I Am Madame X by Gioia Diliberto Page B

shoulders. As soon as the front door slammed behind us, we flew down the stairs and outside to the Champs-Elysées. Running past the wooden booths where vendors sold toys and candy, we arrived at a wide lawn. Harry watched Aurélie as she skipped toward a large marble fountain at the lawn’s center, her black curls springing around her shoulders. Without saying anything to me, he chased after her.
    When we were seated around the fountain, Harry asked Aurélie, “How long have you worn spectacles?”
    “Forever!” she answered. Aurélie scissored her legs under her blue taffeta dress and threw her head back, laughing. Harry stared into the distance and began reciting a poem in French:
    In a sweet indifference
    I lived, peaceful and content;
    To me love seemed without strength:
    Therefore, I often affronted it;
    But, the sweet pleasures of my life,
    Alas, they couldn’t last always,
    Since your beautiful eyes, Aurélie,
    Have interrupted the course.
    I recognized the poem (though in the original version the girl’s name is Amélie) as one by Michel St. Pierre, a Creole poet who was the most famous free man of color in New Orleans. The poem was contained in an anthology that Tante Julie used to read from.
    “Did you like that?” Harry asked Aurélie.
    “It’s lovely,” she answered, her eyes wide.
    “You’ve never heard it before?”
    “No.”
    Harry had never recited a poem to me, and I felt a twitch of jealousy. But it disappeared quickly as we set about playing in the park, laughing and running around. After several hours, just as the sky fell to black, we headed toward the rue de Marignan. Mama was waiting at the corner in a cab. “Au revoir, Harry!” Aurélie and I called out as the cab lurched forward toward the Seine. When we got to the convent, Mama kissed each of Aurélie’s cheeks and said she hoped to see her soon. “Thank you, so much, Madame Avegno,” Aurélie said. “I had a lovely time.”
    Two weeks later, on my next visit home, I went directly with Mama and Valentine to rue de Marignan for another Rebel reunion. When we arrived, Harry Beauvais was reading in the parlor. As soon as he saw me, he jumped up, throwing his book on a settee, and dashed into the foyer to help me with my coat.
    “No Aurélie this week?” he asked.
    “She’s home with her family. I miss her, though. She’s my best friend.”
    Harry handed my coat to a white-aproned maid and looked at me severely, his face hard and very white, his eyebrows a blond furry line above blue eyes. “Mimi, she’s a Negro.”
    “No!” I stared at him, astonished.
    Harry had been looking forward to this moment, and now his news tumbled out in a torrent. “My father knew Aurélie’s father, a white planter named Sébastian Grammont. He owned Laurence Plantation near Monroe, where his wife and children lived. Grammont also kept a cottage in New Orleans for his colored mistress and children, a boy and a girl—your Aurélie. When he died, Grammont left his colored family some money, and they moved to France. My mother met Aurélie’s mother once and says she looks African. I don’t know how she gets by here—probably never leaves the house unveiled. Obviously Aurélie passes for white.”
    “You’re wrong. Aurélie would have told me.”
    “Mimi, how can you be so stupid?”
    I knew from listening to the adults that free American blacks had been emigrating to France for several decades, and, if they were light-skinned enough, slipping quietly into the white race. But Aurélie? A Negro? I felt angry and confused. Among the slaves at Parlange, there were several mulatto children. One of my uncles had a black mistress, and I played with the couple’s children in New Orleans. I was fond of these Negro “cousins,” but I knew that an impenetrable wall divided us. I knew, too, that theirs were doomed lives.
    “Did you tell my mother?” I asked.
    “I’m sure someone did.”
    But Mama said nothing about it. That evening, we rode