“It’s my pleasure, Monsieur.”
As a little boy growing up in Vienna, Monsieur Vaury had been taught by a student of Beethoven’s, and he resembled the great composer, at least superficially. The top of his long head was bald, while a semicircle of sparse gray hair sprouted from just above his ears and fell in a frizzle to his shoulders. He was the only man I knew in those days who didn’t have a mustache—perhaps he was trying to look like Beethoven—and he wore thick, round spectacles that slid down his fleshy nose.
“Well, let’s see what you can do. What would you like to play?” he asked, pushing his spectacles in place with a curled forefinger.
I volunteered to try Chopin and from memory played the Polonaise in A Major.
“Very good, my dear,” said Monsieur Vaury, clapping his dry red hands. “I heard a few wrong notes. But never mind. Now let’s see how your sight reading is.”
He fumbled in his case and placed several yellowed sheets on the music stand. It was the difficult third movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. I struggled through the first measures—I had never played it before—striking many wrong notes, faltering, and finally giving up.
“Not bad for a first try,” Monsieur Vaury encouraged. “You can work on it this week.”
He put me on a rigorous schedule of scales and finger exercises. The grand piano in the parlor had a clear, beautiful tone, but I preferred to practice on the spinet in the privacy of my blue toile-walled sitting room. The piano stood between two windows fronting rue de Luxembourg. With the shutters open, I could hear the hooves of cab horses lightly clicking along the smooth asphalt, a pleasing metronome.
Here, at the piano in my room, I did not feel Papa’s and Valentine’s deaths as crushingly as I had everywhere else. The harmony and rhythm of music eased my sadness and pushed me back toward optimism, my natural temperament. I practiced as much as I could, sometimes for four or five hours a day.
Monsieur Vaury marveled at my progress. He rarely criticized me, though one morning after I had been studying with him for about two years—a period during which I had grown two inches and sprouted breasts—he complained about my fingering in Chopin’s Etude in E Major. “Mademoiselle, you should not be using the one and the four in the right hand. Try the one and the two. Then you can reach up with the five to hit that G.” He was sitting next to me on the padded piano bench, and now he swung his right arm across my back and placed his hand on top of mine. He arranged my fingers under his in the desired position and pressed my hand into the keys. A lovely inverted E chord splashed into the air.
“There. Much better,” he said.
He released my hand but did not shift his weight, so that he was still leaning into me. I felt his stale breath on my neck. Then he moved his hand to my shoulder and stroked it slowly. I leaned as far as I could to the side while still keeping my fingers on the keys. But he moved even closer. A lock of his stiff gray hair fell across my cheek. I shuddered.
Later, after he left, I told Mama what had happened.
“I’m sure you’re imagining it,” she said.
“I’m not! He’s a lecherous buffoon. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw him one night at Velfour’s with a fille publique from La Farcy’s brothel.”
“Mimi!” Mama’s eyes widened.
“Besides, he isn’t a very good pianist. I don’t care if he studied with Beethoven’s student. He has no ear, no true feeling for music. I would like another teacher. Or no teacher. I can work on my own.”
But Mama refused to dismiss Monsieur Vaury, because he also taught Princess Mathilde’s nephew. I don’t know how Mama hoped to benefit from this weak connection to Napoleonic royalty, but one of her chief ambitions was to secure an invitation to the Princess’s salon at her palatial hotel on rue de Courcelles.
The following week, I began a campaign to drive Monsieur Vaury away. I refused to smile at him, ignored his compliments, and spoke to him as little as possible. No matter how coldly and unpleasantly I behaved, however, his ardor grew. He stared adoringly at me. Sometimes he was so moved by my playing that he would grab my hands and cover them with kisses. Other times, he stretched his long ape’s arm across the back of the piano bench, which led inevitably to his touching my shoulder. Then one day, as I finished playing Schubert’s Sonata in C Minor, he moved his hand to the back of my neck and stroked it lasciviously. I vowed to get rid of him.
For several days, I thought of little else, but by the time of my next scheduled lesson, I had not come up with a suitable solution. Then, as I waited for Monsieur Vaury in the parlor, my eyes wandered toward the Louis XVI secretary near the fireplace. Suddenly I had an idea. I grabbed the sheet music off the piano stand, unlocked the door of the secretary, and removed a pen and bottle of ink. Holding my right hand steady with my left hand, I drew in two flats in the third and eighth measures on the first page. Just as I finished, the bell rang, and I heard the maid’s heels clacking across the floor. I dashed toward the piano, replaced the sheet music, and flopped into a settee. My heart was hammering in my chest.
Monsieur Vaury stepped into the room. His smile showed a jumble of large, knobby teeth. “Good afternoon, Mademoiselle. How is the Chopin coming?”
“You be the judge,” I said sweetly.
I arranged myself on the piano bench and spread my skirt out so as to leave no room for the dry old man. But Monsieur Vaury pushed the folds of green faille aside with his forearm and slid onto the bench beside me.
I began to play. Monsieur Vaury stopped me in the fifth measure. “Excuse me, Mademoiselle. This is the key of E major, so that B is not flatted.”
“But the composer has flatted it.” I tried to sound innocent.
Monsieur Vaury blinked and squinted at the music as I continued to play. A minute later, he stopped me again.
“Mademoiselle, you have flatted another B.”
“I know, Monsieur. It is flatted in the music.”
“I’ve played this piece a thousand times, Mademoiselle. You are striking the wrong note.”
“Look for yourself, Monsieur.” I pointed to the music.
Monsieur Vaury pushed his spectacles over his head and leaned toward the music stand, scrunching his forehead and narrowing his eyes to study the altered notes. “What do we have here?”
He recoiled from the music stand and stiffened his back. “I knew it! These flats have been drawn in!” He stared at me severely.
“Are you accusing me?” I said, coquettishly moving my hand to the base of my throat. I was enjoying his discomfort.
“Who else? Do you see anyone else in the room?” Monsieur Vaury’s jowls twitched, and he shook his gray strings of hair. “I won’t have this type of thing, Mademoiselle Avegno. I’m a serious musician. I won’t waste my time with foolishness.”
He jumped to his feet and began gathering up his music, muttering that women were weak, vain creatures, that we were all deceitful wretches, and that he was glad he had never married.
Mama later wrote Monsieur Vaury an apologetic letter imploring him to come back. He refused. We were not only silly women, he explained to her, but also Americans—in his view, a hopeless combination.
At the time, an influx of nouveau-riche Americans had descended on Paris, and their loud, spendthrift ways had sparked waves of resentment among the French. Suddenly everyone from the United States was seen as pushy and vulgar, a prejudice that severely hindered Mama’s social ambitions.
Above all, she aspired to the aristocratic society of old France. She wanted to be invited to dinner parties in the faubourg Saint-Germain, to have lunch with duchesses and vicomtesses, and to attend weekend parties at châteaux in the Loire Valley, where everyone’s name was in Almanach de Gotha.
She had hoped that her grandfather’s title of marquis and the noble particle in her maiden name would give her entrée to the best homes. But it had been generations since the de Ternant name had been attached to a landed estate, and Mama’s ancestry no longer counted for anyt
hing in France.
Though the faubourg Saint-Germain was almost impossible for Americans to penetrate, Louis-Napoléon’s court at the Tuileries was not. He had staged a coup d’état that made him Emperor in 1852, four years after he had been elected President of France, and his rule was marked by a love of pleasure and display that was far more extravagant than anything the original Napoléon had countenanced fifty years earlier. This was the era of spectacular imperial balls, glorious hunting parties, grand military reviews, and huge universal exhibitions. The Emperor was perfectly happy to include Americans in court festivities—as long as they were either fabulously rich or celebrities. Mama was neither.
Still, she aspired to be invited to Princess Mathilde’s salon. A niece of Napoléon I and an intimate of the Emperor’s, Mathilde was the chief link between the faubourg and Louis-Napoléon’s court. At the Princess’s hôtel on rue de Courcelles, the old aristocracy mingled with the most famous celebrities and the best minds of France. At Mathilde’s salon, a guest might meet the composers Saint-Saëns and Gounod, the scientist Louis Pasteur, and the writers Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert. Sometimes the Emperor and Empress themselves showed up, as well as the brightest lights of the demimonde—actresses, actors, even occasionally a dazzling courtesan.
Once, while riding through the Bois de Boulogne, Mama and I saw Princess Mathilde. She drove past us in an open carriage, wearing a string of black pearls over her ample bosom. She wasn’t as old as I had expected, but she was short and fat with the same imperious dark-eyed face as her famous uncle’s.
That was the closest Mama would ever get to French nobility. Still, Mama’s beauty made her a sought-after guest in the homes of the wealthier American expatriates and the newly rich bankers and manufacturers who were our neighbors.
In this crowd, her social ascent had been swift. She had invitations to dinner and the theater several times a week, and her own receptions drew dozens of people. The first one was held on a warm Monday in June, three years after we moved into our hôtel. Carriages began lining up outside our door at four, and by five the street was clogged with landaus, victorias, fiacres, and coupés. Two wigged footmen in pink-and-black livery received Mama’s guests in the marbled foyer, which was filled with potted palms, and led them upstairs.
A garden had grown from the packet of Louisiana seeds I had planted in the small plot at the back of the house, and the scent of camellias, parmelee violets, and magnolias—the scents of Parlange—drifted in through the open French doors. Candles flickered in silver sconces, and the soft pearly light of a Parisian summer afternoon slanted in through the windows, infusing the room with a rosy glow.
Mama held court in a chair covered in pink silk that matched the footmen’s livery. I sat opposite her, in a gray satin dress trimmed with silver beads. A small fan of white feathers lay folded in my lap. I had put my hair up for the first time that day, twisting the heavy auburn mass into a roll and pinning it up at the back of my head. Mama had wanted me to add some fake curls at the temples, but I refused. I thought the simple twist looked elegant, and it set off the long white curve of my neck.
Soon our parlor was overflowing with bloated, blotched old men and their wrinkled wives, ugly in trailing dresses, their hair splashed with gold powder that unconvincingly covered the gray. Madame Slidell had brought two artists, minor painters who were skinny and badly dressed and who sat in the corner near the buffet table gobbling up Mama’s caviar.
One member of the nobility, Baroness Micaela de Pontalba, showed up—though actually she was an American from New Orleans. Old and reeking of patchouli, she had a two-fingered stump for a left hand, the result of a wound she had received in 1834, when her father-in-law, enraged because she had withheld her inheritance from his son, had tried to shoot her to death. Still, Mama fussed over her because she had a title. “You’re looking well, Baroness!” she enthused when the decrepit woman lumbered into the room, wearing a black crepe dress over an old-fashioned cage.
I was the accompanist for a pudgy brown-haired young tenor Mama had hired to perform. He sang William Tell’s “Sombre Forêt” and Schubert’s “Serenade” with one hand resting over his heart. Then I played two solos—a Chopin nocturne and a Mozart sonata.
Afterward I rose and took a bow with the singer. As I crossed the room to resume my perch near the fireplace, two puffy, perfumed dowagers eyed me enviously. “Don’t worry, she’ll fade someday,” I heard one whisper to her friend.
As I turned around to glare back at them, I bumped into a spindly table that held an expensive porcelain clock. The table shook, and the clock tumbled to the parquet and shattered. “Oh, no,” I groaned as one of the maids rushed to gather the jagged shards.
“Never mind, dear. It was a Louis, and a particularly ugly one at that.” I looked up to see a slender black-haired man tuning the right end of his enormous mustache. He was dressed immaculately in a gray topcoat and striped trousers, with a lavender cravat tied neatly against his white silk shirt.
“A what?”
“A Louis. An object inspired by the ancien régime. Never in the history of the world has there been such hideous taste.”
I was so used to Mama’s gilt mirrors, crystal chandeliers, and flounced poufs that it never occurred to me they might be hideous. But I sensed immediately that the man was right. Around the room, the curvy legs and clawed feet on the furniture, the tasseled taffeta draperies puddled on the floor, the bright textured upholstery, looked fatally fussy, like the parlor in my dollhouse at Parlange.
The man read my reaction and smiled. “I’m Pierre Gautreau,” he said.
“I’m Virginie Avegno. Would you like to show me what else you hate about our decor?”
“I’d be delighted.”
For the next half hour, I toured the house with Monsieur Gautreau. Occasionally he commented on a painting or a piece of furniture. But mostly he asked me about our life in Louisiana. And he told me about himself. He had been raised on a large estate in Paramé outside the ancient walled city of Saint-Malo on France’s northern coast. His mother belonged to a wealthy ship-owning family, and one of his uncles ran a lucrative business exporting guano from the islands off the coast of Chile. As a teenager, Monsieur Gautreau moved to Chile and grew rich working in his uncle’s export business. Recently he had returned to France and settled in Paris, where he established an investment firm. He lived in a small hôtel at 80, rue Jouffroy and presided over his family estate at Paramé, the Château des Chênes.
Over the next few months, Mama and I saw a great deal of the cooly elegant Pierre Gautreau. He came to all of our Mondays and was always the first to arrive, stepping from his carriage a few minutes before four, dressed exquisitely in a gray top hat and a cashmere coat, his ivory-topped walking cane cocked on his shoulder. Within no time, Mama was addressing him with the familiar “tu,” and we were both calling him Pierre.
At thirty-three, Pierre was a year younger than Mama, and they became instant friends. There was much to draw them together. Both had grown up in the country, yet loathed rural life. Both were materialistic and worldly. Both were ardent social climbers whose love of society was eclipsed only by their passion for house decoration.
Whereas Mama’s taste ran to the fashionable and pretentious, Pierre’s was sophisticated and well in advance of his time. He loved anything Oriental, an interest that perhaps was sparked by recent political events. A trove of Japanese furniture, china, fabric, and art showed up on the European market in 1868, after the Mikado, tired of being a mere figurehead emperor, seized power. The ensuing revolution ruined Japan’s old feudal families, many of whom were forced to sell off their treasures. Pierre was among the first in France to collect them.
He never liked anything inspired by the French Louis. He thought their style silly and frivolous (and also politically problematic). He soon persuaded Mama to sell her Louis XIV fauteuils, Louis XV chandeliers, and Louis XVI boiseries. He allowed her to keep only one Louis in the public rooms, a hig
h-backed chair inspired by the relatively benign era of Louis XIII. Mama insisted that our boudoirs remain conventionally French. “I can’t go to sleep unless I see a bit of toile,” she said.
Pierre convinced Mama to put her money into japonaiseries, and within a year our house was transformed. Now, in the foyer, parlors, and dining room, instead of gilt mirrors, elaborately painted ceilings, heavily carved furniture, and sumptuous upholstery—a “tous les Louis” decor, as Pierre put it—we had bare ceilings, silk-covered walls, and Japanese screens, prints, and china.
Each room was dominated by a few exquisite pieces carefully chosen by Pierre. The entrance hall held an ancient Japanese incense bowl atop a round fourteenth-century table from a Tokyo palace. The salon featured a large harp and a collection of Oriental urns arranged on a tapestry-covered chest. The dining room walls were covered in jade silk, and standing in the four corners were painted screens of Japanese scenes.
Most of Mama’s friends, especially the old Creole expatriates, were shocked at the decor. But a few collectors with advanced taste who attended her salon praised the house extravagantly. Soon people clamored for invitations to Mama’s Mondays, eager to get a look. Even a few curious reporters showed up.
One Monday, after I had performed several piano pieces for Mama’s guests, a dark, birdlike woman, expensively clad in high-necked red satin, floated toward me carrying an open notebook and a gold pen that was encrusted with four fat diamonds. She had a long, bumpy nose and thin, colorless lips set in a narrow olive-skinned face. A nest of coarse black hair sat on her head over a thick fringe of bangs. Yet her eyes were beautiful, long-lashed and sparkly black, and they radiated intelligence and charm. I thought she was the most attractive ugly woman I had ever met.
Everyone called her Etincelle, and she wrote a popular column, “Carnet d’un Mondain,” that ran every Thursday on the front page of Le Figaro. Etincelle was one of those celebrities whose personality was so strong and distinctive that she needed only one name.
I Am Madame X Page 9
