Strapless

by Deborah Davis

  Amélie was seen also in the company of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the diplomat who masterminded the Suez Canal. Often portrayed as the secret admirer of Napoleon III’s wife, the Empress Eugénie (who was his cousin), Lesseps was a flashy and important figure in the Second Empire and the Third Republic. His comings and goings were reported in the newspapers, and the woman on his arm always attracted interest. Despite the tremendous difference in age (he was in his seventies, while Amélie was not long out of her teens), Lesseps was a distinguished escort, and would have been an impressive choice for a lover as well.

  Of all Amélie’s reputed paramours, the most discussed was her gynecologist. According to one tale that spread rapidly throughout Paris after her wedding, Amélie’s husband was so obsessed with the virginal young Amélie that he had agreed to a mariage blanc—a sexless marriage—to persuade her to be his wife. Pedro Gautreau upheld his end of the bargain by not forcing her to fulfill her wifely duties. Mysteriously, only a few months into their marriage, Amélie began to show unmistakable signs of pregnancy. She was shocked by her condition and insisted that she was still a virgin. Her gynecologist examined her and confirmed her innocence. The doctor assured the irate Monsieur Gautreau that his young wife was not pregnant. He explained that she was carrying her own vestigial twin; the condition, he said, was easily remedied with modern medicine. He quickly came up with a surgical solution to the potentially scandalous situation, and all was well in the Gautreau household.

  The first part of the story is wonderfully implausible. There wasn’t much time for a mariage blanc, given the apparent rapidity with which Louise was conceived after Pedro and Amélie’s wedding. Implausibility notwithstanding, Amélie did in fact have a gynecologist, none other than Samuel-Jean Pozzi. But he was not content to be Amélie’s doctor.

  One day, he invited Amélie to afternoon tea at his Place Vendôme apartment. When she accepted, Pozzi dashed off a few words on a calling card to his friend and confidant Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac. There was a definite tone of victory in his note: “Dear and extremely rare friend . . . Madame Gautreau of the swan’s neck will be taking tea at my house the day after to-morrow, Tuesday the 5th. If you want to see her again, come.”

  Pozzi’s tea with Amélie would lead inevitably to private assignations. Whenever he became enchanted with a woman, Pozzi would mount an elaborate campaign, wooing her with passionate letters, expressing his deepest emotions and most profound thoughts. “I like to be loved,” he wrote in one such letter, and confessed that he enjoyed exploring the “alchemy of the heart.” It is believed that he saved his mistresses’ replies, but these revealing souvenirs of his love affairs seem to have been suppressed out of respect for his family.

  Sargent was familiar with the Pozzi folklore—everyone in Paris was—and had heard that the doctor was, understandably, vain about his looks. During a visit to Place Vendôme in the company of Carolus-Duran, Sargent admired a charming painting of Thérèse Pozzi, and pointedly expressed regret that there was no portrait of her handsome husband in their salon. It was an ingenious move on Sargent’s part. Appealing to Pozzi’s vanity, he planted the idea that there should be a portrait of him and that he, Sargent, should be the one to paint it.

  For more than a century, rumors have linked Amélie to Samuel-Jean Pozzi, one of the most desirable men in Belle Époque Paris. This note from Pozzi to Robert de Montesquiou substantiates the connection. (Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

  Sargent’s audacity—right under the nose of Carolus-Duran, no less—won him the job. Pozzi responded enthusiastically to the suggestion and agreed to sit for Sargent. With this important commission from the doctor, whom Sargent later called “a very brilliant creature,” the artist had secured his entry to the coveted inner circle.

  Heat and Light

  Buttoned up and businesslike in his customary suit, in the late summer of 1881, Sargent set up his easel in Pozzi’s apartment, ready to find a pose for his subject. His admiration of Thérèse Pozzi’s portrait—a sweet depiction of a young woman holding a basket of flowers, by an artist named Blanchard—led his hostess to expect an equally conservative rendering of her husband. But as Sargent observed Pozzi in the flesh, he abandoned any ideas of a conventional portrait of the successful doctor. He wanted to show Pozzi as he really was, a man so flamboyant and dazzling that Sargent, like the most interesting people in Paris, was drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

  Searching for the image that would best convey his subject, Sargent turned his eye on the seductive world the doctor ruled like a high priest. The painter discovered that while Pozzi and his socially prominent friends were relentlessly creative—writing, painting, debating aesthetic issues—their greatest preoccupation was sex. If they weren’t doing it, they were talking about it with an abandon that was unfamiliar to Sargent, a man who seems to have had little sexual experience.

  Sargent, who encouraged his sitters to receive visitors while they posed, because they were likely to be more relaxed in the company of friends, had many occasions to witness Pozzi in action. At the time, the doctor and Amélie were at the height of their affair. Pozzi’s portrait sessions afforded the pair the chance to flirt while ostensibly chaperoned. Given the intensity of the rumors about their relationship, they must have generated a palpable undercurrent of passion when they were together. But Thérèse, busy with her mother and her own social engagements, continued to overlook her husband’s extramarital activities.

  While working on the portrait, Sargent also saw a lot of Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, Pozzi’s friend and frequent dining companion, and a nineteenth-century version of a cool hunter. Called the “Prince of the Aesthetes,” the outrageous Montesquiou started new fads every time he did something daring. When, for example, he painted the walls of his drawing room gray and displayed flowers that matched, the rest of Paris followed suit. He pinned a nosegay of violets at his neck to serve as a tie, and wore a ring that contained a single human teardrop. Having decided that his pet tortoise looked too drab on his carpet, he had the animal’s shell embellished with gold and jewels. He wrote a little, painted a little, and spent the rest of his time seeking pleasure. Montesquiou’s self-indulgence inspired Joris-Karl Huysmans, the author of À Rebours (Against Nature), to create des Esseintes, among the more decadent characters in literature.

  There was talk about Montesquiou’s sexuality: supposedly, he was homosexual and had been confirmed as such by a wild moment with Sarah Bernhardt—he found it so distasteful that he vomited for twenty-four hours afterward. He loved women as idea and even as ideal, but not as flesh-and-blood reality. His affection for Pozzi, though, was tinged with unbridled lust. Their notes to each other—Montesquiou’s written in lavender ink—were playfully erotic, with Pozzi indulging his friend’s tendency to turn the most mundane communication into an impassioned declaration of love. They addressed each other as “my dear, sick soul,” and signed their letters “I am all yours, very yours.”

  Judith Gautier, also a visible figure of the period, was another intimate of Pozzi’s whom Sargent came to know at this time. A respected writer and critic, she was fascinated by Oriental culture and habitually incorporated elements from this exotic world into her life. She wrote about Asia in her stories and plays, and she regularly wore kimonos. Gautier traveled in lofty artistic circles, where she developed a reputation for being something like a groupie, a woman who gave herself body and soul to the artists she admired.

  Gautier had entered the creative world at birth through her father, the writer Théophile Gautier. She grew up in the company of intellectuals such as Baudelaire and embraced their bohemian lifestyles with a vengeance. As a girl, Gautier was extremely precocious and was given much more freedom than other children her age. Her father, who asserted his own independence by never marrying Gautier’s mother, encouraged his daughter to read progressive writers and to make unconventional life choices. Gautier demonstrated what a freethinker she was when she married Catulle Mendès, a dev
ilishly attractive avant-garde writer.

  Mendès was a member of Paris’s new generation of poets, self-absorbed young men who wore their hair long and played at being romantic heroes. It was rumored that he had made up his name, selecting those of the Roman author of libidinous verse, and the Egyptian god with the head of an ox, but his family name really was Mendès. Women found his edgy looks irresistible; he was “as beautiful as a bad angel.” His poetry—laced with pornographic references—was judged obscene, and he served time in prison for offending public morals with it. He made no secret of the fact that he was a philanderer who enjoyed Paris’s demi-monde of prostitutes and criminals. He was said to have contracted a vicious venereal disease from one of his many mistresses.

  During the early years of their marriage, Gautier ignored Mendès’s behavior and concentrated on their pursuit of the artistic elite. The couple befriended important writers, including Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, and cultivated a friendship with Richard Wagner, whom they both worshipped. But after eight years of tolerating her husband’s escapades, Gautier could no longer ignore his raging infidelity. Even her liberal-minded father was relieved when the marriage fell apart in 1874.

  Flirtatious before her divorce, afterward Gautier developed close relationships with many of the men she and Mendès had admired together. Hugo doted on her, and to help her maintain the lifestyle she had had as a married woman, he tried to arrange a government pension for her. When a government official hesitated to do so—Gautier was not such a distinguished artist in her own right that she warranted such a gift—Hugo told him in no uncertain terms that “it is enough that this is so, and that I tell you, for the pension to be given.” He had that kind of power, and was happy to exercise it for his alluring friend.

  Wagner and his wife, Cosima, also welcomed Gautier into their realm. Gautier had a way of making herself indispensable to artistic people. She flattered them. She convinced them that she alone understood their art and its importance. She did such a good job of being a fan that, sometimes, her heroes became her admirers. There was a serious flirtation between Gautier and Wagner, leading the eagle-eyed Cosima to ban her from the composer’s presence. Whether or not Wagner and Gautier had a sexual relationship, she was his intellectual and emotional intimate, and this was enough to make her the high priestess in Wagnerian circles.

  In the 1880s, Richard Wagner was a god in Paris—and a particular favorite of Sargent’s—because he was the quintessential romantic artist. His life and his music were built around his epic vision of the world, a universe of legend, passion, myth, loss, redemption, and the eternal battle between good and evil. His Ring of the Nibelung was the most spectacular, the most imaginative, and certainly the most provocative entertainment anyone had seen. Wagner spent twenty-eight years creating the masterpiece, expanding his Death of Siegfried into a saga that incorporated the tragic hero’s entire life, and more. Wagner was so concerned about the staging of his monumental tale of gods, giants, and other mythological creatures that he persuaded patrons to spare no expense in building the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, a special theater where the Ring cycle could be performed according to his specifications.

  A largely self-taught musician, Wagner spent years bringing his complex compositions to life. He had an enormous ego and insisted on being the dominating force in his household. His first wife was an actress, Christine Wilhelmine (Minna) Planer. Their tempestuous marriage lasted from 1836 to 1860, while Wagner traveled through Europe, composing his operas and creating controversy in the musical world.

  In 1861, Wagner met the great love of his life, and his emotional and artistic match, Cosima von Bülow, the daughter of Franz Liszt and the wife of the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow. They moved in together and started a family, and married after Minna died in 1866. Wagner and Cosima managed to stay afloat financially with the patronage of Ludwig II, the “Mad King” of Bavaria. Ludwig, who had succumbed to the spell of Wagner’s music as a teenager, was an eccentric who spent fabulous sums of money making his most decadent dreams come true. He built elaborate fairy-tale castles, such as Neuschwanstein, in his homeland, freely borrowing the swans from Wagner’s Lohengrin as his insignia. In one of his outrageously outfitted castles, Ludwig would act out bizarre Arabian Nights fantasies in a man-made lagoon. The very castles that sent Bavaria into a financial tailspin and sparked a successful plot to remove the king from his throne would become lucrative tourist attractions in the next century, and Neuschwanstein would inspire the design for Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland.

  People either loved Wagner, as Ludwig did, or hated him. His supporters believed he was one of the greatest artistic forces of the century, and made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth to see the Ring performed exactly as Wagner decreed. But after the Franco-Prussian War, many French people found his music an offensive reminder of their terrible defeat. When they heard the stirring chords and the overt celebrations of German history and folklore, they thought of nothing but the humiliating Prussian victory. Opera houses had to hire guards and print disclaimers in their programs when they produced works by Wagner, warning, “The public is requested neither to hiss nor to shout encore during the Wagnerian performances!”

  As Sargent observed Pozzi and the fascinating figures around him, he saw that their behavior had a marked influence on how he painted. Pozzi presented him with a new challenge. While Sargent was a master at capturing forms and features through the juxtaposition of light and shadow, Pozzi’s most distinctive feature, his potent sexuality, could not be rendered with art school technique alone. Sargent would have to learn to paint emotionally as well as intellectually, using his brush to capture that potency as well as his own reaction to it.

  Sargent conceived a daring image that both demonstrated his talents and expressed the feelings he had for his subject. He persuaded Pozzi to wear his scarlet dressing gown for the portrait, the male equivalent of a lady’s robe d’intérieur. A garment reserved for intimate moments at home would suggest that Pozzi was in his bedroom. Sargent then posed the doctor with one hand at his heart while the other played suggestively with the cord of his tasseled belt, as if preparing to undo it. His long fingers, tools in his profession, were graceful, immaculate, and sensual in the painting. He looked like a man poised to commit an indiscretion.

  With every artistic choice—the robe, the pose, the use of the color red—Sargent eroticized the already erotic Pozzi, turning him into a symbol of male sexuality. And the portrait said as much about Sargent as it did about the libidinous doctor: clearly the painter of this portrait was captivated by his subject. Any artist could have painted Pozzi in a conventional way, but only an artist who was smitten could have captured the man’s power to seduce.

  Sargent sent the finished portrait to an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Art in 1882, where it drew the attention of Oscar Wilde, a writer familiar with “the love that dare not speak its name.” Wilde recognized Sargent’s deep feelings for his subject, and he later immortalized Sargent’s relationship with Pozzi in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the novel, the artist Basil Hallward makes a startling declaration to his subject, Dorian Gray, confessing, “I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. . . . Your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly.” Wilde felt no compunction about using the details of a real artist’s life in his fiction: Hallward is said to paint energetically, with “the sweep and dash of the brush on the canvas,” just like Sargent. Hallward shows his paintings at the same Paris and London galleries where Sargent exhibited, and favors colors Sargent sometimes used, lilac and purple.

  Though Sargent may have been enamored of Pozzi, the doctor would have been an unattainable object of desire. Pozzi flirted with men, but was without question a womanizer, so the relationship between the two—as that between Pozzi and Montesquiou—would have been confined to friendship. Sargent seems to have been comfo
rtable with this platonic bond, and he further secured it by becoming close with several of Pozzi’s intimates, including Judith Gautier. He also started to form his own circle, pursuing friendships with artists he met in various Left Bank cafés and restaurants. At Sargent’s favorite place, L’Avenue, the cashier kept an album for artists to use for drawing if they didn’t bring their own. Sargent would monopolize it, sketching everything from arms and legs to small portraits, and it was commonly referred to as “l’album Sargent.”

  Albert de Belleroche, a student at Carolus-Duran’s atelier, happened into the restaurant one night in 1882 when Sargent was holding court. A beautiful young man with fine bones and an aristocratic bearing, Belleroche was at age eighteen new to the Parisian art world. He had met Sargent once before, at the annual studio dinner honoring Carolus-Duran, but they did not know each other well. When Belleroche looked through the album at the restaurant, he was surprised to see a drawing of himself. Sargent had sketched him without his knowing it. Belleroche, enchanted, tore the page out of the album and took it home.