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Book Description

When John Singer Sargent unveiled Madame X -- his famous portrait of American beauty Virginie Gautreau -- at the 1884 Paris Salon, its subject's bold pose and provocative dress shocked the public and the critics, smashing Sargent's dreams of a Paris career. In this remarkable novel, Gioia Diliberto tells Virginie's story, drawing on the sketchy historical facts to re-create Virginie's tempestuous personality and the captivating milieu of nineteenth-century Paris. Born in New Orleans and raised on a lush plantation, Virginie fled to France during the Civil War, where she was absorbed into the fascinating and wealthy world of grand ballrooms, dressmakers' salons, and artists' ateliers. Even before Sargent painted her portrait, Virginie's reputation for promiscuity and showy self-display made her the subject of vicious Paris gossip.

Immersing the reader in Belle Epoque Paris, I Am Madame X is a compulsively readable and richly imagined novel illuminating the struggle between Virginie and Sargent over the outcome of a painting that changed their lives and affected the course of art history.

Amazon.com

Mystery is often more alluring than knowledge. A fictional memoir of the legendary American-born beauty Virginie Gautreau, the subject of John Singer Sargent's famous 1884 painting, Portrait of Madame X, Gioia Diliberto's I Am Madame X risks dashing cold water on one of the loveliest and most persistent mysteries in Western art history: what the model is thinking. Following in the footsteps of Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, though with much more historical documentation at her disposal, Diliberto gives voice to a woman whose memory rests on this single painting. A gem of Belle époque Paris, Virginie Gautreau had fled Louisiana with her mother during the Civil War. Married at a young age to a French banker, she attracted every kind of attention with her unusual beauty and her daring fashion sense. Her affairs were widely whispered about. Diliberto presents a vivid picture of Virginie's life and times, and brings to life one model's troubled but stimulating relationship with the artist who immortalized her.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

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 decolletage 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[s] 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 epoque, 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.

From Library Journal

John Singer Sargent's provocative portrait of aloof and alluring Virginie Gautreau scandalized the Paris Salon in 1884. In it, the artist offset his subject's luminous white skin with a revealing black evening gown. Captivated by the enigmatic Virginie, biographer Diliberto (A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams) decided to research her. While she didn't collect enough information to write a biography, she teased and tantalized the scant findings into a compelling novel. From New Orleans, where she was born and raised on her grandmother's Creole plantation, Virginie moved to France to escape the Civil War. In Paris, she married a banker and became a "professional beauty" known for her ostentatiousness. Diliberto's writing brings Virginie to life in a way that Sargent's portrait does not, creating a complex woman who recognizes that her beauty is her most precious commodity. The author uses evocative images and sharp descriptions of both people and places to create a word-picture of Parisian society at the turn of the century. Her characters are well imagined, revealing strengths and weakness that explain both who they are and what they have become. Highly recommended.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Caroline Hallsworth, Greater Sudbury P.L., ON

From Booklist

When biographer Diliberto (A Useful Woman [1999] and debutante [1987]) began researching John Singer Sargent's famous Portrait of Madame X, she discovered that little was known about the model beyond her name: Virginie "Mimi" de Avegno Gautreau. Fascinated by the portrait but lacking enough material for a biography, Diliberto used what little information she could find as the basis for this lively and provocative first novel. Born in the antebellum South, Mimi and her family were members of the Creole "aristocracy" who fled to France as the tide of the Civil War turned against the Confederacy. At the age of 11, Virginie says, "I was starting to sense I had something better than mere loveliness." At 15, she has the first of many love affairs, and by the time of her marriage, she is notorious in Paris for her daring makeup, revealing clothes, and extraordinary beauty. Approached by Sargent, she is at first reluctant to pose, but ultimately she is persuaded by the thought that the portrait will make her famous throughout Europe. Readers who enjoyed Amanda Foreman's very popular 2000 biography, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, will enjoy this fictional account of another outrageous woman. In Mimi, Diliberto has created a heroine who is as capricious and vain, and as compelling and seductive, as her portrait suggests.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Meredith Parets

Book Dimension

length: (cm)20.3 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)13.7