Strapless

by Deborah Davis

  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.

  Les Chênes, the Gautreau estate at Paramé, Brittany. The family summered at the impressive château, which was surrounded by a walled park. Sargent stayed at Les Chênes in 1883 to work on his portrait of Amélie.

  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.

  Amélie’s signature, in a charmingly girlish hand, on her 1878 marriage contract. The lengthy legal document lists all the nineteen-year-old’s possessions and carefully describes an elaborate financial arrangement with her forty-year-old husband-to-be.

  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.

  In Paris, Amélie and her husband lived in a four-story mansion on the Rue Jouffroy, near the newly fashionable Parc Monceau. They decorated the house with furnishings from the Bon Marché, the city’s first department store.

  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.

  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.

  A Professional Beauty

  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 h
er 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.