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.