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.