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Title: Frederick Chopin
A man of solitude
Author: Guy de Pourtalès
Translator: Jr. Charles Bayly
Release date: September 21, 2025 [eBook #76904]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1927
Credits: Sean/IB@DP
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FREDERICK CHOPIN ***
[Illustration: CHOPIN. From a Drawing by George Sand.]
FREDERICK CHOPIN:
A MAN OF SOLITUDE
_By_
GUY DE POURTALÈS
_Translated from the French by_
CHARLES BAYLY, JR.
THORNTON BUTTERWORTH LIMITED
15 BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.2
_First published . . . 1927_
_All rights reserved_
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
_“He used his art only to play
to himself his own tragedy.”_
Liszt.
DEDICATION
When I suggested the example of Liszt to a soul stricken but still
capable of enthusiasm, I thought also of offering him this story
of Chopin. Not that this latter should serve to discount whatever
slight exuberance there might be in the former. On the contrary: they
complement and complete each other, and show, the one concave and the
other convex, the twofold visage of that symbolic being whom we call
the artist. Or, the sensitive man, the cognizant—he, in short, whom we
envy.
One of these masks portrays glory and passion: the other, sorrow and
loneliness.
I quite realize the romantic sound of these four words in an age when
they are so out-moded. But if I agree that in our time every thing
possible has been tried, indeed, to eliminate from our orchestra those
harps, those tremolos, those rubatos, those great billows of harmony
that transported three admiring generations with the struggles between
heaven and hell, it is nevertheless necessary only to open a newspaper
at the section on the courts of law, to gaze into the show windows of
the picture dealers, or to hear a saxophone, to convince myself that
the themes of the human legend have in no degree changed. The rhythm,
the harmonies, are different, but our responsive vibrations are just
the same as they were in the most guileless epochs.
The real disaccord between our parents and us is that the ugly—or what
they called the ugly—has been incorporated to-day in the beautiful—or
what we call the beautiful. In other words, there are to-day no such
things as beauty and ugliness, harmony and discord, there is no longer
any æsthetic prohibition. As one of our sages, Paul Valéry, has
written: “I see the modern man as a man with an idea of himself and of
the world that is no longer fixed.... It has become impossible for him
to be a man of a single viewpoint, to hold, really, to one language,
to one nation, to one faith, to one physical type.” Let us add: to one
music.
Thanks to the rigorous method of science, it has become easy to believe
everything, or nothing. To love everyone, or no one. But do we gain
other than in childishness and dotage? I question whether this new
abundance enriches us more than their apparent poverty fertilized our
fathers. This mass of sensations and perceptions has not increased our
lucidity any more than the steam siren and the typewriter have added
new notes to our scale. And yet we should hardly consent to the loss of
one of these recent contributions.
But if a very ironic, very cynical jazz enchants me, it in no way
removes the pleasure I feel in hearing Chopin. I should be sorry not
to be able to savour two such different forms of modern sadness, the
one born in New Orleans and the other in a Warsaw garret. To pursue
still further the little problem which the two parallel existences of
Liszt and Chopin pose for our reflection, let us say that on certain
days we are more apt for action, for youth, for expenditure in any
form; on other days for reserve, for shrinking, for incertitude, for
concentration, and—even though the word has lost its beauty—for mystery.
The life of Liszt is an open book. He wrote it everywhere in ink and
in adventure. Of the life of Chopin almost nothing remains. His nature
protected him from needless experiences, and fate furthermore decreed
that a great many of his letters and relics should be burned in a
house in which his sister lived at Warsaw in 1863. We can discover him
therefore only in his music, in a few scraps of correspondence, and in
the memories of his friends. Meanwhile, his life was always so simple
and so logical that a slight commentary is necessary to understand
it, as an _appoggiatura_ enhances the value of a note. Save for two
or three journeys, the outside world had little chance to penetrate
this imagination that ever turned inward. Its poetry lies in whatever
qualities of possibility and of song that were added to the illusions
of his days. Badly served in love, in friendship, in everything that
demanded blindness or excessive pedal, this clear-sighted sufferer saw
himself in only one mirror: the ebony of his piano. “Piano, marvellous
instrument,” he said. Naturally, since the piano is an orchestra in
itself. But it is something more: it is an instrument. Hence a soul.
It was the only one Chopin ever knew; and he made his piano his only
legatee.
If Liszt has given you the daring to seize the joys of the moment and a
little confidence in yourself, Chopin can become not less a brotherly
companion. His life is that of your anxious shadow. His music is
perhaps nothing but the risen song of your inner loneliness.
All art is rich above all in the measure of what you yourself bring
to it. Every soul possesses you in the measure of the effort you make
to receive it. Welcome this one as the purest expression, for which
there are no words, of what there is in love that must remain for ever
inexpressible.
G. de P.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I “An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman” 17
II The Childhood of Chopin 20
III The Birth of the Poet 25
IV “Sorrow” and “Ideal” 30
V Revolution at Warsaw and Solitude at Vienna 43
VI “I doubt whether there is a city on Earth where more
pianists are to be found than in Paris” 55
VII Happy Years, Working Years 67
VIII Marie Wodzinska and the Dusk 76
IX First Sketch of George Sand 94
X Letters of Two Novelists 103
XI The Chartreuse of Valdemosa 127
XII “If music be the food of love, play on” 144
XIII On some Friendships of Chopin, and on his Æsthetics 159
XIV Misunderstandings, Loneliness 177
XV Chagrin, Hate 192
XVI The Story of an Estrangement 205
XVII Swan Song 228
XVIII “The Cypresses have their caprices” 247
XIX The Death of Chopin 251
XX An Epitaph for a Poet 257
Sources 263
Index 267
CHAPTER I
“An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman”
“An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman...” This portrait of
Chopin, penned by a hand he loved, should stand as the frontispiece of
this study. Naïve painters in the Middle Ages—who also came to pray for
pardon—hung their expiatory offerings in the shadows of the cathedrals.
This once caressing woman’s hand, now dead, surely yielded, while
writing these words, to the inner necessity of knowing absolution. It
added: “There was never anything more pure and at the same time more
exalted than his thoughts...”
And perhaps with faint trembling: “... but this being only understood
that which was inherent within himself. One would have needed a
microscope to peer into his soul, where so little light of the living
ever penetrated.”
A microscope has never helped to reveal a soul. No optical instruments
are necessary in order to follow the teaching of Liszt: let us try to
see with our hearts.
* * * * *
At the head of these pages must stand a name; because that name
breathes life into the whole being of whom we write: Poland. Ever
since 1795 that unhappy country had been completely dismembered, until
Napoleon, that great poet of geography, after his first campaign in
Prussia, created the Duchy of Warsaw (1807). This was to last until the
fall of the Emperor, that is, barely eight years. Yet these eight years
were sufficient to endow the Poles with a singularly youthful hero
worship for France.
Now in 1806, a certain M. Nicolas Chopin, professor of French,
entrusted with the education of the son of the Countess Skarbek,
married in the village of Zelazowa Wola, six leagues from Warsaw,
a Mlle. Justine Krzyzanowska. He was of French origin, a native of
Marainville, a small village near the Hill of Sion, in the heart of
Lorraine, the history of which is so curiously interwoven with that of
Poland. The fiancée of this one-time clerk who had become a teacher
was a girl of twenty-four, of an impoverished noble family. In the
household of the Countess she held, as did others of rank, the position
of attendant and lady-in-waiting, according to the tradition of such
proud, poor seigneurs.
Close to the seigneurial dwelling, which was screened by a group of
trees, stood a small house flanked by an outside staircase. Right
through it ran a passage, at the end of which could be seen the court,
the stables, and, at a distance, the fields of alfalfa and of colza.
Here the young couple settled down. At the right of the entrance were
three low rooms where one could touch the ceiling. After a time a
girl was born, and was named Louise. This obscure event was rapidly
succeeded by the French campaign in Prussia—Tilsit, Austerlitz, Jéna,
Wagram, and the Polish eagles flying in the train of the Imperial
eagles. Haydn died while the cannon of Napoleon were thundering for
the second time under the walls of Vienna. When four shells had fallen
close to him, the old composer said to his terrified servants, “Why
this panic? Remember that wherever Haydn is no accident can happen.”
Stendhal, a commissioner in the army, was present at his obsequies. He
afterwards made the following note: “Why is it that all Frenchmen who
are really great in literature—La Fontaine, Corneille, Molière, Racine,
Bossuet—should have met together about 1660? Why should all the great
painters have appeared about 1510? Why, since these two happy periods,
has nature been so sparing? Will music have the same fate?”
Yet Beethoven at that date was writing the _Quatuor serioso_ and
the sonata in E flat major, which is called _The Farewells_. He
had already composed six of his symphonies, the _Kreutzer Sonata_,
the _Appassionata_, and _Fidélio_. Liszt, Schumann and Wagner were
approaching. Goethe was flourishing; Byron was publishing his first
verses. Shelley and Keats were outlining theirs. Balzac, Hugo, Berlioz
were warming the school benches. And on the 22nd of February, 1810, at
six o’clock in the evening, in the little house in Zelazowa Wola, was
born Frederick François Chopin.
He came into a world of music. For exactly at that moment, under the
windows of his mother, rustic violins were giving a serenade for a
village wedding.
CHAPTER II
The Childhood of Chopin
On the first of October of that same year, Nicolas Chopin was made
professor of French at the Warsaw High School, and the whole family
moved to the capital. They were immediately absorbed into the urban
life and never returned to the country. Warsaw was indeed a fertile
soil where one quickly took root among its Italian palaces and its
wooden huts. Its swarming population mingled Asiatic pomp with the
filth of Esquimaux. Here were to be met the bearded Jew, the nun, the
young girl in a silken cloak, and the mustachioed Pole, in caftan, with
belt, sword, and high red boots.
M. Chopin bestirred himself to increase his income, because his family
had grown. After Louise and Frederick, Isabelle and then Emilie
were born. In 1812 he became professor at the School of Artillery
and Engineers and in 1815 obtained the same post in the Preparatory
Military Academy. Finally he turned his own home into a small
boarding-school for the children of the rich.
It is not difficult to imagine the surroundings, the manners, and
the customs among which Frederick grew up in this united and busy
household. A somewhat rigid modesty and the domestic virtues of the
family protected him from rough contacts with reality. It was thus,
said Liszt, that “his imagination took on the velvety texture of plants
which are never exposed to the dust of the highways.”
Here, then, was a child, very gentle, very pale, sprightly, with the
sensibilities of a little girl, and dominated by two passions: his
love for his mother and his love for the piano. He had been placed
before the keyboard at a very early age and had returned to it of his
own accord, drawn by the keys. Music drew tears and cries from him. It
became at once a necessary evil. He was also very fond of his sisters,
and chose four friends among his father’s pupils: Fontana, Titus
Woyciechowski, and the Wodzinski brothers.
To celebrate his eighth birthday, he played at the benefit of the poet,
Niemcewicz. He had been dressed in the English fashion, with a velvet
coat and a large turn-over collar. And when his mother, afterwards,
questioned him about his success, asking what the audience had liked
best, he replied with pride, “My collar.”
The Polish aristocracy, and even the Grand Duke Constantin himself, the
Governor of Warsaw, became interested in the child. He was commanded to
appear before this redoubtable prince—and played for him a march of his
own composition.
“Child,” asked the brother of the Tsar, “why do you always look
upwards?”
But is it not heavenward that poets look? Chopin was “neither an
intellectual prodigy nor a little thinking animal,” writes one of
his biographers, “but a simple, modest child who played the piano as
naturally as the birds sing....”
He had teachers. First Zywny, a venerable gentleman of over sixty, a
native of Bohemia, a violinist and a good teacher. He was absorbed in
the cult of Bach, a passion which he instilled in his pupil; and the
depth of such childish enthusiasms is well known. Then, in 1824, at the
time when Frederick was sent to college, his father replaced Zywny by
Elsner, a Silesian professor who taught him harmony and composition.
Without being a very famous musician, Elsner was something of a
personage, a composer of operas, symphonies, masses, and a Director
of the Conservatory. He had the virtue of never suppressing Chopin’s
personal gifts: “Let him alone,” he said. “If he leaves the main
road and the traditional methods, it is because he has his own ways,
and some day his work will show an originality that no one possesses
to-day. He follows a unique path because his gifts are unique.”
One can applaud this happy prophet. Elsner was a retiring man. He
lived in two cells in an old monastery in the rue des Jésuites. His
pupils saluted him on the right shoulder, according to the Polish
fashion, and he responded by a kiss on each cheek. In his annual report
to the Conservatory he writes: “Chopin, Frederick (3rd year pupil),
astonishing capability, musical genius.”
Chopin worked well at college also, and took prizes; in short, he was
a fluent and charming youth, and gay to the point of clownishness,
like many melancholics. His comrades adored him, above all because of
his talent for mimicry and imitation, which showed to what a point he
felt the grimaces of souls. He acted plays with his sisters, who wrote
comedies for the children. He edited a paper.
These minor events enamelled the surface of a life without scratches.
Three facts alone should be remarked. In May and June, 1825, in two
concerts at the Conservatory, Chopin played an _Allegro_ of Moschelès’
and improvised for the Emperor Alexander, who gave him a ring. During
the course of the same year, he published his _Premier Rondo in C
minor_ (op. 1), dedicated to Mme. Linde, the wife of the Head of the
school. Then, the next summer, he was invited to the Château d’Antonin
by Prince Radziwill.
Playing in public had already lost its novelty. On the other hand,
publishing his music was a new joy, which he tasted with naïve ardour.
And if the piece was neither very profound nor very scholarly, it had
at any rate his personal imprint. “A lady,” said Schumann somewhat
later in speaking of this little work, “would find it most delicate,
most charming....” Note how already they hasten the advent of the
ladies! Such is the first blossom of this chaste soul.
The stay at the Château d’Antonin, in the summer of 1826, revealed to
Chopin the pleasures that can come from material plenty and refinements
of the spirit, when these are linked together by skilled hands. This
was precisely what the young aristocrat needed to awaken his æsthetic
response. It is a luxury which the strong scorn; but a sensitive heart
would have difficulty in dispensing with a judicious distribution
of these amenities, ranging from perfect food to works of art, from
physical luxury to the subtleties of the mind, and subduing this heart,
despite itself, to the domination of the delicious. I myself should
think it very interesting to know all about the furnishings, the
pictures, the guests, the conversations to be seen and heard during
the summer of 1826 at Prince Radziwill’s. Unfortunately, these details
cannot be known with any degree of certainty. After all, it may be
sufficiently enlightening that Chopin called Antonin “a paradise” and
that he found the young princesses “divine.” But it is certain that
from that time on his nostalgia for that perfect harmony derived from
the union of fatherland, a sumptuous dwelling and radiant young beings,
shattered his transport into invincible regrets.
CHAPTER III
The Birth of the Poet
When he was asked, after one of his improvisations at the piano,
improvisations that were a mixture of brilliance that was always
slightly sombre, and of tenderness that was at once poignant and
dramatic, by what name this atavistic desolation that seemed too old
for his young existence should be called, he replied with the Polish
word _zal_. It was a word that he repeated, that he loved, a word
susceptible of varied meanings and which included sometimes every
tenderness and all humility, and sometimes only rancour, revolt, and
glacial vengeance. It is a word also that holds at one and the same
time connotations of inconsolable sorrow, and menace, or fruitless
bitterness, a word, in short, that could be applied to all those cruel
and poet Hamlets whom we call Slavs. From his sixteenth year _zal_ was
the bright enemy of his fortune, an enemy armed each day anew when one
has a romantic heart and when the destruction of oneself seems the most
brilliant solution of life. In knowing himself and then in cultivating
himself without opposition, Chopin accomplished the rare miracle of
becoming absolutely himself before life had taught him anything.
Himself against life, in spite of life. The sum of knowledge that was
necessary to him he possessed at sixteen. It was reduced to the seven
notes of the scale, which were sufficient for the expression of all
his thoughts. He was tortured by the need of no other nourishment than
the search for his own style. That was his method of attaining the
truth. Apart from his piano, the universe, indeed, was but literature.
Furthermore, his father allowed him to leave school at seventeen to
give himself up entirely to his music. He was given a little attic
study with an old piano and a table. There he wrote his first works.
And it was at this time that, testing his powers, he acquired the
astonishingly original touch and style that were soon to amaze the
artistic world. The following year, he composed his _Variations_ on
the _La ci darem la mano_ of Mozart, of which Schumann said as he
thumbed it over: “Eusebius came in softly the other day. You know
that ironic smile with which he tries to intrigue you. I was at the
piano... Eusebius put a piece of music before us, with these words,
‘Hats off, gentlemen—a genius!’ We were not to see the title. I turned
over the pages mechanically. The veiled joy of music without sound is
like something magical. And then, it has always seemed to me that each
composer offers to the eyes a physiognomy of notes that is the essence
of the man. Beethoven has a different look from Mozart, on paper. But
here I fancied that quite strange eyes, the eyes of a flower, the
eyes of a basilisk, the eyes of a peacock, the eyes of a virgin were
marvellously regarding me. But what was the astonishment of the hearers
on reading the title: opus 2... Chopin? I had never heard the name.”
Listen to the almost prophetic tone of that surprise: “Eyes of a
flower, eyes of a basilisk, eyes of a peacock, eyes of a virgin.” This
splendid musical portrait paints in completely the Polish swan testing
for the first time the flutter of his wings.
He took flight very shortly after, at the beginning of September, 1828,
on his first journey. A friend of his father’s, Professor Jaroçki, took
him to Berlin, where the professor had to attend a scientific meeting.
Frederick was in an ecstasy of enthusiasm. After five days of jolting
in the diligence the travellers reached the Prussian capital and put
up at the Hôtel du Kronprinz. Chopin’s first visit was to the factory
of the Kisting pianos, his second to the Academy of Singing, his third
to the Opera, where they were giving _Ferdinand Cortez_ by Spontini,
and _The Secret Marriage_ by Cimarosa. “I followed these operas with
great pleasure,” he wrote home, “but I must admit that the music of
Handel approaches most nearly the musical ideal that I have adopted....
To-morrow they give _Freyschutz_; that is exactly the music that I
want.” He saw Spontini at a distance, and the young Mendelssohn. He
dined at the Congress of Naturalists. “Yesterday there was a banquet
in honour of the scholars. What caricatures! I divided them into three
groups.” At the table he sat next a professor from Hamburg, who,
talking to Jaroçki, so far forgot himself as to take Chopin’s plate
for his own and begin drumming on it. “A true scientist, eh? Nothing
was lacking, not even the big deformed nose. I was on pins and needles
during the drumming, and when it was finished had nothing better to
do than to rub off the finger-marks with a napkin.” This incident was
the object of a long report in which can be seen his stubborn disgust.
Then there were the toilettes of the ladies. Details? None. That struck
closer home than the compulsory visits to the Geological Museum.
Finally, after a fortnight, they re-entered their travelling carriage
to take once more the road for Warsaw. Arriving at Zullichau, between
Frankfurt-am-Oder and Posen, they found a shortage of horses and were
obliged to stop and wait for fresh ones. What should they do? By chance
the postal relay station was also the tavern. Professor Jaroçki seized
the opportunity to dine. Chopin spied a piano. He opened it, sat
down and began to let his fingers wander. An old traveller came and
sat quietly near him, then another, then silently all the household,
the postmaster, his wife, his daughters, and the neighbours. What
a surprise was this nightingale blown by the wind from fairyland!
Suddenly the head of the postillion was framed in the window, and he
thundered out:
“All aboard! The horses are harnessed.”
“Devil take the spoil-sport,” replied the postmaster furiously.
They begged the young man, who had already arisen, to sit down again.
“Go on, _please_ go on,” said the ladies.
“I’ll give you extra horses if necessary,” added the postmaster.
And the old traveller said in his turn:
“Sir, I am an old-fashioned musician and I know what I am talking
about. I, also, play the piano. If Mozart had heard you, sir, he would
have taken your hand. I, a nobody, dare not....”
When Chopin stopped, this curious audience seized him and carried him
out in triumph.
A Schumann overwhelmed, that enthusiastic postmaster, that timid
musicaster trembling with emotion, these were the signs that a new poet
was born among men.
CHAPTER IV
“Sorrow” and “Ideal”
But it was not until the following year that he was to find his voice.
One evening at the Opera, he noticed in a small part a young singer
with a clear tone, fair hair, and an attractive mouth. He learned that
her name was Constance Gladkowska, and that she was still a pupil at
the Conservatory. The impression this girl produced on him was strong,
but altogether pure and childlike. To get the ribbon that tied her
hair, to die holding it hidden on his breast, would have satisfied his
longings. And so delicate was this sentiment that at first he confided
it to no one. Besides, another thought wrung him more: the thought of
leaving Warsaw, because he well knew that he had exhausted its musical
resources.
In July, 1829, his father furnished him with a little money, which
had been saved with difficulty, and the young composer, on whom from
all sides so many hopes were now centred, was able to leave for
Vienna. His first visit there was to Haslinger, the music publisher,
a great eulogist who received him with open arms and already called
him “the new star of the North.” But Chopin, who was not yet twenty,
was cautious and sceptical. He was presented to Count Gallenberg,
the superintendent of the Imperial theatres; he was urged to give a
concert. “What reassures Count Gallenberg,” he wrote to his family, “is
that I shall not tax his purse. I am going to play for nothing. I am
acting the disinterested and the dilettante. I am a musician for love
of the art.”
The concert took place at the Imperial Theatre on the 11th of August,
at seven in the evening. The orchestra played a Beethoven overture,
some airs of Rossini. Then the delicate Chopin, already sickly looking,
came on to the platform. An old lady sitting in the first row said in a
whisper, “What a pity the young man doesn’t make a better appearance!”
But Chopin’s whiteness was from rage rather than nervousness, because
the orchestra, not having been able to decipher his _Variations_, had
forced him to change the programme. He therefore improvised on a theme
from _The White Lady_, then on the Polish air, _Chmiel_.
With the one exception of Liszt, no one has ever improvised like
Chopin. Under his elegant hand there opened a new world of velvet
tragedies, of ravishing sorrows, where each hearer trembled as he
discovered a memory of his own griefs. And old men as well as young
schoolgirls followed with delight these exquisite whisperings. But the
power of poets—what is it, if not to draw singing from one’s own soul,
the secret of which they know better than oneself?
So successful was this first concert that Chopin resolved to give
another a week later. This time he played his _Krakoviak_, which the
orchestra had rehearsed, and his _Variations_ on the _La ci darem_.
Count Lichnowsky, Beethoven’s friend, was present and applauded wildly.
The public, the musicians, and the critics could not conceal their
surprise, for everything was new about Chopin, both the substance and
the form. “The public recognized a great artist in this young man... On
the ground of the originality of his playing and of his compositions
one could almost attribute genius to him,” said the _Wiener
Theaterzeitung_; and the _Allgemeine Musikalische_: “The exquisite
delicacy of his touch, the indescribable dexterity of his technique,
the finish of his _nuances_, which reflect the deepest sensitiveness,
the clarity of his interpretation and of his compositions, which
bear the marks of a great genius, all reveal a virtuoso favoured by
nature, who has flashed above the horizon without previous heralding,
like one of the most brilliant meteors.” One single criticism, that
Chopin made of himself: he plays too softly, he lacks brilliance and
resonance. “They are almost of one voice in saying I play too softly,
too tenderly, rather, for this public,” he writes to his family. “They
are accustomed to the great drums of their virtuosos. But I prefer them
to say that I played too softly than too brutally.” And in another
letter: “It is my way of playing, and I know it gives infinite pleasure
to women and artists.”
Thereupon he left for Prague, accompanied to the diligence by all
the Viennese musicians, whom he had conquered in so short a time.
Even Czerny, with whom Chopin had several times played duets, was
there. Chopin thought him “a fine man and more sensitive than his
compositions.” He visited Prague, where he made the acquaintance of
the famous violinist Pixis, and of Alexandre Klengel, the composer
of forty-eight fugues considered the finest since Bach. Klengel
interested Chopin greatly, and they spent half a dozen hours together,
at the piano and in conversation. Then Frederick left for Dresden, viâ
Teplitz, a watering-place on the frontier of Bohemia and Saxony, where
he passed the evening at the château of Prince Clary.
A small but “respectable” company were assembled there: the men of the
house, an Austrian general, an English naval captain, a Saxon general
sewed up in decorations, some young men and girls. After tea, the
Princess asked Chopin if he would “deign” to seat himself at the piano.
The artist replied that he would “deign,” and asked for a subject
for improvisation. The Prince’s _maître de musique_ proposed a theme
from Rossini’s _Moses_, and Chopin launched forth upon embroideries
so lovely that he was obliged to return to the piano four times. They
tried to keep him at Teplitz, but he would not consent. A restlessness,
a certain nervousness, pushed him on to continue his journey. Something
was working deeply in him. Dresden hardly interested him. He stayed
there a few days doing nothing, then left for Breslau, and returned at
length to Warsaw on September 12th.
Three weeks later, while writing a waltz, he found out what ailed him.
“I have, perhaps to my sorrow, found my ideal. For six months now I
have dreamed of her each night, and I have never spoken a word to her.
It was for her that I composed the _Adagio_ of my _Concerto_ (in F
minor, op. 21), as well as the _Waltz_ (op. 70, no. 3), written only
this morning and which I am sending to you. Notice the passage marked
with a cross. No one, except you, will know the meaning of it. How
happy I should be, my dear friend, if I could play it to you! In the
fifth bar of the trio, the bass carries the melody as far as the high
E flat, in the key of G flat. I should not tell you this, as I am sure
you would have noticed it for yourself.”
This confidence was addressed to Titus, the friend beloved above all
others because he too was a musician, and Chopin found at once the two
words that were henceforth to be the keys to his whole life: “sorrow”
and “ideal.” They give an atmosphere. Perhaps they give too much; but
if they have since then lost something of their meaning, can we not
give back to them in spirit a living poetical value? In this Europe
which was open to romanticism and fervently breathed a too magnificent
vocabulary lived the faith that moves and the candour that engenders
deeds of love and of history. An evil age, “An age of fools and
follies,” says M. Charles Maurras. Perhaps. But an age in which ideas
and dreams have more than a rhetorical value puts a high price on art.
And no one was less satisfied than Chopin with mere words. Those which
he himself used translate exactly the accents of his piano. When he
wrote that to his sorrow he had discovered his ideal, doubtless he did
not suspect what a true note he had struck. Here, fixed for ever, is
the musical theme in which, thanks to him, millions of beings were to
discover the joys of hopelessness.
In this sorrow, in this ideal, he was of course thinking of Constance
Gladkowska. He wrote again some time later: “You cannot imagine how sad
Warsaw seems to me. If I were not so happy with my family, I would not
care for this place. Oh! how bitter it is to have no one with whom to
share sorrow and joy! How dreadful when the heart is oppressed to be
unable to unfold it. You know what I mean. Many times I pour into my
piano what I should like to confide to you.”
He heard much music, and was greatly struck by the last of Beethoven’s
trios. Never, he said, had he heard anything greater. He composed. He
went to the Opera. Mlle. Gladkowska made her debut in Paër’s _Agnes_
and he admired her playing, her beauty, the range of her voice. “Her
phrasing and _nuance_ are delicious. At first her voice trembled
slightly, but she soon got over that. She was overwhelmed with
applause.” He made her acquaintance, accompanied her at the piano,
felt that he should die of sadness and uncertainty. Ought he to leave?
Must he stay? He decided to accept an invitation from Prince Radziwill
and went to spend one autumn week at Antonin. He was received as a
personage, and played duets with the Prince, who was the author of an
orchestration of _Faust_.
Two charming Eves graced this paradise—“I mean the two young
princesses, pleasant, musical, and gentle creatures. As for the
Princess Mother, she knows that it is not birth that makes a man.”
The young princesses knew it, too, and they amused themselves by taking
lessons from this artist with the complexion of a girl. Wanda allowed
him to play with her fingers, to which he had to teach the correct
position. Elise did his portrait. “Princess Wanda has a real musical
instinct. There is no need to be constantly saying to her: here,
_crescendo_, there, _piano_... here more slowly, there faster... I had
to promise to send her my _Polonaise in F minor_.” He wrote another
Polonaise, for piano and violoncello. “It is a brilliant piece for
women to play.” He did not forget Constance, even though Princess Elise
was so ravishing. But he realized the possibility of being charmed in
all innocence by two beings at once. Nor did he forget his dear Titus
of the silent, savage heart. In a moment of expansion he wrote to him:
“I might anoint my body with the rarest perfumes of Byzantium and you
would still refuse to embrace me if I had not bound you by a kind of
magnetic attraction. But there are secret forces in nature....”
Returning to Warsaw, he decided to give a concert which Constance would
attend. She could not fail to understand that it was to her alone that
he dedicated his young fame. The concert actually took place on the
17th of March, 1830, when he had just completed his twentieth year.
The event aroused an extraordinary amount of attention. The hall was
crowded. The programme, of the usual variegated order, announced music
by Elsner, Kurpinski, a hunting-horn solo, some singing. Chopin’s part
consisted of his _Concerto in F minor_ and a fantasia on national
airs. But the effect was not all that he had hoped. The connoisseurs
alone had realized and appreciated his originality as an artist. But
Constance, sitting in the front row, smiled at him and he felt repaid.
A second concert, several days after the first, was a more brilliant
success, and the _Rondo à la Krakoviak_ aroused acclamations. From
all over the house came cries: “A third concert! A third concert!”
This time it really seemed as though the critics, the crowd, and the
musicians were of one accord in declaring Chopin Poland’s greatest
pianist and composer. But the weeks slipped by without bringing him
real happiness. His love for Titus and Constance both sustained and
tormented him. He carried their letters next his heart. For them alone
he composed, and his latest music seemed to him worthless till they
had heard it. “Work drives me on. I am composing hard. Often I turn
night into day and day into night. I live in a dream and sleep while
I am awake. Yes, worse still, it is as though I must sleep for ever,
for I am for ever feeling the same thing. But instead of gathering
strength from this somnolence, I am tortured further and weaken myself
the more....” He worked on his _Adagio in E major_, which was to be
“romantic, calm, melancholy,” and to evoke “crowds of gentle memories.
It should be like a reverie on a moonlit spring night.... What does it
matter if it is bad? You will see in it my fault of doing badly against
my will. But that is because, also against my will, something has
entered my heart by way of my eyes. It drives me, torments me, although
I love it and cherish it.”
An unexpected treat was given him by the arrival of a celebrated German
singer, Sontag, who gave a series of six concerts. To her Prince
Radziwill presented Chopin, who experienced a moment of enthusiasm. She
was not beautiful, but charming beyond description, and she enchanted
the circle in which she moved. Frederick was allowed the honour of
seeing her in her morning peignoir, and brought Constance to her. But
the transit of the singer was no more than a meteoric interlude and
Chopin slid back into his uncertainties. Departure seemed more and more
necessary for his musical development, and on the other hand the fear
of losing his love paralysed him. On September 4th he wrote to Titus:
“I have fits of fury. I still have not budged. I haven’t the
strength to name a day for leaving. I have a presentiment that if
I leave Warsaw I shall never see my home again. I believe that I
am going away to die. How sad it must be not to die where one has
always lived! How dreadful it would be for me to see at my deathbed
an indifferent doctor or servant instead of all my own folk! I
should like to stay with you for a few days; perhaps I might find
some peace again. But as I cannot, I limit myself to roaming the
streets, crushed by my sadness, and I return—but why? To pursue my
fancies. Man is rarely happy. If he is destined to only a few short
hours of bliss, why should he renounce his illusions. They too are
fugitive.”
More curious still is his letter of September 18th, where he makes this
singular confession:
“You are mistaken in thinking, like so many others, that my heart
is the reason for my prolonging my stay here. Be assured that I
could rise above all if it were a question of my own self, and
that, if I were in love, I could manage to dominate for several
more years my sad and sterile passion. Be convinced of one thing, I
beg, that is, that I too consider my own good and that I am ready
to sacrifice everything for the world. For the world;—I mean, for
the eye of the world; in order that this public opinion which has
so much weight with us may contribute to my sorrow. Not to that
secret suffering that we hide within ourselves, but to what I might
call our outward pain... As long as I am in good health, I shall
work willingly all my life. But must I work more than my strength
permits? If it is necessary, I can do twice what I do to-day. You
may not be master of your own thoughts, but I am always. Nothing
could make me drop them as the leaves from the trees. For me, even
in winter, there is always verdure. Of course, I am speaking only
of the head! In the heart, on the other hand... good Lord! there is
tremendous heat! No wonder the vegetation there is luxurious....
Your letters lie upon my heart, next to the ribbon (Constance’s),
for though they do not know each other, these inanimate objects
nevertheless feel that they come from friendly hands.”
In short, this irresolute knew well that the very base of his nature
was his musical instinct; that this instinct would conquer all, his
desires, his comfort, his peace; that his “secret suffering,” if it was
inevitably necessary, still amounted to less than that stubborn march
towards a future of melody and solitude.
Coming out of church one day he saw Constance. “My eyes caught her
glance. I tore off into the street and it took a quarter of an hour to
pull myself together. Sometimes I am so mad that it is terrifying. But
on Saturday week I leave, come what may. I shall pack my music in my
trunk, her ribbon in my soul, my soul under my arm and,—away I go, in
the diligence!”
Finally, on October 11th, he gave a last concert, in which Mlle.
Gladkowska assisted. Frederick played his whole _Concerto in E minor_,
a work that he had just finished, and a _Fantasia on Polish Airs_.
Mlle. Gladkowska, dressed in white and crowned with roses, sang the
cavatine from Rossini’s _Lady of the Lake_. “You know the theme: _O
quante lagrime per te versai_,” wrote Chopin to Titus. “She rendered
the _tutto detesto_ to the G flat admirably. Zielinski said the G
alone was worth a thousand ducats. After leading her off the stage I
played my _Fantasia_ on the setting of the moon. This time at least I
understood myself, the orchestra understood itself and the audience
understood us.... Now nothing remains but to strap my trunk. My outfit
is ready, my orchestrations are recopied, my handkerchiefs hemmed, my
new trousers have been tried on.” What was he still waiting for?
It was as though destiny offered him one final chance. He did not take
it.
The 1st of November, 1830, was the date fixed; he was to leave for
Vienna. In the morning a whole troupe set forth. Elsner, friends,
musicians, conducted him as far as Wola, the historic suburb where, in
earlier times, the election of the kings had taken place. They held a
banquet. They played a cantata composed by Elsner in his honour. They
sang:
“May your talent, native of our soil,
Display itself in all and everywhere,
Be you on the Danube’s shores,
Or by the Spree, the Tiber or the Seine.
Cherish the customs of your fathers,
And, by the notes of your music,
Our mazurkas and our Kracoviennes,
Sing the glory of your native land.
Yes, you shall realize our dreams.
Know always, Chopin, that you by song
Shall glorify your native land.”
Chorus:
“To leave your fatherland is naught,
Because your soul remains with us.
We raise our prayers for your happiness,
And shall cherish your memory in our hearts.”
He is pale, the young prince, when they present him with a silver cup
filled with his native soil. And now he bursts into sobs.
* * * * *
As for Constance, she never saw him again. Two years later she married
a country gentleman. Then, the blue eyes that the poet had loved,—by
what strange trick of fate should they be deprived of light? Constance
became blind. Sometimes, however, she would sit once more at the piano
and sing that lovely song: _Quante lagrime per te versai_.... Someone
who knew her towards the end of her life told how “from her eyes, which
remained starry in spite of their blindness,” would then fall the tears.
CHAPTER V
Revolution at Warsaw and Solitude at Vienna
Titus Woyciechowski rejoined Chopin at Kalisz. Older than he by
several years, he was in appearance and character just the opposite
of Frederick; a tall strong youth with clear, determined features,
speaking rarely, but with just as passionate a melomania. His huge
hands, chiselled to grasp the sword of his ancestors, as soon as they
rested on the keys of the piano developed an airy delicacy. Slender,
deep-eyed Frederick, however, with his complexion like a child’s, led
on a leash this powerful, submissive dog. They passed by Breslau, and
then went to Dresden, where a whole week evaporated in calls, parties,
and theatres.
Armed with letters of introduction, Chopin betook himself to pay his
respects to Mme. Dobrzyçka, a Pole and Grand Mistress of the Court of
Princess Augusta. This lady occupied an apartment of the royal castle.
She received him graciously, and invited him to spend an evening with
her in a little group of her friends. Chopin accepted, suspecting
strongly that he would have to pay with his art, but he made it a rule
never to refuse anything to his compatriots. On the appointed day
he made his entrance in the salons of the Grand Mistress, where he
found only three or four people; some ladies and a man of some thirty
years, clean shaven, whom he took to be a scholar or an abbé of the
Court. Mme. Dobrzyçka presented him to her guests: “One of our young
compatriots, M. Frederick Chopin, an artist of great talent, who won’t
refuse to let us hear one of his mazurkas, an echo of our far-off
country.” Chopin sat down at the piano. He felt inspired, his head
filled with poetry, his heart with memories; Constance, his sisters,
the ancient city of Warsaw, floated before his eyes. In a dozen ways,
he expressed them with that careless grace, that naked emotion which
owed nothing to any model. He was heard in the deepest silence. Then
the Grand Mistress rose and came to him, with tears in her eyes. “Thank
you. You have given a delightful hour to Their Royal Highnesses.”
With a deep bow she designated the two ladies and the clean-shaven
gentleman. They were the Infanta Augusta, her sister-in-law, and Prince
Jean, the future King of Saxony, whom he had taken for a doctor of
theology. Next day these personages sent him sealed letters addressed
to Their Majesties the King and Queen of the Two Sicilies and to His
Serene Highness the Prince of Lucca, recommending “Frederick Chopin, an
incomparable artist for whom the most brilliant future is in store.”
Under these happy auspices Frederick and Titus arrived in Vienna
towards the end of November. They set out to find an apartment and, for
50 florins a month, rented three rooms in Kohlmarkt.
But this fickle city had already forgotten the artist it had once
acclaimed. Haslinger, the publisher, refused to buy his works, and
Chopin would not consent to part with them for nothing. “Maybe he
thinks,” he said, “that if he affects to treat them as bagatelles I
shall take him seriously and give them to him for love. He is wrong. My
motto shall be: Pay, brute.” But these small cares faded suddenly away
when the events which were taking place in Poland began to filter into
the newspapers. On the 29th of November, indeed, the revolution broke
out in Warsaw. This ancient people, reduced to slavery, was attempting
once again to regain its liberty. They got their news in crumbs: on
November 29th, eighteen conspirators had set out for the Palais de
Belvédère, where the Grand Duke Constantin resided, in order to seize
him. But they were too late. “The bird had flown,” and, leading his
Russian troops, had already withdrawn from the walls of Warsaw. Freed
for the time, the entire town had arisen against its oppressors.
The next day a new Government was formed, the war of independence
proclaimed, and everywhere thousands of volunteers were enlisting.
From the very first Titus and Frederick were wild with enthusiasm.
Titus fitted himself out from head to foot, and without further delay
left to join his brothers in arms. Left alone, Chopin lamented his own
inaction, but what could he do with those delicate hands of his, with
his useless talent? On a gamble, without definite plan, he hired a
post-chaise and struck out on the trail of Titus. But he was unable to
overtake him and, in the sombre winter dusk, his warlike ardour seemed
suddenly so futile that he ordered his driver to turn about and go
back to Vienna. There he found a letter from his father, who, guessing
the feelings of his son, besought Frederick not to allow himself to be
turned from his career. Let the many sacrifices that had been made at
least be allowed to bear fruit! So Chopin stayed. But the ordeal was
hard to bear in this Austria of Metternich, entirely hostile to Poland.
The artists he knew avoided him, and more than once as he passed he
overheard the murmur that God’s only error was to have created the
Poles. His mail reached him now only after long delays and he lived in
anguish. He learned of the march of the Russian General Paskewitch on
Warsaw. Already he saw the town in flames, his family and Constance
massacred. He spent his time in writing, he who had such a horror of
letter paper. “I seem to be dreaming, to be still with you. These
voices which I hear, and which are unfamiliar to me, are like carnival
clackers. It is nothing to me to-day whether I live or die.... Why am I
left behind? Why am I not taking my share of the danger with you?” The
Christmas festivities only aggravated this drama of unrest. Dante was
right when he said that a happy memory is the worst misery of unhappy
days. That Christmas eve he went to the Church of St. Etienne, and
there, standing in the darkest corner under the dome, he leaned against
a Gothic pillar and dreamed of the family Christmas tree, lighted with
candles, of the modest presents he and his sisters gave each other, of
the traditional supper where the whole family gathered about the table
and broke the holy bread that the lay brothers of the convents had
distributed during Advent.
He passed the holidays largely alone in his room, which he thus
describes: “It is large and has three windows; the bed faces them, my
marvellous piano is at the right, the sofa at the left, between the
windows a mirror and in the centre of the room a big mahogany table.
The floor is waxed. It is quiet. In the morning an unbearably stupid
servant wakens me. I get up and have my coffee, which I often take
cold, as playing makes me forget breakfast. About nine o’clock my
German teacher arrives. After that I play. Then Hummel (the son of
the composer) comes to work on my portrait while Nidecki studies my
concerto. I stay in my dressing-gown until noon. Then a funny little
German, Herr Leidenfrost, arrives, with whom I go for a walk on the
pavement. Then I go to lunch wherever I may be invited or else at the
_Café Zur Böhmischen Köchin_, which is frequented by all the University
students.... Afterwards I make calls, come in at dusk, dress, arrange
my hair, dress, and go to some party or other. About eleven or twelve
o’clock, never later, I come home, play, cry, laugh, read, go to bed,
and dream of you.”
In this same letter to his friend Matuszinski, he adds on Christmas Day
(1830):
“I wanted so desperately to have a letter from you. You know why. What
joy news of my angel of peace gives me! How I should like to sound all
the chords, not only those that evoke stormy feelings but those that
sound the _lieder_ whose half-stilled echoes yet hover on the shores of
the Danube.... But I cannot live as I please.... You advise me to make
a poet’s choice. Don’t you realize that I am the most irresolute being
on earth, and that I have made only one single fortunate choice in my
whole life? All these dinners, parties, concerts, balls, bore me. I
am overwhelmed with them. I cannot do what I wish; I must be dressed,
powdered, shod, have my hair dressed, and play the quiet man in the
drawing-room, only to return home and thunder on the piano. I have no
confidant, I have to ‘do the polite’ with everybody. Forgive these
complaints, my dear Jean, they calm me and give me relief. One point in
your letter made me very gloomy. Has there been any change? Has anyone
been ill? I could easily believe it of such a tender being.... Reassure
her and tell her that as long as my strength permits, till death,
yes, until after death, my ashes shall be scattered under her feet.
More... all this is not enough, and you may tell her much more.... I
should have done it myself, but for the dread of people’s gossip. Be my
interpreter to her. The day before yesterday I dined at a Mme. Bayer’s,
a Pole whose name is Constance. I love her society because of this
reminder. Her music, her handkerchiefs, her napkins are marked with
_her_ initial.”
“January 1, 1831.—I received your letter. I do not know what is taking
place in me. I love you all more than my life. Write to me. So you are
with the army? Our poor families! What are all our friends doing? I
live with you. I should like to die for you, for all of you. If you
leave, how can you deliver my message? Look after my family. One might
believe evil.... How sadly the year begins for me. Perhaps I shall not
see its end. Embrace me. Are you leaving for the war? Return a colonel.
Ah! why cannot I be even your drummer boy! If you think it unnecessary,
do not give her my note. I don’t remember what I wrote. You may read
it. It is perhaps the first and the last.”
Then he notes in his little pocket-diary: “This bed, where I sleep ...
perhaps it has already held a corpse. Who was it? Was he more wicked
than I? Had he parents, sisters, a mistress? Now all is peace for him.
I am sure that to die is the noblest human act. Or, on the other hand,
is birth the noblest?...” Later a few scattered lines about Constance:
“Did she love me or is she playing a part? How hard it is to guess.
Yes, or no? Yes, no, yes, no?... Yes, surely. But God’s will be done.”
Thus Chopin stands wholly self-revealed, nervous, lonely, horribly
sensitive. All the pains of the world are latent in him, and a few
simple joys. But the _man_ developed with extreme slowness. The poet
clung to his youth, which had furnished the difficulties he needed. He
had given himself over, as women do, unconsciously to suffering, and
it was by that alone that he was to become adult.
Yet the two years since his first love for Constance Gladkowska
had already produced admirable work. It was not without a certain
pride that Chopin bound into his work such pages as the _Waltz in D
flat major_ (op. 70, no. 3), in which he had earlier called Titus’s
attention to a confidential passage, the sketches of his _Etudes_,
the first of his _Nocturnes_ and the two _Concertos_ (in E minor, op.
11, and in F minor, op. 21). If in construction, in skeleton, they
still owe much to Hummel, in their flesh and blood they are entirely
Chopin. The orchestral parts are weak because he was not able to _think
orchestrally_, but the piano parts have an originality and poetry that
bear the stamp of eternity. Liszt later said of the _adagio_ of the
_Second Concerto_, for which Chopin had a marked predilection, that
the whole piece had “an ideal perfection,” that “his sentiment by
turn radiant and full of pity, evoked a magnificent country bathed in
light, some dowered valley of Tempe that one might have selected as the
site of a tragic tale, a heartbreaking scene. It might be called an
irreparable sorrow enfolding the human heart against a background of
the incomparable splendour of nature.”
There is truth in these somewhat florid words. But it is difficult
to reduce to the average vocabulary what slips so swiftly out of
ordinary experience and opens to our most complex senses an entirely
new universe. An analysis of music is the most futile of intellectual
exercises, because it can build on nothing but emotion. Look at
concert audiences. They are made up for the most part of lovers and old
people. For they understand, remember, and seek again this powerful
inexpressible thing in which they find the best that is in themselves.
Even Chopin still did not know what he was giving. He was hampered by
classic forms. But he carried in him the joy of a growing knowledge,
developed and assimilated in his first sorrows.
The winter dragged on as best it could, and Chopin, with somewhat
more pleasure than he admitted, went from party to party. He let his
whiskers grow, or rather one whisker, the other was not necessary,
“because I only show my right profile to the audience.” He spent many
an evening at the house of Dr. Malfatti, Court Physician and former
doctor to Beethoven, a happy sybarite and philanthropist who lived in
a smart villa surrounded by a garden. And then spring returned and
the doctor’s peach and cherry trees were covered with pink and white
snow. There, on St. John’s Day, they had a fête by moonlight. Out on
the terrace, in the bridal air that rose from the orangery, wafted by
the fountain sprays, Chopin played, while the Viennese listened to the
sad-eyed foreigner who in sombre colours paraphrased a joyous waltz of
Strauss.
He went to concerts, met plenty of musicians but, Slavik the violinist
excepted (another Paganini, who played ninety-six staccato notes with
a single sweep of his bow), none of them impressed him greatly. Vienna
offered him nothing to love. Waltzes, nothing but waltzes, were played
on all sides, and although they were laughed at, still the editors
would publish nothing else. He was ill and admitted it to his friends,
but forbade them to inform his family. He planned another departure,
and had his passport arranged without knowing very definitely whether
he should name France, Germany, or England. Italy attracted him also,
but there were revolutions in Bologna, Milan, Ancona, Rome. In his
indecision, he might have settled the matter by a throw of dice had
that not been to tempt fate somewhat. He ended by deciding on London
and, at all events, had added to the passport: “by way of Paris.” For
the moment he was pacified and furnished with a few landmarks on which
to fasten his imagination. He packed, made his good-bye calls, and
reserved a seat in the diligence for July 20 (1831).
A few days before his departure, a letter reached him from his
compatriot, Witwicki, the writer, a family friend. It touched his most
sensitive spot. “... Keep always in view the idea of nationality,
nationality and yet again nationality. It is a word that means little
for an ordinary artist, but not for a talent like yours. There is
native melody just as there is a native climate. The mountains, the
forests, the waters, and the meadows have their native voice, an inner
voice, though not every soul is aware of it.... Every time I think of
it, dear M. Frederick, I nurse the sweet hope that you shall be the
first to be able to imbibe the vast treasures of Slav melody. Seek out
the popular Slav melodies as the mineralogist seeks out the stones and
minerals of the mountains and the valleys. I hear that in Vienna you
fret and languish. I can put myself in your place; no Pole could be
happy when the life or death of his own country is in question. But
remember always, dear friend, that you left us not to languish but to
perfect yourself in your art and to become the consolation and glory of
your family and your country.”
He left on July 20th and, by way of Salzburg, reached Munich, where he
stayed for several weeks. Then he set out again, and reached Stuttgart.
There, on the 8th of September, he learned of the capture of Warsaw by
the Russians. Under the shock of this frightful news he turned to his
piano and his grief burst into harrowing improvisation. This was the
first germ of the _Etude in C minor_ (op. 10, no. 12) that is called
_The Revolutionary_. “What a change! What a disaster!... Who could have
foreseen it?” he wrote, several weeks later.
These words may sound somewhat feeble. But Chopin did not love great,
strong words. In him emotion always took on a moderate accent.
Nevertheless, in his pocket-notebook he gave free rein to his feelings:
“The suburbs burned! Matuszinski and Titus surely killed! Paskewitch
and that dog Mohilew flee from the beloved town. Moscow commands the
world! Oh, God, where are you? Are you there and do not venge yourself?
Are you not surfeited with Russian massacres? Or else,—or else,—are
you not yourself, indeed, only a Muscovite?”
The young exile little suspected that he was to be, according to
Paderewski’s beautiful metaphor, the ingenious smuggler who would
enable the prohibited Polonism to escape across the frontiers in his
portfolios of music, the priest who would carry to the scattered Poles
the sacrament of nationalism.
CHAPTER VI
“I doubt whether there is a city on Earth where
more pianists are to be found than in Paris”
When the stage-coach in which Chopin rode had passed the walls of
Paris, the young musician climbed up on the seat beside the driver. He
hardly knew where to look, at the monuments or at a crowd so thick it
might be thought another revolution. However, it was only the joy of
living again that had brought the people into the streets and forced
the horses down to a walk. The driver felt impressively at home among
all these symbolic costumes of the bourgeois gentlemen, and pointed
them out to his passenger. Each political group had its own livery.
The School of Medicine and the Young French parties were distinguished
by their beards and cravats. The Carlists had green waistcoats, the
Republicans red, and the Saint Simoniens blue. Many strutted about
in tailed coats, called _à la propriétaire_, which fell to their
heels. There were artists dressed after Raphaël, with hair to their
shoulders and wide-brimmed tam-o’-shanters. Others affected the Middle
Ages,—numbers of women dressed as pages, as musketeers, as hunters. And
in this swarm were hawkers brandishing their pamphlets: “Ask for _The
Art of Making Love and Keeping It_; ask for _The Loves of the Priests_;
ask for _The Archbishop of Paris and the Mme. la Duchesse de Berry_.”
Frederick was at first somewhat scandalized. Later he was agreeably
surprised to see a group of youths march by, crying: “Poland! Poland!”
“That is in honour of General Ramorino, the Italian who is trying to
deliver our Polish brothers from the Russian boot,” explained the
driver. They were obliged to stop the carriage for the crowd to pass.
Eventually they reached the posting station and Chopin dismounted, had
his baggage loaded on a cabriolet, and betook himself to a house agent,
who provided him with two rooms on the fifth floor at 27, Boulevard
Poissonnière.
He liked these quarters because his windows had a balcony from which
he could see the succession of boulevards. The endless perspective of
trees hedged in between two rows of houses astonished him. “It is down
there,” he thought, “that the history of France is being written.”
Not far away, in the rue d’Enfer, M. de Chateaubriand was editing his
memoirs and he too wrote: “What happenings have taken place before
my very door! But after the trial of Louis XVI and the revolutionary
uprisings, all trials and uprisings are insignificant.” And at the same
time, a plainly dressed young woman was writing in her garret novels
which she signed with the name George Sand, and exclaimed: “To live,
how sweet! How good it is, in spite of griefs, husbands, boredom,
debts, relatives, tittle-tattle, in spite of bitter pangs and tedious
annoyances. To live, how intoxicating! To love, to be loved! That is
happiness, that is Heaven!”
The day after his arrival Frederick plunged into the crowd and exulted
in his solitude. It was more complete here than in the depths of the
German forest, and it at once stimulated and frightened the artist.
He floated with the tide, until suddenly the crowd thickened, became
organized, and Chopin found himself carried along by a compact column
who, with flags at their head, were marching to acclaim Ramorino. Then
fear seized him in good earnest, and breaking away, he returned home by
back streets, and climbed to his balcony where he witnessed from above
that storm of enthusiasm. Shops were shut and a squadron of hussars
arrived at a gallop and swept away the populace, who hissed and spat
at the soldiers. Till midnight there was an uproar which approached a
riot. And Chopin wrote to Titus: “I can’t tell you what a disagreeable
impression the horrible voices of this angry mob gave me.” Decidedly he
did not like noise, or crowds; politics were not in his line.
Music, music, his only escape, because it is the only way of thinking
with the emotions. “Here alone can one know what singing is. With the
exception of Pasta, I do not believe there is a greater singer in
Europe than Malibran-Garcia.” He spent his evenings at the Académie
Royale or at the Italian Opera. Veron managed the Académie, where
Habeneck conducted. At the Italian Opera Rossini and Zamboni were in
the bill. He heard Lablache and Malibran in _Il Barbieri di Siviglia_,
in _Otello_, and in _L’Italiana in Algeri_. Under the stimulus of his
pleasure he wrote again to Titus: “You can have no idea what Lablache
is like. Some say that Pasta’s voice is weakening, but I have never in
my life heard one so divine. Malibran has a range of three octaves;
in her own _genre_ her singing is unique, uncanny. She plays Othello;
Schroeder-Devrient, Desdemona. Malibran is small, the German larger.
Sometimes you think Desdemona is going to strangle Othello.”
Chopin had a letter of introduction to Paër, who put him in touch
with Cherubini, Rossini, and the pianist then more famous than any
of the others, Kalkbrenner. With beating heart Chopin went to see
this supreme master at his house. He was a tall man, stiff and cold,
with the bearing of a diplomat, and an unstable glance. He put on
the airs of a gentleman, was doubtless too polite, and certainly
very pedantic. Marmontel says of him that his playing was smooth,
sustained, harmonious, and perfectly even, and that it charmed more
than it astonished; that his left hand had an unequalled dexterity and
that he played, without moving his head or body, with splendid style
in the grand manner. “A giant!” said Chopin. “He crushes everybody,
myself included.” In Kalkbrenner the young artist specially admired the
purist, the man who talked at the piano, the language of Cicero.
The master and the unknown played several pieces for each other. When
Chopin had finished his _Concerto in E minor_, Kalkbrenner said to
him: “You have the style of Cramer and the touch of Field,” which
was without doubt the greatest compliment he could find. Divining
in this unexpected disciple the great man of to-morrow, he explained
his faults, trotted out again his lack of method, even pencilled his
concerto. He tried to decipher it. But if he succeeded in the first
part, he was stopped at the beginning of the second by insurmountable
difficulties, for its technique was entirely new. Nevertheless, he
stated with assurance that nothing short of three years of study
under his direction would make Chopin master of a new piano school.
Frederick was disquieted. Three years more study! What would his family
say? “However, I will submit to it,” he thought, “if I can be sure of
making a big advance.” But, by the time he had reached home again, he
no longer doubted. “No, I will never be a copy of Kalkbrenner.... No,
he shan’t destroy in me that hope, daring, I admit, but noble, _of
creating a new world for myself_.” A quarter of a century earlier than
Wagner, here in this young man of twenty years was the certainty of the
same destiny.
We must be grateful to M. Nicolas Chopin for having upheld his son’s
faith. “But, my dear fellow,” he wrote to him, “I cannot see how, with
your capacities which he (Kalkbrenner) said he remarked, he can think
that three more years of work under his eyes are necessary for you to
become an artist and the head of a new school. You know that I have
done everything I could to further your inclinations and develop your
talent, that I have opposed you in nothing. You know also that the
technique of playing took you only a short time to learn, and that
your mind has been busier than your fingers. If others have spent whole
days in practising scales, you have rarely passed an hour on the works
of others. Experts can distinguish genius from its earliest moments,
but they cannot prophesy the peak it will reach.”
Even more remarkable was the letter from his sister Louise, who had run
to Elsner to lay before him the dilemma in which the whole family was
plunged. The aged teacher, like the young sister, had soon found traces
of a calculating self-interest in the proposal of the virtuoso. And
they said so, they who had simple hearts, they who had faith. “Elsner
was angry. He cried ‘Jealousy already,—three years, indeed!’ and tossed
his head. Then he added: ‘I know Frederick. He is good, but he has no
pride, no ambition; he is easily swayed. I shall write him what I think
of all this.’ Sure enough, this morning he brought a letter which I
am sending you. He went on talking to us about this business. We who
judge men in the simplicity of our hearts thought Kalkbrenner the most
honest man in the world; but Elsner was not altogether of this opinion.
He said: ‘They recognized a genius in Frederick, and they are afraid
of being supplanted by him. That is why they would like to have their
hands on him for three years, so that they could stop the growth that
Nature would develop if she were left alone.’ Elsner does not want you
to imitate, and he expresses himself well when he says: ‘No imitation
is worth the original.’ As soon as you begin imitating you cease to
be creative, and, although you are young, your own conceptions may be
better than those of many others.... Then, M. Elsner does not only want
to see in you a concert player, a famous virtuoso, which is easier and
less worth while, but he wants to see you attain the goal towards which
Nature is urging you and for which she has made you. What irritated him
extremely was, as he says, ‘the presumption and arrogance that after
having run over your orchestration would pick up a pencil to strike out
passages without ever having heard the concerto with the full effect
of the orchestra.’ He says that it would have been quite another thing
to have advised you when you write concerto, to shorten the _allegro_:
but to make you erase what was already written, that he cannot pardon.
Elsner compared it to taking a seemingly unnecessary pillar away from
a house that had already been built, with the result of changing
everything in eliminating what was deemed bad. I think that Elsner is
right in declaring that to be superior it is necessary to excel not
only one’s teachers but also one’s contemporaries. You can excel them
by imitating them, but then, that is following in their tracks. And
he says that you, who already know what is good and what is better,
should now be making your own path. Your genius will guide you. One
more thing, he said. ‘Frederick has drawn from his native soil this
distinguishing particularity: the rhythm—shall I say?—which makes him
as much more original and characteristically himself as his ideas are
more noble than others.’ He would like you to retain that. We do not
understand these things as well as you do, my dear little Fritz, and we
cannot advise you; we can only send you our comments.”
It is beautiful, this letter. It is not literature, but it goes to
the root of the matter. Frederick followed its councils and preferred
to remain himself, even were it at the expense of a rapid success.
Meanwhile, Kalkbrenner had the wisdom not to be annoyed at seeing this
prize pupil refuse to allow himself to be convinced. Their friendship
persisted. It was even Kalkbrenner who presented him to the directors
of the famous house of Pleyel. Chopin attached himself to other
artists, particularly to Hiller, pianist, composer, and musical critic,
and to Franchomme, the celebrated violoncellist, both of whom aided him
to organize his opening concert.
This took place on the 26th of February, 1832, in the Salons Pleyel.
Frederick had got it up with the greatest care amid constantly renewed
difficulties. He had recruited for the occasion five violinists (among
them Urhan, Liszt’s friend, and Baillot), who were to play Beethoven’s
_Quintette_. Mlles. Tomeoni and Isambert were to sing. Kalkbrenner,
Stamati, Hiller, Osborne, Sowinski and Chopin were to play a _Grande
Polonaise_ for six pianos, composed by Kalkbrenner himself; then Chopin
was to play his _Concerto in F minor_ and his _Variations on the “La
ci darem”_ of Mozart. The _Grande Polonaise_ for six pianos disquieted
him. “It is a mad idea, isn’t it?” he wrote to Titus. “One of the
grand pianos is very large: it is Kalkbrenner’s; another is very small:
that is mine.” He never loved show. Besides, concerts for the general
public were always odious to him. So on this evening of February 26th,
there stepped on the platform a very pale young man, whose attitude
betrayed a very sincere annoyance much more than it did a dramatic
inspiration. The hall was only half-filled and that mostly with Poles,
critics and musicians. In the front row could be seen the handsome
features of Liszt. A stunning silence descended when Chopin had slipped
his first caresses over the keyboard.
Then there arose from the piano a voice such as no one, ever, had heard
before. Yet each recognized in it the cry of his innermost self. It
was neither a tale, nor a brilliant commentary, but the simple song
of life; an authentic revelation; the essential word of the heart.
By means of a delicate rightness, which is the strength of the pure,
Chopin transported these connoisseurs. Liszt himself, whose “doubled
and redoubled applause was not sufficient to express his enthusiasm,”
saw here the revelation of “a new phase of poetic feeling side by side
with innovations in the form of the art.” From that evening he gave him
his warm friendship. Fétis, the sharp but influential critic, declared:
“Here is a young man who, abandoning himself to his natural feelings,
and following no model, has discovered, if not a complete renovation
of piano music, at least a part of what we have long been vainly
seeking: an abundance of original ideas which fit into no earlier
classification.”
Chopin accepted these eulogies without pride and without false
modesty, because he totally lacked all vanity. The receipts were
counted; they barely sufficed to cover expenses. But that was nothing
in comparison to another disappointment: the French public had not
attended. The artist’s object, therefore, had not been achieved. When,
towards midnight, he returned to his room, Chopin believed that fate
had pronounced an unfavourable verdict, and he conceived the idea of
leaving for America.
He had hardly any money left. His friends were still few, being limited
to a small number of artists and compatriots. Ah, how happy Meyerbeer
must be, having just had produced his _Robert the Devil_, a mine of
gold and glory! Chopin confided to Titus: “Chance brought me here.
Here one can certainly breathe freely. But perhaps one also sighs
more, too. Paris is everything that you want it to be. Here you can
amuse yourself, be bored, laugh, cry, do whatever you like without
anyone giving you a glance. I doubt whether there is a city on earth
where more pianists are to be found than in Paris, or more asses and
virtuosi. Ah, how I wish I had you with me. If you only knew how sad
it is not to be able to relieve one’s soul. I like the society of
people. I make friends easily, and am up to my ears in acquaintances;
but there is no one, no one who can understand me. My heart always
beats, so to speak, in swoons, and I resent it and should like a
pause,—solitude,—with not a single soul to see me or speak to me all
day long. Above all, I detest hearing my bell ring when I am writing to
you.”
However, it rang a good deal, that little bell, and was mostly pulled
by that worst of the bores, the deadly, the awful, the ridiculous
Sowinski. “He is just coming in to see me. It is something big, and
strong, and it wears a tiny moustache; it sits down at the piano and
improvises without knowing why. It bangs, it knocks, it crosses its
hands without rhyme or reason; for five minutes at a time it batters
a defenceless key. It has enormous fingers made rather to hold the
reins and the whip somewhere in the wilds of the Ukraine. It has no
other virtues than a tiny moustache and a big heart.... When shall
we see each other again? Maybe never, because I assure you that my
health is wretched. Outwardly, I am gay, but within I am consumed. Dark
forebodings, restlessness, insomnia, home-sickness, indifference to
everything. Pleasure in life, then immediately afterwards,—longing for
death....”
Other friends come and go through Chopin’s little apartment: Albert
Grzymala, Count Plater, Liszt, Berlioz, who arrives from Rome and
has great plans, Polish refugees. But money these young people
have practically none, and Frederick, in spite of the “little
reinforcements” that his father sends him, sees his resources vanish.
As for love, that was a luxury of which he must not think. The
memory of Constance faded after Isabelle informed her brother of the
marriage of that faithless one: “Like you I marvel that anyone could
be so callous. It is easy to see that a fine château was a greater
attraction. She had feeling only in her singing!” But chastity is the
natural estate of the poor, and pleasure was a word that Chopin did not
even understand. Living just below him, however, was a fresh, pretty
woman. They met sometimes on the stairs, smiled, occasionally exchanged
a few words. She heard from his room the passionate harmonies that this
handsome male angel invented... for whom? Once she said to him:
“Come and see me some evening. I am often alone and I adore music.”
He refused, blushing. Yet a regret escaped him on paper, in his cold
room: “I should have found a hearth, a fire. It would be nice to warm
myself at it.”
CHAPTER VII
Happy Years, Working Years
“To-morrow,” he wrote to his family, “to-morrow I cross the seas.” He
crossed the Boulevards and encountered Prince Valentin Radziwill.
This Radziwill family seems to have had a special influence on the
life of Chopin. What beautiful analogies one could draw in comparing
this encounter with such another when some pope, king, lord or
_fermier-général_ changed in one instant the fortunes of an artist
apparently condemned to the miscarriage of his genius. It seems
that there are between art and opulence secret and unconscious
fructifications. François I never seems to us more inspired than in
paying the debts of Clément Marot or in welcoming Leonardo da Vinci
on the terrace of Amboise, nor Jules II more sympathetic than when
climbing the scaffoldings of Michelangelo. Never does Elizabeth
of England seem more intelligent than when she commissions _The
Merry Wives of Windsor_ from the pen of Shakespeare, and Fouquet,
Treasurer-General, is remembered only because he subsidized La
Fontaine. Had they dictated their biographies themselves, these great
princes would doubtless have made no mention of such trivial gestures.
In the same way, this Radziwill dreamed not of adding a meritorious
line to his life when, meeting on the Boulevards this pitiful
compatriot, he proposed to take him that very evening to see Baron de
Rothschild. It is, however, from that casual proposal that the glory of
Chopin dates.
Baron de Rothschild received the most exclusive society. Chopin was
asked to play and he acceded with good grace. In a moment he captured
the elegant world, and on the morrow was bombarded with invitations
and requests for lessons. The Maréchale Lannes, Princess de Vaudemont,
Count Apponyi, and Prince Adam Czartoryski made themselves his
protectors. The lessons he gave cost no less than twenty francs an
hour. He changed his lodgings twice and finally installed himself at
No. 5 Chaussée d’Antin. Everybody began to talk of this poet who, in
the evening, in the rare salons where he would consent to play, would
people the darkness with a conclave of fairies. He called it “telling
little musical stories.” They were tales of infinite variety, since
it was above all in improvising that he showed his boldness. The
incompleteness of his sketches opened the avenues of the imagination
wherein the spirit lost itself. Chopin possessed to a high degree
this power of suggestion, the artist’s most precious gift. He talked
to himself, did not finish, and left to his hearers the pleasure of
having clothed with notes for an instant forms and feelings which then
evaporated into nothingness. “Divine gambols,” said Berlioz on hearing
them. “A cloud of love, winter roses,” said Liszt. “By the wonderful
gate,” he added, “Chopin leads you into a world where everything is
a delightful miracle, a mad surprise, a miracle come true. But you
must be initiated to know how to cross the threshold.” And Frederick
confided once to his friend Franz:
“I am not at all the person to give concerts. The crowd intimidates
me; I feel asphyxiated by their breaths, paralysed by their curious
stares, mute before these strange faces. But you, you are destined for
it, because when you don’t win your public, you know how to knock them
dead.”
Chopin himself would not have had the strength. He only sought to
win them. Furthermore, was it really this that he wanted? The public
mattered so little to him. It was his own pain that he chanted and
enchanted. He did not like to express himself through others and, Bach,
Beethoven and Mozart apart, he interpreted none but himself.
For Chopin, as later for Wagner, the superfluous was the only
necessity. The money that was now coming in more or less abundantly,
was spent in poetic pleasures; a smart cabriolet, beautifully cut
clothes, white gloves, expensive suppers. He took great pains with the
furnishing of his apartment, putting in crystal lustres, carpets and
silver, and he insisted on being supplied with flowers in all seasons.
When his new women friends came—Countess Delphine Potoçka, Princess
Marceline Czartoryska, Mlle. O’Meara, Princess de Beauvau, the rule was
that they should bring a rose or orchids that the artist would put in a
vase and endlessly contemplate, like a Japanese enraptured by a unique
print.
Happy years, working years. Chopin composed a solid portion of his
work. In 1833 he published five _Mazurkas_, the _Trio_ for piano,
violin and violoncello, three _Nocturnes_, the twelve great _Etudes_
dedicated to Liszt, the _Concerto in E minor_, and in 1834 the _Grand
Fantasia_ on Polish airs, the _Krakoviak_ for piano and orchestra,
three more _Nocturnes_, the _Rondeau in E flat major_ dedicated to
Caroline Hartmann, four new _Mazurkas_, and the _Grand Waltz in E flat
major_. His works were played by the greatest of the virtuosi at many
concerts: Liszt, Moschelès, Field, Kalkbrenner and Clara Wieck. Liszt
said of him: “A sick-room talent,” and Auber: “All his life he slays
himself.” For Chopin, in spite of his success, was still suffering from
nostalgia, and one day when his friend and pupil Gutmann was playing
the third _Etude_, in E major, Chopin, who said he had never written
a lovelier melody, cried suddenly, “Oh, my country!” Truly, for this
young man of twenty-four, the mother country was always the strongest
passion. He gave a Dantesque sadness to this name of Poland, more
powerful on his heart than the call of a mistress. The hurt must have
been deep indeed for Orlowski, in writing to his people, to take note
of it as of a tubercular illness. “Chopin is well and vigorous,” he
says. “He turns all the women’s heads. The men are jealous. He is the
fashion. Doubtless we shall soon be wearing gloves _à la Chopin_. But
home-sickness is burning him up.” The fact was that Poland remained
the living spring, the reservoir whence he drew his dreams and his
sentiments, the only effective rhythm,—in sun, the dynamo of his
energies. Inspiration is chance caught on the wing. But art is not
found hidden like the dove in the magician’s hat. Perhaps it is only
perfect self-knowledge, the true perception of one’s own limitations,
and the modulations that life teaches to our youthful fine enthusiasms.
The Marquis de Custine wrote to Chopin: “When I listen to you I always
think myself alone with you, and even perhaps with greater than you! or
at least with all that is greatest in you.”
* * * * *
In the spring of ’34 Chopin and his friend Hiller went together to
the Festival of Music at Aix-la-Chapelle. There they encountered
Mendelssohn, who took a liking to the Pole and never tired of listening
to his playing. He called him the first among pianists, and always
reproached him, as well as Hiller, for the Parisian mania for a pose of
despair. “I look like a schoolmaster,” he said, “while they resemble
dandies and beaux.”
They returned by Düsseldorf and Cologne to Paris, where Chopin had the
pleasure of seeing and entertaining his friend Matuszinski, who had
just been made professor at the Ecole de Médecine. This was a period
of the greatest serenity, for to his quiet fame Chopin could add the
joy of daily companionship with one of his “brothers.” He exerted
himself, entertained guests, played in public more than he usually
did. On the 7th of December, at the Théâtre Italien, he appeared at a
concert organized by Berlioz in honour of Harriet Smithson, the Irish
actress he had just married. On Christmas Day, at the Salle Pleyel, he
played, with Liszt at the other piano, a duet by Liszt on a theme of
Mendelssohn. On the 15th of February, 1835, he took part in a concert
at the Salle Erard, and on April 4th he played for the benefit of
the Polish refugees. Berlioz wrote in the _Rénovateur_, “Chopin, as
a player and as a composer, is an artist apart. He has no point of
resemblance to any other musician I know. Unhappily, there is no one
but Chopin himself who can play his music and give it that original
turn, that impromptu that is one of its principal charms; his execution
is veined with a thousand nuances of movement of which he alone has the
secret, and which cannot be indicated... The detail in his mazurkas is
unbelievable; then he has found a way to make them doubly interesting
by playing them to the last degree of softness, with superlative
_piano_, the hammers touching the strings so lightly that one is
tempted to bend the ear over the instrument as one might at a concert
of sylphs and pixies.”
But the crowd always awards the palms to brilliance, and Chopin,
deciding that it had not given his _Concerto in E minor_ the reception
he expected, declared that he was neither understood nor made for
concerts, and made up his mind to abstain from appearing in public for
a long time.
Nevertheless, he played once more in public, on the 26th of April,
1835, at the Conservatory. This was the only time he ever appeared in
that famous hall. He played his _Polonaise brillante_, preceded by an
_Andante Spianato_.
He found compensation for these slight professional disappointments in
the friendship of the Italian Bellini, towards whom he was drawn by a
quick sympathy and whom he often saw. He was further distracted by an
interest in a celebrated beauty, Countess Delphine Potoçka.
She was twenty-five, of regal bearing, with a delicately chiselled
nose, a most passionate mouth, and the high, pensive forehead of the
true voluptuary. Her whole appearance suggested a slender and puissant
goddess, but whatever luxuriance she had was cooled by the severity of
her glance.
Miçkiewicz said that she was “the greatest of all sinners,” and
Krasinski apostrophized her in a poem in the manner of Mephistopheles:
“O stay, for thou art true beauty.” Frederick let himself float in the
sensual _rayonnement_ of this beautiful animal of love. For the first
time his head was turned. The sumptuous voice of Delphine enchanted
him. He accompanied her at the piano, strove to make her soul be born
again, to give it back its flower, and watched for possible beautiful
vibrations; but the soul was the servant of this imperial flesh.
Once or twice, however, she seemed to come out of her lethargy, to
spread herself on an admirable note that sprang from the depths of her
unconscious self, but immediately after, the shrieks, the laughter, the
exigencies of this ravishing hysteric extinguished these gleams. And
as the platonic love towards which Chopin wanted to direct her seemed
to Delphine both comic and impossible, she gave herself before he had
ever dreamed of asking her.
The adventure was of short duration. The Countess had a jealous
husband, who, by cutting off her allowance, obliged this prodigal lady
to make a prompt departure for Poland, whence she did not return till
later on. But she retained a lasting affection for Chopin. The only
lines from her to the artist that have been discovered furnish discreet
witness to the fact:
“I shall not annoy you with a long letter, but I do not want to remain
longer without news of your health and your plans for the future. I am
sad to think of you abandoned and alone... Here my time is passed in an
annoying fashion, and I hope not to have still more vexations. But I am
disgusted. Everyone for whom I have done anything has repaid me with
ingratitude. On the whole, life is one long dissonance. God bless you,
dear Chopin. Good-bye.”
“One long dissonance,” so had Liszt already spoken. There was in
these tormented bodies an invincible straining towards the suavest
harmonies. At least in these beings—male or female—in whom the feminine
predominates. But this is not the case with Chopin, whose musical
travail was always virile. He would have subscribed to the words of
Beethoven: “Emotion is good only for women; for man, music must draw
fire from his spirit.” And even more, perhaps, to those quoted by
Schumann from the German poet Johann-Paul Richter: “Love and friendship
pass through this earth veiled and with closed lips. No human being can
tell another how much he loves him; he knows only that he does love
him. The inner man has no language; he is mute.”
CHAPTER VIII
Marie Wodzinska and the Dusk
In the summer of 1835, Chopin learned that his parents were going very
shortly to Carlsbad to take the cure and he decided on the spot to
get there first. The sentiments that bound him to his own people were
still the most vital that he knew. So he left, his heart melting with
tenderness. When he saw them, after five years of separation, he wrote
to his sisters, who had remained at Warsaw, with transports that might
have been mistaken for those of a rapturous lover.
“Our joy is indescribable. We do nothing but embrace one another... is
there any greater happiness? What a pity we are not all together! How
good God is to us! I write just anyhow; to-day it is better to think
of nothing at all, to rejoice in the happiness we have attained. That
is all I have to-day. Our parents have not changed; they are just the
same; they have only grown a little older. We walk together, holding
the arm of our sweet little mother... We drink, we eat together. We
coax and bully each other. I am simply overflowing with happiness.
These are the very habits, the very movements with which I grew up; it
is the same hand that I have not kissed for so long... And here it has
come true, this happiness, this happiness, this happiness!”
For their part, the father and mother found their son not in the least
changed. It was joy inexhaustible, but brief, and like a preface
to profounder emotions. For Frederick was invited to Dresden, to
his friends the Wodzinskis, and he already felt those annunciatory
quiverings, that exquisite fear, those physiological presentiments
which notify our inner being of the imminent conception of love.
In his father’s boarding-school Chopin had had as comrades the three
Wodzinski brothers, and since his childhood he had known their younger
sister Marie. This great land-owning family had moved to Geneva for
the education of the children, and had lived there during the years
of the Polish Revolution. They had lived at first in a house in the
Place St.-Antoine, and later in a villa on the shore of the lake,
and they had not been long in gathering round them the flower of
Genevese society and of the foreign colony. Familiar guests in their
drawing-rooms were Bonstetten, Sismondi, Mlle. Salandin de Crans,
Prince Louis Napoleon and Queen Hortense.
Marie was nineteen years old. The trace of Italian blood which flowed
in her veins (through the Orsettis, who had come from Milan to Poland
with Bona Sforza, the betrothed of one of the last kings of the dynasty
of Jagellons), this trace had made her dark-haired, lively, with great
black eyes and a full-lipped mouth the smile of which, a poet said, was
passion incarnate. Some called her ugly, others ravishing. This means
that in her face, half Slav, half Florentine, everything derived from
the expression. “The brunette daughter of Euterpe,” she was called by
Prince Napoleon, who liked to listen to her playing the piano while
he smoked his cigar in the Place St.-Antoine. For Marie practised
all sorts of minor talents; piano, singing, composing, embroidery,
painting, without the will or the ability to fix her preference. The
most pertinent thing about her, was her charm, the profound reaction,
possibly unconscious, of a very rich temperament. From her fourteenth
year she had been passionately loved. Readily she used her power over
men, disconcerting them with coquetry. Her imagination was rapid, her
memory exact.
Such was the childhood companion whom Chopin was to meet again at
Dresden, where the Wodzinski family were settled for a time. Frederick
was more curious than moved at seeing her again. He even wondered if
it were not simply a matter of musical interest, Marie having formerly
been one of his small pupils. She still occasionally sent him one of
her compositions. Had he not only a few weeks before replied to one of
these communications by sending her in turn a page of his own music?
“Having had to improvise in a drawing-room here the very evening that
I received it, I took for a subject the lovely theme of a Marie with
whom, years ago, I used to play hide-and-seek... To-day I take the
liberty of offering to my honourable colleague, Mlle. Marie, a little
waltz I have just written. May it give her a hundredth part of the
pleasure I felt when playing her _Variations_.”
So he arrived at Dresden. He saw her once again. He was won. He loved
her. This town, which he had already visited twice, seemed altogether
new and enchanting. In the mornings Marie and Frederick went out
together, filled with delicious melancholy. They walked along the
terrace of Bruhl and watched the flow of the Elbe, sat under the
chestnuts of the Grossgarten, or lingered in ecstasy in the Zwinger
Museum before Raphaël’s Madonna.
Together they paid a call on that Grand Mistress of the Court who had a
few years before taken such pride in producing Chopin for Their Saxon
Highnesses. In the evening the family visited one of Marie’s uncles,
Palatin Wodzinski, who had presided at the last meeting of the Polish
Senate before the fall of Warsaw. Exiled, the greater part of his
wealth confiscated, the old man was now living at Dresden, the second
capital of his ancient kings, surrounded by his prints, his books and
his medals. He was an aristocratic little man, with a smooth face and
a white wig. In his day he had soldiered, had received Napoleon at
Wilna, and had been taken prisoner at Leipzig, at the side of the dying
Poniatowski. He had the serious defect of a dislike for music, and now
that they were playing every evening at his house he spent his time
observing, rather peevishly, that his little niece was turning her
shining eyes on this maker of mazurkas. Still more did he disapprove
of certain sighs and whisperings that came from a corner of the room
where this inseparable couple isolated themselves under the very nose
of everybody. So he coughed loudly, adjusted his toupée, and addressed
his sister-in-law:—
“An artist, a little artist without a future... Ah! that is not what I
have dreamt of for your daughter.”
“Two children,” replied the Countess, laughing. “An old friendship.”
“We all know where that leads to...”
“But he is a child of the house, just as Antoine, Félix and Casimir
were Professor Chopin’s children. Why sadden the poor boy? He is so
tender, so obliging.”
And Frederick continued his love duets at the piano or on the terrace,
in spite of the Palatin’s rebuking eyebrows and under the mother’s
indulgent eyes. A whole month slipped by in these passionate new
experiences. Then he had to think of leaving. One September morning he
went up for the last time to the salon where the girl was awaiting him.
A handful of roses strewed the table. She took one and gave it to him.
The hour of eleven struck from the clock on the Frauenkirche. Chopin
stood rigidly before her, pale, his eyes fixed. Perhaps he was thinking
of that death of the self—that parting always is, whatever it promises
for the future. Or was he listening to the melodic rhythm of his pain?
In any case the only expression of sorrow that welled to the surface
was the theme of a waltz. He sat down at the piano and played it,
hiding thus all the cries of his loneliness.
Later, Marie called it _La Valse de l’Adieu_. It is worth noting that
Chopin, restrained by an insurmountable pride, never published it.
He did write it out, however, recopied it, and gave it to his friend
on that last day with this very simple dedication: “For Mlle. Marie,
Dresden, September, 1835.” Fontana published it after the death of the
composer (Posthumous Works, op. 69, no. 1, _Waltz in A flat major_).
One wants to catch in it “the murmur of two lovers’ voices, the
repeated strokes of the clock, and the rumble of wheels scorching the
pavement, the noise of which covers that of repressed sobs.” It is
possible, after all, in spite of Schumann and his mute language. Be
that as it may, Chopin kept the flower Marie gave him. We shall find it
later, placed in an envelope and marked by him for whom sorrow and the
ideal had always the scent of an autumn rose.
* * * * *
On his way back, Chopin stopped at Leipzig, where he again saw
Mendelssohn, who took him straight to Wieck, his daughter, Clara, and
Robert Schumann. The small house of the Wiecks’ that day sheltered the
three greatest composers of the age.
After his arrival in Paris, Chopin shut himself up at home in order
to live in close relationship with the loved face that now bloomed in
his desert. He wrote. He received letters. These were, on both sides,
a little flat, because neither of them knew how to talk well except
through music. But what of it? A lover’s pen is not necessarily
literary nor abounding in sentiments. There are even those who, in
their exigency, scorn the worn vocabulary of love. To the novices and
the pure, the palest nuances are enough to show the naked heart. Listen
with Chopin’s delicate ear to the gossamer letters of Marie Wodzinska:
“Though you do not like either to receive or to write letters,
I nevertheless want to profit by the departure of M. Cichowski
to send you news of Dresden since you left. So I am annoying you
again, but no longer by my playing. On Saturday, when you had gone,
all of us went about sadly, with our eyes full of tears, in the
room where only a few minutes before we had still had you with us.
Father came in presently, and was so sorry not to have been able
to say good-bye. Every minute or so Mother, in tears, would speak
of some traits of ‘her fourth son Frederick,’ as she called you.
Félix looked quite cast down: Casimir tried to make his jokes as
usual, they did not come off that day as he played the jester,
half-crying. Father teased us and laughed himself only to keep from
crying. At eleven the singing master arrived; the lesson went very
badly, we could not sing. You were the subject of all conversation.
Félix kept asking me for the _Waltz_ (the last thing of yours we
had received and heard). All of us found pleasure in it, they in
listening and I in playing, because it reminded us of the brother
who had just left us. I took it to be bound; the German opened his
eyes wide when he saw a single page (he did not know by whom it
had been written). No one to dinner; we kept staring at your place
at the table, then too at ‘Fritz’s little corner.’ The small chair
is still in place and probably will be as long as we keep this
apartment. In the evening we were taken to my aunt’s to spare us
the sadness of this first evening without you. Father came to fetch
us saying that it was as impossible for him as it had been for us,
to stay in the house that day. It was a great relief to leave the
spot that kept renewing our sorrow. Mother talks to me of nothing
but you and Antoine. When my brother goes to Paris, think a little
of him, I beg you. If you only knew what a devoted friend you have
in him,—a friend such as one rarely finds! Antoine is good-hearted,
too much so, because he is always the dupe of others. And he is
very careless; he never thinks of anything, or rarely, at least...
When by some miracle you have an impulse to write: ‘How are you?
I am well. I have no time to write further,’ add, I beg, _yes_ or
_no_ to the question I want to ask you: Did you compose ‘_If I were
a little sun up there, for none but you would I want to shine_’? I
received this a day or so ago and I have not the courage to sing
it, because I fear, if it is yours, that it would be altogether
changed, like _Wojak_, for instance. We continually regret that
you are not named _Chopinski_, or at least that there is not some
indication to show that you are Polish, because then the French
would not be able to dispute with us the honour of being your
compatriots. But this is too long. Your time is so precious that it
is really a crime to make you spend it reading my scrawls. Besides,
I know you do not read them all through. Little Marie’s letter will
be stuck away in a corner after you have read a few lines. So I
need not reproach myself further about stealing your time.
“Good-bye (simply). A childhood friend needs no fine phrases.
Mother embraces you tenderly. Father and my mother embrace you
sincerely (no, that is too little) in the most—I do not yet know
how to say it myself. Joséphine, not having been able to say
good-bye, asks me to express her regrets. I asked Thérèse: ‘What
shall I say to Frederick for you?’ She answered: ‘kiss him and give
him my regards.’
“Good-bye,
“Maria.
“P.S. When you started out, you left the pencil of your portfolio
on the piano. This must have been inconvenient on the way; as for
us, we are keeping it respectfully as a relic. Once again, thank
you very much for the little vase. Mlle. Wodzinska came in this
morning with a great discovery. ‘Sister Maria, I know how they say
Chopin in Polish,—Chopena!’”
Frederick replied, sent his music, and above all, composed. The year
1836 opened under the sign of Marie. He published the _Concerto in F
minor_ and the _Grande Polonaise_ for piano and orchestra. He wrote the
_Ballade in G minor_, which is the monument to his love.
It is not deliberately that an artist discovers and then fashions the
residue of his amorous experiences. He receives his joys and sufferings
within himself and leaves them to ferment. It is only after the rude
labour of his conflicts with himself, after the corrosion of each of
his illusions, under the salt of his tears, that the costly fruit of
which he bears the germ can be born. From this obscure chemistry, from
the disillusionment which Marie’s letters, little by little, brought to
him, came the _Ballade in G minor_ (op. 23). Schumann called it one of
the most bitter and personal of Chopin’s works. He might have added,
the saddest, and thus the most passionate, for there is no passion
without pain. Here we see passion itself crucified, and hear its cries.
How powerful is the instinct of the poet to submit his pain to the form
of narrative, like a heroic tale! For in theory the ballad is a song
with accompaniment. Under this form of legend Chopin transposed the
ancient malady of man, which had become for a second time his own. It
is in this way, by what it tells us of him, involuntarily, that the
_Ballade in G minor_, irresistible in its unique and unhappy sentiment,
retains an accent that flatters us. It convinces us that we also are
marked by the sign of love.
Schumann, who saw him again that summer, at Leipzig, tells of the
magical hours they spent together at the piano. To listen to the
dreamer was to become oneself the dream of his spirit. But nothing
could be more exasperating than Chopin’s habit of drawing his finger
rapidly from one end of the keyboard to the other at the end of each
piece, as though forcibly to drive away the dream he had created.
A curious detail: in the original edition of the _Ballade_, there
appears in the last bar of the introduction a _D_, evidently written
with an _E_ flat and corrected later. Saint-Saëns writes on this
subject: “This supposed _E_ gives a dolorous accent which is quite
in keeping with the character of the piece. Was it a misprint? Was
it the original intention of the author? This note marks a dissonant
accent, an effect of surprise. But dissonances, sought out to-day like
truffles, were then distrusted. From Liszt, whom I questioned on the
subject, I could obtain only this reply: ‘I prefer the _E flat_....’ I
concluded from this evasive answer that Chopin, in playing the ballad,
sounded the _D_; but I am still convinced that the _E flat_ was his
original idea and that cowardly and clumsy friends persuaded him to the
D.”
I reproduce this detail for the lovers of sources, for those who like
to surprise in the heart not the sweetest tones, but the most pure.
They will understand the distinction.
* * * * *
Thus Chopin worked, economized, and prepared for his next meeting with
Marie. He refused an invitation from Mendelssohn, who wanted him to
come to Düsseldorf for a music festival. He refused Schumann, although
he had signed his invitation “with love and adoration.” He reserved
all his forces for a trip to Marienbad, which he finally took in July,
1836.
On a radiant summer morning Chopin reached the wooded hills round the
little Austrian watering place where his loved one was awaiting him.
The effect was so powerful that he closed his eyes as from a shock of
pain. In that instant, even before seeing her, a presentiment came to
him that he had reached the summit of his joy. He knew the unreasonable
agony advanced by false joys, finished, experienced, emptied,
almost before they have begun to exist. However, Marie’s agitated
face steadied him and gave him back his confidence. But a shade of
uneasiness, a slight tendency on the part of Marie and her mother to be
more ceremonious than they had been the year before, left him anxious.
Nevertheless, they resumed the intimate family life which he loved.
Forebodings fled. There were walks in that agreeable country-side,
musical séances, evening talks, stories of his Paris life, memories.
Frederick shone with his talent for mimicry. He imitated famous
artists, assaulted the keys with a great waving of arms and hands,
went, as he said, “pigeon-shooting.” The Wodzinskis lived in a villa.
In their garden spread a tall lime-tree. During the hot hours of the
afternoon Marie and Frederick took refuge in its shade and the girl
sketched in charcoal the ever slightly grave features of this friend
who was at once so childlike and so mature.
On August 24th they all returned to the beloved town of Dresden. There
they spent two more weeks. Two weeks which were to lead fatally to
the crisis. At dusk on the 7th of September, two days before Chopin’s
departure, he asked Marie to be his wife. She consented. That is all we
know, except that the Countess also gave her consent but imposed the
condition of secrecy. They were obliged to hide the decision from the
father, whom they would without doubt persuade, but whose family pride
made a rapid consent improbable. Besides, he thought Chopin in delicate
health. Frederick departed, carrying with him this promise and his own
despair. He knew that the presentiment of Marienbad had not deceived
him, and already he had lost his faith in happiness.
However the Wodzinskis wrote to him,—especially the Countess. Marie
added little postscripts. Here is Mme. Wodzinska’s first letter:—
“_14 Sept., ’36._
“Dear Frederick:
“As we agreed I am sending you a letter... I should have sent it
two days ago if it had not been for a tooth which I had extracted
and from which I suffered greatly. I cannot sufficiently regret
your departure on Saturday; I was ill that day and could not put my
mind on _the dusk_. We spoke of it too little.
“The next day I could have talked of it further. M. de Girardin
says: ‘To-morrow is always a great day.’ We have it still ahead of
us. Do not think I retract what I said,—no. But we must discuss
the path to follow. I only beg of you to keep the secret. Keep it
well, because everything depends on that... On October 15th I shall
be at Warsaw. I shall see your parents and your sisters; I shall
tell them that you are well and in excellent spirits: however, I
shall say nothing of _the dusk_.... Good-bye, go to bed at eleven
o’clock and until January 7th drink _eau de gomme_. Keep well, dear
Fritz: I bless you with all my soul, like a loving mother.
“P.S. Marie sends you some slippers. They are a little big, but
she says you are to wear woollen stockings. This is the judgment
of Paris, and I trust you will be obedient; haven’t you promised?
Anyway, remember that this is a period of probation.”
_The dusk_, it was so, among themselves, that they called Chopin’s
love. No chance name was ever more appropriate.
To a letter which her brother Casimir sent off the next day, Marie
added these lines: “We cannot console ourselves for your departure; the
three days that have just passed have seemed like centuries; have they
to you? Do you miss your friends a little? Yes,—I answer for you, and
I do not think I am mistaken; at least I want to believe not. I tell
myself that this _yes_ comes from you (because you would have said it,
wouldn’t you?).
“The slippers are finished; I am sending them to you. I am chagrined
that they should be too large, in spite of the fact that I gave your
shoe as a measure, _carissimo maestro_, but the man is a common German.
Dr. Paris consoles me by saying this is good for you as you should wear
very warm woollen stockings this winter.
“Mamma has had a tooth out, which has made her very weak. She has
had to stay in bed ever since. In two weeks we leave for Poland. I
shall see your family, which will be a joy for me, and that sweet
Louise,—will she remember me? Good-bye, _mio carissimo maestro_. Do not
forget Dresden for the present, or in a little while Poland. Good-bye,
_au revoir_. Ah, if it could be soon!
“Maria.
“Casimir says that the Sluzewo piano is in such ramshackle condition
that it cannot be used. So think about a Pleyel. In the happy days, not
like to-day (as far as we are concerned), I hope to hear you play on
the same piano. _Au revoir, au revoir, au revoir!_ That gives me hope.”
Such is the most passionate letter Chopin ever received from Marie
Wodzinska. In October another letter from the Countess, another
postscript from Marie.
“_October 2nd—Dusk._
“Thank you ever so much for the autographs. Will you please send
some more? (Mamma makes me write this.) Now we are leaving at once
for Warsaw. How I shall rejoice to see all your family and next
year _you_!... Good-bye, till _May_, or _June_ at the latest. I
recommend to your memory your very faithful secretary.
“Marie.”
In January, 1837, Countess Wodzinska was disturbed about a Pleyel piano
Chopin had sent her. She thanked him for a new supply of autographs,
and added this slightly ambiguous sentence at the end of her letter:
“From now on we must inform ourselves still more prudently about our
loved one.” Marie put in her postscript, her “imposition,” one would
like to say.
“Mother has been scolding. I thank you so much,—so much. And when we
see each other again I shall thank you even more kindly. You can see
how lazy I am about writing, because to put off my thanks till our
next meeting spares me many words to-day. Mamma has described to you
our way of life. There is nothing left for me to say, except that it
is thawing; which is great news, isn’t it? This tranquil life we lead
here is what we need, so I like it,—for the present, I mean, because
I should not like it to be always so. One takes what comes with as
good grace as possible, when things cannot be different from what they
are. I occupy myself a little to kill time. Just now I have Heine’s
_Germany_, which interests me enormously.
“But I must stop and leave you to God’s grace. I hope I do not need
to repeat to you the assurance of the sentiments of your faithful
secretary.
“Marie.”
This time Chopin must have discovered in the colourless words not the
least gleam of _the dusk_. The night had completely fallen. He took
down the album Marie had given him the year before to write in it a
page of music. For a year the pages had remained virgin. Chopin said:
“I could not have written anything at all in it, not if I had tried a
hundred years.”
Now he could fill it, because he realized that Marie’s love was dead.
So he wrote on the first page a _Lento con gran expressione_ and eight
other melodies to the words of Witwicki and Miçkiewicz. Soon after, he
received in reply this letter, the last:—
“_For Frederick Chopin._
“I can only write you a few words to thank you for the lovely
scrapbook you have sent me. I shall not try to tell you with what
pleasure I received it, as it would be in vain. Accept, I beg you,
the assurance of the gratitude I owe you. Believe in the life-long
attachment of our whole family for you, and particularly of your
naughtiest pupil and childhood friend. Good-bye. Mamma sends her
dearest love. Thérèse is always talking of her ‘Chopena.’
“Good-bye,—think of us,
“Maria.”
It is hard to say whether it was heart or intelligence that was wanting
in this young woman. Besides,—it scarcely matters. Love is not within
the compass of all little girls any more than happiness is made for
difficult souls. “Perhaps we are worth more than happiness,” said Liszt
to Mme. d’Agoult.
Chopin accepted the breaking of his engagement in silence. But neither
his heart nor his body recovered, ever. His friend Camille Pleyel took
him to London for a few days, to distract him. There he was very ill.
His latent tuberculosis seems to have begun its ravages at that time.
The Marquis de Custine wrote him: “You have gained in sympathy, in
poetry; the melancholy of your compositions goes deeper into the heart
than ever before. One is alone with you even in the midst of the crowd.
It is not a piano, it is a soul...”
* * * * *
Chopin gathered the notes of Marie Wodzinska and placed them, with the
rose of Dresden, in an envelope on which he wrote these two Polish
words: “_Moïa Biéda_,” my grief. They found this poor packet, after his
death, tied with a loving ribbon.
CHAPTER IX
First Sketch of George Sand
Some six years before this romance in such few words, we glanced at the
face of a woman bending over her paper and watched her enthusiastic
hand pen these words: “To live, how sweet! How good it is, in spite
of griefs, husbands... in spite of bitter pangs. To live,—how
intoxicating! To love, to be loved! That is happiness, that is Heaven!”
During these six years neither this heart, nor this body, nor this
hand had much slackened. To live, indeed, was the vital business of
George Sand, dumpy, greedy, and so formidably endowed for all the
extravagances of the spirit and the flesh. Nothing was too strong for
this small woman, so solid of head and of body. And no one had bested
her. In spite of her “bitter pangs,” her chagrin, for and against a
boorish and rapacious husband, this great-granddaughter of the Maréchal
de Saxe, this daughter of a daughter of the people had pretty well
solved the double tactical problem of happiness that she had set
herself: love and fame—enough to satisfy the most exigent appetites.
At twenty-seven, this provincial had written her first book and taken
her first lover. At thirty she could have said, like her ancestor
the Maréchal: “Life is a dream. Mine has been short, but it has been
beautiful.” Now, in her thirty-fourth year, this surprising pagan
thought herself finished, and for ever disgusted with pleasure. She
had not yet learned that the malady of desire, once it has opened in
a being its ever-living wound, has but a feeble chance of healing. At
least before the season of the great cold.
But, to this malady of desire, Aurore Dudevant added a taste for
lengthy associations. Heart and head she was made for them,—and from
them had contracted the habits of bed and of thought. Jules Sandeau had
given her her pen name, her theories of “love free and divine,” and
her first experience of love. The disappointment that followed this
trial plunged her into war against all yokes, even that of sentiment.
Still, perhaps yoke is too heavy a word. Pressure is enough. To rid
herself, however, of such disturbing memories, she chose an intelligent
thaumaturgist, and, against love, a marvellous antiseptic: the writer
Mérimée. She confessed as much, at a later date, in a curious letter:
“On one of those days of weariness and despair I met a man of sublime
self-confidence, a man who was calm and strong, who understood nothing
of my nature and who laughed at my troubles. The vitality of his spirit
completely fascinated me; for a week I thought he had the secret of
happiness, that he would teach it to me, that his scornful indifference
would cure me of my childish susceptibilities. I believed that he had
suffered like me, and that he had triumphed over his surface emotions.
I do not yet know if I was wrong, if this man is strong by reason of
his greatness or of his poverty.... At any rate, at the age of thirty I
behaved as a girl of fifteen would not have done. The experience was a
complete failure.”
This woman, so smothered in words, sometimes found a phrase that
plumbed the depths. She adds a little farther on, in that same letter
to Sainte-Beuve: “If Prosper Mérimée had understood me, he might
perhaps have loved me, and if he had loved me he might have vanquished
me, and if I had been able to submit to a man I should have been saved,
_because my liberty devours and kills me_.” Here is the real misfortune
of this gross temperament. It needed a master and from that time sought
it only among the weak. Her slight physiological inversion induced
psychological aberrations from which sprang all the wrongs which this
fine thinking animal committed against her own peace.
Thus, there was thenceforth in the life of George Sand an _absent
being_. We can take those words to mean a kind of ideal lover, lord of
her thought and minister to her flesh, this marvellous twin self who
arouses our instincts but never satiates them, who invents our dearest
pains and stirs up our devils, yet like an angel bears us up to the
mystical union of souls. The difficulty is to find united in one being
all the colours of our own neurosis. We all join the chase, however,
giving each his own name to the pursuit. George Sand called it “the
search for her truth.” After all, why not? One might call truth the
rhythm from which our engines derive the greatest potential power,
whether this be for pleasure, for pain, for work, or for love. But we
must do Sand this justice, that next to her private ills the general
ill, “the suffering of the race, the view, the knowledge, meditation
on the destiny of man” also impassioned her elastic soul. She often
succeeded in forgetting herself in order to understand others. She knew
how to let her intelligence ripen, to give maturity to her thoughts.
Yet, in spite of the part she took in the idealistic battles of the
century, in spite of the intellectual influence which she exerted at
such an early age on the minds of her time, this woman’s profound
lament was that of her _Lélia_: “For ten thousand years I have cried
into the infinite,—‘Truth, truth!’ For ten thousand years the infinite
has answered,—‘Desire, desire!’”
But here is this _désenchantée_, after her period of despair in 1833,
suddenly writing: “I think I have blasphemed Nature, and God perhaps,
in _Lélia_; God, who is not wicked, and who does not wreak vengeance
upon us, has sealed my mouth by giving me back my youthful heart and
by forcing me to admit that he has endowed us with sublime joys.” She
had just dined at the side of a fair young man of twenty-three, with
arrogant eyes and no eyelashes, with a slender waist and beautiful,
aristocratic hands, who scoffed loudly at all social idealism and
bent over to breathe in the women’s ears: “I am not gentle, I am
excessive.” He scoffed both at the “labouring classes” and at the
“ruling,” at St.-Simon and at the Abbé de Lamennais. He even said: “I
am more interested in the way Napoleon put on his boots than in all the
politics of Europe.” Women felt that his real interest was love.
He paid immediate attention to his already celebrated neighbour with
the olive skin, who sent him a few days later the two volumes of her
_Leila_ with these inscriptions: the first: “To _Monsieur mon gamin
d’Alfred_;” the second “To Monsieur the Viscount Alfred de Musset,
respectful regards from his devoted servant, George Sand.”
We know to-day in all its details the story of this liaison and its
magnificent expenditure of sorrows. We shall retain only certain
crystals, the bitter dregs left in their hearts by the excesses of two
fierce and consummate imaginations. It can be said that they devoured
each other. Their desires differed: the one more brutal, more ravenous,
less merciful; the other evil, maniacal, but savouring in little
bites the marrow of their mutual suffering. “Contract your heart, big
George,” he said. And she: “I no longer love you, but I still adore
you. I no longer want you, but I cannot now do without you.” They
departed for Venice, where these two sadists took vengeance on each
other for their double impotence: cerebral with him, physical with
her. And they continued nevertheless to desire and adore each other in
spite of their outworn senses and spent joys. Then came those tortures
that are self-inflicted for the stimulation of the senses. They soon
had nothing left but the taste of their tears. Finally, in the very
middle of the crisis, each of the two lovers sought refuge according
to his own temperament: George in work and Alfred in sickness. Then
the saviour appeared in the form of a handsome Venetian doctor on
whom, at the very bedside of the delirious poet, fell the brunt of the
reillumined desires of the other victim. No more pity, when the beast
is once more at large. And no more despair, when the dry scales fall
from an old love to leave naked a new body that melts to softness at
the first touch of unfamiliar lips.
Musset departed. The three of them cultivated a curious relationship.
The following summer George wrote to Alfred: “Oh! that night of
rapture, when, in spite of ourselves, you joined our hands and said:
‘You love each other and still you love me; you have saved me body and
soul!’” And for his part Musset cried: “Poor George, poor dear child!
You thought yourself my mistress,—you were only my mother....” There
the word is spoken. That physiological inversion we mentioned could
at once assume another form. But the _mot juste_ is really that of
mother. Because Sand was above all maternal, protective, the mistress
_genetrix_. She needed to endow everything about her with the sentiment
of maternity. A few months later on, when everything was over between
them, the shrieks she uttered in her _Journal Intime_ over this badly
quenched love were again those of a mother deprived of her suckling.
“I love you! I would submit to every torture to be loved by you, and
you leave me! Ah! poor man, you are mad... It is your pride that leads
you... Oh, my poor children, how unhappy your mother is!... I want to
surround myself with pure and distinguished men. Away with the strong;
I want to see the artists: Liszt, Delacroix, Berlioz, Meyerbeer. I
shall be a man among them and we shall gossip and talk. Alfred shall
hear our bad jokes... Alas, if I only had him to-day! What haste I am
in to have him! If I had only a few lines from you once in a while,
just a word, permission to send you sometimes a little two-penny
picture bought on the _quai_, cigarettes I made myself, a bird, a
toy... Oh, my blue eyes, you will never look at me again! Lovely head,
I shall never see you bend over me again, or wrap you in sweet languor.
My little body, warm and supple, you will never stretch yourself out on
me, as Elisha on the dead child, to quicken it!” “Ah! who will care for
you, and for whom shall I care?”
This was the punishment for loving a man devoid of passion. The depth
of her being, when she stirred it well, sent up always the same hope:
“I need to suffer for someone. I must nourish this maternal solicitude,
which is accustomed to guard over a tired sufferer.”
A fancy for a kind of tribune of the people intervened to heal the
still live sore: she thought herself in love with Everard, he whom his
contemporaries called Michel de Bourges. She yielded him the virginity
of her intelligence. A cold love. The love of a slave who admires a
handsome captain and a just legislator. But no giving, no suffering,
nothing to blast deep caves of passion into the soul. Besides, Michel
de Bourges was anti-artist. She wanted to avenge art with irony.
“Berlioz is an artist,” she wrote to the master of rhetoric. “Perhaps
he is even criminal enough to think secretly that all the people in the
world are not worth a rightly placed chromatic scale, just as I have
the insolence to prefer a white hyacinth to the crown of France. But
rest assured that one can have these follies in one’s head and not be
an enemy of the human race. You are for sumptuary laws, Berlioz is for
demi-semi-quavers, I am for liliaceous plants.”
This lawyer was nevertheless jealous underneath his coldness. He
was even tiresome. George Sand saw Liszt, found him handsome, and
received him at Nohant with his mistress, Marie d’Agoult. Envying
their still-young love, she noted in her diary: “What fearful calm
in my heart! Can the torch be extinguished?” It was not the torch
that was dying but the burned out candle lighted by the philosopher
whose penholder she had aspired to be. And still the old stubborn
idea reappeared: “My sweetest dream... consists in imagining the care
I might give you in your feeble old age.” One important service she
received from Michel was the winning of her action for divorce from
Casimir Dudevant.
In the summer of 1836 she shook off the lover’s chain and broke the
hobble of a husband. She was free. On the spot she turned over her
two children, Maurice and Solange, to a young tutor by the name of
Pelletan, whom, to know him better, she put to the test by becoming
his mistress. Then she left for Geneva to join Liszt and the Countess
d’Agoult. She returned in the early autumn and settled for a time in
Paris with this couple, who were beginning to tire of solitude. All
three of them went to the Hôtel de France in the rue Laffitte. This
sedate bourgeois tavern became a communal dwelling of artists. On the
stairs one passed Eugène Sue, Miçkiewicz, the singer Nourrit, the Abbé
de Lamennais, Heinrich Heine. The musical gentlemen, with Liszt at the
head, spoke of nothing but Chopin.
“Bring him to me,” demanded George.
He came one evening with Hiller. Mr. Sand and Miss Chopin saw each
other for the first time.
Returning home, Chopin said to his friend: “What an antipathetic woman
that Sand is! Is she really a woman? I’m inclined to doubt it.”
CHAPTER X
Letters of Two Novelists
While Frederick Chopin, in the year 1837, was living out the slow
decomposition of his love, George Sand was back at her little Château
de Nohant. There she spent long months alone, with her children and
her work. The summer brought her the Liszt-d’Agoult ménage, nights of
music, new dreams of happiness. Then her mother died unexpectedly,
and she was obliged to return to Paris, while the Countess and Franz
took the road for Italy. She planned to rejoin them there, but was
prevented by a sudden inclination for the new tutor of her children,
Félicien Mallefille. The rupture with Michel de Bourges still bled
feebly, but George felt that she had finally “slain the dragon,” and
that this attachment, more stubborn than she had dreamed, would be
cured by a gentle affection, “less enthusiastic, but also less sharp,”
and, she hoped, lasting. She was mistaken. Six months were sufficient
to drain this spring to the bottom. Nevertheless she had pity on this
rather vapid lover, who never interested her physically. For several
months more she dragged him about with her luggage between Paris,
Fontainebleau, and Nohant.
In January of 1838, the great Balzac stumbled one fine evening into
this country seat and stayed for several days. The two novelists
passed the nights in gossip and confidences. Balzac set down his
still warm impressions for Countess Hanska: “I reached the Château de
Nohant on Holy Saturday, about half-past seven in the evening, and
I found comrade George Sand in her dressing-gown, smoking an after
dinner cigar, in front of her fire in an immense empty room. She had
lovely yellow slippers ornamented with fringe, bewitching stockings
and red trousers. So much for her state of mind. As to physique, she
had doubled her chin like a prebendary. She has not a single white
hair in spite of her frightful misfortunes; her swarthy complexion has
not changed; her fine eyes are as brilliant as ever; she has the same
stupid air when she is thinking, because, as I told her after studying
her, her whole countenance is in her eye. She has been at Nohant for a
year, very sad and working prodigiously. She leads about the same life
that I do. She goes to bed at six in the morning and gets up at noon; I
go to bed at six in the evening and get up at midnight. But, naturally,
I conformed to her habits, and for three days we have gossiped from
five o’clock in the evening, after dinner, till five in the morning.
The result is that I know her, and she knows me, better after these
three talks than during the whole of the preceding four years, when she
used to visit me while she was in love with Jules Sandeau and when she
was attached to Musset... It was just as well that I saw her, for we
exchanged mutual confidences regarding Jules Sandeau... However, she
was even more unhappy with Musset, and now there she is, in profound
seclusion, raging at both marriage and love, because in each she has
found nothing but disappointment.
“Her right male was hard to find, that is all. All the harder because
she is not amiable, and, consequently, loving her will always be beset
with difficulties. She is a bachelor, she is an artist, she is big,
generous, loyal, chaste; she has the features of a man. _Ergo_, she is
not a woman. While I was near her, even in talking heart to heart for
three days, I felt no more than before the itch of that gooseflesh of
gallantry that in France and in Poland one is supposed to display for
any kind of female.
“It was to a friend I was talking. She has high virtues, virtues
that society regards askance. We discussed the great questions of
marriage and of freedom with a seriousness, a good faith, a candour, a
conscience worthy of the great shepherds who guide the herds of men.
“For, as she said, with immense pride (I should not have dared think of
it myself), ‘Since by our writings we are preparing a revolution in the
customs of the future, I am not less struck by the inconveniences of
the one state than by those of the other.’
“We spent the whole night talking of this great problem. I am
absolutely in favour of liberty for the young girl and bondage for
the woman, that is, I want her to know before marriage what she is
undertaking: I want her to have considered everything; then, when
she has signed the contract, after having weighed the chances, to be
faithful to it. I gained a great point in making Mme. Dudevant realize
the necessity of marriage; but she will come to believe in it, I am
sure, and I feel that I have done good in proving it to her.
“She is an excellent mother, adored by her children; but she dresses
her daughter Solange like a little boy, and that is not right.
“She is like a man of twenty, _morally_, because she is chaste, modest,
and only an artist on the outside. She smokes inordinately, she plays
the princess, perhaps, a little too much, and I am convinced that
she portrayed herself faithfully as the princess in _Le Secrétaire
Intime_. She knew and said of herself, before I told her, just what
I think,—that she has neither power of conception nor the gift of
constructing plots, nor the ability to attain to the truth, nor the
art of pathos; but that, without knowing the French language, she has
_style_. This is true. She takes fame, as I do, lightly enough, and has
a profound scorn for the public, whom she calls _Jumento_.
“I shall tell you of the immense and secret devotion of this woman
for these two men, and you will say to yourself that there is nothing
in common between the angels and the devils. All the follies she has
committed entitle her to glory in the eyes of great and beautiful
souls....
“Anyway, it is a man she would like to be, so much so that she has
thrown off womanhood, and is no longer a woman. A woman attracts and
she repels, and, since I am very masculine, if she produces that effect
on me, she must produce it on men who are like me. She will be unhappy
always. And so,—she is now in love with a man who is her inferior, and
in that covenant there is only disillusionment and disappointment for a
woman with a beautiful spirit. A woman should always love a man greater
than she, or she be so blinded that it is the same as though he were.
“I have not come from Nohant unscathed. I carried away one enormous
vice; she made me smoke a _hooka_ with _Lattakieh_; it has suddenly
become a necessity to me...”
* * * * *
Balzac’s eye and ear were not mistaken in their diagnosis. Yet he could
neither fully see nor fully hear what was passing behind the windows
of this being who was more complex than he knew. This spring of 1838
germinated once again the strong dark violet of a new love.
* * * * *
George Sand had been to Paris several times. She had seen Chopin again.
And the drama of pleasure, of difficulties, of pains, had involved
them. Both Sand and Chopin had come through too many sufferings to
turn the new page of their story with anything but distrust and
uncertainty. But with Chopin it had all been buried in silence, and his
music alone had received his queries and his secret raptures. We may
consult all his work of this period, which witnesses magnificently to
this: the _Twelve Studies_, dedicated to Mme. d’Agoult (Vol. 2, op.
25), the _Impromptu_ (Op. 29), the _Second Scherzo_ (Op. 31), the _Two
Nocturnes_ (Op. 32), the four mazurkas of op. 30 (C minor, B minor, D
flat major, and C sharp minor), the three _Valses Brillantes_ of op.
34, and four other mazurkas (op. 33) dedicated to Mlle. la Comtesse
Mostowska.
As for George, the first hint of her new passion is found in a letter
to her friend, Mme. Marliani, dated the 23rd of May, where she says:
“Pretty dear, I have received your letters and have delayed replying
_fully_, because you know how _changeable_ the weather is in the season
of love. There is so much _yes_ and _no_, _if_ and _but_, in one week,
and often in the morning one says: _This is absolutely intolerable_,
only to add in the evening: _Truly, it is supreme happiness._ So I
am holding off until I may tell you _definitely_ that my barometer
registers something, if not stable, at least set fair for any length of
time at all. I have not the slightest reproach to make, but that is no
reason to be happy....”
Yet it was not to Mme. Marliani that she showed the singular and
interesting fluctuations of her sentimental barometer, but to Count
Albert Grzymala, a close friend of Chopin. But here is what she wrote
him at the beginning of that summer:
“Nothing could ever make me doubt the loyalty of your advice, dear
friend; may you never have such a fear. I believe in your gospel
without knowing or examining it, because once it has a disciple
like you it must be the most sublime of all gospels. Bless you for
your advice, and be at peace about my thoughts. Let us state the
question clearly, for the last time, for on your final reply on
this subject will depend my whole future conduct, and since it had
to come to this I am vexed at not having conquered the repugnance I
felt to questioning you in Paris. It seemed to me that what I was
to hear would blanch _my poem_. And, indeed, now it has browned,
or rather it is paling enormously. But what does it matter? Your
gospel is mine when it prescribes thinking of oneself last and not
thinking of oneself at all when the happiness of those we love
claims all our strength. Listen to me well, and reply clearly,
categorically, definitely. This person whom he wants, ought, or
thinks he ought to love, is she the one to bring him happiness?
Or would she heighten his suffering and his sadness? I do not ask
if he loves her, if he is loved, if she is more or less to him
than I. I know, approximately, by what is taking place in me, what
must be happening to him. I want to know which of _us two_ he must
forget and forsake for his own peace, for his happiness, for his
very life, which seems to me too precarious and frail to withstand
great sorrows. I do not want to play the part of a bad angel. I am
not Meyerbeer’s Bertram and I shall never fight against a childhood
friend, provided she is a pure and lovely Alice. If I had known
that there was a bond in the life of your child, a sentiment in
his soul, I should never have stooped to inhale a perfume meant for
another altar. By the same token, he would without doubt have drawn
back from my first kiss had he known I was as good as married. We
have neither of us deceived one another. We gave ourselves to the
wind that passed, and for a few minutes it carried us both into
another region. But we had, none the less, to come back down here,
after this celestial embrace and this flight through the empyrean.
Poor birds, we have wings, but our nest is on the ground, and when
the song of the angels calls us on high, the cries of our family
recall us below. For my part, I have no wish to abandon myself
to passion, although there is in the depths of my heart a fire
that still occasionally threatens. My children will give me the
strength to break with anything that would draw me away from them,
or from the manner of life that is best for their education, their
health, their well-being.... Thus I am unable to establish myself
at Paris because of Maurice’s illness, etc., etc. Then there is
an excellent soul, _perfect_, in regard to heart and honour, whom
I shall never leave, because he is the only man who, having been
with me for a year, has never once, _for one single minute_, made
me suffer by his fault. He is also the only man who has ever given
himself absolutely and entirely to me, without regret for the past,
without reserve for the future. Then, he has such a good and wise
nature that I can in time teach him to understand everything, to
know everything. He is soft wax on which I have put my seal. When
I want to change the imprint, with some precaution and patience I
shall succeed. But it cannot be done to-day, and his happiness is
sacred to me.
“So much for me. Tied as I am, bound fairly tightly for years to
come, I cannot wish that our _child_ should on his side break
the bonds that hold him. If he should come to lay his existence
in my hands, I should be indeed dismayed because, having already
accepted another, I could not offer him a substitute for what
he had sacrificed for me. I believe that our love could last
only under the conditions under which it was born, that is, that
sometimes, when a good wind blows us together, we should again make
a tour among the stars and then leave each other to plod upon the
ground, because we are earth children and God has not decreed that
we should finish our pilgrimage together. We ought to meet among
the heavens, and the fleet moments we shall pass there shall be so
beautiful that they shall outweigh all our lives below.
“So my task is set. But I can, without ever relinquishing it,
accomplish it in two different ways; the one, by keeping as aloof
as possible from C[hopin], by never seeking to occupy his thoughts,
by never again being alone with him; the other, on the contrary,
by drawing as close to him as possible without compromising the
position of M[allefille], to insinuate myself gently into his hours
of rest and happiness, to hold him chastely in my arms sometimes,
when the wind of heaven sees fit to raise us and transport us
up to the skies. The first way will be the one I shall adopt if
you tell me that the _person_ is fit to give him a pure, true
happiness, to care for him, to arrange, regularize, and calm his
life, if, in fact, he could be happy through her and I should be
an impediment. If his spirit _strongly_, perhaps _madly_, perhaps
wisely scrupulous, refuses to love two different beings, in two
different ways, if the eight days I might pass with him in a whole
season should keep him from inner happiness for the rest of the
year,—then, yes, then I swear to you that I should try to make him
forget me. I should adopt the second way if you should say one of
two things: either that his domestic happiness could and should
do with a few hours of chaste passion and of sweet poetry, or
that domestic happiness is not possible to him, and that marriage
or any union that resembled it would be the grave of this artist
soul, that he must at any cost be saved from it and even helped to
conquer his religious scruples. It is thereabouts that I arrive
in my conjectures. You shall tell me if I am mistaken; I believe
the person charming, worthy of all love and all respect, because
such a being as he could love only the pure and the beautiful. But
I believe that you dread marriage for him, the daily bond, real
life, business, domestic cares, everything in a word that seems
remote from his nature and detrimental to the inspiration of his
muse. I too should fear it for him; but on this point I can say
nothing and decide nothing, because there are many aspects under
which he is quite unknown to me. I have seen only the side of his
being that is warmed by the sun. You shall therefore settle my
ideas on this point. It is of the very greatest importance that I
should know his position, so that I can establish my own. If it
were left to me, I should so arrange our poem that I should know
nothing, absolutely nothing of his _positive_ life, nor he of mine,
and that he should follow all his own ideas, religious, social,
poetic, artistic, without question from me, and _vice versa_, but
that always, in whatever place or at whatever moment of our lives
we might meet, our souls should be at their apogee of happiness and
goodness. Because, I am sure, one is better when one loves with a
heavenly love, and, far from committing a sin, one comes near to
God, the fountain-head of this love. It is perhaps this, as a last
resort, that you must try to make him thoroughly understand, my
friend, and without opposing his ideas of duty, of devotion and
of religious sacrifice, you may put his heart more at ease. What
I fear above anything in the world, what would be most painful to
me, what would make me decide even to make myself _dead for him_,
would be to see myself become a horror and a remorse in his _soul_.
I cannot (unless, quite apart from me, she should be tragic for
him) fight against the image and memory of someone else. I have too
much respect for decency for that, or rather it is the only decency
I respect. I will steal no one from anyone, except captives from
jailers and victims from executioners and, consequently Poland
from Russia. Tell me if it is a _Russia_ whose portrait haunts our
child. Then I would ask heaven to lend me all the seductions of
Armida to keep him from throwing himself away on her. But if it
is a Poland, let him be. There is nothing like a native land, and
when you have one you must not take another. In that case, I shall
be an _Italy_ to him, an Italy which one goes to see and where one
enjoys the days of spring, but where one does not stay, because
there is more sun than there are beds and tables, and the _comforts
of life_ are elsewhere. Poor Italy! The whole world dreams of her,
desires her, and sorrows for her, but no one may live with her,
because she is unhappy and cannot give the happiness which she has
not. There is a final supposition that I must tell you. It might be
possible that he no longer loves the _childhood friend_ at all, and
that he would have a real repugnance towards any alliance, but that
the feeling of duty, the honour of a family, or what not, demands
a remorseless sacrifice of himself. In that case, my friend, be
his good angel. _I_ could scarcely meddle in it, but you should.
Keep him from too sharp attacks of conscience, save him from his
own virtues, prevent him, at all costs, from sacrificing himself,
because in this sort of thing (I mean marriage or those unions
that, without the same publicity, have the same binding power and
duration), in this sort of thing, I say, the sacrifice of him who
gives his future is not in proportion to what he has received in
the past. The past is something appreciable and limited; the
future is infinite, because it is unknown. The being who, for a
certain known sum of devotion, demands in return the devotion of
a whole lifetime, asks too much, and if he on whom the demand is
made is hard pressed to defend his rights and satisfy at the same
time both generosity and justice, it is the part of friendship to
save him and to be the sole judge of his rights and his duties. Be
firm in this regard, and believe that I, who detest seducers, I,
who always take the part of outraged and deceived women, I who am
thought the spokesman of my sex and who pride myself on so being;
I, when it has been necessary, have on my authority as a sister or
mother or friend broken more than one engagement of this kind. I
have always condemned the woman when she has wanted to be happy at
the expense of the man; I have always absolved the man when more
was demanded of him than it is given to freedom and human dignity
to undertake. A pledge of love and faithfulness is criminal or
cowardly when the mouth speaks what the heart disavows, and one
may ask anything of a man save a crime or a cowardice. Except in
that case, my friend, that is to say except he should want to make
too great a sacrifice, I believe we must not oppose his ideas, nor
violate his instincts. If his heart can, like mine, hold two quite
different loves, one which might be called the _body_ of life, the
other the _soul_, that would be best, because our situation would
dominate our feelings and thoughts. Just as one is not always
sublime, neither is one always happy. We shall not see each other
every day, we shall not possess the sacred fire every day, but
there will be beautiful days, and heavenly flames.
“Perhaps we should also think of telling him my position regarding
M[allefille]. It is to be feared that, not knowing it, he might
conjure up a kind of duty towards me which would irk him and come
to oppose _the other_ painfully. I leave you absolutely to judge
and decide about this confidence; you may make it if you think the
moment opportune, or delay it if you feel that it would add to his
too recent sufferings. Possibly you have already made it. I approve
of and confirm anything and everything you have done or will do.
“As to the question of possession or non-possession, that seems
secondary to the question we are now discussing. It is, however,
an important question in itself, it is a woman’s whole life, her
dearest secret, her most pondered philosophy, her most mysterious
coquetry. As for me, I shall tell you quite simply, you, my
brother and my friend, this great mystery, about which everyone
who mentions my name makes such curious observations. I have no
secrets about it, no theory, no doctrine, no definite opinion,
no prejudice, no pretence of power, no spiritual aping—in fact,
nothing studied and no set habit, and (I believe) no false
principles, either of licence or of restraint. I have trusted
largely to my instincts, which have always been worthy; sometimes I
have been deceived in people, never in myself. I reproach myself
for many stupidities, but for no platitudes or wickednesses. I hear
many things said on the question of human morality, of shame and
of social virtue. All that is still not clear to me. Nor have I
ever reached a conclusion. Yet I am not unmindful of the question;
I admit to you that the desire to fit any philosophy at all to
my own sentiments has been the great preoccupation and the great
pain of my life. Feelings have always been stronger than reason
with me, and the limits I have wanted to set for myself have never
been of any use to me. I have changed my ideas twenty times.
Above everything I have believed in fidelity. I have preached it,
practised it, demanded it. Others have lacked it and so have I.
And yet I have felt no remorse, because in my infidelities I have
always submitted to a kind of fatality, an instinct for the ideal
which pushed me into leaving the imperfect for what seemed to me
to come nearer to the perfect. I have known many kinds of love.
The love of the artist, the love of the woman, the love of the
sister, the love of the mother, the nun’s love, the poet’s love,—I
know not what. Some have been born and dead in me within the same
day without being revealed to the person who inspired them. Some
have martyred my life and have hurled me into despair, almost into
madness. Some have held me cloistered for years in an excessive
spirituality. All of it has been perfectly sincere. My being passed
through these different phases as the sun, as Sainte-Beuve said,
passes through the signs of the zodiac. To one who watched my
progress superficially I would have seemed mad or hypocritical;
to one who watched, reading me deeply, I seemed just what I am,
a lover of beauty, greedy for truth, very sensitive of heart,
very weak of judgment, often absurd, always sincere, never small
or vindictive, hot tempered enough, and, thank God, perfectly
forgetful of evil things and evil people.
“That is my life, dear friend. You see it is not much. There is
nothing to admire, much to regret, nothing for good souls to
condemn. I am sure that those who have accused me of being bad have
lied, and it would be very easy to prove it if I wished to take the
trouble to remember and recount it; but that bores me, and I have
no more memory than I have rancour.
“Thus far I have been faithful to what I loved, absolutely
faithful, in the sense that I have never deceived anyone, and that
I have never been unfaithful without very strong reasons, which,
by the fault of others, have killed the love in me. I am not
inconstant by nature. On the contrary, I am so accustomed to loving
him who loves me, so difficult to inflame, so habituated to living
with men without consciousness of being a woman, that really I have
been a little confused and dismayed by the effect produced on me by
this little being. I have not yet recovered from my astonishment,
and if I had a great deal of pride I should be greatly humiliated
to have fallen full into an infidelity of the heart, at the very
moment when I believed myself for ever calm and settled. I think
this would be wrong; if I had been able to foresee, to reason, and
combat this inroad; but I was suddenly attacked, and it is not in
my nature to govern myself by reason when love possesses me. So
I am not reproaching myself, but I realize that I am still very
impressionable and weaker than I thought. That matters little;
I have small vanity. This proves to me that I should have none
at all, and should never make any boast of valour and strength.
This makes me sad, for here is my beautiful sincerity, that I had
practised for so long and of which I was a little proud, bruised
and compromised. I shall be forced to lie like the others. I assure
you that this is more mortifying to my self-respect than a bad
novel or a hissed play. It hurts me a little; this hurt is perhaps
the remains of pride; perhaps it is a voice from above that cries
to me that I must guard more carefully my eyes and my ears, and
above all my heart. But if heaven wishes us to remain faithful to
our earthly affections, why does it sometimes allow the angels to
stray among us and meet us on our path?
“So the great question of love is raised again in me! No love
without fidelity, I said only two words ago, and certainly, alas! I
did not feel the same tenderness for poor M[allefille] when I saw
him again. Certainly since he went back to Paris (you must have
seen him), instead of awaiting his return with impatience and being
sad while he is away, I suffer less and breathe more freely. If
I believed that a frequent sign of C[hopin] would increase this
chill, I would feel it my _duty_ to refrain.
“That is what I wanted to get to—a talk with you on this question
of possession, which to some minds constitutes the whole question
of faithfulness. This is, I believe, a false idea; one can be
more unfaithful or less, but when one has allowed one’s soul to
be invaded, and has granted the simplest caress, with a feeling
of love, then the infidelity is already consummated, and the
rest is less serious; because whoever has lost the heart has
lost everything. It would be better to lose the body and keep
the soul intact. So, _in principle_, I do not believe a complete
consecration to the new bond would greatly increase the sin; but,
in practice, it is possible that the attachment might become more
human, more violent, more dominating, after possession. It is even
probable. It is even certain. That is why, when two people wish
to live together, they must not outrage either nature or truth
in recoiling from a complete union; but when they are forced to
live apart, doubtless it is the part of prudence. Consequently,
it is the part of duty and of true virtue (which is sacrifice) to
abstain. I have not reflected seriously on this and, if he had
asked me in Paris, I should have given in, because of this natural
straightness that makes me hate precautions, restrictions, false
distinctions and subtleties of any kind. But your letter makes me
think of scuttling that resolution. Then, too, the trouble and
sadness I have endured in again experiencing the caresses of
M[allefille], the courage it has taken to hide it, is a warning to
me. So I shall follow your advice, dear friend. May this sacrifice
be a kind of expiation for the perjury I have committed.
“I say sacrifice, because it would be painful for me to see this
angel suffer. So far he has had great strength; but I am not a
child. I saw clearly that human passion was making rapid progress
in him and that it was time we parted. That is why, the night
before my departure, I did not wish to stay with him and why I
almost sent you both home.
“And since I am telling you everything, I want to say to you
that only one thing about him displeased me; that is, that he
himself had bad reasons for abstaining. Until then I thought it
fine that he should abstain out of respect for me, from timidity,
even from fidelity for someone else. All that was sacrifice, and
consequently strength and chastity, of course. That is what charmed
and attracted me most in him. But at your house, just as he was
leaving us, and as if he wished to conquer one last temptation,
he said two or three words to me that did not answer to my ideas.
He seemed, after the fashion of devotees, to despise _human_
grossness and to redden at the temptations he had had, and to fear
to soil our love by one more transport. This way of looking at the
last embrace of love has always been repugnant to me. If the last
embrace is not as sacred, as pure, as devoted as the rest, there
is no virtue in abstaining from it. These words, physical love,
by which we call what has no name under heaven, _displease_ and
_shock_ me, like a sacrilege and at the same time like a false
notion. Can there be, for lofty natures, a purely physical love,
and for sincere natures a purely intellectual one? Is there ever
love without a single kiss and a kiss of love without passion? _To
despise the flesh_ cannot be good and useful except for those who
are all _flesh_; with someone one loves, not the word _despise_,
but the word _respect_ must serve when one abstains. Besides, these
are not the words he used. I do not exactly remember them. He
said, I think, that _certain acts_ could spoil a memory. Surely,
that was a stupid thing to say, and he did not mean it? Who is the
unhappy woman who left him with such ideas of physical love? Has
he then had a mistress unworthy of him? Poor angel! They should
hang all the women who degrade in men’s eyes the most honourable
and sacred thing in creation, the divine mystery, the most serious
act of life and the most sublime in the life of the universe.
The magnet embraces the iron, the animals come together by the
difference of sex. Plants obey love, and man, who alone on this
earth has received from God the gift of feeling divinely what the
animals, the plants and the metals feel only materially, man in
whom the electric attraction is transformed into an attraction
felt, understood, intelligent, man alone regards this miracle
which takes place simultaneously in his soul and in his body as a
miserable necessity, and he speaks of it with scorn, with irony or
with shame! This is passing strange! The result of this fashion of
separating the spirit from the flesh is that it has necessitated
convents and bad places.
“This is a frightful letter. It will take you six weeks to decipher
it. It is my _ultimatum_. If he is happy, or would be happy through
_her_, _let him be_. If he would be unhappy, _prevent him_. If he
could be happy through me, without ceasing to be happy through
_her_, _I can for my part do likewise_. If he cannot be happy
through me without being unhappy with her, _we must not see each
other and he must forget me_. There is no way of getting around
these four points. I shall be strong about it, I promise you,
because it is a question of _him_, and if I have no great virtue
for myself, I have great devotion for those I love. You are to tell
me the truth frankly. I count on it and wait for it.
“It is absolutely useless to write me a discreet letter that I
can show. We have not reached that point, M[allefille] and I. We
respect each other too much to demand, even in thought, an account
of the details of our lives....
“There has been some question of my going to Paris, and it is still
not impossible that if my business, which M[allefille] is now
looking after, should be prolonged I shall join him. Do not say
anything about it to the _child_. If I go, I shall notify you and
we will surprise him. In any case, since it takes time for you to
get freedom to travel, begin your preparations now, because I want
you at Nohant this summer, as soon and for as long as possible.
You shall see how happy you will be. There is not a hint of what
you fear There is no spying, no gossip, no provincialism; it is an
oasis in the desert. There is not a soul in the country who knows
what a Chopin or a Grzymala is. No one knows what happens in my
house. I see no one but _intimate_ friends, angels like you, who
have never had an evil thought about those they love. You will
come, my dear good friend, we shall talk at our ease and your
battered soul will regenerate itself in the country. As for the
_child_, he shall come if he likes; but in that case I should like
to be forewarned, for I should send M[allefille] either to Paris or
to Geneva. There is no lack of pretexts, and he will never suspect
anything. If the _child_ does not want to come, leave him to his
ideas; he fears the world, he fears I know not what. I respect in
those I love everything I do not understand. I shall go to Paris
in September myself, before the final departure. I shall conduct
myself with him according to your reply to this letter. If you
have no solution for the problems I put, try to draw one from him,
ransack his soul; I must know what he feels.
“But now you know me through and through. This is such a letter as
I do not write twice in ten years. I am too lazy, and I do so hate
talking about myself. But this will spare me further talk on that
subject. You know me by heart now, and you can _fire at sight on
me_ when you balance the accounts of the Trinity.
“Yours, dear good friend, yours with all my heart. Ostensibly I
have not spoken of you in all this long chat. That is because it
seemed as though I were talking of myself to another _me_, the
better and the dearer of the two, I swear.
“George Sand.”
Let us, above all, admire the woman’s method of so conducting her
battle that she necessarily remains victorious, no matter what the
attacks or shifts of the enemy. Everything is foreseen, arranged,
admitted, except the omission to become the lover of George Sand.
Besides, she must have known perfectly well that the little “Russia”
she pretended to fear had already surrendered her arms, that Chopin
had flung her out of his proud heart. But such a letter, such a
rare psychological document, deserves to be included intact in the
_dossier_ of this love. The personality of the writer becomes clearly
illuminated, even—perhaps above all—in what it tries to hide. One
feels the intelligence; weighs the slightly heavy goodness, once more
maternal, _pelicanish_; one wonders at the moist-lipped desire of
a woman of thirty-four for the “child” of twenty-eight, who looked
still younger and whose very purity intoxicated the voluptuous woman
enamoured of it. She called it “doing her duty.” It is all a matter of
well-chosen words. She admitted also: “I must love or die,” which is
less pretentious.
To sum up the matter, be it admitted that Chopin needed a fine,
generous tenderness after the poor, dried-up little romance he had
hidden in an envelope. He also needed care. George began by sending
him to Doctor Gaubert, who sounded him, and swore that he was not
phthisical. But he needed air, walks, rest. The new lovers set out in
quest of solitude.
Paris soon heard that the novelist had left with her three children:
Maurice, Solange and Chopin, for the Balearic Isles.
CHAPTER XI
The Chartreuse of Valdemosa
As a matter of fact, they had agreed to meet at Perpignan, because
Chopin’s decent soul stuck at advertising his departure, and at
proclaiming his resounding luck. Perhaps, too, George wanted to smooth
the pride of poor Mallefille. So the two left in their own way, and
came together at Perpignan in the last two days of October. George
was happy, at peace. She had travelled slowly, visiting friends on
the way, and passing through Lyons, Avignon, Vaucluse, and le Pont du
Gard. Furthermore, it was not so much a question with her of travelling
as of getting away, of seeking, as she always said on such occasions,
some nest in which to love or some hole in which to die. Doubtless she
hardly remembered having made the same trip with Musset four years
before, when they had encountered fat Stendhal-Beyle on the steamship.
Chopin, for his part, did not stop on the road; he had four days and
four heroically borne nights by mailcoach. Yet he descended “fresh as a
rose and as rosy as a turnip.” Grzymala, Matuszinski and Fontana alone
knew of this journey, which he wanted to conceal even from his family
in Poland. Fontana undertook to forward his mail. Chopin had a little
money on hand because he had sold Pleyel his first _Preludes_ for two
thousand francs, a quarter of which he had received.
They all embarked for Barcelona on board the _Phénicien_, on “the
bluest sea, the purest, the smoothest; you might call it a Greek sea,
or a Swiss lake on its loveliest day,” wrote George to her friend
Marliani just before they left. They stopped a few days at Barcelona,
where they visited the ruins of the Palace of the Inquisition.
Then a fresh embarkation on the _El Mallorquin_. The crossing was made
on a mild and phosphorescent night. On board all slept, except Chopin,
Sand and the helmsman, who sang, but with a voice so sweet and so
subdued that he too seemed to be half-asleep. Chopin listened to this
rambling song that resembled his own vague improvisations. “The voice
of contemplation,” said George. They landed at Palma, on Majorca, in
the morning, under a precipitous coast, the summit of which is indented
with palms and aloes. But learning to their amazement that there was
no hotel, nor even rooms where they could live, they sought out the
French Consul and, thanks to him, succeeded in discovering the house of
a certain Señor Gomez. It was outside the town, in a valley from which
could be seen the distant yellow walls of Palma and its cathedral. This
uncomfortable oasis, which had to be furnished and equipped with all
accessories, was called _The House of the Wind_. The travellers were at
first jubilant.
“The sky is turquoise,” wrote Chopin to Fontana, “the sea lapis-lazuli,
the mountains emerald. The air is like heaven. In the daytime there is
sunshine, and it is warm, and everybody is in summer dress. At night,
you hear songs and guitars on all sides for hours on end. Enormous
balconies hung with vines, houses dating from the Moors.... The town,
like everything here, resembles Africa. In short, life is delicious. My
dear Jules, go and see Pleyel, because the piano has not yet arrived.
How was it sent? Tell him he will soon receive the _Preludes_. I shall
probably live in an enchanting monastery, in the most lovely country in
the world; the sea, mountains, palms, a cemetery, a crusaders’ church,
a ruined mosque, thousand-year-old olive trees.... Ah! dear friend, I
now take a little more pleasure in life; I am near the most beautiful
thing in the world, I am a better man.”
This _House of the Wind_ was rented for a hundred francs a month. But
as it did not completely satisfy their appetite for isolation, and as
they wanted something more “artistic,” more rare, they found three
rooms and a garden full of oranges for thirty-five francs a year in
the Chartreuse of Valdemosa itself, two leagues away. “It is poetry,
it is solitude, it is everything that is most enchanting under the
sky; and what sky! what country! We are in a dream of happiness,” Sand
wrote. This joy at once expressed itself in too long walks. Chopin
wore himself out, tore his feet on the stones of the paths, caught
cold in the first rain. He had hardly been there a few days when he
was forced to take to his bed with bad bronchitis. The tuberculosis,
momentarily checked, came on again, in spite of a temperature of
65 degrees, in spite of roses, lemons, palms, fig trees in bloom.
“The three most celebrated doctors of the Island came together for a
consultation. One sniffed what I had expectorated, another tapped me
where I had expectorated, the third listened while I expectorated. The
first said I would die, the second said I was about to die, the third
said I was already dead. But I go on living as I have always lived....
I cannot forgive Jeannot (Dr. Matuszinski) for not having given me any
instructions about this acute bronchitis which he should have foreseen
when I was at home. I was barely able to escape their bleedings and
cuppings and suchlike operations. Thank God, I am myself again. But
my sickness delayed my _Preludes_, which you will receive God knows
when.... In a few days I shall be living in the most beautiful spot in
the world; sea, mountains, everything you could want. We are going to
live in an enormous old ruined monastery, abandoned by the Carthusians,
whom Mendizabal seems to have driven out just for me. It is quite
close to Palma and incomparably marvellous: cells, a most romantic
graveyard.... In fact, I feel I shall be well off there. Only my piano
is still lacking. I have written direct to Pleyel, rue Rochechouart.
Ask him about it and tell him I was taken sick the day after I arrived,
but that I am already better. Do not say much in general about me or
my manuscripts.... Do not tell anyone I have been ill; they would only
make a fuss about it.”
Here was George in action. She had her hands full. She wrote, managed
the household as well as her novels, explored the shops of the little
town, gave their lessons to her two children and nursed the third,
who claimed her every other moment. “He improves from day to day
and I hope that he will be better than before. He is an angel of
gentleness and goodness.” But the material side of life became more
and more difficult. They lacked everything, even mattresses, sheets,
cooking-pots. They had to buy expensive furnishings, write to Buloz,
the editor of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and borrow. Soon _The
House of the Wind_ became uninhabitable. The walls were so thin that
under the autumn rains the lime swelled like a sponge. There was no
stove, of course, as in all so-called hot countries, and a coat of ice
settled on the travellers’ shoulders. They had to fall back on the
asphyxiating warmth of braziers. The invalid began to suffer greatly,
coughed incessantly, could hardly be nourished, because he could
not stand the native food, and George was obliged to do the cooking
herself. “In fact,” she wrote, again to her friend Marliani, “our trip
here has been, in many ways, a frightful fiasco. But here we are. We
cannot get out without exposing ourselves to the bad season and without
encountering new expenses at every step. Besides, it took a great deal
of courage and perseverance to install myself here. If Providence is
not too unkind, I think the worst is over, and we shall gather the
fruit of our labours. Spring will be delicious, Maurice will regain
his health.... Solange is almost continually charming since she was
seasick; Maurice pretends she lost all her venom.”
The invalid, whom they hid at the back of the least damp room, became
an object of horror and fear to the natives. Service was refused. Señor
Gomez, learning that it was a matter of lung trouble, demanded the
departure of his tenants after a complete replastering and whitewashing
of his house at their expense and an _auto-da-fé_ of the linen and
furnishings. The Consul intervened, and sheltered the miserable
emigrants for a few days. At last, on the fifteenth of December, a
beautiful day, they set out for their monastery. Just before they
started, Chopin wrote again to Fontana: “I shall work in a cell of
some old monk who had perhaps in his soul a greater flame than I, but
stifled and mortified it because he did not know what to do with it....
I think I can shortly send you my _Preludes_ and the _Ballade_.”
As for George Sand: “I shall never forget,” she wrote later on in her
_Winter at Majorca_, “a certain bend in the gorge where, turning back,
you espy, at the top of a mountain, one of those lovely little Arab
houses I have described, half-hidden among the flat branches of cactus,
and a tall palm bending over the chasm and tracing its silhouette
against the sky. When the sight of the mud and fog of Paris gives me
the spleen, I close my eyes and see again as in a dream that green
mountain, those tawny rocks, and this solitary palm tree, lost in a
rose-coloured sky.”
The Chartreuse of Valdemosa... The name alone, associated with the
names of Chopin and Sand in this African setting, evokes an image
which is not only romantic and picturesque, but fixed, as in a poem.
Here is the scene of their sickly passion. We still love the picture,
mingled with the music into which this Nordic consumptive threw his
heart-rending sweetness. What indeed would Majorca be in the story of
human dreams without this encampment of the rainy winter of 1838? This
abandoned island has no other worth than its unhappy monastery, which
for two months served as the prison of a hopeless love. Because no
search, even between the lines of their letters, reveals any happiness.
George tried in vain to blow the embers of her tired heart, and kindled
but a tender pity, full of nostalgia, raising with each puff of smoke
the memory of those terrible Venetian delights. And Chopin, bruised
by a thousand little sufferings, proud and lacking in virility, felt
the strength for pleasures ebbing from him day by day. In one way or
another, nerves got the upper hand. Work alone was deliverance for
them, and solitude, riveting them together, filled them with fraternity.
Valdemosa is an enormous pile of masonry. An army corps could be
lodged in it. There are the quarters of the Superior, cells for the
lay brothers, cells for the novices, and the three cloisters that
constitute the monastery proper. But that is all empty and deserted.
The oldest part is fifteenth century, and is pierced by Gothic windows
over which creep vines. In the centre is the old Carthusian cemetery,
without stones or inscriptions. A few cypresses frame a tall cross
of white wood and a pointed well-head, against which have grown up a
pink laurel and a dwarf palm. All the cells were locked and a yellow
sacristan jealously guarded the keys. Although he was extremely ugly,
this fat satyr had wronged a girl who with her parents was spending
a few months in that solitude. But he gave as an excuse that he was
employed by the State to protect only the painted virgins.
The new cloisters, girded by evergreens, enclosed twelve chapels and
a church decorated with wood carvings and paved with Hispano-Moresque
majolica. A Saint Bruno in painted wood, provincial Spanish in style,
is the only work of art in this temple. The design and colour are
curious, and George Sand found in the head an expression of sublime
faith, in the hands a heartbreaking and pious gesture of invocation. “I
doubt,” she said, “if this fanatical saint of Grenoble has ever been
understood and depicted with such deep and ardent feeling. It is the
personification of Christian asceticism.” The church, alas! is without
an organ, according to the Carthusian regulations.
Sand, Chopin, and the children occupied three spacious cells, vaulted,
with walls three feet in thickness. The rooms faced south, opening on
to a garden-plot planted with pomegranates, lemon trees, orange tress.
Brick paths intersected this verdant and fragrant pleasaunce. And on
the threshold of this garden of silence Chopin wrote to Fontana three
days after Christmas:
“Can you imagine me thus: between the sea and the mountains in a
great abandoned Carthusian monastery, in a cell with doors higher
than the porte-cochères in Paris, my hair uncurled, no white
gloves, but pale, as usual? The cell is shaped like a coffin; it
is high, with a cobwebbed ceiling. The windows are small.... My
bed faces them, under a filigreed Moorish rose-window. Beside the
bed stands a square thing resembling a desk, but its use is very
problematic. Above, a heavy chandelier (this is a great luxury)
with one tiny candle. The works of Bach, my own scrawls and some
manuscripts that are not mine,—that is all my furniture. You can
shout as loud as you like and no one will hear; in short, it is a
strange place from which I am writing.... The moon is marvellous
this evening. I have never seen it more beautiful.... Nature here
is kind, but the men are pirates. They never see strangers, and
in consequence don’t know what to charge them. So they will give
you an orange for nothing but ask a fabulous price for a trouser
button. Under this sky one feels permeated with a poetic sentiment
that seems to emanate from all the surrounding objects. Eagles
hover over our heads every day and no one disturbs them.”
But it was in vain that he sought to enjoy himself there; this
rather lofty setting did not suit Chopin. He had too great a taste
for intimate habits, for sophisticated surroundings, to feel at his
ease in these unfurnished rooms where his mind had nothing on which
to fasten. And then, unfortunately, they had come in for the height
of the rainy season, which at Majorca is diluvian. The air is so
relaxing in its humidity that one drags heavily about. Maurice and
Solange were perfectly well, “but little Chopin is very exhausted, and
still coughs a great deal. For his sake, I am impatient for the return
of good weather, which cannot be long now in coming.” His piano at
last arrived, a joy that carried with it forgiveness for everything.
Chopin worked, composed, studied. “The very vaults of the monastery
rejoice. And all this is not profaned by the admiration of fools. We
do not see so much as a cat,” apart from the natives of the country, a
superstitious and inquisitive people, who climbed, one after another,
up to this old monastery in the charge of one ancient monk and a few
devils. In order to get a look at them they came to have their beasts
blessed. It became a holiday of mules, horses, donkeys, goats and pigs.
“Real animals themselves,” said George, “stinking, gross and cowardly,
but nevertheless them superb, nicely dressed, playing the guitar and
dancing the fandango.... I am supposed to be sold to the devil because
I do not go to Mass, nor to the dances, and because I live alone in
the mountains, teaching my children the rule of participles and other
graces.... In the middle of all this, comes the warbling of Chopin,
who goes his own pretty way, and to whom the walls of his cell listen
with astonishment.”
One evening they had an alarm and a ghost which made their hair stand
on end. First there was a strange noise, like thousands of sacks of
nuts being rolled across a parquet floor. They rushed out of their
cells to investigate, but the cloister was as deserted as ever. Yet
the noise drew nearer. Soon a feeble light illuminated the vaulting,
torches appeared, and there, enveloped in red smoke, came a whole
battalion of abominable beings; a horned leading devil, all in black,
with a face the colour of blood, little devils with birds’ heads, lady
devils and shepherdesses in pink and white robes. It was the villagers
celebrating Shrove Tuesday who had come to hold their dance in one of
the cells. The noise that accompanied their procession was that of the
castanets that the youngsters clacked with a sustained and rolling
rhythm. They stopped it suddenly to sing in unison a _coplita_ on a
musical phrase which kept recurring and seemed never to end.
This was a shock to poor Chopin’s nerves. It was worse when Maurice
and Solange disappeared in the echoing depths of the monastery, or
when George left him for excursions that lasted whole days. Then the
deserted cloister seemed to him full of phantoms. Returning from one
of her nocturnal explorations among the ruins, George surprised him at
his piano, white, with haggard eyes, and it took him several minutes
to recognize her. Yet it was then, during or after these spells of
nervous exaltation, that he composed some of his most beautiful pages.
Sand affirms that several of the _Preludes_ were begotten of these
agonies. “There is one,” she says, “which came to him one lugubrious
rainy evening that plunged his soul into a frightful depression.
Maurice and I had left him that day feeling very well, to go to Palma
to buy some necessities for our camp. The rain had come, torrents were
unloosed; we made three leagues in six hours, coming back in the midst
of the flood, and it was full night when we arrived, without shoes,
abandoned by our driver in the midst of untold dangers. We had hurried
on account of our patient’s anxiety. It had indeed been lively; but
it had, as it were, congealed into a kind of resigned despair, and he
was playing, in tears, his fine prelude. When he saw us come in, he
rose with a great cry; then he said to us with a vague stare and in
a strange voice: ‘Ah, I knew you were dead!’ When he had recovered
himself and saw the state we were in, he became ill at the thought of
our past dangers; but he then swore to me that while he was awaiting
us, he had seen it all in a dream, and that, unable to tell what was
dream and what was reality, he had become quiet and as though drugged
while playing the piano, convinced that he was dead himself. He saw
himself drowned in a lake; heavy drops of icy water fell with a regular
beat on his chest, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops
that were really falling on the roof, he denied having heard them. He
was even angry at what I meant by the words ‘imitative harmony.’ He
protested with all his strength, and rightly, at the puerility of these
auditory imitations. His genius was full of the mysterious harmonies of
nature, rendered in his musical thought by sublime equivalents and not
by a slavish mimicry of outside sounds. That evening’s composition was
full of the raindrops sounding on the resonant tiles of the monastery,
but they were transposed in his imagination and in his music into tears
falling from heaven on his heart.”
There has been a great deal of discussion as to what _Prelude_ this
might be. Some call it No. 6, in B minor, others No. 8, in F sharp
minor, or the 15th, in D flat major, or the 17th, or the 19th. In my
own opinion there is no possible doubt. It is certainly the Sixth
Prelude, where the drops of sorrow fall with a slow inexorable
regularity on the brain of man. But it matters little, after all. Each
one will find it where he will, at the bidding of his own imagination.
Let us credit music with this unique power, that of adapting itself to
us rather than us to it, of being the Ariel that serves our fancy. Here
is the place to recall Beethoven’s words: “You must create everything
in yourself.” Liszt, so fond of psychology and æsthetics, said that
Chopin contented himself, like a true musician, with extracting the
_feeling_ of pictures he saw, ignoring the drawing, the pictorial
shell, which did not enter into the form of his art and did not belong
to his more spiritual sphere. Then, returning to that rainy twilight
when his friend had composed so beautiful a melody, Liszt wondered if
George Sand had been able to perceive in it the anguish of Chopin’s
love, the fever of that overexcited spirit; if the genius of that
masculine woman could attain “to the humblest grandeurs of the heart,
to those burnt offerings of oneself which have every right to be called
devotion.” Probably not. She never inspired a song in this miraculous
bird. The only one that came to him through her was that moment of
agony and grief.
The next day he played over again, with comments and finishing touches,
this unique musical expression snatched from his depths. But she
understood it no better. All the incompatibility of these two natures
is revealed here. “His heart,” said Liszt, “was torn and bruised at
the thought of losing her who had just given him back to life; but
her spirit saw nothing but an amusing pastime in the adventurous
trip, the danger of which did not outweigh the charm of novelty. What
wonder that this episode of his French life should be the only one of
which his work showed the influence? After that he divided his life
into two distinct parts. For a long time he continued to suffer in an
environment material almost to the point of grossness, in which his
frail and sensitive temperament was engulfed; then,—he escaped from the
present into the impalpable regions of art, taking refuge among the
memories of his earliest youth in his beloved Poland, which alone he
immortalized in his songs.”
Chopin soon acquired a horror of Majorca. He felt seriously ill. In
addition, he had little taste for the country, and less still for this
Spanish monastery where his imagination failed to find the intimate
warmth and urbanity in which alone it could unfold. His spirit was
wounded to the quick; “the fold of a rose leaf, the shadow of a fly,
made him bleed.” He was dying of impatience to get away, and even
Sand confessed that “these poetic intervals which one voluntarily
interpolates into life are but periods of transition, moments of repose
granted to the spirit before it again undertakes the _exercise of the
emotions_.” Underline these words, so luminous in the analysis of their
characters. For this deceived woman Valdemosa was a poetic interlude,
a time of waiting, an intellectual vacation. Already she was dreaming
only of taking up again the exercise of her feelings, while for Chopin,
his life was done, his emotions were exhausted. There was but one joy
left to which he aspired: the great peace of work. “For the love of
God, write,” he enjoins Fontana. “I am sending you the _Preludes_.
Re-copy them with Wolf. I think there are no mistakes. Give one copy
to Probst (publisher) and the manuscript to Pleyel. Out of the 1,500
francs he will give you, pay the rent on my apartment up to the first
of January, that is, 450 francs. Give the place up if you think you can
find another for April....”
This savours of a return, and is like an odour of Paris. The life at
the monastery was becoming really unbearable. A servant left them,
swearing they were plague infected. They had all the trouble in the
world to procure supplies, thanks to the bad faith of the peasants, who
made them pay ten times too much for everything. The skimmed goat’s
milk meant for Chopin was stolen from them. No one would consent to
wait on the consumptive, whose health declined. Even their clothes
mildewed on their backs. There was nothing for it but flight from this
hard-hearted land.
They strapped their baggage at last, nailed up their boxes,—and were
refused a carriage in which to go down to Palma. They were obliged
to do the three leagues by _birlocho_, a sort of wheelbarrow, Chopin
barely able to breathe. At Palma he had a dreadful hæmorrhage.
Nevertheless, they embarked on the one boat of the island, on which
a hundred pigs were already grunting. The artist was given the most
miserable bunk, as they said it would have to be burned. The next day,
at Barcelona, he lost a full bowl of blood and drooped like a ghost.
But it was the end of their miseries. The Consul and the commandant
of the French naval station took them in and had them put on board
a sloop-of-war, _Le Méléagre_, whose doctor succeeded in arresting
Chopin’s hæmorrhage.
They rested eight days at an inn. On the fifteenth of February,
1839, George wrote to Madame Marliani: “My sweet dear, here I am at
Barcelona. God grant that I get out soon and never again set foot in
Spain! It is a country that I do not relish in any respect.... Read
Grzymala the part about Chopin, and warn him not to mention it, because
after the good hope the doctor gives me, it is useless to alarm his
family.”
A few days later, they landed at Marseilles. It was perfect happiness.
“At last, my dear, I am here in France.... A month more and we should
have died in Spain, Chopin and I; he of melancholy and disgust; I of
fury and indignation. They wounded me in the tenderest spot in my
heart, with their pinpricks at a being who was suffering before my
eyes; I shall never forgive them, and if I write of them it shall be
with gall.”
To François Rollinat, the real confidant of her life: “Dear friend, I
should not like to learn that you have suffered as much as I during my
absence....”
Such was the brilliant return from this honeymoon.
CHAPTER XII
“If music be the food of love, play on”
Nietzsche, on a very dark day, wrote to a friend: “Isn’t it a work of
art: to hope?” In landing at Marseilles in the early spring of 1839,
Chopin and George Sand built a work of art, because they hoped, because
they were overflowing with that inexplicable enthusiasm that the most
banal things inspire at certain predestined hours. Anything sufficed:
an expected letter, a beautiful face, the shadow of a church on the
street, the reassuring words of a doctor, to convince them that this
was the dawn of a convalescence that would dry their almost rotted love
and ripen it, transmute it into a peaceful and lasting friendship.
Sometimes nothing more than a chance landscape is enough to change the
rhythm of souls.
At Majorca, one might wonder if the deserted monastery was not a sort
of Dantesque Purgatory from which Sand explored the Hells and the
invalid felt himself already rising towards Heaven. “This Chopin is an
angel,” George had written. “At Majorca, while he was sick unto death,
he wrote music that had the very smell of Paradise; but I am so used to
seeing him in Heaven that neither his life nor his death seems likely
to prove anything for him. He does not know himself on which planet he
exists.”
At Marseilles, a good town of grocers, perfumers, soap sellers, their
feet were once more on the earth. They settled at the Hôtel de Beauvau,
saw a physician, and decided to await the summer in the south. This
resolution was not carried out without a certain amount of boredom, but
boredom itself contributes to rest, which was so necessary after their
voyage of miscarried love. They had, besides, to shut themselves up
against the mistral and the pests that entered by all the doors. But
they lay hidden. Dr. Cauvières regularly sounded Chopin’s lungs, made
him wear cupping glasses, put him on a diet and pronounced him well
on the way to cicatrization. He could begin to play again, to walk,
to talk like anybody else, he whose voice for weeks had been nothing
more than a breath. He slept a great deal. He busied himself with the
publication of his works, wrote to Fontana on the subject of their
dedications, and discussed with him the price of his new compositions.
For he had to think of the future, about the Paris apartment he had
decided to re-rent: “Take Schlesinger the 500 francs you will receive
from Probst for the _Ballade_.” “Schlesinger is trying to cheat me,
but he makes enough out of me; be polite to him.” “Tell him I shall
sell the _Ballade_ for France and England for 800 francs and the
_Polonaises_ for Germany, England and France for 1,500.” He grew angry.
He stood out against the publishers and would cede nothing. “As for
money, you must make a clear contract and not hand over the manuscripts
except for cash....” “I should rather give my manuscripts as I did
before, for a low price, than stoop to these....” He returned to the
charge in April: “Keep everything till I come back since they are such
Jews. I have sold the _Preludes_ to Pleyel and have so far received
only 500 francs. He has the right to do as he pleases about them. As
for the _Ballade_ and the _Polonaises_, do not sell them either to
Schlesinger or to Probst... get them back... Enough. Enough for you
and for me. My health improves but I am angry.” “It is not my fault
if I seem like a toadstool that poisons you when you dig it up and
eat it. You know perfectly well that I have never been of any use to
anyone, not even myself. Meanwhile, they continue to regard me as not
tubercular. I drink neither coffee nor wine, only milk. I keep in the
warmth and look like a young lady.”
In March the famous singer Nourrit died at Naples and it was
rumoured that he had committed suicide. His body was brought to
Marseilles the following month, and a funeral service was arranged at
Notre-Dame-du-Mont. To honour the memory of a friend whom he had seen
so often at Liszt’s and had even entertained himself, Chopin agreed
to take the organ during the Elevation. Although the instrument was
squeaky and out of tune, he drew from it what music he could. He played
_The Stars_ of Schubert, which Nourrit had sung a short time before at
Marseilles: and, renouncing all theatricality, the artist played this
melody with the softest stops. George was in the organ stall with a
few friends, and her fine eyes filled with tears. The public did not
recognize the novelist in this little woman dressed in black.
In May, Chopin was strong enough to take a short trip to Genoa with his
mistress. It was a beautiful interlude. They visited the palaces, the
terraced gardens, the picture-galleries. Did she think of that journey
of almost four years earlier, when with Musset she first put foot on
this Italian soil? Genoa is perhaps the only town where their love was
not overcast. She has written that to see it again was a pleasure. I do
not know if the word is sincere but it does not ring true. Something
like a wrinkle of fatigue, however, can be seen in the statement which
she made, on her return, to Mme. Marliani: “I no longer like journeys,
or rather, _I am no longer in such condition that I am able to enjoy
them_.” One hopes, too, that Chopin knew nothing of that first Genoese
visit, because, for a distrustful heart, such a picture would have been
terrific.
On May 22nd, they left Marseilles and started for Nohant, where they
planned to spend the entire summer. After a week of jolting, they at
last reached the wide, well-cultivated district of Berry, “studded with
great round walnut trees” and cut by shady roads that George loved.
All at once, there was the modest village, the church with its tiled
roof, and, bordering the square, the château. A country château that
symbolized the double origin, royal and plebeian, of this woman of
thirty-five years whom all Europe regarded with admiration, and who
brought to the nest her _little one_, her new little one, a noble and
diaphanous young man who seemed to have dropped down like a sea-bird
into this ancient French country-side.
Dear woman, must we admire you for the period of rest you accorded
to this beautiful weary soul? We know that you were bad for him,
sometimes, because you were sound, ardent, and, in spite of everything,
curious about that inviolable mind, about those limbs without desire.
But we have seen too that you knew your rôle of guardian. “Of whom
shall I take care?” you cried, when your other invalid had left you
because he could no longer bear the sufferings with which you seasoned
your pleasure. Dear woman, nevertheless! You cannot be judged by any
common standards, you with your hot blood and your heart always so soon
feasted by the very strength of its own hungers. The enormous labour
you accomplished was but the result of your own energies. They burdened
you with work. They tired you out like a man. You never found those
horrible mental tasks too stupid, those tasks from which they feigned
to derive an elastic and libertarian moral, when you were really made
but for love and travail and the old human order. This is all rather
amusing, and sad as truth. But we must thank you for having in some
sort made Musset and broken that easy fop to healthy sorrows. We cannot
blame you, as others do, for having finished Chopin. You fought for
him a long time against his malady. If you bruised him further, it is
because even your friendship was costly. But always, it was your best
that you gave.
Now that we have seen you enter Nohant with this new prey to your
tenderness, let us say with Shakespeare: “If music be the food of love,
play on.”
* * * * *
Chopin never liked the country. Yet he enjoyed Nohant. The house was
comfortable. After Majorca and Marseilles, it was a joy to have a large
room, fine sheets, a well-ordered table, a few beautiful pieces of
furniture. Without being luxurious, the big house had a pleasant air.
There was a sense of ease. He was spoiled, petted. An old friend of
George’s, Dr. Papet, ran up at once to examine the invalid thoroughly.
He diagnosed a chronic affection of the larynx: he ordered plenty
of rest and a long stay in the country. Chopin submitted with no
difficulty to this programme, and adopted a perfectly regulated, wise
way of living. While George went back to the education of her children
and her job as a novelist, he corrected a new edition of Bach, finished
his _Sonata in B flat minor_, the second _Nocturne_ of op. 37 and four
_Mazurkas_ (op. 41). They dined out of doors, between five and six
o’clock. Then a few neighbours dropped in, the Fleurys, the Duteils,
Duvernet, Rollinat, and they talked and smoked. From the first, they
all treated Chopin with respectful sympathy. Hippolyte Chatiron,
George’s half-brother, who lived with his wife in the immediate
neighbourhood, a kind of squireen, good-natured and convivial, formed
a passionate friendship for him.
When they had gone Chopin played the piano in the twilight; then at
Solange’s and Maurice’s bedtime, he too went to bed and slept like a
child. As for George, she took up the Encyclopædia and prepared the
lessons for the next day. Truly a family life, such, exactly, as Chopin
understood best; such also as he needed during his working periods.
“I am composing here a _Sonata_ in B flat minor,” he wrote to Fontana,
“in which the _Funeral March_ you already have will be incorporated.
There is an _allegro_, then a _scherzo_ in E flat minor, the _March_,
and a short _finale_ of about three pages. After the _March_ the left
hand babbles along _unisono_ with the right. I have a new _Nocturne_
in G major to accompany the one in G minor, if you remember it. You
know I have four new _Mazurkas_: one from Palma in E minor, three from
here in B major, in A flat major, and C sharp minor. To me they seem
as pretty as the youngest children seem to parents who are growing
old. Otherwise, I am doing nothing; I am correcting a Paris edition of
Bach’s works. There are not only misprints, but, I believe, harmonic
errors committed by those who think they understand Bach. I am not
correcting them with the pretention of understanding him better than
they, but with the conviction that I can sometimes divine how the thing
ought to go.”
Every evening, during that hour of music that Chopin dedicated to
George alone, she listened and dreamed. She was a choice listener.
Without doubt, it was in those moments that these two souls, so
impenetrable to each other, understood each other best. She fully
realized that he was the extreme artist type; that it would never be
possible to make him accept any jot of reality; that his continued
dream was too far from the world, too little philosophic for her to be
able to follow into those unpeopled regions. But it was, nevertheless,
sweet to be the object of such a man’s preference. Cruel also, because
if Chopin kept usurious account of the least light given him, “he did
not take the trouble to hide his disappointment at the first darkness.”
His fantastic humour, his profound depressions, at once interested
and worried the amateur of emotions in George. But a kind of terror
gripped her heart at the thought of a new obligation she would assume
if Frederick were definitely to install himself with her. She was no
longer under the illusion of passion. She was afraid of having some
day to struggle against some other love that might conquer her and
prove the death of this frail being she had torn from himself. Then she
stiffened. One more duty in a life already so burdened, would this not
be precisely a defence against temptation—an even greater chance for
her to attain to that austerity towards which she felt herself drawn
by the old depths of religious enthusiasm of which she had never freed
herself? How should she settle the matter? She compromised by leaving
it for time to tell.
As for Chopin, this peaceful lot was too perfectly fitted to the
measure of his strength for him to dream of any change. He was
radiating all his gentleness, he was creating; such was his beautiful
present, his only possible future. While he improvised George opened
a scrapbook and wrote: “The genius of Chopin is the most profound and
pregnant of feeling and emotions that has ever existed. He makes a
single instrument speak the language of the infinite. He knows how to
gather into ten lines that even a child could play poems of immense
elevation, dramas of unequalled power. He never needs great material
means.... He needs neither saxophone nor bass horns to fill the soul
with terror; neither Cathedral organs nor the human voice to give
it faith and exultation. There must be great advances in taste and
artistic intelligence if his works are ever to become popular....
Chopin knows his strength and his weakness. His weakness lies in the
very excess of that strength, which he cannot control. His music is
full of delicate shades of feeling and of the unexpected. Sometimes,
rarely, it is bizarre, mysterious, and tormented. In spite of his
horror of the unintelligible, his overpowering emotions sometimes sweep
him unconsciously into regions known to him alone.”
* * * * *
Towards the end of the summer, they all decided to return to Paris.
Sand was persuaded that she could not manage to finish the education of
her children without assistance. Maurice was eager to learn drawing;
Solange was difficult, a little sullen, stubborn. George also had to
see her publisher, Buloz, the editor of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_.
Chopin wanted to get to his pupils again and resume their lessons, the
main source of his revenue. So they bombarded friends with letters,
asking them to find two apartments not too far from each other.
Grzymala, Arago and Fontana started a search. From Nohant, instructions
rained on the heads of the three friends.
Chopin asked them to choose a _dove-like_ wallpaper, glowing and
glossy, for his rooms. Something else for the vestibule, but still
_respectable_. If there was anything more beautiful, more fashionable,
they were not to hesitate to get it.
“I prefer something simple, modest, elegant, to the loud, common
colours the shopkeepers use. That is why I like pearl-grey, because
it is neither striking nor vulgar. Thank you for the servant’s room,
because it is really essential.”
For George, it was vital that the house should be quiet. There must
be three bedrooms, two next to each other, and one separated by
the drawing-room. Close to the third there must be a well-lighted
work-room. Drawing- and dining-room must be next each other. Two
servants’ rooms and a cellar. Inlaid floors in good condition if
possible. But most of all, quiet,—“no blacksmith in the neighbourhood.”
A decent staircase, windows facing south. “No young ladies, no smoke
or unpleasant odours.” Chopin even took the trouble to sketch the plan
of this imagined suite.
Soon they had good news. Chopin was to live at 5, rue Tronchet, while
George was to have two small pavilions in a garden at 16, rue Pigalle.
Nohant was in a state of joy, and Frederick, always so particular
about matters of elegance, now began to think of his clothes. He
wrote again to Fontana: “I forgot to ask you to order a hat for me
at Duport’s, rue de la Chausée d’Antin. He has my measure and knows
what I want. Show him this year’s shape, not too exaggerated, because
I don’t know how you are dressing now. Also, drop in on Dautremont,
my tailor, on the Boulevards, and tell him to make me a pair of grey
trousers. Will you choose a dark shade, for winter trousers, something
good, not striped, but plain and soft. You are English; so you know
what I ought to have. Dautremont will be glad to know that I am coming
back. I also need a black velvet waistcoat, but one with very little
ornament and not loud,—a plain waistcoat, but elegant. If he has no
very fine velvet, let him make a waistcoat of fine wool, but not too
open....” In recompense for all these errands: “... I shall keep
changing the second part of the _Polonaise_ for you till the end of my
life. Yesterday’s version may not please you either, though it put my
brain on the rack for eighty seconds. I have copied out my manuscripts
in good order. There are six with your _Polonaises_, not counting the
seventh, an impromptu, which may be worthless. I can’t judge of it,
myself, because it is too new. Titus advises me to compose an oratorio.
I have asked him in reply why he is building a sugar mill rather than a
Dominican monastery. As you are such a clever fellow, you can arrange
so that neither black thoughts nor suffocating cough shall bother me
in my new rooms. Arrange for me to be good. Erase, if you can, many
episodes of my past. And it would be no bad thing if I set myself a
task that will last me several years. Finally, you would oblige me by
growing much younger, or in finding a way of arranging for us to be not
yet born.
“Your old Frederick.”
Both Frederick and George settled in Paris in October of that year,
1839. But they were soon convinced that after a whole year of existence
together it would be difficult to live apart. Chopin still had need of
attentions, precautions. He gave up his lodging to Dr. Matuszinski, and
moved with his furniture to the lower floor of one of the two pavilions
in the rue Pigalle.
So these longed-for years of great and perfect work, unrolled
themselves in about the desired rhythm. During the morning, the
professors for Maurice and Solange succeeded one another. In Chopin’s
part of the house it was a procession of pupils. His lessons lasted at
least an hour, sometimes more. It often happened that the master would
play the pieces himself. On one occasion he played from memory to one
of his pupils fourteen _Preludes_ and _Fugues_ of Bach. And as the
young girl expressed her admiration for this _tour de force_, “One can
never forget them,” he said, smiling. “For a year I have not practised
a quarter of an hour at a time. I have no strength, no energy. I am
always waiting for a little health to take all that up again, but—I am
still waiting.” Such efforts exhausted him. He used to take a little
opium in a glass of water, and rub his temples with _eau-de-Cologne_.
“The final triumph,” he continued, “is simplicity. When you have
exhausted all the difficulties, and have played an immense quantity of
notes, simplicity emerges in all its charm, as the final seal of art.
Anyone who expects to achieve it at the outset will never succeed in so
doing; you cannot begin at the end.”
The afternoon was generally devoted to the personal work of the two
artists. In the evening they met at George’s, and dined together;
then someone or another of the intimates of the household came to see
them. The salon was _café au lait_ in colour, decorated with very fine
Chinese vases always filled with flowers in the Chopinesque mode.
The furniture was green; there was a sideboard of oak laden with
curiosities and, on the wall, the portrait of the hostess by Calamatta
and several canvases by Delacroix. The piano was bare, square, ebony.
Chopin almost always sat at it. At one side, George’s bedroom could
be seen, where two mattresses on the floor covered with a Persian rug
served as a bed.
Sand arose late, because she sat up most of the night. Chopin polished
and put the final touches to his works, the first versions of which had
in general come to him during the summer. His creation was entirely
spontaneous. It gushed forth during a walk, an hour of meditation, or
it might unfold sudden and complete, while he was sitting before his
piano. He played it to himself, sang it, took it up again, modified
its accents. Then began that immensely laborious quest of perfection,
which will always be, whatever people may say, the essential mandate
of the artist. “He locked himself in his room for whole days at a
time, weeping, walking up and down, shattering his pens, repeating or
changing a single bar a hundred times, writing it down only to rub
it out again, and beginning all over again the next day with minute
and despairing perseverance. He spent six weeks on one page, only to
write it finally as he had jotted it down in the first flush.” In
noting these things, George was exasperated with the genuine surprise
of facile creators who are not tortured by any yearning for finality.
But, like Giotto, who, when the Pope asked for a perfect example of his
knowledge, wanted to send only a true circle, so Chopin, having filled
one line with all the ornament of his thought, came back to exquisite
nudity, the final and sufficient symbol of the idea. So a poet works.
So he squeezes his universe into the smallest possible limits, makes
it as heavy as a crystal, but gleaming from a thousand facets. That
is what made that great blackener of paper, Sand, say that Chopin
could compress into a few bars “poems of immense elevation, dramas of
unequalled power.” Mozart alone, she thought, was superior to him,
because he had the calm of health, and so the fullness of life. But
who knows what happy accidents illness may bring to art? It is certain
that Chopin’s breathlessness, his nervousness, brought to his virile
inspiration those qualities of languor, those weary echoes by which he
touches us most finely.
CHAPTER XIII
On some Friendships of Chopin, and on his Æsthetics
It was not only furniture and habits that were held in common in
the rue Pigalle, but friends as well. Sharing,—that was the great
doctrine of Pierre Leroux, George’s new director of conscience and
“preacher of eternal Truth in its steady progress.” According to this
philosophic typographer, it passed from people to people according
to mysterious laws, becoming incarnate now in one, now in another,
and had just settled in Poland. The mission of the Poles was thus all
equality, fraternity, love. Chopin smiled at this, without revealing
his opinion. But he often invited his compatriots, who joined all of
George’s friends: Leroux, Delacroix, Pauline Viardot, the great singer,
and Heinrich Heine at the head. Frederick introduced the Grzymala
brothers, Prince Czartoryski, Franchomme, the violoncellist, Fontana,
the poets Slowacki and Krasinski, the artist Kwiatkowsky, and above all
Miçkiewicz, the author of _Dziady_ (or _The Feast of the Dead_), whom
they thought profounder than Goethe and Byron.
He was an ecstatic, a visionary, inspired, at any rate, and,
like Socrates, St. John, or Dante, was smitten occasionally with
“intellectual falling-sickness.” At such times he became fired with an
eloquence that enraptured his listeners and sent them into veritable
trances. George Sand, so sensitive to disturbances, either the highest
or the lowest, found herself ravished to the point of ecstasy before
the sublime abstractions of this dreamer, the whispers of his soul,
by which she was led into those dangerous regions where reason and
madness go hand in hand. Ecstasy is contagious. Assuredly it is an
evil for simple souls; but with the great spirits, such as Apollonius
of Tyre, Moses, Swedenborg, Pierre Leroux, Miçkiewicz, and, who knows,
George Sand, perhaps, is it not a sacred enthusiasm, a divine faculty
of understanding the incomprehensible, “capable of producing the most
noble results when inspired by a great moral and metaphysical cause?”
This is the question George put to herself in her _Journal_. Meanwhile,
this Miçkiewicz gave at the College de France a course of lectures full
of logic and clarity. He was great hearted, had himself perfectly in
hand, and reasoned with mastery. But he was transported into exaltation
by the very nature of his beliefs, by the violence of his partially
savage instincts, the momentum of his poetic faith, and the sentiment,
so fecund in all these exiles, of the misfortunes of their fatherland.
Chopin also believed in the mystic aureole of this saintly bard. He
did not know that Miçkiewicz, overjoyed at having been able to win
so great a convert as George, thought her lover “her evil genius,
her moral vampire, her cross, who tortured and would possibly end by
killing her.” How surprising such a judgment from one who received
secret communications from the other world! Fortunately, Sainte-Beuve
came along, lent his delicate ear to Miçkiewicz and declared that
if he had eloquence his faults should be noticed as well. However
delicate Chopin’s perceptions, he no longer regarded them because for
him Miçkiewicz was the great bell that tolled the sorrows of Poland.
Who could be more stimulating than this apostle prophesying the
resurrection of his country? The Redeemer was announced. The Saviour
was about to arise, and his coming must be hastened by deeds of faith
and by repentance.
Sometimes in the evening the seer came to the rue Pigalle accompanied
by several of his compatriots. He would retire into a dim corner of the
little salon and read his _Infernal Comedy_ or one of his _Ballades_,
some new poem filled with the odour of his forests. Or else, in a
divine delirium, he would improvise. That great Slavic dismay, mute
and passive, soon appeared on the face of the exiles and was prolonged
in a silence loaded with memories. Then Chopin would rise and seat
himself at the piano. The lamp would be still further lowered. He would
begin with feathery arpeggios, stealing over the keys in his usual
way, until he encountered the _blue note_, the pitch which seemed to
correspond best to the general atmosphere. Then he would start one of
his favourite pieces, the _Etude_ in thirds from the second volume,
for instance (G sharp minor). One of his compatriots called it _The
Siberian_ because it symbolized the journey of the deported Pole.
The snow falls on the endless plains. (An ascending and descending
scale for each hand pictures this universal infinity in a striking
manner.) You hear the bells of the troika that approaches, passes, and
disappears towards the horizon. And each one of them has seen a brother
or a friend pass by, escorted by two Russian police who were taking
him off for ever. Or else a _scherzo_ takes shape, crystallizes: an
old popular refrain that Frederick has heard in his childhood at the
doors of the village inn. All of them, recognizing it, follow with
muted humming from between tightened lips, while tears cover their
faces. And the artist varies it, scans it softly, throws it up and
catches it again, neglects the colouring, seeking only the design.
For him the design is the soul. In spite of effects of resonance, of
cloudlike fluidity, it is the design he pursues, the pure line of his
thought. One of the friends who heard him writes: “His eyes burned with
a feverish animation, his lips became blood-red, his breath short.
He felt, we felt, that part of his life was running out with the
sounds.” Suddenly a little dry cough, a sudden pause in a _pianissimo_
passage, and in the dim light Chopin raises his fine white face with
black-circled eyes.
But the evenings did not always end on this affecting scene. Sometimes,
on the contrary, there would burst out from behind the piano the
Emperor of Austria, an insolent old man, a phlegmatic Englishman, a
sentimental and ridiculous Englishwoman, a sordid old Jew. It was again
Chopin, past master of grimaces, who, after having drawn tears from
all eyes, wrinkled their faces with fits of laughter.
* * * * *
Among George Sand’s old friends was a delicate, pale, nervous little
man, with however, a will and a mind so strong that he stands out from
his time like a bronze figure in an Olympus of plaster casts. In his
own profession he was at once the most violent, the steadiest, the
purest of creators. But, as in art everything is, as he said, a matter
of the soul, here is an opinion which coming from his pen has some
weight. He wrote: “Times without number, I have talked intimately to
Chopin, whom I like greatly. He is a man of rare distinction and the
truest artist I have ever met. He is of that small number that one can
admire and esteem.”
This man was named Eugène Delacroix. His very young friend, Baudelaire,
said of him that he loved the big, the national, the overwhelming, the
universal, as is seen in his so-called decorative painting or in his
_big machines_. What could be farther from Chopin’s whole æsthetic?
But they had both a certain taste for the conventional, especially in
the arts which were not their own. Delacroix, the powerful innovator,
liked only the classic in literature, only Mozart in music. Chopin, in
painting, greatly preferred M. Ingres to Delacroix. Opposite as they
were in culture, in tendencies, in taste, yet Chopin and Delacroix
understood each profoundly in their hearts. Delacroix, a great lover
and connoisseur of music, soon placed Chopin directly after Mozart.
As for Chopin, who loved and respected the man, he continued to detest
his painting. It was above all in temperament that they were brothers.
“... A mixture of scepticism, politeness, dandyism, of burning will,
of finesse, of despotism, and finally of an especial kind of goodness,
and of _restrained tenderness_ that always goes with genius.” Well now,
who is the subject of this portrait that so resembles Chopin? It is
still Baudelaire talking of Delacroix. A hater of crowds, a polished
sceptic, a man of the world entirely preoccupied in dissimulating the
cholers of his heart,—such characteristics applied to either of them.
Both violent, both reserved, both modest, such were these aristocrats
born among the people. Delacroix taking his old servant to the Louvre
to explain the Assyrian sculpture to her, or Chopin playing the piano
for his valet,—these are pictures which give a better critical estimate
than ten pages of abstractions. Let us add that both of them were
invalids, both sufferers, both tubercular, and that the only revenge
they could take upon life was to live by the spirit. I should say: by
the emotional spirit. Exquisite judges of nuances, music furnished
them with incomparable ones. Mozart was their God because his science
naturally was equal to his inspiration. Of the works of Beethoven they
said: “Vulgar passages side by side with sublime beauty.” To the ear of
Delacroix he was sometimes diffuse, tortuous; to Chopin’s too athletic,
too Shakespearean, with a passion that always bordered on a cataclysm.
Yet the painter admired him because he found him modern, entirely of
his own times. That is precisely the reason that made him suspect to
Chopin, who before everything demanded a delicately decanted wine, a
liqueur from which rose the bouquet of memory. Nietzsche said later on:
“All music begins to have its _magical_ effect only from the moment
when we hear the language of our past in it.” Now that exile, Chopin,
never heard anything but the oldest voices of his memory. That was his
poetry.
“When Beethoven is obscure,” he said, “and seems to lack unity, the
cause is not the rather savage, pretended originality, for which people
honour him; it is that he turns his back on the eternal principles;
Mozart never. Each of the parts has its own direction which, even while
harmonizing with the others, forms a song and follows it perfectly. In
that is the counterpoint, _punto contrapunto_. It’s the custom to learn
harmony before counterpoint, that is, the succession of notes that
lead up to the chords. Berlioz pounds out the chords and fills up the
intervals as best he can. In music, the purest logic is the _fugue_. To
know the fugue thoroughly is to know the element of all reason and all
deduction.”
Sand tells us that one day she came to Delacroix’s studio to take him
to dine at her house where Chopin was asking for him. She found him at
work, his neck wrapped in woollens, just like her “regular invalid,”
coughing like him, and husky, but raging none the less against Ingres
and his Stratonice. They joined Chopin. He did not like the Stratonice
either; he found the figures mannered, but the “finish” of the painting
pleased him. In everything he was a lover of the exact, of the finished.
“About colour,” he said, “I don’t understand a thing.”
They dined. At dessert, Maurice asked his master to explain the
phenomenon of reflections to him, and Delacroix drew a comparison
between the tones of a painting and the sounds of music. Chopin was
astonished.
“The harmony of music,” explained the painter, “is not only in the
construction of chords, but also in their relations, their logical
sequence, their sweep, their auditory reflections. Well, painting is no
different. The reflection of reflections...”
Chopin bursts out: “Let me breathe. One reflection is enough for the
moment. It’s ingenious, new, but it is alchemy to me.”
“No, it’s pure chemistry. The tones decompose and recompose themselves
constantly, and the reflection is not separated from the _relief_.”
Here is Delacroix well in the saddle. He explains colour, line, flat
tones; that all colour is an exchange of reflections; that what M.
Ingres lacks is half of painting, half of sight, half of life, that he
is half a man of genius, the other half an imbecile.
But Chopin is not listening. He rises and goes to the piano. He
improvises an instant, stops.
“But,” cries Delacroix, “it’s not finished.”
“It’s not begun. Nothing comes to me... Nothing but reflections,
shadows, reliefs that won’t become clear. I look for colour, and can’t
even find design.”
“You’ll never find one without the other, and you are going to find
both of them.”
“But if I only find moonlight?”
“You will have found a reflection of a reflection.”
Chopin returned to his theme without seeming to begin again, so vague
was his melody. Then the _blue note_ sounded, and they were transported
into the heavens, straying with the clouds above the roofs of the
square.
* * * * *
Several times already we have noticed this _blue note_. It did not
alone proceed from the characteristic Chopin pitches. It was the
song of his touch, the timbre of his hand. Like Liszt, Chopin had a
distinct state of consciousness in each of his fingers. He managed to
disassociate their impressions, to make them transmit to his brain
a harmony of infinitely varied manual sensations. It was a whole
education in technique and observation which taught a new method of
self-knowledge, how to think of oneself in a new way.
For him, a good technique had for its object not the ability to play
everything with an equal tone but to acquire a beautiful quality of
touch in order to bring out nuances perfectly. “For a long time,” he
said, “pianists have gone against nature in trying to give equal tone
to each finger. On the contrary, each finger should play its proper
part. The thumb has the greatest strength, because it is the largest
and most independent of the fingers. After that comes the little
finger, at the other end of the hand. Then the index, the principal
support of the hand. Then the middle finger, the weakest of all. As for
its Siamese twin, some pianists try, by putting all their strength into
it, to make it independent. That is impossible, and perfectly useless.
So there are several kinds of tones, as there are several fingers. It
is a matter of profiting by these differences. This, in other words, is
the whole art of fingering.”
Chopin had worked a great deal on these questions of transcendental
mechanics. Taking his hand, which was small, people were surprised by
its bony resistence. One of his friends has said that it was the frame
of a soldier covered with the muscles of a woman. Another, on the
contrary, thought it a boneless hand. Stephen Heller was stupefied to
see him cover a third of the keyboard, and compared his hand to the jaw
of a snake opening suddenly to swallow a whole rabbit in one mouthful.
He had invented a method of fingering all his own. His touch was,
thanks to this care, softer than any other in the world, opposed to all
theatricality, and of a beauty that charmed from the first bars. In
order to give the hand a correct position, he had it placed lightly on
the keyboard in such a way that the fingers struck the _E, F sharp, G
sharp, A sharp_, and _B_. This was, to his mind, the normal position.
Without changing it, he made his pupils do exercises designed to
give independence and equality to the fingers. Then he put them at
_staccato_, to give them lightness, then at _staccato-legato_, and
finally at _accented-legato_. He taught a special system to keep the
hand in its close and easy position while using the thumb in scales and
in _arpeggio_ passages. This perfect ease of the hand seemed to him
a major virtue, and the only means of attaining exact and equalized
playing, even when it was necessary to pass the thumb under the fourth
or fifth finger. But these exercises explain also how Chopin executed
his extremely difficult accompaniments (unknown until his time), which
consist in striking notes that are very distant from each other. We can
easily understand how much he must have shocked the pianists of the
old school by his original fingering, which had always the object of
keeping the hand in the same position, even while passing the third or
fourth finger over the fifth. Sometimes he held it completely flat, and
thus obtained effects of velvet and of finesse that threw Berlioz, and
even Liszt, into ecstasy. To acquire the independence of the fingers,
he recommended letting them fall freely and lightly, while holding the
hand as if suspended in the air without any pressure. He did not want
his pupils to take the rapid movements too soon, and made them play all
the passages very _forte_ and very _piano_. In this way the qualities
of sound were formed of themselves, and the hand was never tired. It
is he who, always for the purpose which he considered so important, of
gaining the independence of the fingers, conceived the idea of making
his pupils play the scales with an accent on each third or fourth note.
He was very angry when accused of being too free in his handling of
the beat. “Let your left hand be your precentor,” he said, “while your
right hand plays _ad lib_.”
Reading these rapid technical indications ought not to be
disheartening. In every art the technique and the material are the
living joys of the intelligence. They are the beautiful secrets of the
potter. Chopin, moreover, did not leave a _method_. He dreamed of it,
but it all remained in the state of a project. The big, the developed,
the scholarly frightened him. He always inhabited closed regions where
he did not much like to be accompanied. He never felt the strength to
compose an opera. His teachers and his friends pressed him to do it.
“With your admirable ideas,” demanded M. de Perthuis, “why don’t you do
an opera for us?”
“Ah, Count,” replied Chopin, “let me write only piano music. I do not
know enough to build operas.”
He had a taste for the rare and the finished rather than for great
applause. It was in the detail that he excelled. His most pregnant
harmonic inventions are made of nothings, but of nothings essential to
the character of his art. Professor Kleczynski, one of his compatriots
to whom I am indebted for several of these details, has written: “Given
the richness of his talent, he, like Schumann, disappointed us a
little. But on the other hand, putting his whole soul into the little
things, he finished and perfected them in an admirable manner.” It
is precisely in these “little things” that Chopin was great. Perhaps
for him nothing was little. Indeed, where does the little end, and the
big begin? Without doubt he put his soul into everything from which he
expected a pitch of perfection.
“When I am ill-disposed,” he said, “I play on an Erard piano, and
easily find a _ready-made_ tone; but when I feel keyed up, and strong
enough to discover _my own tone_, then I need a Pleyel piano.”
* * * * *
Another friend of Chopin’s was Liszt, a friend by heart and by
profession. People often tried to pitt one against the other, to
persuade each of them that the contrast of their methods, of their
playing as of their characters, made them rivals. But this was not
so, and if Chopin sometimes seemed rather retiring, and even timid
before the other great virtuoso of his time, it is because the women
interfered.
George Sand and Marie d’Agoult had known each other for a long time.
Before the reign of Chopin George had gone to Geneva, where she had
sojourned for a season in the intimacy of this pretty, romantic
left-handed establishment. Then Franz and Marie had come to spend a
summer at Nohant. On both sides there had been curiosity, admiration,
but also secret jealousies. The Countess prided herself on her writing.
She had a noble style, a sceptical but well-furnished mind, and, except
in love, balance in everything. With George, spontaneity carried the
day. She had at first a temperamental sympathy for this beautiful tall
woman who threw her bonnet over the great houses of the Faubourg. It
was a brilliant putting into practice of her theories on love and
liberty. “You seem to me the only beautiful, estimable and truly noble
thing that I have seen shine in the patrician sphere,” she wrote to
her. “You are to me the true type of the Princess of romance, artistic,
loving and noble in manner, language, and dress, like the daughters
of the Kings in heroic days.” But this extravagant admiration was
entirely literary. So also was it with Marie d’Agoult, who was much
more interested in the almost illustrious novelist than in this strange
descendant of a line of kings and of a bird-seller. She soon decided
to withdraw Liszt from her influence, and it was with displeasure that
she saw the arrival of that Chopin whose sweet and profound genius her
lover prophesied. So they became cold. They separated. George sent the
Countess to all the devils.
But Liszt continued to see Chopin because he loved him. No one played
the Pole’s compositions better than he, because no one knew them
better, nor had sounded them more deeply and played them more in his
concerts. “I love my music when Liszt plays it,” said Chopin. In the
work which Liszt dedicated, later on, to his friend, he compares the
_Etudes_, the _Preludes_, and the _Nocturnes_ to the masterpieces of
La Fontaine. I do not know that anyone has made a truer comparison.
Two great poets, who tried to hold the very-big in the very-little,
and who salted with irony their daily-wounded hearts. This is the
place to recall the words of Heine, who called Chopin “the Raphaël
of the pianoforte.” In his music “each note is a syllable, each bar
a word,” and each phrase a thought. He invented “those admirable
harmonic progressions by which he dowered with serious character even
those pages which, in view of the lightness of their subject, seemed
to have no claim to such importance.” It is by their sentiment that
they excel, and on closer examination one recognizes, according to
Liszt, those transitions that unite emotion and thought, these degrees
of tone of which Delacroix speaks. Of the _classic_ works of Chopin,
Liszt admired above all the _adagio_ of the _Second Concerto_, for
which Chopin himself had a marked predilection. “The secondary melodies
belong to the author’s most beautiful manner; the principal phrase is
of admirable breadth: it alternates with a _recitative_ that strikes
the minor key and is like an antistrophe.” In several of the _Etudes_
and of the _Scherzos_ Liszt discovers the concentrated exasperation,
the proud and ironic despair of Fritz. Yet it takes a trained ear,
because Chopin allowed hardly a suspicion to be entertained of the
“secret convulsions” that disturbed him. His character “was made up of
a thousand nuances which, in overlapping, disguised each other in an
indecipherable manner.” And Liszt, whose intelligence always stands out
so sharply, wrote this fine comment on the last works of Chopin: “He
used his art only to play to himself his own tragedy.” After having
sung his feeling, he set himself to disintegrate it. But even then,
the emotion that inspired these pages remains pure nobility, their
expression rests within “the true limits of the language of art,”
without vulgarity, without wild shrieks, without contortion. “Far from
being diminished, the quality of the harmonic stuff becomes only more
interesting in itself, more curious to study.”
Needless to say Chopin considered himself a romantic, and yet
he invoked two masters: Bach and Mozart; Bach, whom he admired
boundlessly, without a single reserve, and Mozart, in whom he found
“the laws of all the liberties of which he made abundant use.” And yet
he would not admit that “one should demolish the Greek architrave with
the Gothic tower, nor that one should abolish the pure and exquisite
grace of Italian architecture to the profit of the luxuriant fantasy of
Moorish buildings... He never lent the lightest approval to what he did
not judge to be an effective conquest for art. His disinterestedness
was his strength.” (Liszt.) We know that Beethoven, Michelangelo,
Shakespeare, frightened him. It seems stranger that he should not have
liked Schumann more. He found Mendelssohn common, and he would not
willingly listen to certain works of Schubert, “whose contours were too
sharp for his ear, where the feelings seemed to be stripped naked. All
savage brutality repelled him. In music, as in literature, as in the
habit of life, everything that approached melodrama was torture to
him.” Apropos of Schubert he said to Liszt one day:
“The sublime is defamed when the common or the trivial takes its place.”
Even in Mozart he found blemishes. He regretted certain passages of
_Don Juan_, the work that he adored. “He managed,” Liszt always said,
“to forget what was repugnant to him, but to reconcile himself to it
was always impossible.” Romantic that he was, yet he never engaged in
any of the controversies of the epoch. He stood apart from the battles
into which Liszt and Berlioz wholeheartedly threw themselves, but he
brought to their group, nevertheless, convictions that were “absolute,
stubborn, and inflexible.” When his opinions had prevailed, like a
true _grand Seigneur_ and party leader, he kept himself from pushing
his victory too far, and returned to all his habits of art and of the
spirit.
How often did Liszt bend over the keyboard at Chopin’s side to follow
the sylph-like touch! He studied it with love and infinite care, and
he was the only one who succeeded in imitating it. “He always made
the melody undulate ...; or else he made it move, indecisive, like an
airy apparition.” This is the famous _rubato_. But the word
conveys nothing to those who know, and nothing to those who do not
know, and Chopin ceased to add this explanation to his music. If one
has the intelligence it is impossible not to divine this _rule of
irregularity_. Liszt explained it thus to one of his pupils: “Look at
those trees; the wind plays in their leaves and awakens life in them,
yet they do not stir.” His compositions should be played “with this
kind of accented and prosodic balance, this _morbidezza_ of which it
is difficult to grasp the secret when one has not often heard Chopin
himself play.... He impressed upon all of them some mystery of nameless
colour, of vague form, of vibrating pulsations, that were almost devoid
of materiality, and, like imponderable things, seemed to act upon the
soul without passing through the senses. Chopin also liked to throw
himself into burlesque fantasies; of his own accord he sometimes evoked
some scene from Jacques Callot, with laughing, grimacing, gambolling
caricatures, witty and malicious, full of musical flings, crackling
with wit and English humour like a fire of green boughs. One of these
piquant improvisations remains for us in the fifth _Etude_, where only
the black keys are played,—just as Chopin’s gaiety moved only on the
higher keys of the spirit.”
It was to his compatriots that he demonstrated it most willingly, to
a few choice friends. It is said that even to-day the pupils of his
pupils shine in the reflected glory of these preciously transmitted
recipes. Doubtless there will always be born here or there a Chopinian
soul; but can the intangible be taught? Liszt said: “Chopin passed
among us like a phantom.”
CHAPTER XIV
Misunderstandings, Loneliness
In October, 1839, King Louis-Philippe expressed a desire to hear Chopin
play, and had him invited with Moschelès, the pianist, to Saint-Cloud.
Count de Perthuis received the two artists at the entrance of the
castle. They had to cross a succession of rooms before arriving at the
Salon Carré, where the royal family were informally gathered. Round
the table sat the Queen with her work-basket, Madame Adélaïde, the
Duchess of Orleans, and the ladies-in-waiting. Near to these, the fat
King filled his arm-chair. Chopin and Moschelès were welcomed as old
friends. They took turns at the piano. Chopin played his _Nocturnes_
and _Etudes_, Moschelès his own _Etudes_; then they played as a duet
a sonata by Mozart. At the end of the _andante_ there was a shower
of “delicious!” “divine!” and they were asked to repeat it. Chopin’s
fervour electrified the audience, so much so that he gave himself up to
a real “musical delirium.” Enthusiasm on all sides. Chopin received as
a souvenir a cup of silver-gilt, Moschelès a travelling-case.
Such an evening was exactly what was needed to stimulate Chopin to
work. The three years of the rue Pigalle (1839–1842) which opened under
these royal auspices, were just such as he had wished; years of great
and perfect labour. If the year 1839 saw the publication of only _Trois
valses brillantes_, it was pre-eminently the year of the _Preludes_,
perhaps the most rare and perfect of Chopin’s masterpieces. Then came
the famous _Sonata in B flat minor_ of which Schumann said strangely
enough: “... A certain pitiless genius blows in our face, strikes
anyone who tries to stand out against him with a heavy fist, and makes
us listen to the end, fascinated and uncomplaining... but also without
praise, because this is not music. The sonata ends as it began, in a
riddle, like a mocking Sphinx.”
Following this, Chopin gave to the world in 1840 and 1841 four
_Nocturnes_, the second and third _Ballades_, a _Scherzo_, three
_Polonaises_, four _Mazurkas_, three new _Etudes_, a _Waltz_, the
_Fantasy in F minor_, the _Tarantella_, and a _Concerto Allegro_.
In the spring of 1841 he consented to play again in public at Pleyel’s.
The hall was crowded, naturally, for at that time Chopin and Liszt were
making the greatest sensation at Paris. It was Liszt himself, that
enthusiastic heart, who claimed the honour of reporting it for the
_Gazette Musicale_. Here are a few of the variations and cadenzas from
the pen of the pianist:
“On Monday last, at eight in the evening, the Salon Pleyel
was magnificently lighted; to the foot of the carpeted and
flower-covered stairway a limitless line of carriages brought the
most elegant women, the most fashionable young people, the most
celebrated artists, the richest financiers, the most illustrious
of the great Lords, the whole _élite_ of society, a whole
aristocracy of birth, fortune, talent, and beauty.
“A large grand piano was open on a stage; they pressed about it;
they sought the closest places, already they lent their ears,
collected their thoughts, and said that they must not lose a chord,
a note, an intention, a thought of him who was to be seated there,
and they were right to be thus greedy, attentive, religiously
stirred, because he whom they awaited, whom they wanted to see, to
hear, to admire, to applaud, was not only an accomplished virtuoso,
a pianist expert in the art of making notes, was not only an artist
of great renown. He was all that, and more than all that; he was
Chopin.
“... It is only rare, at very long intervals, that Chopin is
heard in public, but what would be a certain cause of obscurity
and neglect for anyone else is precisely what assures him a
renown beyond the whim of fashion, and what puts him out of the
reach of rivalry, jealousy and injustice. Chopin, holding aloof
from the excessive turmoil which for the last several years has
driven executive artists from all parts of the world, one on top
of another, and one against another, has remained constantly
surrounded by faithful disciples, enthusiastic pupils, warm
friends, who, while protecting him from vexing quarrels and painful
slights, have never ceased to spread his works and with them
admiration for his genius and respect for his name. Therefore this
exquisite celebrity always on a plane, excellently aristocratic,
has been free from every attack. He has been surrounded by a
complete absence of criticism, as though posterity had rendered its
verdict; and in the brilliant audience which flocked about the too
long silent poet, there was not a reticence, not a restriction;
there was but praise from every mouth.”
Chopin was satisfied with his friend. Some weeks later he left for
Nohant, full of ideas, but with no real pleasure. “I am not made for
the country,” he said, “although I do rejoice in the fresh air.” That
was really very little. For her part, Sand wrote: “He was always
wanting Nohant, and could never stand Nohant.” His rural appetite
was soon sated. He walked a little, sat under a tree, or picked a
few flowers. Then he returned and shut himself in his room. He was
reproached for loving the artificial life. What he really loved was
his fever, his dimmed soul, his position as Madame Sands’ “regular
invalid.” Without realizing it, he cultivated the old leanings of
his childhood, his irresolution, his most morbid sensibility, all
the refinements of luxury and of the spirit. What he did not like he
set himself, unthinkingly, to hate: the plebeian side of George’s
character, her humanitarian dreams, her friends who were democratic by
feeling and by birth, especially Pierre Leroux, dirty, badly combed,
with a collar powdered with dandruff, who was continually turning
up to beg subsidy. Oh, how good it was to see Delacroix appear, the
perfect dandy, looking as if he had just stepped out of a bandbox!
He and Frederick had the air of two princes strayed into evil company
at the table where Leroux and Maurice’s studio friends exaggerated
their open collar garb. Together the two artists humorously bewailed
George’s toleration of such freedom. What would Liszt have said, Liszt
so particular in such matters, Liszt who, called himself a “professor
of good manners?” But Madame Sand had small sympathy with such regard
for appearances. She overrode the bursts of coarse laughter, the
shouts, the disputes of her guests, the familiarity of her servants,
the drunkenness of her brother Hippolyte. She heeded nothing but the
sincerity of heart, listened to nothing but ideas, and insisted that
“flies should not be taken for elephants.” She termed the exasperation
of Chopin unhealthy, incomprehensible, and refused to see in it
anything but the caprices of a sick child of genius. He retired into
his room and sulked. He was not visible except at meal times when he
looked on the company with suspicion, with disgust.
A rather painful incident marked the summer of 1841. It arose through
Mlle. de Rozières, a pupil of Chopin’s, who was George’s friend and
the mistress of Antoine Wodzinski. Chopin thought her an intriguer, a
parasite, and he was displeased that she had been able to insinuate
herself into intimacy with George. More than that, he thought her
ostentatious, loud, and grandiloquent in the expression of her
friendship. But what loosed his anger was that Antoine, inspired
perhaps by Mlle. de Rozières, had sent to the Wodzinski family a
replica of his, Chopin’s bust, by the sculptor Dantan. What equivocal
intention might they not read into such an action? What might Marie,
his old _fiancée_, think? Frederick was aghast, and complained to
Fontana, who had given the statue to Antoine. “I gave Antoine no
permission,” he wrote to him.... “And how strange this will appear to
the family... They will never believe that it was not I who gave it
to him. These are very delicate matters in which there should be no
meddling touch... Mlle. de Rozières is indiscreet, loves to parade
her intimacy, and delights in interfering in other people’s affairs.
She will embellish all this, exaggerate it, and make a bull out of a
frog, and it won’t be for the first time. She is (between ourselves)
an insipid swine, who in an astonishing manner has dug into my private
affairs, thrown up the dirt, and rooted around for truffles among the
roses. She is a person that one must on no account touch, because
when one has touched her the result is sure to be an indescribable
indiscretion. In fact, she is an old maid! We old bachelors, we are
worth a lot more!”
On her side, George revealed the great man’s irritation to this young
lady. She unfolded on this friendly heart, because was she not attacked
from below and pierced with pin pricks each time that she took sides
against the pronouncements of her friend? “If I had not been a witness
to these extravagant neurotic likes and dislikes for three years, I
should by no means understand them, but unfortunately I am too used
to them,” she wrote. “I tried to cheer him up by telling him that W.
was not coming here; he could count on that. He hit the ceiling, and
said that if I was certain, apparently it was because I had told W. the
truth. Thereupon I said ‘Yes.’ I thought he would go mad. He wanted to
leave. He said I would make him look like a fool, jealous, ridiculous,
that I was embroiling him with his best friends, that it all came from
the gossip that had been going on between you and me, etc., etc....
Anyway, as usual, he wanted no one to suffer from his jealousy but
me.” And further on: “I have never had any rest and I never shall have
any with him. With his distressing nature, you never know where you
are. The day before yesterday he passed the whole day without saying
a syllable to anyone at all.... I do not want him to think he is the
master. He would be so much the more suspicious in the future, and even
if he gained this victory he would be in despair, because he does not
know what he wants, nor what he does not want.”
Certainly Chopin was jealous, but a meaning slightly different to the
usual one should be attached to the word. It was not the jealousy of
a lover. His jealousy extended to all the influences, the desires,
the curiosities, and the friendships of his mistress. It was the wild
need of absolute possession. He had to know at each moment that all of
George’s vital sources were born in his own heart, that if he was the
child in fact, he was the father in spirit. He had to feel that his
reign effaced preceding reigns, abolished them, and that in adopting
him, in loving him, George was born anew. He would have liked her to
be ignorant of the very existence of evil, never to think of it in
speaking to him, and without ceasing to be good, tender, devoted,
voluptuous, maternal, still be the pale, the innocent, the severe,
the virginal spouse of his soul. “He would have demanded but that of
me, this poor lover of the impossible,” noted Sand. And when he found
himself losing this universal possessorship, which his love should have
given him, he would have nothing more to do with it. He repulsed feeble
substitutes.
Assuredly, he had some reason to be jealous of everyone, of a
too-forward servant, of the Doctor, of the great simpleton of a cousin,
half bourgeois, half lout, who brought game to the mistress of Nohant,
of a beggar, a poacher with a strong face,—because this invalid with
sharpened nerves well understood what troubles, what desires these
passers-by aroused in a woman for whom the “exercise of the emotions”
was the true law of knowledge; of a woman,—who, he well knew, had no
fear, and no scruples in the face of this kind of experience. So he
found the wit to torment her. “He seemed to be gnawing softly to amuse
himself, and the wound that he made penetrated the entrails.” Then
he would leave her presence with a phrase that was perfectly polite,
but freezing, and once more shut himself up in his own room. During
her nights of toil, George served as her own _écorché_, stripped
the elusive soul of her lover, and, good woman of letters that she
was, traced their double portrait in her _Lucrezia Floriani_. Was it
obtuseness, sadism, or an obscure vengeance that led her the next day
to make Chopin read these pitiless reconstructions? But the artist
saw nothing, or at least he seemed not to. He bent over the pages, he
admired, he praised; but as always, he gave out nothing of his inner
self, and if Lucrezia delivered herself in writing, Prince Karol
returned to his room where the light sounds of the piano interpreted
all of his suppressed misery. He, also, clung to his grief, and even
to the outward signs of his grief, “Take good care of my manuscripts,”
he advised Fontana. “Don’t tear them, don’t dirty them, don’t spoil
them.... I love my _written pain_ so much that I always tremble for my
papers.”
“The _friendship_ of Chopin...” wrote George. Or else: “Our own story
had no romance in it.” And even: “His piano was much more his torment
than his joy.” This shows to what a point beings who have mingled their
lives can reserve their souls. Here are two such—very penetrating, very
greedy, who yet were never wedded.
In the Autumn of 1842 George Sand and Chopin left the rue Pigalle
to move to Nos. 5 and 9 in the Square d’Orléans. Between them at
No. 7 lived their great friend Mme. Marliani, the wife of a Spanish
politician. Near neighbours were Pauline Viardot and the sculptor
Dantan. Here they established a kind of _commune_ which provided
diversion for them, and where freedom was “guaranteed.” Each one
worked and lived at home. Their meals were taken, at the common
expense, at Mme. Marliani’s. Chopin had a large salon for his pianos;
Sand, a billiard room. His quarters were furnished in the modern
style of Louis-Philippe, with a clock and empire candelabra on the
mantelshelf. Behind one of the pianos was a painting by Frère of
a caravan on the desert, above the other a Coignet pastel of the
Pyramids. During the day they seldom met, but in the evening they
dropped in on one another like good country neighbours. Chopin always
cultivated elegant society, and received at his house his titled and
amorous pupils. But he received only with a good deal of distaste
the innumerable pianists and priers who now came to call on him and
solicited his support.
One day Chopin’s valet brought in the card of a M. W. de Lenz, a
Russian virtuoso and writer on musical subjects. He would have stood
less chance than any, this enemy of his Poland, of being received
by Chopin if the card had not borne in pencil the words “_Laissez
passer_: Franz Liszt.” He therefore decided to have this slightly
importunate gentleman in, and begged him to be seated at the piano.
Lenz played well. It was apparent that he was a pupil of Liszt. He
surpassed himself in one or two of Chopin’s _Mazurkas_, and like his
master, added a few embellishments. Chopin was both amused and a little
irritated.
“He has to touch everything, this good Franz! But a recommendation
from him deserves something; you are the first pupil who has come
from him. I shall give you two lessons a week. Be punctual; with me
everything runs on schedule. My house is a pigeon-cote.” As M. de Lenz
had expressed a lively desire to make the acquaintance of Mme. Sand,
Chopin invited him to call again as a friend. He arrived, therefore,
one evening, and Chopin presented him to George, to Pauline Viardot,
to Mme. Marliani. Sand, hostile and reserved, said not a word, for she
detested Russians; but Lenz pointedly seated himself at her side. He
noticed that Chopin was fluttering about “like a little frightened bird
in a cage.” In order to relieve the tension, Chopin asked Lenz to play
the _Invitation to the Waltz_, an elegant specialty of the Russian,
who several years before had revealed it to Liszt himself. Lenz played
it, slightly intimidated. On which George continued to remain silent.
Chopin held out his hand amiably, then Lenz seated himself with some
embarrassment behind the table on which a _Carcel_ lamp was burning.
“Aren’t you coming to St. Petersburg some time?” demanded the stranger,
addressing Sand.
“I should never lower myself to a country of slaves!”
“You would be right not to come. You might find the door shut.”
The disconcerted George opened her big eyes which Lenz described in
his notes as “beautiful big heifer’s eyes.” Chopin, however, did not
seem displeased, as if he enjoyed having his mistress put out of
countenance. She arose, went to the fireplace where a log was flaming,
and lighted a fat Havana cigar.
“Frederick, a spill!” she cried. He rose and brought the light.
“At Petersburg,” went on George, blowing out a cloud of smoke,
“probably I could not smoke a cigar in a drawing-room?”
“In no drawing-room, Madame, have I ever seen a cigar smoked,” replied
this badly brought up Lenz, looking at the pictures through his glasses.
Nevertheless, it must be supposed that these robust manners were not
altogether displeasing, for the day after this visit while Chopin was
giving him his lesson, he said to Lenz:
“Madame Sand thinks she has been rude to you. She can be so pleasant.
She liked you.”
One can divine what obscure attractions this sensualist obeyed. At
times victories of the flesh are preceded by victories of wit. But
Chopin was not the man for that sort of thing, Chopin who had so little
muscle, so little breath, and such a delicate skin “that a prick of
a gnat made a deep gash in him.” The whole complication came about
because he still loved with passion, while she had, for a long time,
dwelt in affection. Her “little Chopin” she loved, she adored, but in
the same way that she loved Maurice and Solange.
In the months during which they lived apart, she was constantly
disturbed about his health. She knew that he did not take care of
himself. She wrote to one person and another to ask them to keep a
discreet watch. Wasn’t he forgetting to drink his chocolate in the
morning, his bouillon at ten o’clock? They must make him take care of
himself, and not go out without his muffler.
But, he had found a new way to exalt still further the sentiments
which, from their very lack of balance, are an active stimulant to
artistic production; he would not worry her, he would leave her in
ignorance of his moral and physical illness, of his agonies, of his
hæmorrhages. Let her, at least, have the peace necessary for her work.
In every willing sacrifice to love there are humble joys, all the
deeper for remaining hidden; but it is the most deeply buried love that
nourishes the most.
George now passed part of her winters in the country, while Chopin
wore himself out in Paris. It was a problem not to let her notice
anything. His letters were gay, confiding. Sickness holds aloof, so
he pretends, and only happiness is ahead. “Your little garden (in the
Square d’Orléans) is all snowballs, sugar, swans, ermine, cream cheese,
Solange’s hands, and Maurice’s teeth. Take care of yourself. Don’t tire
yourself out too much with your tasks. Your always older than ever, and
very, extremely, incredibly old,
“Chopin.”
Perhaps he had never felt more alone, this “little sufferer,” as his
maternal friend calls him. But he was the essential solitary.
Forty years later than that time, I see another who resembles him,
and who also feeds upon a terribly hard _me_, a me which, no more than
that of Chopin, could expand over other beings, bleed on them, because
he was too high, too savage, too shamed; that is Nietzsche. It is not
surprising that Nietzsche loved Chopin like a chosen brother. The love
of both was too great for their hearts.
When I hear played the _Nocturne in C Minor_ (op. 48), where, under
so much repressed suffering, there still bursts forth, mingled with
sadness, this ideal which is built only upon the creative joys of the
spirit, I think of a page written by Nietzsche in a loggia overlooking
the Barberini Square at Rome, in May, 1883. This is that beautiful
_Night Song_ through which pass the blue and black visions of Chopin,
his flower-like glance, his young girl’s eyes, and his heart so
“extremely, incredibly old.” Some fragments of these strophes seem to
me to furnish for the _Nocturne_ of which I speak—and for the final
solitudes into which the poet is now entering—a commentary worthy of
them. Before calling them to mind I should say that a tradition among
the Polish artists has it that this piece was composed one stormy day
when Chopin had taken refuge in the Church of St.-Germain des Prés.
He listened to the Mass under the rolling thunder and, coming back
home, improvised the fine chorale that forms the centre of this solemn
Elevation. But that does not for a moment prevent me from associating
this prayer with the pagan song of Nietzsche. Quite the contrary: both
the one and the other have this transport, this point of enthusiasm,
which draws the cry from the philosopher: “There is in me a desire for
love which itself speaks the language of love.”
THE NIGHT SONG
“It is night: now the voice of the trickling fountains rises
higher. And my soul, also, is a trickling fountain.
“It is night: now all the songs of the lovers awake. And my soul,
also, is a lovers’ song.
“There is in me something unappeased, and unappeasable, that
struggles to raise its voice. There is in me a desire for love
which itself speaks the language of love.
“I am light: ah! if I were night! But this is my solitude, to be
enveloped in light.
· · · · ·
“My poverty is that my hand never rests from giving; my jealousy,
to see eyes full of waiting and nights illuminated with desire.
“Oh, misery of all those who give! Oh, eclipse of my sun! Oh,
desire of desiring! Oh, the devouring hunger in satiety!”
· · · · ·
Thus sang Zarathustra.
CHAPTER XV
Chagrin, Hate
It seems that it was about 1842 that life for Chopin began to lower
its tone. For whom should he cultivate even the will to get well, now
that love was no longer ahead, but behind him? Lovers who feel the
power of suffering desiccating in them abandon themselves immediately
to the soft call of Death. If they disappear, they are reproached for
having been weaklings; if they survive, for having been cynics. They
themselves do not suspect that they are emptied of their substance
like those hollow trees still full of leaves which a gust of wind will
vanquish. Chopin, dying, thought himself eternal.
In the spring of 1842, his childhood friend, Matuszinski, succumbed to
tuberculosis. In May, 1844, his father passed away at Warsaw. It was
the end of a just man. He closed his eyes looking at the portraits and
the bust of his beloved son, and asked that after death his body should
be opened because he feared being buried alive.
These two shocks were terrific for the artist, yet he wrote to his own
people: “I have already survived so many younger and stronger people
than I that it seems I am eternal.... You must never worry about me:
God gives me His Grace.” In view of his persistent depression, George
conceived the idea of inviting Frederick’s oldest sister and her
husband, the Jedrzeïewiczs, to Nohant. It was necessary to warn them of
the great changes they were to see in their brother’s health. George
wrote to them:
“You will find my dear child very thin and greatly changed since
the time when you saw him, yet you must not be too fearful for
his health. In general, it has not changed for more than six
years, during which I have seen him every day. A strong paroxysm
of coughing every morning, and each winter two or three more
considerable spells, each lasting only two or three days, some
neuralgic pain from time to time, that is his regular state. For
the rest, his chest is healthy, and his delicate organism has no
lesion. I am always hoping that with time it will grow stronger,
but at least I am sure that with a regulated life and care it will
last as long as any other. The happiness of seeing you, mixed
though it be with deep and poignant emotions, which may perhaps
wound him a little the first day, nevertheless will do him immense
good, and I am so happy for him that I bless the decision you have
made.... For a long time he has cared for nothing but the happiness
of those whom he loves, instead of that which he can no longer
share with them. For my part, I have done everything I could to
soften this cruel lack, and though I have not made him forget it, I
have at least the consolation of knowing that, after you, I have
given and inspired as much affection as is possible.”
George even wrote to Mme. Nicolas Chopin to assure her that henceforth
she would consecrate her life to Frederick and regard him as her own
son.
So Louise and her husband came in 1844 to spend part of the summer at
Nohant, and the joy that Chopin experienced was translated into a new
feeling of gratitude for his friend. Some of the bitterness left his
soul, making him stronger and more courageous. Even confidence returned
for a time. The filial and family side of his tenderness was thus
reënforced.
When they had gone, Frederick clung even more closely to his “dear
ones,” those pieces of himself. He saw them again in dreams. He looked
for their places on the sofa, preserved like a relic an embroidered
slipper forgotten by his sister, and used the pencil from her
pocket-book as in other days Marie Wodzinska had used his. He sent them
news of the autumn, of the garden. He entered into the most minute
details, even to speaking of the tiny bear which went up and down on
the barometer. How clearly one sees all that he lacked, this deficient
lover!
On their walks he followed the others on a donkey so as to tire
himself less. But the autumn was cold and rainy, and Chopin passed
more time before the piano than out of doors. He returned to Paris
and reinstalled himself in the Square d’Orléans at the very beginning
of November. George was seriously concerned this time about “her
dear corpse,” and recommending him to friends while she stayed in
the country. This period is marked in one way and another by a blaze
of affectionate solicitude. Chopin did not want her to worry, and
continued to hide the progress of his malady. Without his knowledge,
George got information about him. “He must not know....” “I cannot
rid myself of these preoccupations which make up the happiness of my
life....” “Decidedly I cannot live without my little sufferer.” She
realized that “Chip’s” constitution was attacked in a very serious
way. He was visibly declining. The bad winter, nerves, irritation, the
persistent bronchitis were perhaps the causes. In any case, love was
still powerful. But love had apparently taken refuge in family feeling.
“... Let him never have the least inquietude about any of you,” wrote
George to Louise, “because his heart is always with you, tormenting him
at every moment and turning him toward his dear family.”
During the winter of 1845, and the spring of 1846, he was ill with
influenza, yet he made none but the usual plans and proposed to spend
the summer at Nohant. Before leaving, he gave a little dinner. “Music,
flowers, grub.” For guests: Prince Czartoryski and his wife (the
latter, it may be said in passing, was the most brilliant and the most
authentic of the feminine pupils of her master); Princess Sapieha,
Delacroix, Louis Blanc, Pauline Viardot; in short, old friends. But on
his arrival at Nohant everything seemed strange to him, as in a house
abandoned by life. He moved his piano and rearranged his table, his
books of poetry, his music. “I have always one foot with you,” he wrote
to Louise and her husband, “and the other in the room next door where
my hostess works, and none at all in my own home just now, _but always
in strange places_. These are without doubt imaginary _places_, but I
don’t blush for them.”
His delight was to make Pauline Viardot sing the Spanish melodies
that she had noted down herself. “I am very fond of these songs. She
has promised me to sing them to you when she goes to Warsaw. This
music will unite me with you. I have always listened to it with great
enthusiasm.”
But we must look below the surface, because in the depths of all these
beings who lived in common a drama was preparing. One can say that it
had been brewing for several years. And neither George nor Frederick
was to be responsible for its explosion, but the children.
First there was Maurice, the oldest, a young man of twenty-two adored
and very much spoiled by his mother, wretchedly brought up, a dabbler,
as the whim took him, in painting and literature, and a collector of
lepidoptera and of minerals, he promised, in sum, to become a fairly
complete type of the intelligent failure. He was not without talent; he
had charm and gaiety, touched, however, with bitterness and gruffness.
Since the trip to Majorca, he had had time to get accustomed to Chopin,
having seen this friend of his mother every day, so to speak. But if
there had been at first a certain sympathy between them, it quickly
flagged, and for several years now they had not got on. No doubt,
this is easily explained. Maurice loved his mother above everything,
and he saw clearly that her life was not easy, or smooth; he came
upon disputes, he was exasperated by the nervousness of the so-called
great man, who was to him merely a difficult, reserved, and sometimes
ill-natured invalid. Perhaps he even suffered from the ambiguous
smiles that followed the two celebrated lovers. And then his father,
the mediocre Dudevant, must occasionally have let fall outrageously
gross witticisms when his son came to see him. Maurice was chilled also
by the character of Chopin, by the aristocratic manners, the often
disdainful eye of this puzzling and encumbering parasite. Children
never forgive a stranger who allows himself a criticism, much less if
it is well founded. Chopin made one, severe enough, concerning Maurice
and Augustine. This Augustine was a relation of Mme. Sand, daughter of
her cousin, Adèle Brault, who belonged to the side of the family that
was entirely bourgeois and who was nothing else than a lady of easy
virtue. Out of pity for the girl, George had taken her into her home,
where Augustine, charming and tender-hearted, had become the favourite
of all the young people with one exception, Solange. Chopin did not
like Augustine. He took Solange’s side. As for Maurice, the born enemy
of his sister, he was _for_ Augustine to such a degree that he was
suspected of having become her lover. George denied this vociferously,
with authority, but Chopin willingly believed it, first because of his
intuition, secondly because Solange tried, by all manner of means, to
fix the idea in his head.
A strange child, this Solange. Physically, she was the image of her
great-grandmother, Marie-Aurore of Saxe, that is to say, blonde, fresh,
beautifully built. In character, she was cold, brilliant and lively,
passionate, vain, very excitable, sullen, possibly false, certainly
strong willed, vicious without any doubt, absolutely unbalanced. This
neurotic, who might have developed in such a very interesting way, they
always regarded as hard-hearted. They pestered her, they soured her,
they made her ruthless. Pauline Viardot contended that she did wrong
for the love of it. She was, in point of fact, innately ardent and
unhappy. A nature such as this has need of being loved deeply, and her
trials came above all through jealousy. Offences slowly recorded by her
heart made it solitary and injurious. Her mother herself said: “She is
nineteen years old, she is beautiful, she has a remarkable mind, she
has been brought up with love under conditions of happiness, growth and
morality, which should have made of her a saint or a heroine. But this
century is damned, and she is a child of this century.... Everything
is passion with her, an _icy_ passion, that is very deep, inexplicable
and terrifying.” Whose fault was that? It is only in families that one
finds these refined hatreds which are one of the sad aspects of love.
For a long time the mystery of this soul had attracted Chopin. Solange
was essentially a coquette. Ever since her puberty she had practised
the power of her troubled age on him, and this man of nerves had not
seemed insensible. Did he not rediscover in her the seductions and
even that free and animal grace that George must have had at fifteen?
A lover loves, in the daughter of his mistress, the happiness that he
has missed, and the rejuvenated memory of his sufferings. Solange was
less frank than her mother; she was even somewhat perverse. She tried a
few games that were not altogether innocent; first from predilection,
and also to appease the amorous rancour that she vowed against her own
people. It would be fine to avenge her own spurned heart by stealing
Chopin’s tenderness from her mother. Another of his attractions
for Solange was his elegance, his distinction, his high worldly
connections. For she was a snob, and it was delicious to flee to the
great friend’s salon, which was filled with countesses, when that of
her mother resounded with the roars of Maurice and his comrades, or
the “great thoughts” of Pierre Leroux. Lately there had even been
found there a herd of poet-workmen to whom the novelist was stubbornly
attached.
Here then was a whole obscure drama daily averted but daily reawakened,
sown with misunderstandings, and complicated by embarrassments. For
Sand, many times, wanted to talk it out with her lover, to force him
to interfere, but he shied away, or even openly took Solange’s part.
George tried in vain to break her daughter. Rather she broke herself
against the sharp edges of the character which in many ways were so
like her own.
It was Chopin who suffered the most from these misunderstandings,
because he could never relieve himself by words, by vain explanations,
because he could never express anything except in music. His
nervousness increased. He allowed himself to become exasperated to
the point of tears by incidents affecting servants. He could not
conceive that an old servant could be dismissed, and Mme. Sand, that
good _communist_, was quite capable of reconstructing her household
with a sweep of her arm. It was a calamity. Frederick’s Polish _valet
de chambre_ was dismissed “because the children (Read: ‘Maurice and
Augustine’) did not like him.” Then it was the old gardener, Pierre,
who was turned off after forty years of service. Next came the turn of
Françoise, the chambermaid, to whom, nevertheless, George had dedicated
one of her books. “God grant,” wrote Frederick to his sister, “that the
new ones will please the young man and his cousin more.” He was tired.
And, when he was tired he was not gay. That reacted on everyone’s
spirits. He felt old.
George also felt old. She was forty-two. And even while correcting a
passage in her _Lucrezia Floriani_, she was thinking so strongly of
herself, and of her first lover, that she returned for the first time
in fifteen years to the little wood she could see from her window,
where she used to meet Jules Sandeau. It was in this “sacred wood”
that her flight from the conjugal house had been decided, in 1831.
There she searched, and there she found a tree under which her lover
had been in the habit of waiting for her. Their initials cut into the
bark were still faintly visible. “She went over in her memory the
details and the whole story of her first passion, and compared them to
those of her last, not to establish a parallel between the two men,
whom she did not dream of judging coldly, but to ask her own heart if
it could still feel passion and bear suffering.... ‘Am I still capable
of loving? Yes, more than ever, because it is the essence of my life,
and through pain I experience intensity of life; if I could no longer
love, I could no longer suffer. I suffer, therefore I love and I
exist.’” And yet she felt that she must renounce something. What then?
The hope of happiness? “‘At a certain age,’ she finished by thinking,
‘there is no other happiness than that which one gives; to look for any
other is madness.’... So La Floriani was seized with an immense sadness
in saying an eternal farewell to her cherished illusions. She rolled on
the ground, drowned in tears.”
This summer’s end of 1846 was a trying period, a period of crises. The
sky itself was full of storm. Yet Chopin worked. He wrote to the loved
ones at Warsaw. He told them all the stories which one must pack into a
letter when one wishes to hide one’s true feelings. The giraffe at the
Jardin des Plantes was dead. The _Italians_ had reopened in Paris. M.
Le Verier had discovered a new planet. M. Faber of London, a Professor
of Mathematics, had built a machine that sang an air of Haydn, and
_God Save the Queen_. “I play a little, and also write a little. I am
one moment happy about my _Sonata_ with the violoncello, and the next
unhappy; I throw it in the corner and then take it up again. I have
three new _Mazurkas_ (in B major, F minor, and C sharp minor, dedicated
to Countess Czosnowska. These are his last works—op. 63 and 65). When
I am composing them I think they are good; otherwise one would never
compose. Later on comes reflection, and one rejects or accepts. Time is
the best judge and patience the best master. I hope to have a letter
from you soon, yet I am not impatient, and I know that with your large
family it is difficult for each one to write me a word, especially
as with us a pen is not enough. I don’t know how many years we would
have to talk to be at the end of our Latin, as they say here. So you
must not be surprised or sad when you do not receive a letter from me,
because there is no real reason, any more than there is with you. A
certain sadness blends with the pleasure of writing to you; it is the
knowledge that between us there are no words, hardly even deeds.... The
winter does not promise badly, and by taking care of myself a little it
will pass like the last, and God willing, not worse. How many people
are worse off than I! It is true that many are better, but I do not
think about them.”
Have we noticed those words: “Especially as with us a pen is not
enough...?” There sounds the exquisite mute on Chopin’s plaints. For
George the pen was enough. Everyone around Frederick, in default of
being happy, was noisy. They played comedies. They got up _tableaux
vivants_ and charades. Pantomime, over which the whole world was soon
to go crazy, was Chopin’s invention. It was he who sat at the piano
and improvised while the young people danced comic ballets, with the
assistance of a few guests: Arago, Louis Blanc. But no one suspected
that between George and Frederick the break was complete. Desire
had been dead for a long time. And now tenderness, affection, the
attachment of the soul, no longer existed but on one side. In weeping
over her lost youth in the “sacred wood,” George had shed her last
tears.
Thenceforth she was to be only a mother, pitilessly a mother, and only
of her _two_ children. She was busy now in marrying off Solange. Two or
three aspirants succeeded each other at Nohant, one after the other,
among them Victor de Laprade, followed by a young Berry lad, with whom
Solange flirted gaily.
Then one fine day, a dispute burst out between Maurice and Chopin over
some silly question. One of those grave, irreparable disputes. The two
wounded each other unmercifully. A moment later they embraced, “but the
grain of sand has fallen into the quiet lake, and little by little the
stones fall in, one by one,” wrote George. It soon began again. Maurice
spoke of leaving the group and the house. His mother took his side,
naturally. So Chopin bowed his head. It was he who would go. No one
said a word to restrain him.
He started out in the first days of November. Seven years and a half
before, he had arrived at Nohant for the first time, his physique
already much deteriorated. That is nothing, however, when the soul is
strong. But on this late autumn day that, too, had collapsed.
They saw the invalid, wrapped in rugs, getting into his carriage. With
his hand, pale and dry, he made a sign of farewell. No one understood
its meaning, not even himself. He was about to get into his grave.
CHAPTER XVI
The Story of an Estrangement
There was a great deal of sickness in Paris. Grzymala had just passed
seventeen days without sleeping; Delacroix, more ill than ever, dragged
himself nevertheless to the Luxembourg. Chopin too, tried to put people
off the scent, as he had done all those past years. But at length he
was forced to admit that he had not the courage to leave his own hearth
for an instant. New Year’s Day, 1847, arrived. He sent George the
customary bonbons, and his best wishes, and, smothered in coats, had
himself driven to the Hôtel Lambert, to his friends the Czartoryskis.
At Nohant, they kept up the semblance of happiness. Pantomime raged.
Scenery was brushed up, costumes were made. This united family
played out its comedy also. But suddenly the luggage was packed for
a return to Paris early in January, leaving Solange’s fiancé, M. des
Préaulx, stranded. And hardly had they been settled a month in the
Square d’Orléans when everything was unsettled again by the entrance
on the scene of a new actor: the sculptor Clésinger. He was a man of
thirty-three, violent, full-blooded, enthusiastic, who had just made
a name in the exhibitions and achieved fame at the first stroke. He
had asked to do a bust of Mme. Sand, came to call, saw Solange and was
lost. She was almost as quickly inflamed. The projected marriage with
M. des Préaulx was postponed in spite of the misgivings of George,
who had gathered decidedly vexing information about the sculptor.
“A hot-tempered and disorderly gentleman, a one-time dragoon, now a
great sculptor everywhere conducting himself as though he were in the
café of the regiment, or in the studio,” said Arsène Houssaye. All
decisions were postponed. The novelist took her daughter back to Nohant
immediately after the first days of Holy Week, at the beginning of
April.
Chopin at once had a very decided opinion about these events. First;
regret to see the Berry union fall through, as it seemed to him a very
sweet and proper one. Then, an instinctive dislike made him hostile to
the “stone tailor,” as he called Clésinger. He wrote to his people:
“Sol is not to be married yet. By the time they had all come to Paris
to sign the contract, she no longer wanted it. I am sorry, and I pity
the young man, who is very honest and very much in love; but it is
better that it should have happened before the marriage than after.
They say it is postponed till later on, but I know what that means.”
George, for her part, confided her difficulties to a friend: “Within
six weeks she has broken off a love affair she had hardly felt, and
she has accepted another on which she is ardently set. She was engaged
to one when she drove him off and became engaged to another. It’s odd,
it’s above all bold; but still, it is her right, and fortune smiles
on her. She substitutes for a gentle and modest marriage a brilliant
and burning one. She has it all her own way, and is taking me to Paris
at the end of April.... Work and emotion take up all my days and all
my nights.... This wedding must take place suddenly, as though by
surprise. Also it is a _deep_ secret I am confiding to you, and one
that even Maurice does not know. (He is in Holland.”)
Above all, Chopin was not to know anything,—Chopin, who was now refused
all intimate participation in the family affairs. George really knew
she had met her master this time, in his fierce Clésinger who boasted
that he would attain his ends at any cost. He appeared suddenly at La
Châtre, he repeatedly met Solange in the woods, he demanded a definite
answer. Naturally she said yes, since she loved him. George was forced
to give in, despite her apprehensions, her terror. On the 16th of
April, she called her son to the rescue because she was afraid, she
needed to be reassured. She added at the end of the letter: “Not a word
of all this to Chopin; it does not concern him, and when the Rubicon is
crossed, _ifs_ and _buts_ do only harm.”
When the Rubicon is crossed.... One more time! How many times had she
crossed it during her life, this old hand at ruptures? And yet she
pretended not to see that this was the critical point of her long
liaison. The marriage of Solange, this fact, indeed, entirely outside
of her own love-life, had become the plank to which the hand of the
pianist still clung, and she kicked it away with her heel.
Chopin heard whispered gossip about the affair, but he said nothing,
he questioned no one. He waited for a renewal of confidence. If all
the mystery astonished him, if he even guessed at the deliberate and
childish side of the now obvious rupture of his friendship, he made no
sign. As always, it was his health that paid for his muzzled pangs. He
was taken gravely ill. But it was no longer George who nursed him; it
was Princess Marceline Czartoryska. She sent a bulletin of his health
to Nohant. “One more trouble added to all the rest,” replied George on
May 7th. “Is he really seriously ill? Write to me, I count on you to
tell me the truth and to nurse him.” Yet on that very day she wrote in
her _Journal_ with a calmer pen: “Here I am at the age of forty-three
with a constitution of iron, streaked with painful indispositions,
which give me, however, _only a few hours of spleen, dissipated the
next day.... To-day my soul is well, and my body also._” Was it that
day that she was sincere, or the next, the 8th of May, when she said
to Mlle. de Rozières: “I am sick with worry and am having an attack
of giddiness while writing to you. I cannot leave my family at such
a moment, when I have not even Maurice to save the proprieties and
protect his sister from wicked insinuations. I suffer a great deal, I
assure you. Write to me, I beg. Tell Chopin whatever you think best
about me. Yet I dare not to write him, I am afraid of disturbing him,
I am afraid that Solange’s marriage displeases him greatly and that he
has a disagreeable shock each time I speak to him about it. Yet I could
not make a mystery of it to him and I have had to act as I have done. I
cannot make Chopin the head and counsellor of the family; my children
would not accept him, and the dignity of my life would be lost.”
Had it been a question of dignity it would have been better to have
thought of that earlier. Had it been a question of sparing Chopin’s
health, then it was too late for that, too. She did not even perceive
the contradictions in her letter. The poor great artist remained firm
in his determined silence, and desperately proud.
Yet George had just published her _Lucrezia Floriani_, already the
funeral march of her love. But Chopin continued to see in it nothing
but “beautiful characters of women and men, great naturalness and
poetry.” This would force her to confess differently, to explain
herself further. For there was always in her this impetuous need of
justification which drove her, at the decisive moments of the beginning
or of the end of a love affair, to acknowledge the forces that
motivated her. To whom should she, this time, fling the comments of her
sick brain, and expose the fatigue of a body which thenceforth would be
able to demand but the briefest of gratifications? Eight years before
she had written to Count Grzymala to show of what she was capable, and
that a heart like hers could pass through the most diverse phases of
passion. If the whole horizon of love had been traversed, it seemed
right, even useful, to call a halt at the threshold of the oncoming
night. So she took a sheet of paper and wrote to the same confidant—he
of the first and of the final hour—the following lines:
“_12th May, 1847._
“Thank you, my dear friend, for your good letters. I knew in a
vague and uncertain way that he was ill twenty-four hours before
the letter from the good Princess. Thank that angel also for me.
How I suffered during those twenty-four hours it is impossible to
tell you. Whatever had happened I was in such a position that I
could not have budged.
“Anyway, once again he is saved, but how dark the future is for me
in that quarter!
“I do not yet know if my daughter is to be married here in a week,
or at Paris in a fortnight. In any case, I shall be in Paris for
a few days at the end of the month, and if Chopin can be moved I
shall bring him back here. My friend, I am as happy as can be over
the marriage of my daughter, as she is transported with love and
joy, and as Clésinger seems to deserve it, loves her passionately,
and will give her the life she wants. But in any case, one suffers
a great deal in making such a decision.
“I feel that Chopin must for his part have suffered also at not
knowing, at not understanding, and at not being able to advise
anything; but it is impossible to take his advice on the real
affairs of life into consideration. He has never seen facts
truly, nor understood human nature on a single point; his soul is
all poetry and music, and he cannot bear what is different from
himself. Besides, his influence in my family affairs would mean for
me the loss of all dignity and of all love for and from my children.
“Talk to him and try to make him understand in a general way that
he should refrain from thinking about them. If I tell him that
Clésinger (whom he does not like), deserves our affection, he
will only hate him the more, and will bring on himself Solange’s
hatred. This is all very difficult and delicate, and I know of
no way of calming and restoring a sick soul who is irritated by
efforts to heal him. The evil that consumes this poor being, both
morally and physically, has been killing me for a long time, and I
see him go away without ever having been able to do him any good,
since it is the anxious, jealous and suspicious affection he has
for me that is the principal cause of his sadness. For seven years
I have lived like a virgin with him and with others; I have grown
old before my time, without effort or sacrifice even, so tired was
I of passions and so irremediably disillusioned. If any woman on
earth should have inspired him with the most absolute confidence,
it was I, and he never understood that; and I know that many people
are accusing me, some with having exhausted by the violence of my
senses, others with having made him desperate with my outbursts. I
believe you know the truth. He complains of me that I have killed
him by privation, while I was certain that I should kill him if
I acted otherwise. See how I stand in this dismal friendship, in
which I have made myself his slave whenever I could without showing
an impossible and culpable preference for him over my children,
in which the respect that I had to inspire in my children and in
my friends has been so delicate and so important to preserve. I
have achieved in this respect prodigies of patience of which I did
not believe myself capable, I, who had not the nature of a saint
like the Princess. I have attained to martyrdom; but Heaven is
inexorable against me, as though I had great crimes to expiate,
because in the midst of all these efforts and sacrifices, he whom I
love with an absolutely chaste and maternal love is dying a victim
of the mad attachment he bears for me.
“God grant, in His Goodness, that, at least, my children be
happy, that is to say, good, generous, and at peace with their
consciences; because I do not believe in happiness in this world,
and the law of Heaven is so strict in this regard that it is almost
an impious revolt to dream of not suffering from all external
things. The only strength in which we can take refuge is in the
wish to fulfil our duty.
“Remember me to our Anna, and tell her what is in the bottom of
my heart, then burn my letter. I am sending you one for that dear
Gutmann, whose address I do not know. Do not give it to him in the
presence of Chopin, who does not yet know that I have been told of
his sickness, and who does not want me to know it. His worthy and
generous heart has always a thousand exquisite delicacies side by
side with the cruel aberrations that are killing him. Ah! If Anna
could but talk to him one day, and probe into his heart to heal it!
But he closes it hermetically against his best friends. Good-bye,
my dear, I love you. Remember that I shall always have courage and
perseverance and devotion, in spite of my suffering, and that I do
not complain. Solange embraces you.
“George.”
What contradictions again, and how this time each phrase rings false!
The only truths that shine out here in spite of the author are the
twitchings of her will in the affair of her daughter, and her decision
to be finished with Chopin. She is, once more, in the pangs of
delivery, and a woman when a prey to that ill sticks at nothing. It was
in spite of her also—and perhaps because there is in love affairs as in
those of art, a sort of symmetry, a secret equilibrium—that this last
association had opened almost nine years earlier and is closed to-day
on a letter to the same man. These nearly nine years lie completely
between these two missives, of which the one expressed the initial
desire to unite two opposite souls by forcing nature; the other, to
jilt the ill-assorted partner—“all poetry and music”—for whom the
practical part of existence and the realities of the flesh remain the
true grounds of illusion. It is vain to try to comment further on so
perfectly intelligible a conflict. I am trying to be just in giving
neither right nor wrong to either of the two persons concerned. Each
brought his own contribution to the establishment, and, as it usually
happens, the one who had eaten his first took from the other that in
which he was more rich. George was bound to remain the stronger because
she had nothing left to give. Chopin was bound to founder because his
very wealth had ruined him.
* * * * *
On the 20th of May, Solange was married in haste, almost by stealth,
at Nohant. M. Dudevant was present at this curious wedding, where
his daughter did not even sign her name on the register, but the
pseudonym of her mother. The latter, having strained a muscle, had
to be carried to the church. “Never was a wedding less gay,” she
said. Evil presentiments were in the air. There followed yet another
engagement,—that of Augustine, Maurice’s friend, whom the young man
wanted to marry to his friend Théodore Rousseau, the painter. Then
certain strange events occurred. The engagement of Augustine was
abruptly broken off on some absurd pretext. In reality this was the
revenge of Solange. Out of her hate for her cousin and bitterness
against her brother, she informed Rousseau of the relationship she
assigned to them. They separated. George was outraged and complained
with bitterness. Then the Clésinger couple, two months married,
returned to Nohant and raised the mask, and there took place between
George and her son on the one side, and the sculptor and his wife on
the other, scenes of unprecedented violence.
“We have been nearly cutting each other’s throats here,” wrote the
unfortunate Sand to Mlle. de Rozières. “My son-in-law raised a hammer
against Maurice, and would perhaps have killed him if I had not thrown
myself between them, striking my son-in-law in the face, and receiving
a blow of his fist in the chest. If the priest, who was present, and
friends and a servant, had not interfered by main force, Maurice, who
was armed with a pistol, would have killed him on the spot. Solange
fanned the flame with cold ferocity, having caused these deplorable
furies by backstairs gossip, lies, unimaginable slanders, without
having had here from Maurice or from anybody whatever the slightest
shadow of teasing or the hint of a wrong. This diabolic couple left
yesterday evening, riddled with debt, triumphant in their insolence,
and leaving a scandal in the country-side that they can never live
down. Lastly, I was confined to my house for three days by the blow of
a murderer. I do not want ever to see them again, never again shall
they put foot in my house. They have gone too far. My God! I have done
nothing to deserve such a daughter.
“It was quite necessary for me to write part of this to Chopin; I was
afraid he might arrive in the middle of a catastrophe, and that he
would die of pain and shock. Do not tell him how far things went; they
are to be kept from him if possible. Do not tell him I wrote to you
and if M. and Mme. Clésinger do not boast of their behaviour, keep it
secret for my sake....
“I have a favour to ask of you, my child. That is to take complete
charge of the keys of my apartment, as soon as Chopin has left (if he
has not already), and not to let Clésinger, or his wife, or anyone
connected with them set foot in it. They are supreme robbers and with
prodigious coolness they would leave me without a bed. They carried off
everything from here, down to the counterpanes and candlesticks....”
It is most important to note two things. In this first letter to Mlle.
de Rozières, Sand supposes that Chopin has already left the Square
d’Orléans, or is on the point of so doing. We shall see why later on.
In the second letter—which I shall reprint below—notice the date: _July
the twenty-fifth_. These points will serve to shed a certain light on
a situation that is at first glance obscure, but which becomes clear
enough if these two landmarks are kept in sight.
“Nohant, _25 July._
“My friend, I am worried, frightened. I have had no news of Chopin
for several days, for I don’t know how many days because in the
trouble that is crushing me I cannot keep count of the time. But it
seems too long a time. He was about to leave and suddenly he does
not arrive, he does not write. Did he start? Has he been stopped,
ill somewhere? If he were seriously ill, wouldn’t you have written
me when you saw his state of illness prolonged? I myself, should
already have left if it had not been for my fear of passing him,
and for the horror I have of going to Paris and exposing myself to
the hate of her whom you think so good, so kind to me....
“Sometimes I think, to reassure myself, that Chopin loves her much
more than he does me, looks sourly at me and takes her part.
“I would rather that a hundred times than know him to be ill.
Tell me quite frankly how matters stand. If Solange’s frightful
maliciousness, if her incredible lies sway him,—so be it! Nothing
matters to me if he only gets well.”
Chopin had already suffered too much, renounced too much to come to
heel again and let himself be recaptured by the cries of this despoiled
mother, this hardened mistress. He did not want her pity. He did not
even give her his. Solange came to him. She had little difficulty in
convincing him that she was right, his distrust and suspicions had so
crystallized. Did not all the darkness in which they tried to keep
him hide still other breaches of faith, other riddances? His long
docility had turned at one bound into bitter disgust. “The cypresses
also have their caprices,” he said. It was his only complaint. He wrote
to George, but neither his letter, nor the one he received in reply
has been preserved. The lovers who had given each other eight years
of their lives could not consent to preserve in their archives the
bulletin of their supreme defeat. On the other hand, if we do not know
the terms in which they drew up the act of dissociation, we do know
their echo.
To Delacroix alone Chopin showed the letter of farewell he had
received. “I must admit that it is atrocious,” this friend wrote in
his _Journal_ under the date of _July the twentieth_. “Cruel passions,
long-suppressed impatience come to the surface; and as a contrast which
would be laughable if the subject were not so sad, the author from time
to time takes the place of the woman and spreads herself in tirades
that seem borrowed from a novel or a philosophical homily.”
If I have underlined the date, July the twenty-fifth, above, where
George complains of having been abandoned, it is to make the fact stand
out more clearly that already, five days before, on the twentieth,
Delacroix in his diary signals the existence of the letter of rupture,
which he describes as _atrocious_. So the astonishment of George may be
called astonishing. Note well her duplicity. There can be no doubt that
she foresaw its effect too well to suppose for an instant that Chopin
would come running to Nohant. Rather she counted on his moving out. Yet
she still wanted to play a part, to pose as the victim. Though she had
decided on the break, she feared the fame and the friends of Chopin,
who, later on, might search out the truth in the name of history. So in
her third letter to Mlle. de Rozières she wrote thus:
_(No date.)_
“... Sick to death, I was about to go and see why no one wrote to
me. Finally, I received by the morning post a letter from Chopin.
I see that, as usual, I have been duped by my stupid heart, and
that while I passed six sleepless nights torturing myself about his
health, he was engaged in talking and thinking ill of me with the
Clésingers. Very well. His letter has a ridiculous dignity and the
sermons of this good _pater familias_ shall serve as lessons to me.
A man warned is worth two. From now on I shall be perfectly easy in
that regard.
“There are many points about the affair that I can guess, and I
know what my daughter is capable of in the way of calumny. I know
what the poor brain of Chopin is capable of in the way of prejudice
and credulity.... But my eyes are open at last! and I shall
conduct myself accordingly; I will no longer allow ingratitude
and perversity to pasture on my flesh and blood. From now on I
shall remain here, peaceful and entrenched at Nohant, far from
the bloodthirsty enemies that are after me. I shall know how to
guard the gate of my fortress against the scoundrels and madmen. I
know that meanwhile they will be tearing me to pieces with their
slanders. Well and good! When they have glutted their hatred of me,
they will devour each other.
“... I think it _magnificent_ of Chopin to see, associate with, and
approve Clésinger, who _struck_ me, because I tore from his hands
a hammer he had raised against Maurice. Chopin, whom all the world
told me was my most faithful and most devoted friend! Marvellous!
My child, life is a bitter irony, and those who have the folly to
love and believe must close their careers with a lugubrious laugh
and a despairing sob, as I hope will soon be my lot. I believe
in God and in the immortality of my soul. The more I suffer in
this world, the more I believe. I shall quit this transitory life
with a profound disgust, to enter into life eternal with a great
confidence....”
She took up her pen a fourth time, on August the 14th:
“I am more seriously ill than they think. Thank God for it. I have
had enough of life, and I am packing up with great joy. I do not
ask you for news of Solange; I have it indirectly. As for Chopin,
I hear nothing further of him, and I beg you to tell me truthfully
how he is; no more. The rest does not in the least interest me and
I have no reason to miss his affection.”
There is a strong dose of the “_mélo_” that Chopin thought so hateful
in several passages of these documents, and the evident desire to
extract all possible pathos. But without doubt certain authentic
accents are to be found as well. It is probable that she herself would
not recognize them any too clearly. George Sand had suffered from
this rupture of which she was the cause, the agent and the victim. If
the same cries are no longer to be heard as in the Venetian days, it
is because thirteen years had passed since the de Musset experience.
But perhaps I am making her part seem too easy. For what are years to
passionate hearts? No, growing old is a poor reason. The only true one
is that this woman no longer tears anything living from her soul. If
she has not yet arrived at the time of the great cold, of which we have
already spoken, at least she has come to that of the first serenities.
A favourable epoch for her literature. She took advantage of it so well
that she chose it precisely for _L’Histoire de ma Vie_, the best of her
books.
As for Chopin, to complain was not in his nature. Even in these mortal
weeks all his pain had a beautiful discretion. As before, as always,
it rose and fell within himself. No blame passed his lips. To Louis
Viardot (the husband of the singer), who questioned him, he replied
simply: “Solange’s marriage is a great misfortune for her, for her
family, for her friends. Daughter and mother have been deceived, and
the mistake has been realized too late. But why blame only one for this
mistake that was shared by both? The daughter wished, demanded, an
ill-assorted marriage; but the mother, in consenting, has she not part
of the blame? With her great mind and her great experience, should she
not have enlightened a girl who was impelled by spite even more than by
love? If she had any illusion, we must not be without pity for an error
that is shared. And I, pitying them both from the depths of my soul,
I am trying to bring some consolation to the only one of them I am
permitted to see.”
He wanted to inform his sister about these happenings, but could not
at first manage to do it. To write certain words is sometimes so great
a cruelty to oneself! At last, after having burned several sheets of
paper, he succeeded in giving the essentials in his Christmas letter.
“_25 December, 1847._
“Beloved children,
“I did not reply to you immediately because I have been so horribly
busy. I am sending you, by the usual channel, some New Year
pictures.... I spent Christmas Eve in the most prosaic way, but I
thought of you all. All my best wishes to you, as always....
“Sol is with her father, in Gascony. She saw her mother on the way.
She went to Nohant with the Duvernets, but her mother received
her coldly and told her that if she would leave her husband she
might return to Nohant. Sol saw her nuptial room turned into a
theatre, her boudoir into a wardrobe for the actors, and she wrote
me that her mother spoke only of money matters. Her brother was
playing with his dog and all he found to say to her was: ‘Will you
have something to eat?’ The mother now seems more angry with her
son-in-law than with her daughter, though in her famous letter
she wrote to me that her son-in-law was not bad, that it was her
daughter who made him so. One might think she had wanted to rid
herself at one sweep of her daughter and of me, because we were in
the way. She will continue to correspond with her daughter; thus
her maternal heart, which cannot completely do without news of her
child, will be appeased for a moment and her conscience lulled
to sleep. She will think herself in the right, and will proclaim
me her enemy, for taking the part of the son-in-law she cannot
tolerate, simply because he married her daughter, while I really
opposed the marriage as much as I could. Singular creature, with
all her intelligence! A frenzy seizes her, and she spoils her life,
she spoils her daughter’s life. It will end badly with her son,
too, I predict and am certain. To excuse herself, she would like
to pick holes in those who wish her well, who believe in her, who
have never insulted her, and whom she cannot bear near her because
they are the mirror of her conscience. That is why she has not
written me a single word; that is why she is not coming to Paris
this winter; that is also why she has not said a single word to
her daughter. I do not regret having helped her to bear the eight
most difficult years of her life, those in which her daughter was
growing up, those in which she was bringing up her son; I do not
regret all that I have suffered; but I do regret that her daughter,
that perfectly tended plant, sheltered from so many storms, should
have been broken at her mother’s hands by an imprudence and a
laxity that one might pass over in a woman of twenty years, but not
in a woman of forty.
“That which has been and no longer is will not be written in the
annals. When, later on, she delves into her past, Mme. Sand will be
able to find in her soul only a happy memory of me. For the moment
she is in the strangest paroxysm of maternity, playing the rôle
of a juster and a more perfect mother than she really is, and it
is a fever for which there is no remedy, especially when it takes
possession of an excitable imagination that is easily carried away.
“... A new novel by Mme. Sand is appearing in the _Débats_, a novel
in the manner of the Berry novels, like _La Mare Au Diable_, and it
begins admirably. It is called _François Le Champi_.... There is
talk also of her _Mémoires_; but in a letter to Mme. Marliani, Mme.
Sand wrote that this would be rather the thoughts she has had up
until now on art, letters, etc.... and not what is generally meant
by memoirs. Indeed, it is too early for that, because dear Mme.
Sand will have many more adventures in her life before she grows
old; many beautiful things will still happen to her, and ugly ones
too...”
The irony is hardly malicious, and “the enemy” who would “tear her to
pieces” is very gentle. Indeed one must admire the way the artist holds
his temper in hand. The same day he wrote to Solange:
“... How the story of your two visits to Nohant saddened me!
Still, the first step is taken. You have shown heart, and this
was followed by a certain _rapprochement_, since you have been
begged to write. Time will do the rest. You know you must not take
everything that is said at face value. If they no longer want
to know a _stranger like me_, for instance, that cannot be the
lot of your husband, because he belongs to the family... I feel
suffocated, have headaches, and beg you to excuse my erasures and
my French...”
This was in January, 1848. February. Soon it would be ten months since
George and Frederick had separated. But Chopin did not get well. Quite
the contrary. His broken tenderness had not only killed his heart, it
had dried up the one source of his consolation, music. Since 1847, the
_bad year_, as he called it, Chopin composed nothing more.
“She has not written me another word, nor I to her,” he confided again
to his sister on the 10th of February. “She has instructed the landlord
to let her Paris apartment.... She plays comedies in the country, in
her daughter’s wedding-chamber; she forgets herself, acts as wildly
as only she can, and will not rouse herself until her heart hurts too
much, a heart that is at present overpowered by the head. I make a
cross above it. God protect her, if she cannot discern the true value
of flattery! Besides, it may be to me alone that the others seem
flatterers, while her happiness really lies in that direction and I do
not perceive it. For some time her friends and neighbours have been
able to make nothing of what has been going on down there of late, but
they are probably used to it already. Anyway, no one could ever follow
the caprices of such a soul. Eight years of a half-steady life were too
much. God permitted them to be the years when the children were growing
up, and if it had not been for me I do not know how long ago they would
have been with their father and no longer with her. And Maurice will
run off at the first opportunity to his father. But perhaps these are
the conditions of her existence, of her talent as a writer, of her
happiness? Don’t let it bother you,—it is already so far away! Time is
a great healer. Up till now, I have not got over it; that is why I have
not written to you. Everything I begin I burn the next moment. And I
should have so much to write to you! It is better to write nothing at
all.”
They saw each other again one last time, on the fourth of March, 1848,
quite by accident. Chopin was leaving Mme. Marliani’s as Mme. Sand was
going in. She pressed his trembling and icy hand. Chopin asked her if
she had recently had news of her daughter.
“A week ago,” she replied.
“Not yesterday, or the day before?”
“No.”
“Then I inform you that you are a grandmother. Solange has a little
girl, and I am very happy to be the first to give you the news.”
Then he bowed and went down the stairs. At the bottom he had a pang of
remorse, and wanted to go back. He had forgotten to add that Solange
and the child were doing well. He begged a friend who was with him to
give Mme. Sand this additional information, because going up steps had
become a frightfully painful business. George came back immediately.
She wanted further talk, and asked for news about himself. He replied
that he was well, and left. “There were mischievous meddlers between
us,” she said later in telling of this minute in the _Histoire de ma
Vie_.
As for Chopin, he reported this fortuitous encounter with her mother to
Mme. Clésinger, and added, “She seemed to be in good health. I am sure
that the triumph of the Republican idea makes her happy....”
Eight days before, in fact, the Revolution had burst. It must have been
singularly displeasing to _Prince Karol_. He wrote again to Solange:
“The birth of your child gave me more joy, you may well believe, than
the birth of the Republic.”
CHAPTER XVII
Swan Song
For twenty years Chopin had been playing hide-and-seek with
revolutions. He had left Warsaw a few weeks before that of 1830. His
projected trip to Italy in the spring of 1831 had been put off because
of the insurrections at Bologna, Milan, Ancona, Rome. He had arrived
in Paris a year after the “Three Glorious Days,” but still he had
witnessed from his balcony on the Boulevard Poissonnière the last
squalls of the storm. Louis-Philippe was then King of France. Now he
was abdicating after a reign of little more than seventeen years, just
the length of Chopin’s stay at Paris. ’48 promised to be a bad year
for artists. Very bad for Chopin, with that gaping wound in his heart,
and the phthisis against which he no longer even struggled. He decided
to leave France for a time, and to undertake a tour in Great Britain
that Miss Stirling, a Scotch lady whom he greatly liked, proposed
to organize. She had been his pupil for four years. But his friends
advised him to give a last concert in Paris before leaving. He allowed
himself to be persuaded. This was at the beginning of February.
In eight days all the tickets were sold, three hundred seats at 20
francs in the Salons Pleyel. “I shall have all Parisian society,” he
wrote to his family. “The King, the Queen, the Duke of Orleans, the
Duke of Montpensier have each taken ten places, even though they are
in mourning and none of them can come. Subscriptions are coming in for
a second concert, which I shall probably not give because the first
one already bores me.” And he adds the next day: “My friends tell me
that I shall not have to bother about anything, only to sit down and
play... They are writing to my publisher from Brest and Nantes to
reserve places. Such enthusiasm astonishes me, and I must begin playing
to-day, if only for the sake of my conscience, because I play less than
I used to do. (Before his concerts Chopin always practised on Bach.) I
am going to play, as a curiosity, the Mozart trio with Franchomme and
Allard. There will be neither free programmes nor free tickets. The
room will be comfortably arranged, and can hold three hundred people.
Pleyel always jokes about my foolishness, and to encourage me for this
concert, he is going to have the stairs banked with flowers. I shall
be just as though I were at home, and my eyes will meet, so to speak,
none but familiar faces... I am giving a great many lessons. I am
overwhelmed with all sorts of work, yet, with all that, I do nothing...
If you leave I shall move, too, because I doubt if I could stomach
another summer such as the last in Paris. If God gives us health, we
shall see each other again, and we shall talk, and embrace each other.”
It is not only lassitude that this letter breathes; does one not read
beneath the weary smiles the certainty of an approaching end? This
gathering of friends, this atmosphere of flowers and wreaths, has about
it something funereal. We detect in the eagerness of this élite of
worldlings and of artists an anxiety, something like a presentiment of
the twilight of a whole peaceful and elegant epoch. Poet and King are
passing away. Society is hastening to catch the last perfume of the
ancient lilies of France, and of the young Polish rose. Sweeping closer
was the triumph of George Sand, of the philosophers with dandruff, and
of Barbès.
Frederick Chopin’s supreme concert took place on Wednesday, the 16th
of February, 1848, one week before the abdication of Louis-Philippe.
Everything about it was extraordinary. The room was decorated with
flowers and carpets. The list of the selected audience had been revised
by Chopin himself. The text of the programme had been steel-engraved in
English script, and printed on beautiful paper. It read:
Part One
_Trio_ of Mozart, for piano, violin and violoncello,
by MM. Chopin, Allard and Franchomme.
_Airs_ sung by Mlle. Antonia Molina di Mondi.
_Nocturne_ } composed and played by M. Chopin.
_Barcarolle_ }
_Air_ sung by Mlle. Antonia Molina di Mondi.
_Etude_ } composed and played by M. Chopin.
_Berceuse_ }
Part Two
_Scherzo_, _Adagio_ and _Finale_ of the _Sonata in
G Minor for piano and violoncello_, composed by M. Chopin and
played by the composer and M. Franchomme.
_Air nouveau_ from _Robert the Devil_, by Meyerbeer,
sung by M. Roger.
_Preludes_ }
_Mazurkas_ } composed and played by M. Chopin.
_Valses_ }
Accompanists: MM. Aulary and de Garaudé.
The _Barcarolle_ is that of 1846 (op. 60). The _Berceuse_ (op. 57)
dates from 1845. As for the _Nocturne_ and the _Etude_ that were
announced, one can only guess. The _Sonata for piano and violoncello_
is the last work he published. As to the _Preludes_ and the _Mazurkas_
we are again at a loss. But it is known that the Waltz chosen was that
which is called “The Waltz of the Little Dog” (op. 64, no. 1).
Chopin appeared. He was extremely weak, but erect. His face, though
pale, showed no change. Neither did his playing betray any exhaustion,
and they were sufficiently accustomed to the softness and surprises
of his touch not to wonder that he played _pianissimo_ the two
_forte_ passages at the end of his _Barcarolle_. One is glad to know
that for that evening he chose this lovely plaint, the story of a
lovers’ meeting in an Italian country-side. Thirds and sixths, always
distinct, turn this dialogue for two voices, for two souls, into a very
easily read commentary on his own story. “One dreams of a mysterious
apotheosis,” Maurice Ravel has said of this piece. Perhaps, indeed, it
is an inner climax, the glorification of his unexpressed tenderness.
The effort was so great that Chopin nearly fainted in the foyer when he
had finished. As for the enthusiasm of the public, it hardly needs to
be mentioned. “The sylph has kept faith,” said the _Gazette Musicale_,
a few days later, “and with what success, what enthusiasm! It is easier
to tell of the welcome he received, the transports he excited, than
to describe, to analyse, and to lay bare the secrets of an execution
that has no like in our earthly world. When we can command the pen that
traced the delicate marvels of Queen Mab, no bigger than the agate that
shines on the finger of an alderman... it will be as much as we can do
if we succeed in giving you an idea of a purely ideal talent into which
the material hardly enters. No one can interpret Chopin’s music, but
Chopin: all who were present on Wednesday are as convinced of that as
we are.”
Chopin arrived in London on the 20th of April, 1848, and settled in a
comfortable room in Dover Street with his three pianos: a Pleyel, an
Erard and a Broadwood. He did not arrive alone: England was invaded
by a swarm of artists fleeing the Continent, where revolutions were
breaking out on all sides. But Miss Stirling and her sister, Mrs.
Erskine, had thought of everything, and already society and the Press
were talking of Chopin’s visit.
At first, the change of air and of life seemed favourable to his
health. He breathed more easily and could make a few calls. He went
to the theatre, heard Jenny Lind sing, and the Philharmonic play,
but “their orchestra is like their roast beef, or their turtle soup:
energetic, serious, but nothing more.” His greatest trouble was the
lack of all rehearsals, and Chopin, before giving a concert, always
demanded rehearsals of the most detailed kind. For this reason he
decided not to appear in public. In addition, his spirits were low,
because of the bad political news from Poland. Furthermore, he learned
with pain of the complete misunderstandings of the Clésinger couple, of
a possible separation, and he thought at once of George. It was to be
hoped that this unhappy mother would have no new tears to shed!
Soon he was again overwhelmed with fatigue. He was obliged to be out
very late every evening, to give lessons all day long in order to pay
for his costly rooms, his servant, and his carriage. He began again to
spit blood. Still he was received with many attentions by diverse great
lords and ladies: the Duke of Westminster, the Duchesses of Somerset
and Sutherland, Lord Falmouth, Lady Gainsborough. Miss Stirling and her
sister, who adored him, wanted to drag him about to all their friends.
Finally, he played in two or three drawing-rooms for a fee of twenty
guineas, a fee that Mme. Rothschild advised him to reduce a little
“because at this season (June) it is necessary to make prices more
moderate.” The first evening took place at the Duchess of Sutherland’s,
at which were present the Queen, Prince Albert, the Prince of Prussia,
and more than eighty of the aristocracy, among them the old Duke of
Wellington. Stafford House, the ancient seat of the Sutherlands, struck
the artist with admiration He gave a marvelling description of it: “All
the royal palaces and old castles are splendid, but not decorated with
such taste and elegance as Stafford House. The stairs are celebrated
for their splendour, and it is a sight to see the Queen on these
staircases in a blaze of light, surrounded by all those diamonds,
ribbons, and garters, and descending with the most perfect elegance,
conversing, stopping on the different landings. In truth, it is
regrettable that a Paul Veronese could not have seen such a spectacle
and left one more masterpiece.”
Dear Chopin, he did not dream that in looking at such a picture we
should have hunted only for his poor bloodless face! What do this
ephemeral glitter and all these tinsel grandeurs mean to us beside
his little person, so wasted, but near to our hearts. We see the
magnificence of this gala evening merely for his sake, obscure actor
in a fête where nothing seems extraordinary to us save his feverish
glance. “I suffer from an idiotic home-sickness,” he wrote, “and in
spite of my absolute resignation, I am preoccupied, God knows why, with
what is to become of me.” He played at the Marquis of Douglas’s, at
Lady Gainsborough’s, at Lord Falmouth’s, in the midst of an affluence
of titled personages. “You know they live on grandeur. Why cite these
vain names again?” Yet he cites a great many. Among celebrities, he
was presented to Carlyle, to Bulwer, to Dickens, to Hogarth, a friend
of Walter Scott, who wrote a very beautiful article about him in the
_Daily News_. Among the “curiosities,” was Lady Byron. “We conversed
almost without understanding each other, she in English, I in French.
I can understand how she must have bored Byron.” Mr. Broadwood, the
piano manufacturer, was among the most attentive of his bourgeois
friends. Occasionally he had a visit from him in the mornings. Chopin
told him one day that he had slept badly. Coming in that evening, he
found on his bed a new spring mattress and pillows, provided by this
faithful protector.
These various recitals brought Chopin about five thousand francs, no
great sum, all told. But what did money matter? What could he do with
it? He had never been more sad. Not for a long while had he experienced
a real joy, he confided to Grzymala. “At bottom I am really past all
feeling. I vegetate, simply, and patiently await my end.”
On the 9th of August he left London for Scotland, where he went to
the house of his friends the Stirlings and their brother-in-law, Lord
Torphichen. The excellent Broadwood had reserved two places for him
in the train so that he might have more room, and had given him a Mr.
Wood, a music-seller, as a companion. He arrived in Edinburgh. His
apartment was reserved in the best hotel, where he rested a day and
a half. A tour of the city. A halt at a music shop where he heard
one of his _Mazurkas_ played by a blind pianist. He left again in an
English carriage, with a postilion, for Calder House, twelve miles
from Edinburgh. There Lord Torphichen received him in an old manor
surrounded by an immense park. There was nothing in sight but lawns,
trees, mountains and sky. “The walls of the castle are eight feet
thick. There are galleries on all sides and dark corridors hung with an
incalculable number of ancestral portraits of all colours and costumes,
some Scotch, others in armour, or again in panniers. There is nothing
lacking to satisfy the imagination. There is even a little Red Riding
Hood in the form of a ghost. But I have not yet seen her.” As for his
hosts, they were perfect, discreet and generous. “What splendid people
my Scots are!” wrote Chopin. “There is nothing I can desire that I do
not immediately receive. They even bring me the Paris papers every day.
I am well. I have peace and sleep, but I must leave in a week.”
These Stirlings of Keir were a very ancient family. They went back to
the fourteenth century, and had acquired wealth in the Indies. Jane
and her older sister, Mrs. Erskine, had known Chopin in Paris. They
were two noble women, older than Frederick, but the younger still
very beautiful. Ary Scheffer painted her several times, because she
represented to his eyes the ideal of beauty. It was said that she
wanted to marry Chopin. To those who spoke to him about it, “As well
marry her to Death,” he said.
Life was agreeable at Calder House; quiet mornings, drives in the
afternoon, and in the evening music. Chopin harmonized for the old lord
the Scotch airs that the latter hummed. A picture that does not lack
piquancy. But the poor swan was restless. He thought always of George,
of whom he had just received news through Solange. It was bad. As the
proclamations which had ignited Civil War, even in the provinces, were
attributed to her, she had been in bad odour in her Nohant world.
Taking refuge at Tours, “she is stuck in a sea of mud,” wrote Chopin
to his sister, “and she has dragged many others with her.” A filthy
lampoon was circulating about her, published by the father of that
same Augustine whom Chopin detested. This man complained that “she had
corrupted his daughter, whom she had made the mistress of Maurice, and
then married to the first comer... The father cites Mme. Sand’s own
letters. In one word, a most dirty sensation, in which all Paris is
interested to-day. It is an outrage on the part of the father, _but
it is the truth_. So much for the philanthropic deed she thought she
was doing, and against which I fought with all my strength when the
girl came into the house! She should have been left with her parents,
not put into the head of this young man, who will never marry except
for money. But he wanted to have a pretty cousin in the house. She
was dressed like Sol, and better groomed, because Maurice insisted on
it.... Solange saw the whole thing, which made them uncomfortable...
Hence, lies, shame, embarrassment, and the rest.”
All the rancours, all the bitternesses are seen coming to the surface
again. And immense regrets. “The English are so different from the
French, to whom I am attached as to my own people,” he wrote again
in this same letter to his family. “They weigh everything by the
pound sterling, and love art only because it is superfluous. They are
excellent people, but so original that I understand how one could
oneself become stiff here: one changes into a machine.”
He was obliged to leave Calder House to give several concerts.
Manchester at the end of August; Glasgow at the end of September;
Edinburgh at the beginning of October. And if everywhere he reaped
the same success, the same admiring surprise, a kind of tempered
enthusiasm, yet most of the criticisms noted that his playing was no
more than a kind of murmur. “Chopin seems about thirty years old,” said
the _Manchester Guardian_. (He was thirty-eight.) “He is very frail of
body, and in his walk. This impression vanishes when he seats himself
at the piano, in which he seems completely absorbed. Chopin’s music,
and the style of his playing, have the same dominant characteristics;
he has more refinement than vigour; he prefers a subtle elaboration
to a simple grasp of the composition; his touch is elegant and quick
without his striking the instrument with any joyful firmness. His
music and his playing are the perfection of chamber music... but they
need more inspiration, more frankness of design, and more power in the
execution to be felt in a large hall.”
These are the same discreet reproaches that were made in Vienna in
1828. But only his friends knew how ill he was, and how he now had to
be carried up the stairs. He remained _chic_, however, as refined in
his dress as a woman, exercised about his linen, his shoes, insisting
on their being irreproachable. His servant curled him every morning
with an iron. The imperious side of his nature revealed itself.
Everything weighed him down: attentions, even affection, became heavy
on his shoulders, like his greatcoat or even his cashmere shawl.
These are the irritations of a very sick man: “People kill me with
their useless solicitude. I feel alone, alone, alone, although I am
surrounded... I grow weaker every day. I can compose nothing, not
that the will is lacking, but rather the physical strength... My
Scots will not leave me in peace; they smother me with politeness and
out of politeness I will not reproach them.” These were his plaints
to Grzymala. He was carried to Stirling, to Keir, from one castle
to another, from a Lord to a Duke. Everywhere he found sumptuous
hospitality, excellent pianos, beautiful pictures, well-selected
libraries, hunting, horses, dogs; but wherever he is, he expires of
coughing and irritation. What was he to do after dinner when the
gentlemen settled down in the dining-room around their whisky and when,
not knowing their tongue, he was obliged “to watch them talk, and hear
them drink”? A renewal of home-sickness, of sickness for Nohant. While
they talked of their family trees, and, “as in the Gospel, cited names
and names that went back to the Lord Jesus,” Chopin drafted letters
to his friends. “If Solange settles in Russia,” he wrote to Mlle. de
Rozières, “with whom will she talk of France? With whom can she prattle
in the Berry _patois_? Does that seem of no importance to you? Well,
it is, nevertheless, a great consolation in a strange country to have
someone about you who, as soon as you see him, carries you back in
thought to your own country.”
He came back at last to London in the beginning of October, to go
straight to bed. Breathlessness, headaches, cold, bronchitis, all the
regular symptoms. His Scots followed him, cared for him, as did also
Princess Czartoryska, who constituted herself his sick-nurse. From that
time on, his one dream was to get back to France. As before, on his
return from Majorca, he charged Grzymala to find him a lodging near the
Boulevards between the rue de la Paix and the Madeleine. He needed also
a room for his valet. “Why I give you all this trouble, I don’t know,
for nothing gives me pleasure, but I’ve got to think of myself.” And
suddenly the old pain bursts forth without apparent rhyme or reason in
the very middle of these domestic affairs: “I have never cursed anyone,
but at this moment everything is so insupportable to me that it would
soothe me, it seems to me, if I could curse Lucrezia!...” Three lines
follow which he immediately effaced, and made indecipherable. Then
coming back to himself, or having once more swallowed what he could
never consent to express, he adds: “But they are suffering down there,
too, no doubt; they suffer so much the more in that they are growing
old in their anger. As for Solange, I shall eternally pity her.”
So the mystery of this soul remains. No one will ever clearly trace its
meetings of the extremes of love, scorn, and hate. The only certain
fact is that from the time of his break with George, the life both of
his body and of his spirit was finished for Chopin. It will be said
that was already condemned. Not more than at the return from Majorca.
And his father did not succumb to the same illness until he was
seventy-five years old. Chopin had deliberately given up a struggle in
which he had no further motive for the will to win. In fact, he says
as much: “And why should I come back? Why does God not kill me at once
instead of letting me die slowly of a fever of irresolution? And my
Scots torture me more than I can bear. Mrs. Erskine, who is a very good
Protestant, possibly wants to make a Protestant out of me, because she
is always bringing me the Bible, and talking to me of the soul, and
marking Psalms for me to read. She is religious and good, but she is
very much worried about my soul. She _saws_ away all the time at me,
telling me that the other world is better than this, and I know that by
heart. I reply by citations from Scripture and tell her that I know all
about it.”
This dying man dragged himself again from London to Edinburgh, to a
castle of the Duke of Hamilton, came back to London, gave a concert
for the benefit of the Poles, and made his will. Gutmann, his friend
and pupil, informed him that a rumour of his marriage was circulating
in Paris. Those unfortunate Scots, no doubt! “Friendship remains
friendship,” replied Chopin. “And even if I could fall in love with a
being who would love me as I should want to be loved, I still should
not marry, because I should have nothing to eat, nor anywhere to go. A
rich woman looks for a rich man, and if she loves a poor man, at least
he shouldn’t be an invalid!... No, I am not thinking of a wife; much
rather of my father’s house, of my mother, of my sisters... And my art,
where has that gone? And my heart, where have I squandered it? I can
scarcely still remember how they sing at home. All round me the world
is vanishing in an utterly strange manner—I am losing my way—I have no
strength at all... I am not complaining to you, but you question and I
reply: I am closer to the coffin than to the nuptial bed. My soul is at
peace. I am resigned.”
He left at last, at the beginning of the year 1849, to return to the
Square d’Orléans, and he sent his last instructions to Grzymala. Let
pine cones be bought for his fire. Let curtains and carpet be in place.
Also a Pleyel piano and a bouquet of violets in the salon, that the
room may be perfumed. “On my return, I want still to find a little
poetry when I pass from the salon to my room, where no doubt I shall be
in bed for a long time.”
With what joy he saw again his little apartment! Unhappily, Dr.
Molin, who alone had the secret of setting him on his legs again, had
died not long before. He consulted Dr. Roth, Dr. Louis, Dr. Simon, a
homeopath. They all prescribed the old inefficacious remedies: _l’eau
de gomme_, rest, precautions. Chopin shrugged his shoulders. He saw
death everywhere: Kalkbrenner was dead; Dr. Molin was dead; the son of
the painter Delaroche was dead; a servant of Franchomme’s was dead; the
singer Catalani (who had given him his first watch at the age of ten)
had just died also.
“On the other hand, Noailles is better,” said one of his Scots.
“Yes, but the King of Spain has died at Lisbon,” replied Chopin.
All his friends visited him: Prince Czartoryski and his wife,
Delphine Potoçka, Mme. de Rothschild, Legouvé, Jenny Lind, Delacroix,
Franchomme, Gutmann.
And then,—he had not a sou. Absent-minded and negligent, Chopin never
knew much about the state of his finances. Just then they were at zero,
for he could no longer give a single lesson. Franchomme served as
his banker, but he had to exercise his ingenuity, and invent stories
to explain the origin of the funds advanced by one or other of his
friends. If he had suspected this state of things, Chopin would have
flatly refused. The idea of such charity would have been insupportable
to him. In this connection there came about a curious happening. The
Stirling ladies, wishing to remove this worry, thought of sending
to his concierge the sum of 25,000 francs in a sealed and anonymous
envelope. Mme. Etienne received the envelope, slipped it behind the
glass of her clock, and forgot it. When Mrs. Erskine perceived that
Chopin had not received this money she made her confession to the
artist. He shouted aloud. “I must have told her a lot of truths,” he
told Grzymala, “as, for example, this: ‘that she would have to be the
Queen of England to make me accept such princely presents.’” Meanwhile,
as the money was not found, the postman who had delivered it to the
concierge consulted a fortune-teller. The latter requested, in order
to consult his oracles properly, a lock of Mme. Etienne’s hair. Chopin
obtained it by subterfuge, upon which the clairvoyant declared that
the envelope was under the clock glass. And in truth it was discovered
there intact. “Hein! What do you say to that? What do you think of this
fortune-teller? My head is in a whirl with wonder.”
As is the case with very nervous people, Chopin’s health was
capricious. There were ups and downs. With the return of spring he
could go out a little, in a carriage, but he could not leave it. His
publisher, Schlesinger, came to the edge of the pavement to talk
business to him. Delacroix often accompanied him. He consigned to his
_Journal_ notes that remain precious to us.
January 29th. “In the evening to see Chopin; I stayed with him till
ten o’clock. Dear man! We spoke of Mme. Sand, that woman of strange
destiny, made up of so many qualities and vices. It was apropos of her
_Mémoires_. He told me that it would be impossible for her to write
them. She has forgotten it all; she has flashes of feeling, and forgets
quickly.... I said that I predicted in advance an unhappy old age for
her. He did not think so.... Her conscience does not reproach her
for anything of all that for which her friends reproach her. She has
good health, which may easily last; only one thing would affect her
profoundly: the loss of Maurice or that he should turn out badly.
“As for Chopin, illness prevents him from interesting himself in
anything, and especially in work. I said to him that age and the
agitations of the times would not be long in chilling me, too. He
replied that he thought I had strength to resist. ‘You rejoice in your
talent,’ he said, ‘with a sort of security that is a rare privilege,
and is better than this feverish chase after fame.’”
March 30th. “Saw in the evening at Chopin’s the enchantress, Mme.
Potoçka. I had heard her twice, I have hardly ever seen anything more
perfect... Saw Mme. Kalerji. She played, but not very sympathetically;
on the other hand, she is really extremely lovely when she raises her
eyes in playing, like the Magdalens of Guido Reni or of Rubens.”
April 14th. “In the evening to Chopin’s: I found him very much
weakened, hardly breathing. After awhile my presence restored him. He
told me that his cruellest torment was boredom. I asked him if he had
not known in earlier times the insupportable emptiness that I still
sometimes feel. He said that he had always been able to find something
to do; an occupation, however unimportant, filled the moments, and kept
off those vapours. Grief was another matter.”
April 22nd. “After dinner to see Chopin, a man of exquisite heart,
and, I need not say, mind. He spoke to me of people we have known
together... He had dragged himself to the first performance of _The
Prophet_. His horror of this rhapsody!”
* * * * *
In May, Chopin burned his manuscripts. He tried to work up a method for
the piano, gave it up, burned it with the rest. Clearly the idea of the
imperfect, of the unfinished, was insupportable to his spirit.
The doctors having recommended a purer air, a quieter neighbourhood,
his friends rented an apartment in the rue de Chaillot, on the second
floor of a new house, and took him there. There was a beautiful view
over Paris. He stayed there motionless behind his window, speaking very
little. Towards the end of June he desired suddenly, and at any cost,
to see his own people again. He sent a letter summoning them which took
him two days to write.
CHAPTER XVIII
“The Cypresses have their caprices”
“To Madame Louise Jedrzeïewicz.
“Paris, _Monday, June 25, 1849._
“My dearly beloveds,
“If you can, come. I am ill, and no doctor can help me as you can. If
you need money, borrow it; when I am better I can easily make it and
return it to whoever lends it to you, but just now I am too broke to
be able to send you anything. My Chaillot apartment is big enough to
receive you, even with the two children. Little Louise will benefit in
every way. Papa Calasante[1] shall run about all day long; we have the
Agricultural Products Exhibition close to us here; in a word, he will
have much more time for himself than he did the other time, because I
am weaker, and shall stay more in the house with Louise. My friends and
all my well-wishers are convinced that the best remedy for me would be
the arrival of Louise, as she will certainly learn from Mme. Obreskow’s
letter. So get your passport. People whom Louise does not know, one
from the North, and one from the South, told me to-day that it would
benefit, not only my health, but also my sister’s.
[Footnote 1: His brother-in-law.]
“So, mother Louise and daughter Louise, bring your thimbles and your
needles. I’ll give you handkerchiefs to mark, socks to knit, and you
shall spend your time for a few months in the fresh air with your old
brother and uncle. The journey is easier now; also you don’t need much
luggage. We’ll try to be happy here on very little. You shall find
food and shelter. And even if sometimes Calasante finds that it is far
from the Champs Elysées to town, he can stay in my apartment in the
Square d’Orléans. The omnibus goes right from the Square to my door
here. I don’t know myself why I want so much to have Louise, it’s like
the longing of a pregnant woman. I swear to you that it will be good
for her, too. I hope that the family council will send her to me: who
knows whether I shan’t take her back when I am well! Then we could
all rejoice and embrace each other, as I have already written, but
without wigs and with our own teeth. The wife always owes obedience
to her husband; so it’s the husband whom I beg to bring his wife; I
beg it with my whole heart, and if he weighs it well he will see that
he cannot give a greater pleasure either to her, or to me, or do a
greater service even to the children, if he should bring one of them.
(As to the little girl I do not doubt it.) It will cost money, it is
true, but it cannot be better spent nor could you travel more cheaply.
Once here, your quarters will be provided. Write me a little word.
Mme. Obreskow, who had the kindness to want to write (I have given her
Louise’s address), will perhaps be more persuasive. Mlle. de Rozières
will also add a word, and Cochet, if he were here, would speak for
me, because there is no doubt that he would find me no better. His
Æsculapius has not shown himself for ten days because he has at last
perceived that there is something in my sickness that passes his
science. In spite of that, you must praise him to your tenant, and to
all who know him, and say that he has done me a great deal of good;
but my head is made that way: when I am a little bit better, that’s
enough for me. Say also that everyone is convinced that he has cured a
quantity of people of cholera. The cholera is diminishing a great deal;
it has almost disappeared. The weather is superb; I am sitting in the
salon from where I can admire the whole panorama of Paris: the towers,
the Tuileries, the Chambres, St.-Germain l’Auxerrois, St. Etienne du
Mont, Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, St. Sulpice, Val de Grâce, the five
windows of the Invalides, and between these buildings and me nothing
but gardens. You will see it all when you come. Now get busy on the
passport and the money, but do it quickly. Write me a word at once. You
know that the cypresses have their caprices: my caprice to-day is to
see you in my house. Maybe God will permit everything to go well: but
if God does not wish it, act at least as though He did. I have great
hope, because I never ask for very much, and I should have refrained
from this also if I had not been urged on by all who wish me well.
Bestir yourself, Monsieur Calasante. In return, I shall give you _huge_
and excellent cigars; I know someone who smokes marvellous ones—in
the garden, mind you! I hope the letter I wrote for Mamma’s birthday
arrived, and that I did not miss the date too far. I don’t want to
think of all that because it makes me feverish, and, thank God, I have
no fever, which disconcerts and vexes all the ordinary doctors.
“Your affectionate but very feeble brother,
“Ch.”
CHAPTER XIX
The Death of Chopin
“Mother Louise and daughter Louise” hurried to him at once. Calasante
accompanied them. Chopin would have greatly liked to see again the
friend of his youth, Titus, who had just arrived at Ostend. But as
he was a Russian subject, passport difficulties prevented him from
entering France. “The doctors do not allow me to travel,” wrote the
invalid, who had hoped to be able to go to meet him. “I drink Pyrenees
water in my room, but your presence would be more healing than any
medicine. Yours even in death, your Frederick.”
About six weeks glided by without any improvement. Chopin hardly spoke
any more and made himself understood by signs. A consultation took
place between the Doctors Cruveillé, Louis and Blache. They decided
that any change to the South of France was thenceforth useless, but
that it would be preferable to take the dying man to quarters that
could be heated, and were more convenient, and very airy. After long
search, they found what they needed at No. 12, Place Vendôme. Chopin
was carried there. One last time he took up his pen to write to
Franchomme. “I shall see you next winter, being settled at last in a
comfortable manner. My sister will remain with me unless they should
call her back for something important, I love you, that is all that I
can say for the moment because I am crushed with fatigue and weakness.”
Charles Gavard, the young brother of one of his pupils, often came to
see him and read to him. Chopin indicated his preferences. He returned
with the greatest pleasure to Voltaire’s _Dictionnaire Philosophique_,
in which he appreciated especially the form, the conciseness, and the
impeccable taste. It was, in fact, the chapter on “The Different Tastes
of Peoples” that Gavard read to him one of the last times.
His condition grew rapidly worse; yet he complained little. The
thought of his end did not seem to affect him much. In the first days
of October he had no longer strength enough to sit up. The spells of
suffocation grew worse. Gutmann, who was very tall and robust, knew
better than any how to hold him, to settle him in his pillows. Princess
Marceline Czartoryska again took up her service as nurse, spending the
greater part of her days at the Place Vendôme. Franchomme came back
from the country. The family and friends assembled about the dying man
ready to help as they could. All of them waited in the room next to
that in which Chopin lived his last days.
One of his childhood friends, Abbé Alexandre Jelowiçki, with whom he
had been on cold terms, wanted to see him again when he learned of
the gravity of his illness. Three times in succession they refused
to receive him; but the Abbé succeeded in informing Chopin of his
presence, and was admitted immediately. After that he came back every
day. Chopin had great pleasure in recovering this comrade of other days.
“I would not like to die,” he said, “without having received the
sacraments, lest I should pain my mother; but I do not understand them
as you wish. I can see nothing in confession beyond the relief of a
burdened heart on the heart of a friend.”
The Abbé has related that on the 13th of October, in the morning, he
found Chopin a little better.
“My friend,” the Abbé said, “to-day is the birthday of my poor dead
brother. You must give me something for this day.”
“What can I give you?”
“Your soul.”
“Ah! I understand,” cried Frederick. “Here it is. Take it.”
Jelowiçki fell on his knees and presented the Crucifix to Chopin,
who began to weep. He immediately confessed, made his communion, and
received extreme unction. Then he said, embracing his friend with
both arms in the Polish fashion: “Thank you, dear friend. Thanks to
you I shan’t die like a pig.” That day was calmer, but the fits of
suffocation began again very shortly. As Gutmann was holding him in
his arms during one of these wearing attacks, Chopin said after a long
breathless silence:
“Now I begin my agony.”
The doctor felt his pulse and sought for a reassuring word, but Chopin
went on with authority:
“It is a rare favour that God gives to a man in revealing the moment
when his agony begins; this grace He has given to me. Do not disturb
me.”
It was that evening also that Franchomme heard him murmur: “Still, she
told me that I should not die except in her arms.”
On Sunday the 15th of October his friend Delphine Potoçka arrived from
Nice, whence a telegram had recalled her. When Chopin knew that she was
in his drawing-room he said: “So that is why God has delayed calling me
to Him. He wanted to let me have the pleasure of seeing her again.”
She had hardly approached his bed when the dying man expressed the
desire to hear the voice that he had loved. They pushed the piano on
to the threshold of the room. Smothering her sobs, the Countess sang.
In the general emotion no one could remember later on, with certainty,
what pieces she chose. Yet at the request of Chopin she sang twice.
Suddenly they heard the death-rattle. The piano was pushed back, and
all knelt down. Yet that was not the end, and he lived through that
night. On the 16th his voice failed, and he lost consciousness for
several hours. But he came to himself, made a sign that he wished to
write, and placed on a sheet of paper his last wish:
“_As this Earth will smother me I conjure you to have my body opened so
that I may not be buried alive._”
Later he again recovered the feeble use of his voice. Then he said:
“You will find many compositions more or less sketched out; I beg of
you, by the love you bear me, to burn them all, with the exception of
the beginning of a _Method_, which I bequeath to Alkan and Reber to
make some use of it. The rest, without exception, must be burned, for
I have a great respect for the public, and my efforts are as finished
as it has been in my power to make them. I will not have my name made
responsible for the circulation of works unworthy of the public.”
Then he made his farewells to each of them. Calling Princess Marceline
and Mlle. Gavard, he said to them: “When you make music together, think
of me, and I shall hear you.” Addressing Franchomme: “Play Mozart in
memory of me.” All that night Abbé Jelowiçki recited the prayers for
the dying, which they all repeated together. Chopin alone remained
mute; life now revealed itself only by nervous spasms. Gutmann held
his hand between his own, and from time to time gave him something to
drink. “Dear friend,” murmured Chopin once. His face became black and
rigid. The doctor bent over him and asked if he suffered. “No more,”
replied Chopin. This was the last word. A few instants later they saw
that he had ceased to live.
It was the 17th of October, 1849, at two o’clock in the morning.
They all went out to weep.
From the early morning hours Chopin’s favourite flowers were brought
in quantities. Clésinger came to make the death-mask. Kwiatkowski made
several sketches. He said to Jane Stirling, because he understood how
much she loved him: “He was as pure as a tear.”
CHAPTER XX
An Epitaph for a Poet
The death of an artist is the moment of his transfiguration. There are
many who were thought great, whose work nevertheless returns at once to
the dust. For others, on the contrary, the state of glory only begins
with death. Perhaps, as Delacroix said, in art everything is a matter
of the soul. We have not yet reached agreement as to the meaning and
value of that little word. But if it were necessary to give a working
idea of it, nothing would furnish it better than music. “A cry made
manifest,” Wagner called it. Doubtless that means: the most spontaneous
expression of oneself. The artist is he who has need to give form to
his cry.
Each one sets about it in his own manner. With a life expended
sumptuously like that of Liszt, contrast that of Chopin, entirely
reserved, not to be plucked by any hand, but so much the more filled
with perfume. All that he did not give forth, his love which none
could seize, his modesty and his timidity, that constant fever for
perfection, his elegancies, his exile’s home-sickness, and even his
moments of communication with the unknowable,—all these things are
potent in his work. To-day that is still the secret of its strength;
music received what men and women disdained. It is for music that he
refused himself. How one understands the desolation of Schumann when he
learned of the death of the swan, and this beautiful metaphor gushed
spontaneously from his pen: “The soul of music has passed over the
world.”
Just this must the crowds have dimly felt as they pressed to the Temple
of the Madeleine on the 30th of October, 1849. Thirteen days had been
required to prepare for the funeral that they wished to be as solemn
as the life of the dead had not been. But he was not even a Chevalier
of the Legion of Honour, this Monsieur Frederick Chopin! No matter.
“Nature had a holiday air,” reported the papers. Many lovely toilettes.
(He would have been flattered.) All the leaders of the musical and
literary world, Meyerbeer at their head, Berlioz, Gautier, Janin. Only
George Sand was missing. M. Daguerry, the Curé of the Madeleine, spent
two weeks in obtaining permission for women to sing in his church.
It is to the obsequies of Chopin that we owe this tolerance. Without
that, it would have been impossible to give Mozart’s _Requiem_. It was
played by the orchestra of the Conservatoire, conducted by Giraud.
The soloists were hidden by a black drapery behind the altar: Pauline
Viardot and Mme. Castellan, Lablache and Alexis Dupont. Lefébure-Wély
was at the organ. During the Offertory, they played two _Preludes_,
that in E minor (no. 4) and the 6th, in B minor, written at Majorca in
that dusk when Chopin had seen death while the rain fell in torrents on
the Chartreuse of Valdemosa.
The coffin was then lowered in the midst of the congregation, while
the famous _Funeral March_, orchestrated by Reber, sounded for the
first time. The cords of the pall were held by Prince Czartoryski,
Franchomme, Delacroix and Gutmann. Meyerbeer walked behind the hearse.
They set out, down the Boulevards, for the cemetery of Père-Lachaise.
There the body of Chopin was buried, except the heart, which was sent
to Warsaw, where it has since remained in the church of the Holy Cross.
A beautiful symbol which accords with that faithful heart.
No eulogy was pronounced. In the moments of meditation that followed
the descent of the bier a friendly hand was seen to throw on the coffin
that Polish earth that had been given to Chopin on the day he left
his country. Exactly nineteen years had passed since then. During all
those years the native soil had remained in the silver cup awaiting
this supreme use. But now Poland no longer existed. Nowhere but in this
delicate handful of earth,—and the work of Chopin: a few score pages in
which were to burn for three-quarters of a century the mysticism of a
Nation.
* * * * *
On the next 17th of October, in 1850, Miss Stirling went early in the
morning to Michon, the florist, who had served Chopin, and bought all
the violets she could find. Then she went to Père-Lachaise and placed
them on the tomb with a wreath in the name of the family of the dead.
At noon, Mass was celebrated in the chapel at the cemetery. Those who
were present then went back to the tomb, where Clésinger’s monument was
unveiled. It is a mediocre allegory, made by a man who hated Chopin.
How could such a thing have been beautiful? Only the medallion has a
little life. These words are engraved on the pedestal: “To Frederick
Chopin, his friends.” Deputy Wolowski tried to make a speech, but his
throat tightened and nothing was heard. All those who were brought
together there had been friends of the dead. They were still listening
to his voice, his piano, his consumptive cough. One of them recalled a
saying of his: “None can take from me that which belongs to me.”
To-day, these remains, pelted by the rain, this sorry Muse bent over
its lyre with broken strings, blend well enough with the trees of Mont
St.-Louis. There are strollers in this park of the dead. They stop
before the bust of de Musset, the handsome boy-lover who spelt his
sorrows into such charming rhymes. They make a little pilgrimage to the
tomb of Abélard and Héloïse, where a pious Abbess has had these words
cut: “The love that united their spirits during their life, and which
is preserved during their separation by the most tender and spiritual
of letters, has reunited their bodies in this tomb.” This reassures the
silent lovers who come secretly to throw a flower at the foot of these
two stone symbols lying side by side. But no one is seen on the narrow
path that leads from the central avenue to the grave of Chopin. For he
did not exemplify the career of a great lover, this musician of souls.
No soul was found that could be attuned to his. It never found its
lute-maker.
That word makes me think of a letter he wrote to Fontana fourteen
months before he died, and in which he throws some light on the depths
of his being: “The only unhappiness,” he wrote, “consists in this: that
we issue from the workshop of a celebrated master, some _sui generis_
Stradivarius, who is no longer there to mend us. Inexpert hands do not
know the secret of drawing new tones from us, and we push back into our
depths what no one has been able to evoke, for want of a lute-maker.”
There is a beautiful epitaph for a poet: dead for want of a lute-maker.
But where is he, this lute-maker of our lives?
_Etoy, October 17, 1926._
_77th Anniversary of the death of Chopin._
SOURCES
_The sources from which one can gather an authentic documentation of
the life of Chopin are extremely scarce. During his life, few people
took the trouble to preserve his letters, although he wrote but few.
Some, doubtless, attached but little value to them. Others caused them
to disappear because they exposed too intimate a part of their lives._
_An historic anecdote has it that Alexandre Dumas_ fils, _in the course
of a sentimental pilgrimage to Poland in the spring of 1851, fell by
chance upon the complete file of letters written by George Sand to
Chopin. Dumas brought the file back to France and, having restored
it to the novelist, saw her re-read her letters and then throw them
into the fire. Doubtless she thus thought to bury in eternal oblivion
the sad remains of a love whose raptures and whose pains alike would
not return to her. The burning, in 1863, of the Warsaw house of Mme.
Barcinska, Chopin’s youngest sister, destroyed other precious relics._
_So there remains to us but a very small number of the composer’s
letters. Even these were altered at will by their first editor, Maurice
Karasowski. Many biographers, however, have placidly copied them,
without taking the trouble to collate them with the original texts, or
even with the faithful and inexpurgated German translation which M. B.
Scharlitt published at Leipzig in 1911. M. Henri Bidou has been the
first to restore to us some of these letters in their libelled original
form. Karasowski’s work is important, nevertheless, because the
author, writing between 1860 and 1863, was intimately associated with
Chopin’s sisters and niece, and he gathered from their lips the family
traditions. Parts of this I have used particularly those concerned with
the composer’s childish years and his death, being convinced that the
pious legend is based on fact._
_Other episodes, notably the journey to Berlin and his love for
Constance Gladkowska, have been borrowed from the work of Count
Wodzinski. I have also adopted certain picturesque details furnished by
this same biographer, as well as some family information concerning his
relation, Marie Wodzinska. Let me say this much once for all, in order
not to load my text with references. The curious reader will find all
these on a later page in the list of Works Consulted._
_The first complete and soundly documented work on the life of Chopin
was published by F. Niecks, in London, in 1888. Niecks too had known
a number of friends and pupils of the master. His study has therefore
an individual flavour which has not been superseded by later works.
Elsewhere have been issued a whole series of works on the musician,
particularly in Polish, German and English. I cite first of all the
monumental_ Chopin _of Ferdynand Hoesick. But if we exclude the
imaginative and erroneous little books published in France during the
latter half of the nineteenth century (and up to our own day) we must
go to the work of M. E. Ganche to discover the first complete and
serious study of the Polish musician that has been published in French.
The recent volume of M. H. Bidou rectifies certain points in it and
amplifies certain others. It is an indispensable work for those who
wish to fathom Chopin’s music._
_As I lately attempted with Liszt, I have sought here only to discover
a face and to replace it in its frame. With this object, I have
always allowed my characters to speak and act. I have scrupulously
refrained from_ invention. _On the other hand, I have not hesitated to_
interpret, _believing, as I have said several times elsewhere, that
every fact draws its enduring value from artistic interpretation. My
effort has been only to group events in a certain order, to disentangle
the lines of the heart and those of the spirit without trying to
explain that which, in the soul of Chopin, has remained always
inexplicable; not to lift, indeed, from my subject that shadow that
gives him his inner meaning and his nebulous beauty._
PRINCIPAL WORKS CONSULTED
Franz Liszt: _F. Chopin._ Leipzig (Breitkopf). 1852 and 1923.
George Sand: _Histoire de ma vie._ 4 vol. Calmann-Lévy. Paris.
—_Un hiver à Majorque._ 1 vol., _ibid._ 1843.
—_Correspondance._
Maurice Karasowski: _F. Chopin._ Warsaw, 1862, and new ed. Berlin, 1877
and 1925.
Comte Wodzinski: _Les trois romans de F. Chopin._ Calmann, Paris, 1886.
Robert Schumann: _Etudes sur la musique et les musiciens._ Trad. H. de
Curzon. Paris, 1898.
M. Karlowicz: _Souvenirs inédits de F. Chopin._ Paris, and Leipzig,
1904. Trad. F. Disière.
Friedrich Niecks: _F. Chopin as a Man and a Musician._ London.
(Novello), 1882, 2 vol.
Kleczinski: _F. Chopin. De l’interpretation de ses œuvres._ Paris, 1906.
Wladimir Karénine: _George Sand, sa vie et ses œuvres._ Plon,
1899–1926. 4 vol. (An important and remarkable work, including a
quantity of unpublished documents of which I have made much use.)
Bernard Scharlitt: _F. Chopin’s gesammelte Briefe._ Leipzig, 1911.
(Only authentic and complete text of the letters.)
Samuel Rocheblave: _George Sand et sa fille._ Paris, 1905.
Elie Poirée: _Chopin._ Paris, 1907.
Edouard Ganche: _Frédéric Chopin, sa vie et ses œuvres._ Paris, 10th
ed. (_Mercure de France_), 1923.
Ferdynand Hoesick: _Chopin_, 3 vol. Warsaw, 1911.
I. Paderewski: _A la mémoire de F. Chopin_ (speech). 1911.
Eugène Delacroix: _Journal._ Plon, Paris. 3 vol., new ed., 1926.
Opienski: _Chopin._ Lwow, 1910 (Altenberg).
Henri Bidou: _Chopin._ (Libr. Alcan). Paris, 1926.
Aurore Sand: _Journal Intime de George Sand._ Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1926.
INDEX
Abélard, 260
Academy of Singing (Berlin), 27
Académie Royale (Paris), 57
_Adagio in E major_ (Chopin), 37
_Adagio_ of _Concerto in F minor_ (op. 21) (Chopin), 34, 50, 173
Adélaïde, Madame, 177
_Agnes_ (Paër), 35
Agoult, Countess Marie d’, 93, 101–103, 171–172
Aix-la-Chapelle, 71
Albert, Prince, 233
Alexandre, Czar (Emperor), 23
Allard, Monsieur, 229, 230
_Allegro_ (Moschelès), 23
_Allgemeine Musikalisches_ (Vienna), 32
Amboise, 67
America, 64
Ancona, 218
_Andante Spianato_, 73
Antonin, Château d’, 23–24, 35
_Appassionata, The_ (Beethoven), 19
Apollonius of Tyre, 160
Apponyi, Count, 68
Arago, 153, 203
Archbishop of Paris, 55
Artillery and Engineers, School of (Warsaw), 20
Auber, Daniel François Esprit, 70
Augusta, Princess (Infante), 43–44
Augustine, 197–198, 214, 237
Aulary, Monsieur, 231
Austerlitz, battle of, 18
Avignon, 127
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 33, 69, 150, 174, 229
Baillot, violinist, 62
Balearic Isles, _see also_ Majorca, Palma, Valdemosa, 127–142
_Ballade in G minor_ (op. 23) (Chopin), 85–86, 132, 145
Balzac, Honoré de, 19, 103–107
Barberini, Place (Rome), 190
_Barber of Seville, The_ (Rossini), 57
Barbès, 230
_Barcarolle_ (op. 60) (Chopin), 230–231
Barcelona, 128, 142
Baudelaire, Pierre-Charles, 163
Bayer, Mme. Constance, 48
Beauvau, Hôtel de (Marseilles), 145
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 19, 26, 31, 32, 35, 51, 62, 69, 74, 165, 174
Bellini, Vincenzo, 73
Belvédère, Palais de (Warsaw), 45
_Berceuse_ (op. 57) (Chopin), 230–231
Berlin, 27
Berlioz, Hector, 19, 65, 68, 72, 101, 165, 169, 258
Berry (France), 147 _et seq._, 240
Berry, Mme. la Duchesse de, 56
_Bertram_ (Meyerbeer), 109
Blache, Dr., 251 _et seq._
Blanc, Louis, 195, 203
Böhmischen Köchin, Café zur (Vienna), 47
Bologna, 228
Bona Sforza, 77
Bonstetten, Charles-Victor de, 77
Bossuet, Jaques Bénigne, 19
Bourges, Michel de, 100–101
Brault, Adèle, 197
Breslau, 33, 43
Brest, 229
Broadwood, piano, 232
Broadwood, piano manufacturer, 235
Bruhl, 79
Buloz, publisher, 131, 153
Bulwer, Lord, 234
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 19, 159, 285
Byron, Lady, 234
Calamatta, Louis, 156
Calder House (Scotland), 235
Callot, Jacques, 176
Carlist Party (Paris), 55
Carlsbad, 76
Carlyle, Thomas, 234
Carthusians, Order of, 130
Castellan, Mme., 258
Catalani, Angelica, 243
Cauvières, Dr., 145
Chaillot, rue de (Paris), 246
Chambres des Députés (Paris), 249
Champs Elysées (Paris), 248
Chartreuse of Valdemosa. _See_ Valdemosa
Chateaubriand, François-René, Vicomte de, 56
Chatiron, Hippolyte, 149, 181
Chaussée d’Antin (Paris), 68, 154
Cherubini, Marie-Louis-Charles-Zénobi-Salvador, 58
_Chmiel_, improvisation from (Chopin), 31
Chopin: Compositions, Pieces, Transcriptions, etc.
_Adagio_ of _Concerto in F minor_ (op. 21), 34, 50, 173
_Adagio in E major_, 37
_Ballade in G minor_ (op. 23), 85–86, 132, 145
_Barcarolle_ (op. 60), 231
_Berceuse_ (op. 57), 231
_Chmiel_, improvisation from, 31
_Concerto In E minor_ (op. 11), 40, 50, 58, 70, 72
_Concerto in F minor_ (op. 21), 34, 37, 50, 62, 84
_Etude_ (no. 5), 176
_Etude in C minor_ (op. 10, no. 12), 53
_Etude in E major_ (no. 3), 70
_Etude in G sharp minor_, 161
_Fantasia in E minor_, 178
_Fantasia on Polish Airs_, 40
_Funeral March_, 150, 259
_Grand Fantasia on Polish Airs_, 70
_Grande Polonaise_, 84
_Grande Valse in E flat major_, 70
_Impromptu_ (op. 29), 108
_Mazurkas_ (op. 41), 149
_Mazurka in A flat major_, 150
_Mazurka in B major_, 150, 202
_Mazurka in B minor_ (op. 30), 108
_Mazurka in C minor_ (op. 30), 108
_Mazurka in C sharp major_ (op. 30), 108
_Mazurka in C sharp minor_ (op. 63), 150, 202
_Mazurka in D flat major_ (op. 30), 108
_Mazurka in E minor_, 150
_Mazurka in F minor_ (op. 63), 202
_Mazurka in G major_, 150
_Mazurka in G minor_ (op. 30), 108
_Nocturne_ (op. 37, no. 2), 149
_Nocturne in C minor_ (op. 48), 150, 190–191
_Nocturne in G major_, 150
_Polonaise Brillante_, 73
_Polonaise in F minor_, 36
_Polonaise for piano and violoncello_, 36
_Potpourri on the setting moon_, 41
_Prelude in B minor_ (no. 6), 258
_Prelude in E minor_ (no. 4), 258
_Prelude in B minor_ (op. 6), 139
_Premier Rondo, in C minor_ (op. 1), 23
_Revolutionary, The_ (_Etude in C minor_, op. 10, no. 12), 53
_Rondeau in E flat major_, 70
_Rondo à la Krakoviak_, 31, 37, 70
_Second Scherzo_ (op. 31), 108
_Siberian, The_, 161, 162
_Sonata in B flat minor_, 150
_Sonata in E flat minor_, 149
_Sonata in G flat minor_, 178
_Sonata in G minor, for piano and violoncello_, 230
_Sonata with violoncello_, 202
_Tarantella_, 178
_Three Mazurkas_ (op. 33), 108
_Trio, for piano, violin, and violoncello_, 70
_Twelve Etudes_ (2nd vol., op. 25), 70
_Two Nocturnes_ (op. 32), 108
_Valses Brillantes_ (op. 34), 108, 178
_Valse de l’Adieu, in A flat major_ (op. 69, no. 1), 81
_Variations_ on the _La ci darem_, 26–27, 31, 32, 62
_Waltz in D flat major_ (op. 70, no. 3), 34, 50
_Waltz of the Little Dog, The_ (op. 64, no. 1), 231
_White Lady, The_, variations from, 31
Chopin, Emilie, 20
Chopin, Isabelle, 20, 66
Chopin, Louise, 18, 20, 60–62.
_See also_ Jedrzeïewicz, Louise
Chopin, Nicolas, 18, 20, 22, 26, 30, 46, 59, 76–77, 80, 193–194
Chopin, Mme. Nicolas, 18, 19, 76–77, 194, 247–251.
_See also_ Krzyzanowska, Justine
Cichowski, Monsieur, 82
Cimarosa, Domenico, 27
Clary, Prince, 33
Clary, Princess, 33
Clésinger, Jean-Baptiste-Auguste-Stello, 205–227, 233, 256, 260 _et
seq._
Clésinger, Mme., 214–227, 233, 237, 239, 241.
_See also_ Sand, Solange
Coignet, Jules-Louis-Philippe, 186
Cologne, 71
_Concerto in E minor_ (op. 11) (Chopin), 40, 50, 58, 70, 72
_Concerto in F minor_ (op. 21) (Chopin), 34, 37, 50, 62, 84
Congress of Naturalists (Berlin), 27
Conservatory of Music (Paris), 73, 258
Conservatory of Music (Warsaw), 22, 23, 30
Constantin, Grand Duke, Governor of Warsaw, 21, 45
Cramer, pianist, 58
Crans, Mlle. Saladin de, 77
Cruveillé, Dr., 251 _et seq._
Custine, Marquis de, 71, 93
Czartoryski, Prince Adam, 68, 159, 195, 205, 243, 259
Czartoryska, Princess Marceline, 195, 205, 208, 240, 243, 252–255
Czerny, Charles, 32, 33
Czosnowska, Countess, 202
Daguerry, Monsieur, 258
_Daily News_ (London), 234
Dantan, Jean-Pierre, 182, 185
Dante, Alighieri, 46, 159
Danube, The, 41
Dautremont, tailor (Paris), 154
da Vinci, Leonardo, 67
de Garaudé, Monsieur, 231
Delacroix, Eugène, 156, 158, 163–167, 173, 180, 195, 205, 218,
243–246, 257, 259
de Laprade, Victor, 203
Delaroche, Hippolyte-Paul, 243
_Desdemona_ (_see also Othello_), 58
des Préaulx, M., 205–206
Dickens, Charles, 234
_Dictionnaire Philosophique_ (Voltaire), 252
di Mondi, Mlle. Antonia Molina, 230
Dobrzyçka, Mme., 43–44, 79
_Don Juan_ (Mozart), 175
Douglas, Marquis of, 234
Dover Street (London), 232 _et seq._
Dresden, 33, 43, 77–81
Dudevant, Aurore. _See_ Sand, George
Dudevant, Casimir, 101, 197, 214, 222
Dudevant, Maurice. _See_ Sand, Maurice
Dudevant, Solange. _See_ Sand, Solange
Dupont, Alexis, 258
Duport, hatmaker (Paris), 154
Düsseldorf, 71, 86
Duteil, family of, 149
Duvernet, Théophile-Imarigeon, 149, 222
_Dziady (The Feast of the Dead)_ (Miçkiewicz), 159
Ecole de Médecine. _See_ School of Medicine (Paris)
Edinburgh, 235, 238, 241
Elbe, 79
Elizabeth, Queen, 67
_El Mallorquin_, 128
Elsner, Joseph-Xavier, 22, 37, 41, 60–62
Enfer, rue d’ (Paris), 56
Erard, piano, 171, 232
Erard, Salle, 72
Erskine, Mrs. _See also_ Stirling, family, 232 _et seq._
Etienne, Mme., 244
_Etude_ (no. 5) (Chopin), 176
_Etude in C minor_ (op. 10, no. 12) (Chopin), 53
_Etude in E major_ (no. 3) (Chopin), 70
_Etude in G sharp minor_ (Chopin), 161
Eusebius, 26
_Euterpe_, 78
Everard. _See_ Bourges, Michel de
Faber, Monsieur, 202
Falmouth, Lord, 233–234
_Fantasia in E minor_ (Chopin), 78
_Fantasia on Polish Airs_ (Chopin), 40
_Farewells, The (Sonata in E flat major)_ (Beethoven), 19
_Faust_ (Gounod), 35
_Ferdinand Cortez_ (Spontini), 27
Festival of Music (Aix-la-Chapelle), 71
Fétis, music critic, 63
_Fidélio_ (Beethoven), 19
Field, pianist, 58, 70
Fleury, family of, 149
Fontana, Jules, 21, 127, 128, 132, 141, 145–146, 150, 153, 154–155,
159, 182, 185, 261
Fouquet, Nicolas, 67
France, Hôtel de (Paris), 102
Franchomme, violoncellist, 62, 159, 229, 230, 243, 251–252, 259
François I, 67
Françoise, the chambermaid, 200
_François Le Champi_ (Sand), 224
Frankfurt-am-Oder, 28
Frauenkirche, The (Dresden), 80
Frère, Charles-Théodore, 186
_Freyschutz Die_ (Handel), 27
_Funeral March_ (Chopin), 150, 259
Gainsborough, Lady, 233–234
Gallenberg, Count, 30
Gaubert, Dr., 126
Gautier, Théophile, 258
Gavard, Charles, 252
Gavard, Mlle., 252, 255
_Gazette Musicale_ (Paris), 178–180, 232
Geneva, 77, 102, 171
Genoa, 147
Geological Museum (Berlin), 28
_Germany_ (Heine), 91
Giotto, Ambrogio, 157
Giraud, Monsieur, 258
Gladkowska, Constance, 30, 33–42, 44, 46, 48–50, 66
Glasgow, 238
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, 159
Gomez, Señor, 128, 132
_Grand Fantasia on Polish Airs_ (Chopin), 70
_Grande Polonaise_ (Chopin), 84
_Grande Polonaise_ (Kalkbrenner), 62
_Grande Valse in E flat major_ (Chopin), 70
Grenoble, 134
Grzymala, Count Albert, 65, 108–125, 127, 143, 153, 159, 205,
209–213, 235, 239–240, 242, 244
Gutmann, Monsieur, 70, 241, 243, 252–255, 259
Habeneck, conductor, 57
Hamilton, Duke of, 241
Handel, George Friedrich, 27
Hanska, Countess, 104, 107
Hartmann, Caroline, 70
Haslinger, music publisher (Vienna), 30, 44
Haydn, Joseph, 19, 202
Heine, Heinrich, 91, 102, 159, 173
Heller, Stephen, 168
Héloïse, 260
Hiller, Ferdinand, 62, 71, 102
_Histoire de ma Vie_ (Sand), 221, 227
Hogarth, William, 234
Holy Cross, Church of (Warsaw), 259
Hortense, Queen, 77
_House of the Wind, The_ (Majorca), 128–132
Houssaye, Arsène, 206
Hugo, Victor, 19
Hummel, Jean-Népomucène, 46, 50
Imperial Theatre (Vienna), 31
_Infernal Comedy_ (Miçkiewicz), 161
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 163
Inquisition, Palace of (Barcelona), 128
Invalides, Hôtel des (Paris), 249
_Invitation to the Waltz_ (von Weber), 187
Isambert, Mlle., singer, 62
Italian Opera House (Paris), 57
_Italienne à Alger, L’_ (Rossini), 57
Italy, 52, 218
Jagellons, dynasty of, 77
Janin, 258
Jardin des Plantes (Paris), 201
Jaroçki, Professor, 27–28
Jean, Prince of Lucca, future King of Saxony, 43–44
Jedrzeïewicz, Calasante, 193, 196, 247–250
Jedrzeïewicz, Louise, 193–195, 237–238, 247–250.
_See also_ Chopin, Louise
Jelowiçki, Abbé Alexandre, 252–255
Jéna, battle of, 20
Jésuites, rue des (Warsaw), 22
_Journal_ (Delacroix), 218, 244–246
_Journal des Débats_ (Paris), 224
_Journal Intime_ (Sand), 99–100, 169, 208
Jules II, 67
Kalerji, Mme., 245
Kalisz, 43
Kalkbrenner, Frédéric-Guillaume, 58–63, 70, 243
_Karol, Prince_ (Sand), 185, 227.
_See also Lucrezia Floriani_
Keats, John, 19
Keir, The Stirlings of, 236, 239
Kisting, piano factory, 27
Kleczynski, Professor, 170
Klengel, Alexandre, composer, 33
_Krakoviak. See Rondo à la Krakoviak_ (Chopin)
Krasinski, 159
_Kreutzer Sonata_ (Beethoven), 19
Kronprinz, Hôtel du (Berlin), 27
Krzyzanowska, Justine, 18.
_See also_ Chopin, Mme. Nicolas
Kurpinski, 37
Kwiatkowsky, 159, 256
Lablache, Mme. Louis, 57, 258
La Châtre (France), 207
_Lady of the Lake, The_ (Rossini), 41
Laffitte, rue (Paris), 102
La Fontaine, Jean de, 19, 67, 172
Lambert, Hôtel (Paris), 205
Lamennais, Abbé de, 97, 102
Lannes, Maréchale, 68
Lefébure-Wély, 258
_Légion d’Honneur, La_, 258
Legouvé, Monsieur, 243
Leipzig, 81, 85
Leipzig, battle of, 79
_Lélia_ (Sand), 97
_Le Méléagre_, 142
Lenz, Monsieur W. de, 186–188
_Le Phénicien_, 128
Leroux, Pierre, 159–160, 180, 199
Le Verier, Monsieur, 202
Lichnowsky, Count, 32
Lind, Jenny, 232, 243
Linde, Mme., 23
Liszt, Franz, 19, 21, 31, 50, 62, 63, 65, 68, 70, 75, 86, 93, 101,
103, 139, 146, 167, 171–176, 178, 181, 186, 257
Lorraine (France), 18
Louis XVI, King, 56
Louis, Dr., 243, 251 _et seq._
Louis-Philippe, King, 177–178, 228–230
Louvre, The (Paris), 164
Lucca, Prince of. _See_ Jean
_Lucrezia Floriani_ (Sand), 185, 200–201, 209, 240
Luxembourg, Musée du (Paris), 205
Madeleine, Church of the (Paris), 240, 258
Majorca, 128–143, 149, 240, 258.
_See also_ Balearic Isles, Palma, Valdemosa
Malfatti, Dr., 51
Malibran, Maria-Félicité Garcia, 57–58
Mallefille, Félicien, 103, 111, 116, 119, 121, 123–124, 127
Manchester, 238
_Manchester Guardian_, 238
Marainville (France), 18
Mardi Gras, 137
_Mare Au Diable, La_ (Sand), 224
Marliani, Mme., 108, 128, 131, 142–143, 147, 184, 185, 187, 226
Marie-Aurore of Saxe, Queen, 198
Marienbad, 87–88
Marmontel, 58
Marot, Clément, 67
Marseilles, 143–147, 149
Matuszinski, Dr. Jean, 47–49, 53, 71, 127, 130, 155, 192
Maurras, Charles, 34
_Mazurkas_ (op. 41) (Chopin), 149
_Mazurka in A flat major_ (Chopin), 150
_Mazurka in C sharp major_ (op. 30) (Chopin), 108
_Mazurka in C sharp minor_ (op. 63) (Chopin), 150, 202
_Mazurka in C minor_ (op. 30) (Chopin), 108
_Mazurka in D flat major_ (op. 30) (Chopin), 108
_Mazurka in E minor_ (Chopin), 150
_Mazurka in F minor_ (op. 63) (Chopin), 202
_Mazurka in G major_ (Chopin), 150
_Mazurka in G major_ (op. 63) (Chopin), 202
_Mazurka in G minor_ (op. 30) (Chopin), 108
_Mémoires_ (Sand), 224, 245
Mendelssohn, Bartholdy Felix, 27, 71, 72, 81, 86
Mendizabal, Don Juan Alvarez y, 130
Mérimée, Prosper, 95–96
_Merry Wives of Windsor, The_ (Shakespeare), 67
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 64, 109, 231, 258–259
Michelangelo, Buomarroti, 67, 174
Miçkiewicz, 91, 102, 159–160
Milan, 77, 228
Mohilew, General, 53
Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin), 19
Molin, Dr., 243
Montpensier, Duke of, 229
Moschelès, Ignace, 23, 70, 177
Moscow, 53
Moses, 160
_Moses_ (Rossini), 33
Mostowska, Countess, 108
Mozart, Wolfgang von, 26, 29, 69, 158, 163–165, 174–175, 177, 229,
230, 255, 258
Munich, 53
Musset, Viscount Alfred de, 98–100, 105, 126, 147, 148, 221, 260
Nantes, 229
Naples, 146
Napoleon I, Emperor, 17, 79
Napoleon III, Emperor. _See_ Napoleon, Prince Louis
Napoleon, Prince Louis, 77, 98
Nidecki, 47
Niemcewicz, Julian-Orsin, 21
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 144, 165, 190–191
_Night Song_ (Nietzsche), 190
Noailles, Duke of, 243
_Nocturne_ (op. 37, no. 2) (Chopin), 149
_Nocturne in C minor_ (op. 48) (Chopin), 150, 190–191
_Nocturne in G major_ (Chopin), 150
Nohant, Château de, 101, 103–107, 147 _et seq._, 237, 239
Notre Dame de Paris, Church of (Paris), 249
Nourrit, Adolph, 102, 146
Obreskow, Mme., 247–248
O’Meara, Mlle., 69
Opera, The (Berlin), 27
Opera, The (Warsaw), 30, 35
Orleans, Duchess of, 177
Orleans, Duke of, 229
Orléans, Square d’ (Paris), 185 _et seq._, 242, 248
Orlowski, 70–71
Orsetti, family of, 77
Osborne, pianist, 62
Ostend, 250
_Othello_ (Rossini), 57
Paderewski, Ignace, 54
Paër, Fernando, 35, 58
Paganini, Nicolo, 51
Paix, rue de la, 240
Palma, 128, 142.
_See also_ Majorca, Balearic Isles, Valdemosa
Panthéon, The (Paris), 249
Papet, Dr., 149
Paskewitch, General, 46, 53
Pasta, Giuditta Negri, 57, 58
Pelletan, 102
Père-Lachaise, Cemetery of (Paris), 259 _et seq._
Perpignan, 127
Perthuis, Count de, 170, 177
Philharmonic Orchestra (London), 232
Pierre, the gardener, 200
Pigalle, rue (Paris), 154 _et seq._
Pixis, violinist, 33
Plater, Count, 65
Pleyel, Camille, 62, 93, 127–128, 129, 130, 141, 146, 229
Pleyel, piano, 90, 91, 171, 232, 242
Pleyel, Salon, 62, 72, 178–180, 229–232
Poissonnière, Boulevard (Paris), 56 _et seq._, 228
_Polonaise Brillante_ (Chopin), 73
_Polonaise in F minor_ (Chopin), 36
_Polonaise for piano and violoncello_ (Chopin), 36
Poniatowski, Prince Joseph-Antoine, 79
Pont du Gard, 127
Posen, 28
Potoçka, Countess Delphine, 69, 73–75, 243, 245, 254–255
_Potpourri on the setting moon_ (Chopin), 41
Prague, 32–33
_Prelude in B minor_ (no. 6) (Chopin), 258
_Prelude in E minor_ (no. 4) (Chopin), 258
_Prelude in G minor_ (op. 6) (Chopin), 139
_Premier Rondo, in C minor_ (op. 1) (Chopin), 23
Preparatory Military Academy (Warsaw), 20
Probst, music publisher (Paris), 141, 146
_Prophet, The_ (Meyerbeer), 246
Prussia, Napoleon’s campaign in, 18
Prussia, Prince of, 233
_Quatuor Serioso_ (Beethoven), 19
_Quintette_ (Beethoven), 62
Racine, Jean, 19
Radziwill, Prince Antoine, 23–24, 35, 38
Radziwill, Princess, 35
Radziwill, Princess Elise, 24, 36
Radziwill, Princess Marceline, 68
Radziwill, Prince Valentin, 67
Radziwill, Princess Wanda, 24, 36
Ramorino, General, 56
Ravel, Maurice, 231
Reber, Monsieur, 255
_Rénovateur, Le_ (Paris), 72
Republican Party (Paris), 55
_Requiem_ (Mozart), 258
Revolution of 1830 (Poland), 45, 77
Revolution of 1848 (France), 228
_Revolutionary, The_ (_Etude in C minor_, op. 10, no. 12) (Chopin), 53
_Revue des Deux Mondes_ (Paris), 153
Richter, Johann-Paul von, 75
_Robert the Devil_ (Meyerbeer), 64, 231
Rochechouart, rue (Paris), 130
Roger, Monsieur, 231
Rollinat, François, 143, 149
Rome, 65, 228
_Rondeau in E flat major_ (Chopin), 70
_Rondo à la Krakoviak_ (Chopin), 31, 37, 70
Rossini, Gioachino, 31, 33, 41, 57, 58
Roth, Dr., 243
Rothschild, Baron James de, 68
Rothschild, Baroness, 233, 243
Rousseau, Théodore, 214
Rozières, Mlle. de, 181–182, 208, 215–217, 240
St.-Antoine, Place (Geneva), 77
Saint Bruno, 134
St.-Etienne, Church of (Vienna), 46
Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin de, 96, 117, 161
St.-Etienne du Mont, Church of (Paris), 249
St.-Germain des Prés, Church of (Paris), 190
St.-Germain l’Auxerrois, Church of (Paris), 249
St. John, 159
St.-Louis, Mont (Paris), 260
St. Petersburg, 187
Saint-Saëns, Charles-Camille, 86
St.-Simon, Henri-Jean-Victor de Rouvroy, Duc de, 97
St. Simonien Party (Paris), 55
St.-Sulpice, Church of (Paris), 249
Salzburg, 53
Sand, George, 56, 94 _et seq._
Sand, Maurice, 102, 110, 126, 131, 137–138, 150, 153, 155, 166–167,
181, 188, 196–197, 203, 207, 208, 219, 237, 245
Sand, Solange, 102, 126, 132, 137, 150, 153, 155, 188, 197–199, 203,
205–227.
_See also_ Clésinger, Mme.
Sandeau, Jules, 95, 104, 201
Sapieha, Princess, 195
Saxe, Maréchal de, 94
Saxony, King of. _See_ Jean, Prince of Lucca
Saxony, Queen of, 44
Scheffer, Ary, 236
Schlesinger, publisher (Paris), 146, 244
School of Medicine (Paris), 55, 71
Schubert, Franz, 146, 174–175
Schumann, Robert, 19, 23, 26, 29, 75, 81, 85, 86, 170, 174, 178
Scott, Sir Walter, 234
_Secret Marriage, The_ (Cimarosa), 27
_Secrétaire Intime, Le_ (Sand), 106
Seine, The, 41
Shakespeare, William, 67, 149, 174
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 19
Shroeder-Devrient, 58
_Siberian, The_ (Chopin), 161–162
Simon, Dr., 243
Skarbeck, Countess, 18
Slavik, violinist, 51
Slowacki, 159
Smithson, Henrietta, 72
Socrates, 159
Somerset, Duchess of, 233
_Sonata in B flat minor_ (Chopin), 150
_Sonata in E flat major_ (Beethoven), 19
_Sonata in E flat minor_ (Chopin), 149
_Sonata in G flat minor_ (Chopin), 178
_Sonata in G minor for piano and violoncello_ (Chopin), 230
_Sonata with violoncello_ (Chopin), 202
Sontag, German singer, 38
Sowinski, pianist, 62, 65
Spain, King of, 243
Spontini, Gasparo Luigi Pacifico, 27
Sprée, The, 41
Stafford House (London), 233–234
Stamati, pianist, 62
_Stars, The_ (Schubert), 146
Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), 19, 127
Stirling, Jane, 228 _et seq._, 256 _et seq._
Stradivarius, 261
Strauss, Johann, 51
Stuttgart, 53
Sue, Eugène, 102
Sutherland, Duchess of, 233
Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 160
_Tarantella_ (Chopin), 178
Tempe, valley of, 50
Teplitz, 33
Théâtre Italien (Paris), 72
“Three Glorious Days” (Paris), 228
_Three Mazurkas_ (op. 33) (Chopin), 108
Tiber, The, 41
Tilsit, battle of, 18
Titus. _See_ Woyçieckowski, Titus
Tomeoni, Mlle., singer, 62
Torphichen, Lord, 235
Tours, 237
_Trio for piano, violin and violoncello_ (Chopin), 70
_Trio for piano, violin and violoncello_ (Mozart), 230
Tronchet, rue (Paris), 154
Tuileries, The (Paris), 249
_Twelve Etudes_ (2nd vol., op. 25) (Chopin), 70
Ukraine, 65
Urhan, violinist, 62
Val de Grâce Hospital (Paris), 249
Valdemosa, Chartreuse of, 129, 133–142, 258.
_See also_ Palma, Majorca, Balearic Isles
_“Valse de l’Adieu” in A flat major_ (op. 69, no. 1) (Chopin), 81
_Valses Brillantes_ (op. 34) (Chopin), 108, 178
_Variations_ on the _La ci darem_ (Chopin), 26–27, 31, 32, 62
Vaucluse, 127
Vaudemont, Princess de, 68
Vendôme, Place (Paris), 251 _et seq._
Venice, 98
Veron, Louis-Désiré, 57
Veronese, Paul, 234
Viardot, Louis, 221
Viardot, Pauline, 159, 185, 187, 195, 258
Victoria, Queen, 234
Vienna, 31, 41, 46, 53, 238
Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 252
Wagner, Richard, 19, 59, 69, 257
Wagram, battle of, 18
_Waltz in D flat major_ (op. 70, no. 3) (Chopin), 34, 50
“_Waltz of the Little Dog_” (op. 64, no. 1) (Chopin), 231
Warsaw, 20, 33, 35, 36, 38, 44, 45–46, 53, 76, 89, 192, 228, 259
Warsaw, Duchy of, 18
Warsaw High School, 20
Wellington, Duke of, 233
Westminster, Duke of, 233
_White Lady, The_, improvisation from (Chopin), 31
Wieck, Clara, 70, 81
Wieck, Herr, 81
_Wiener Theaterzeitung_ (Vienna), 32
Wilna, 79
_Winter at Majorca_ (Sand), 132
Witwicki, Polish writer, 52
Wodzinska, Countess, 80–92
Wodzinska, Marie, 76–93, 182, 194
Wodzinska, Mlle. Thérèse, 84, 92
Wodzinski, Casimir, 80, 82, 90
Wodzinski, Count Antoine, 83, 181
Wodzinski, family, 21, 77–93, 181
Wodzinski, Félix, 80, 82
Wodzinski, Palatin, 79–80
Wola, suburb of Warsaw, 41
Wolowski, deputy, 260
Woyciechowski, Titus, 21, 34, 36–39, 43–46, 50, 53, 57, 58, 64, 251
Young French Party (Paris), 55
_zal_, 25
Zamboni, conductor, 57
_Zarathustra_ (Nietzsche), 191
Zelazowa, Wola, 18, 19
Zielinski, 41
Zullichau (Poland), 28
Zwinger Museum (Dresden), 79
Zywny, 22
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London
Transcriber’s Note
A closing quotation mark was added after: like an airy apparition on
page 175
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