collect their wages. Grandmère would arrange several whiskey bottles and glasses on the table, and as each man approached, she would pour him a drink and place a few coins in his outstretched hand.

Doing a man’s job had coarsened Grandmère and exacerbated her bad temper. She was always yelling at somebody about something, and I knew to stay out of her way.

Nothing infuriated her more than hearing a member of her household speak English. She had banned all use of
“les mots Yanquis”
at Parlange. In Grandmère’s view, English was
“la langue des voleurs,”
the language of thieves, because all the words were stolen from other languages, chiefly, of course, from French.

She claimed that the few times she was forced to speak English she almost dislocated her jaw, which you’d understand if you heard her pronounce, say, “biscuit” or “potato.” In Grandmère’s mouth, they sounded like “bee-skeet” and “pah-taht.”

Only Alzea, who had been raised on an American plantation before Grandmère bought her on a New Orleans auction block, was allowed to speak English. Papa had also known English, and, unbeknownst to Grandmère, he and Alzea had taught Charles and me some of the language. But we never dared breathe a word of it in front of Grandmère.

On her birthday, Charles and I prepared a little French poem to recite to her after dinner, before the cutting of the cake. We stood in front of her chair in the parlor while Mama played softly on the dainty Pleyel piano. I was waiting for Charles to nod, our agreed-upon signal to start reciting
“Oh, notre chère grandmère, oh, que nous sommes fiers.”

I looked at Julie crumpled under an old shawl on the settee. She looked so sad it broke my heart. I wanted to cheer her up, so I blurted out a fragment of an English verse:

Mama’s playing halted, and I heard Julie laugh softly behind her shawl. Grandmère stared at me with bright blue eyes. She rose slowly from her chair, walked up to me, and slapped me across the face. I ran to my room and stayed there for the rest of the evening.

I dreaded facing Grandmère the next morning at breakfast, but when I entered the dining room, it was obvious she had more important matters on her mind. Julie’s former fiancé, Lucas Rochilieu, was sitting at the table, dressed in frayed, grubby grays. He had grown desperately thin in the eight months since I had seen him last, and his brown hair hung over his collar in scraggly grayish strands.

He had fought at the Battle of Shiloh with Papa, I later learned, and then gone to Vera Cruz, Mexico, on orders from President Jefferson Davis, to buy guns. He was to rejoin his regiment in Richmond, but instead he deserted, bolting for Louisiana, traveling mostly by horseback through back roads and swamps. It took him two weeks to reach his plantation in Plaquemine, where he collected some money and valuables. Now he was on his way to the Gulf of Mexico. He hoped to flag down a foreign ship to take him to France. But he had heard that Yankee troops were in the area and decided to stop off at Parlange to warn us.

“Friends, you will be attacked for sure if you stay,” he said heavily. “You don’t know the danger! The Yankees have been shooting women and children in their beds.” Rochilieu opened his square linen napkin and draped it dramatically across his lap. He tucked into the plate of beignets Alzea had placed in front of him. His mustache moved up and down as he chewed, and I considered the large mole on his nose. If Julie hadn’t thrown herself over the gallery, she’d probably have to kiss that mole every day, I thought with a shudder.

From the opposite side of the table, Mama listened intently, with her long-fingered hands folded on the table. Her engagement ring, a diamond surrounded by six small rubies, sparkled in the sunlight streaming through the windows. I thought of Papa, and my chest tightened.

“Well, I’m in favor of going with you,” Mama said.

Grandmère dropped her coffee cup onto its saucer, and a spray of tan liquid splashed onto her knobby hand. “You’re not leaving Parlange!” she hissed.

“I’m not staying here and risking my daughters’ deaths. Or worse, having them grow up to be country bumpkins like the Cabanel girls,” Mama countered. Eulalie and Nanette Cabanel lived with their parents on a nearby plantation and were notorious for never wearing corsets, not even to pay calls or to attend church.

Ever since Papa’s death, Mama had dreamed of Paris. She knew several women—Creole war widows like herself—who had moved to the City of Light and found, if not prosperity and happiness, at least a relative peace.

The argument that day was never resolved. But the next evening, while Charles and I were playing backgammon on the gallery, a shell whirled past the house. We looked up and saw a group of Yankee soldiers and a cannon in the middle of the road. The adults were in the parlor talking, and they ran outside when they heard the shell’s high screech and, moments later, the explosion as it crashed in the garden, striking and killing one of the dogs. “My God, they’re at our front door!” Grandmère cried. Mama wanted to leave at once. Instead we spent the night on mattresses in the basement. Rochilieu and Grandmère snored, and the rest of us didn’t get much sleep.

The lone shell was apparently just a warning. Still, the next morning, Rochilieu said it was no longer safe for him at Parlange. If caught by the Federals, he’d be taken prisoner; if caught by the Rebels, he’d be shot as a deserter. “I’m leaving tonight, whether you come with me or not,” he said.

He spent the day reading in the parlor, biding his time until night fell. No one said anything about our going with him, and I went to bed as usual at nine.

Grandmère awoke me at midnight. Holding a lighted candle, she led me through the darkened house, past the bedrooms where Charles and Julie were sleeping, and outside to the front gallery. Rochilieu and Mama, with Valentine swaddled against her chest, were inkblots on the lawn below. Beside them, the horses moved restlessly under a magnolia tree. “You’re going with your mama and Lieutenant Rochilieu,” Grandmère said. “Julie and Charles are staying with me.” I ran to the barn to say good-bye to my chickens, Papillon and Sanspareil. Outside, Charles’s bear, Rossignol, was tethered to his post, asleep. “Farewell, Rossignol,” I sighed, feeling terrible that I had not had a chance to say good-bye to Charles himself.

Back at the house, Grandmère tied a gunnysack around my waist. It was heavy and pulled at my abdomen whenever I took a step. “Mimi, this is very important,” she said. “There are enough gold coins in here to provide for you and your mother and sister in Paris, and you must never let it out of your sight, ever.
Tu comprends?
If the soldiers stop you, they will not search a child.”

She kissed me on the forehead, then embraced Mama. In all my days at Parlange, I had never seen them touch each other. In fact, if I didn’t know they were mother and daughter, I would have assumed they disliked each other, so chilly and formal were their relations. Yet now they gripped each other with a fierceness that frightened me.

I started to cry. “What’s this? What’s this?” groused Rochilieu. “We can’t have crying. You’ll bring the armies down on us.” Mama and Grandmère broke apart. Their faces were wet.

We mounted our horses and trotted along the path by the cane fields, away from the house. The moon looked like a pearl button above the roof, and the air was sweet with the perfume of magnolias and jasmine.

Under Rochilieu’s plan, we would make our way to Port Hudson on the east side of the Mississippi, then follow the Old County Road to New Orleans. From there we would take the last leg of the river to the Gulf of Mexico and the open sea, where we would flag down a French or English ship.

As we rode through the forest, Valentine stayed as still as death. But Mama, who hated horseback riding, complained constantly about her mount, her saddle, her aching back. “Shut up!” grunted Rochilieu. “For all we know, the Yanks or the Rebels are behind the next grove of trees.” He wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. Once, when a rabbit ran across the path, he clutched his chest and yelped. Mama was relying on God to see us through, and she mumbled prayers all night.

At daybreak, we reached the Mississippi, where a rickety skiff was waiting on the bank. We piled into the leaky boat and pushed off. Rochilieu did the rowing. Mama held Valentine, and I lay against Mama’s legs with her shawl enfolding me. I fell asleep, and when I awoke, smoke from burning cotton on the levees rose against the pink sky. A pool of water from the boat’s leaky bottom had risen and soaked my shoes.

After a while, the baby began to cry. “Will you hold her a moment?” Mama said. As I stood to take Valentine from her arms, a square of sunlight broke through the trees and blinded me momentarily. The boat rocked; I stumbled. The sack of gold slid from my waist, vanishing into the muddy water with a loud plop and narrowly missing the black, scaly head of an alligator lurking nearby.

A half hour later, we came ashore at Port Hudson and plodded through the woods. I couldn’t shake from my head the image of an alligator with huge open jaws. Cold terror, mingled with wretchedness over losing our gold, brought on a convulsion of sobs. I wailed loudly as we stepped over branches and brambles, wending our way to the Old County Road. Honeysuckle lined the shoulders, and the road was strewn with blue-clad bodies—Union men who had succumbed to illness and exhaustion on their march to battle. We didn’t look at the corpses and sucked in our breath to avoid the stench.

It was a bright day and already boiling hot. Itchy red bumps had broken out on my neck where the tight collar of my dress met my skin, and I scraped them furiously with my fingers. “Stop that scratching. You’re a girl, not a dog!” Mama cried. She was furious with me. As she walked with Rochilieu, a few yards behind me, I could hear her moaning refrain, “How will we live without our gold?”

A distant cannon shook the air, then another. “Right now, money should be the least of your worries,” said Rochilieu.

We walked on, mile after mile, under the burning sun. A fine gray dust covered our clothes, and our shoes were cracked and coming apart. After a couple of hours, a rickety wagon driven by an old farmer rattled up beside us. “Don’t tell him anything,” Rochilieu warned. The farmer had a sunburned face, and when he smiled, two ragged teeth appeared in his black mouth. “Y’all look like you need a ride,” he said. We clambered into the back of the wagon. I quickly fell asleep, and when I woke, we were in New Orleans, parked in front of a small, run-down hotel with laundry hung over the balcony. I jumped down to the pavement, and Rochilieu whispered to me, “Remember, if anyone asks, we’re French refugees, and I’m your papa.” Rochilieu gave the farmer a few coins, and the cart rolled away.

The hotel lobby teemed with people—mostly mulattoes and shabbily dressed whites. We ate a dinner of gumbo and rice in the stuffy, candlelit dining room and went to our room. Rochilieu slept on the floor, and Mama, Valentine, and I took the bed. In the middle of the night, Rochilieu woke us. “Hurry, ladies. Our boat is waiting,” he said. We scrambled into our sour, dusty clothes, padded out of the hotel, and walked to the wharf. An oyster lugger bobbed against the dock.

The young sailor on deck extended his muscular arms and hoisted us aboard. The boat smelled terrible, and we had to stay in blackness down below as it pulled into the Gulf. By midday we were several miles out at sea and could climb to the deck. The wind whipped through a gray sky, and water churned around the boat. Mama pointed into the distance. “Look, a ship.”

A frigate with a dark oak hull and huge squares of white sail swayed toward us in the surging water. A French flag flew from the mast. Rochilieu waved Mama’s shawl and shouted, “Bonjour!”

As the ship drew up to the oyster lugger’s side, a small man in a blue-and-red uniform threw Rochilieu a rope, and Rochilieu tied it to the lugger. He went aboard to talk to the captain and returned a few minutes later grinning broadly. “Ladies, we have a ride to France.”

The ship,
La Belle de Jour,
had come from New York and was on its way home, carrying cotton and a few civilian families. From our state-room, I could hear the whoops and shouts of children on board. But I never saw them. I was violently seasick and spent all of the crossing in bed. I didn’t start to feel better until we reached Calais and boarded a train for Paris.

We arrived in the city on a drab, chilly Tuesday. Mama, Valentine, and I settled into three furnished rooms in a hotel on Avenue Montaigne, a wide, leafy street not far from the Champs-Elysées. A servant brought us our meals from the hotel kitchen and did some paltry cleaning. But the apartment remained filthy. The draperies were ripped and stained; the backs of the sofa and chairs held grease marks left by the pomaded hair of the apartment’s previous occupants. If the servant didn’t come, Mama didn’t bother to tidy up. Bureau drawers and armoire doors were left open. The bed was unmade. Corsets and stockings littered the floor.

Those first few weeks in Paris, Mama often seemed as indifferent to me as she was to the housekeeping. She didn’t notice if I ate all the candy in the crystal jar on the sideboard, or if my stockings were dirty and my hair unbrushed. She had always been inattentive, but now she was worn down, I thought then, by mourning, though I see now she was tortured by guilt. Her grief over her ruined marriage was as raw as the day she learned of Papa’s death, and her pale face and red-rimmed eyes testified to her anguished nights.

I spent most of my time playing with Valentine, who had grown from a quiet baby into a lively, chattering child. Each day, she looked more and more like Papa, with the same small mouth and round dark eyes. I loved reading to her and helping her assemble her blocks. Sometimes Mama left me in charge while she went out. I was alone with Valentine the day she took her first steps, toddling a few feet across the worn carpet and collapsing in my arms.

Because Valentine was small and thin, Mama worried constantly over her health. She fussed over the child’s sleep schedule and diet, and every cough and sniffle was cause for grave concern. Such devotion, though, didn’t prevent Mama from losing her temper with Valentine, or, indeed, from behaving cruelly toward her, as she did one evening when Lucas Rochilieu visited.

Rochilieu was living in a hotel around the corner and frequently came for dinner. That evening, he arrived at seven. Though he had spent the day doing nothing but reading the newspapers in his room and checking his balance at the bank, he was dressed as if for an audience at the Tuileries in pinstriped gray trousers, a starched white linen shirt, and a Prince Albert coat with a cameo stickpin in the lapel. He had regained much of the weight he had lost fighting for the Confederacy, and the wound over his right eye had healed into a thick purple scar.

“Good evening, my dear. You look lovely as usual,” said Rochilieu as Mama opened the door. His face brightened when he saw her, and he straightened his body to appear taller.

“Thank you, Monsieur,” she replied, bowing slightly.

I knew with the sensitive child’s unfailing intuition in such matters that Rochilieu had fallen in love with Mama, just as I knew that she was repulsed by him. Still, he had brought us safely to Paris, and for that Mama had to be grateful.

We settled ourselves on the frayed furniture in the parlor. Then, as they did every time Rochilieu came to dinner, he and Mama replayed our escape from Louisiana. It was as if they were following a theater script, starting with the boat ride across the Mississippi, then the trek to New Orleans, and, finally, our rescue by
La Belle de Jour.

“The captain of the French ship never would have taken us if I hadn’t given him a few pieces from my sack of candy,” said Rochilieu, patting Valentine, who nestled against him on the settee. Rochilieu pulled from his coat pocket, as he always did at exactly this point in the drama, a small chamois bag and turned it upside down on a table. Twenty uncut jewels of varying sizes tumbled out and scattered like glittering marbles.

“Ladies, what is your pleasure this evening? A cherry, perhaps?” said Rochilieu, holding a large ruby between his fingers.

Rather than embarrass Mama with cash handouts, Rochilieu made a little game of presenting her with a jewel every time he visited. Mama sold the gems at a shop on rue de Rivoli where all the expatriate Southerners took items to be pawned. The money paid our room and board.

As Mama reached for the ruby, Valentine grabbed a pearl on the table, popped it in her mouth, and gulped. “Valentine!” Mama screeched. She slapped the little girl across the face and then locked her in the bedroom. Valentine kicked the door and shrieked; then, after a while, she whimpered quietly. When Rochilieu had gone, I entered the bedroom to find Valentine lying on the rug sucking her thumb and clutching one of her dolls.

Each day, Mama’s temper seemed to grow worse. Anything could set her off—an undelivered bonnet, say, or a rainy morning. She constantly bemoaned my losing our gold and said it was my fault if I never became educated. “How am I going to pay for your school?”

She must have mentioned something about it to Rochilieu, because on his next visit, he let Mama pick two jewels instead of one.

That’s how I found myself on a cool September morning standing with Mama before a vine-covered archway on the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor, behind the Panthéon on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. A taxi had dropped us off, along with a small wicker trunk containing all my belongings. A chilly gust of wind blew leaves around my legs, and I shivered in my shapeless purple serge uniform. I did not want to attend the Couvent des Dames Anglaises. The thought of being cloistered with a group of strange girls and even stranger nuns filled me with misery. Streams of tears dripped off my chin and onto my uniform. Mama looked at me sternly through the black veil of her widow’s bonnet. “Mimi, you must stop so we can go in. The mother superior is expecting us.”

Taking my wrist with one hand and carrying my trunk with the other, Mama led me through the arched doorway. Before us was a small courtyard paved with flagstones and surrounded by crumbling buildings—on one side a church, on the other a cloister. The convent was one of several English Catholic communities established in Paris during the sixteenth century, and the only one still standing. For several centuries, Catholic women escaping persecution in England had been sheltered in the cloister, and female aristocrats were imprisoned here during the French Revolution. Mama claimed that an ancestor of Grandpère de Ternant had once been locked behind these walls. But the ancient family connection doesn’t explain why she chose it for me. Mama was sending me here because it was the only school she could afford. For many years, the English convent had been a popular repository for the daughters of French nobles, who considered a knowledge of English a valuable social asset. But recently a rumor that Emperor Louis-Napoléon planned to raze the convent to make way for a new boulevard had driven enrollment down. To attract students, the English nuns had drastically reduced their fees. Now most of the girls were daughters not of the aristocracy, but of the petite bourgeoisie: tradesmen, doctors, professors, and minor government officials.

A porter unlocked a heavy wooden door and showed us into a spacious visiting parlor. A few moments later, two dark figures appeared in habits of deep purple serge—the same fabric as my uniform. One was Mother Superior Mary-Josephine, who lifted her veil to reveal a dry, pale face and watery brown eyes. The other nun was her secretary, Sister Emily-Jean, a young beauty with wide-set blue eyes and a fresh, pink complexion. The mother superior said something to Mama in French that was so poor, and in a voice so small and raspy, that I couldn’t make out the words. Then she lumbered off and disappeared into her office, an old purple bear entering her den.

Mama kissed me good-bye, and I was alone in the parlor with Sister Emily-Jean. “Virginie, we’re all so happy you’re here, especially the junior girls,” the nun said sweetly. “And the one who is happiest of all is Aurélie Grammont. She’s also from Louisiana. Would you like to meet her?”

I nodded, too terrified to speak. Sister Emily-Jean led me through a maze of corridors and out a back door to a lovely garden shaded by chestnut trees. At one end stood a marble statue of the Virgin Mary and, at the other, a stone wishing well. On the old flagstones in between, the girls were playing prisoner’s base, a tag game.

Sister Emily-Jean summoned a tall, thin girl who looked about two years older than I. I’ve always trusted my first impressions of people, and I knew immediately that I would like Aurélie Grammont. She had long, black corkscrew curls, a pleasant tawny face, and hazel eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles, which I’d never seen before on a female under forty.

“Aurélie, this is Virginie Avegno from Louisiana. Will you take her to Madame Farnsworth’s class, please?” said Sister Emily-Jean.

“Of course,” answered Aurélie. Her manner was direct, and those deep hazel eyes radiated intelligence and kindness. It was impossible to imagine her ever saying anything stupid or mean.

The chapel bell clanged, announcing the end of recreation. I marched in line with Aurélie and the other girls, up a creaky flight of stairs to the juniors’ classroom. As we entered, Aurélie pointed to a hat form on the windowsill holding a dingy muslin cap and warned, “Don’t speak a word of French. If Farnsworth hears it, she’ll make you wear that nightcap all day!”

A fat Englishwoman with a wiry mustache like a man’s was standing next to an old wooden desk. The drafty room was painted a hideous yellow; the desks were wobbly and scarred. The only decorations were a torn, stained map of the world and a chipped plaster crucifix.

Madame Farnsworth looked at me indifferently and pointed to an empty desk in the second row in the middle of the room. “Grammar books!” she bellowed.

There was a scramble of rustled papers and slammed desktops. I found my book—its spine was broken and the pages were falling out—at the bottom of the well of my desk. Madame Farnsworth shuffled across the room. “Page forty-three,” she announced. Then she turned to me. “Girls, we have a new student, Virginie Avegno from Louisiana in America, where, as you all know, English is the native tongue. Miss Avegno, please demonstrate how English is spoken in your country by reading the first two exercises.”

A chill rippled through me. Though I understood English, I did not know how to read it.
“Excusez-moi, Madame. Je ne lis pas l’anglais,”
I stammered.

Farnsworth’s face turned bright red, and her jowls twitched. It never occurred to her that an American wouldn’t know English. She thought I was mocking her. “Miss Avegno, this is no way to start your career here. On your knees! Five times!”

Aurélie, sitting directly behind me, leaned forward and whispered, “Virginie, you have to kiss the floor.”

I dropped below my desk. The worn wood floor was filthy with dustballs and tiny bugs. I bent forward and slipped my hand between my lips and the dreadful surface. But Farnsworth saw me and rushed over to push my face all the way down.