Free I Am Madame X by Gioia Diliberto Page A

office, where he handed Mama a jar of Chomel’s Solution and a small bottle with a label reading BLOOM OF YOUTH .
    “Your daughter should take one teaspoonful of the Chomel’s every night and apply two fingertips of the cream to her face. I’m sure the effect will be agreeable to you. Bring her back in a month,” he ordered.
    At the convent, Mama handed Mother Superior the bottles and told her I was to be given them every night before bed.
    “What’s this medicine for?” the old nun asked.
    I started to explain, but Mama cut me off. “Virginie has some stomach trouble,” she explained.
    I took the medicine that evening and every evening afterward for three weeks. Almost overnight, I lost my tan and my freckles. My skin became smoother and more translucent, with a clear, bluish tinge from the veins showing through.
    Then, almost as suddenly as the medicine had worked its magic to whiten me, it began to make me ill. I became overwhelmingly tired, I lost my appetite, and I suffered from an insistent, violent trembling on the right side of my face—typical symptoms I know now of the first stage of arsenic poisoning. What’s more, my freckles reappeared. Soon, they had darkened and run together and suddenly my face was very brown indeed. I looked a lot like the red-haired slave girl in Grandpère Avegno’s house, the one everyone gawked at because the black and white blood in her was so oddly mixed.
    “My God, what’s happened to you!” Mama cried when she picked me up at the convent on a warm April afternoon for my scheduled rendezvous with Dr. Chomel. She hustled me through the courtyard and into a cab. When we reached rue de l’Echiquier, she yanked me to the pavement in front of Dr. Chomel’s building and scurried to pull the bell. We found the distinguished man in his office, standing on a ladder and searching for a book on a high shelf. “Look at my daughter!” Mama shrieked.
    Dr. Chomel descended the ladder slowly and walked over to me. He leaned his face into mine and studied my skin. “This happens sometimes,” he said, straightening abruptly. “A complete reversal of the expected effect.” He shrugged his shoulders. “So we reduce the dose.”
    “I don’t want any more medicine,” I protested.
    “Now, now, my dear, wise little girls listen to their doctors.”
    Dr. Chomel left his office and padded down the hall. A few minutes later he returned, carrying two jars, which he handed to Mama. “Let’s see how she does with these,” he said.
    When we got to the convent, Rochilieu was waiting at the curb, glancing anxiously through a newspaper. He was pale and his forehead was slick with sweat.
    “What’s he doing here?” Mama whispered as the cab creaked to a halt under the skinny iron arm of a towering lamppost. Rochilieu ran over and opened the door.
    “It’s over!” he cried as Mama and I stepped to the pavement. “General Lee has surrendered!” Rochilieu embraced Mama, and they both wept.
    Neither of them had expected the Confederates to lose. Living in Paris and cut off from the grimmest news about the war, they did not realize how hopeless the Rebel cause had become, nor the extent of the fighting’s devastation to the South.
    “The Negroes will own us now,” Mama said bitterly. She pulled from her purse a black-bordered handkerchief—the one she’d carried since Papa’s death—and lifted her veil to wipe the tears from her cheeks.
    No one at the convent talked about the end of the war. Everyone continued to be much more interested in my face. Mostly, the nuns and the girls stared at me silently. But once Isolde, who at five was the convent’s youngest student, ran up to me during recreation. “Are you turning into a Negro?” she asked. Sister Emily-Jean overheard her and rushed to defend me. “Isolde, Mimi is taking some medicine that makes her dark. When she stops using it, her skin will be white again,” she said.
    Later, though, Sister Emily-Jean whispered to me,