Gioia Diliberto
Scribner
2003
Ms. Hen picked up this book at a Little Free Library near where she lives, which she stumbled across one day walking around her neighborhood. She had heard about the book years ago when it first came out, and she was intrigued, because she likes art, and is also a fan of John Singer Sargent.
I AM MADAME X is a novel about a painting called Portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent. The painting caused a scandal when it was shows in the Paris Salon in 1884, because the French saw it as obscene. It didn’t help that both the artist and the model were Americans, because Paris society was always looking for a reason to make Americans the scapegoats.
The novel is an imagined life of Virginie Gautreau, the model of the portrait. When she is young, she lives in Louisiana on a plantation near New Orleans named Parlange. She lives with her grandmother and mother, uncle, and sister. Her parents separated, but her father dies in the Civil War. When the war hit, her mother takes Virginie and her sister Valentine to Paris and are supported by her aunt’s former fiancé, who her aunt did not marry because she jumped out the window on her wedding day.
Virginie and her mother and sister move back to Louisiana after the war, but the plantation does not make that much money. They move back to Paris when her mother gets an inheritance from her husband's estate. Her mother is materialistic and wants to launch herself into Paris society. She buys a house and has parties, and hopes to marry Virginie to a duke or an aristocrat.
Virginie is beautiful, exceptionally so. She has an affair with a doctor named Dr. Pozzi and gets pregnant. Her mother is furious, but Viginie gets married to a family friend Pierre, a marriage blanc, which means a marriage of convenience in which the couple can do what they wish. Pierre has a married lover, and he would carry on as usual. His family wanted him to be married because it was the right thing to do.
Virginie has love affairs and she eventually meets Sargent. She is vain and has always wanted her portrait painted. The Paris Salon is a scandal, and at first she is gossiped about as a harlot and Sargent has to leave Paris because he is ostracized and could never work there again.
Ms. Hen thinks it’s interesting how the world has changed. The painting now looks so innocent and elegant, compared to what is shown today. She would have thought that the French would love something like that, but she thinks they weren’t ready for it when it came out.
This novel reminded Ms. Hen of a couple of things she has read. The setting reminded her of Proust, of Paris society in the late nineteenth century. When she read the author’s notes, she learned that Dr. Pozzi was a real person who Proust based one of his characters on in IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.
This also reminded Ms. Hen of a memoir she read called THE BASTARD or LA BATARDE in French by Violette Leduc, a book about her life as an illegitimate child and the problems being ugly. I AM MADAME X reminded her of this because the two characters were the case of extremes: one was the height of beauty and the other the height of ugliness. The also lived in Paris, and they lived through different wars.
Lots of chickens live in these pages, as they do in books about France. When Virginie lives on the plantation, she talks about her pets, “Or we’d spend hours playing with our pets at the barn. I had two chickens, which I had named Sanspareil and Papillon.” Ms. Hen likes that Virginie had pet chickens when she was young.
Ms. Hen enjoyed this book, even though the central character was vain, and the world she lived in was a superficial world, where everyone was obsessed with looks and trivialities. Ms. Hen is interested in art, and things that are beautiful, but she knows the fruit beneath the flower is what is more important.
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