I Am Madame X

November 18, 2002
Paris gasped and gossiped when John Singer Sargent's portrait of Madame X was first exhibited in 1884. Everyone knew the subject was the notorious Virginie Gatreau, and Sargent's shocking depiction—posed in profile, the woman boasts bare shoulders, deep décolletage and an exotically pale complexion—intimately suggested her vanity, arrogance and sexuality. In her first novel (after biographies of Jane Addams, Hadley Hemingway and Brenda Frazier), Diliberto competently imagines Gatreau's controversial life. During the Civil War, six-year-old Virginie, her younger sister and her widowed mother flee the Union soldiers approaching her grandmother's sugar plantation in Louisiana. As an expatriate in Paris, Virginie (or Mimi, as she is called) becomes a "professional beauty," someone who is "received in the best society but ha no other occupation, no other ambition than to be beautiful." At 15, she begins trysting with a married doctor. Pregnant, she hastily marries social climber Pierre Gatreau (and then suffers a miscarriage). Later, she has an affair with French Republican leader Leon Gambetta. Her life is filled with tragedy: the shame of pregnancy, the death of her sister from typhoid and her emotional isolation. Her only trustworthy relative is her Aunt Julie, who refuses to marry and becomes a professional artist; Virginie's narcissistic mother uses her daughter to get into the top echelons of society. This fast scroll through history (the Civil War, the fall of the French Second Empire, the belle époque, etc.) against a backdrop of parties, salons, operas, artists' studios and sexual escapades is inviting for its wealth of well-researched period details, but limited by its narrator's sensibility. In this evocation, Virginie Gatreau never becomes anything more than a shallow object of beauty.

Madame X, the figure in John Singer Sargent's unforgettable Belle Epoque portrait of a Paris beauty, was Louisiana-born Virginie Gautreau. Anyone who has seen the painting has wondered about her (and wondered why Sargent never attached her real name to the picture), but a scarcity of detail about Gautreau has mostly confounded the curious. Biographer Gioia Diliberto has created a satisfying solution to the problem in this inventive and persuasive imagining of Gautreau's story. Lorna Raver is sensational as the throaty, world-weary Virginie, looking back over her life and loves (there were quite a few), and especially vividly recounting the making of the famous painting, the scandal it caused, and the aftereffects of the celebrity it created. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine