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.