and she thought she would take her family to Majorca. This was a
lamentable excursion, but it seemed satisfactory at first. They
travelled by way of Lyons, Avignon, Vaucluse and Nimes. At Perpignan,
Chopin arrived, "as fresh as a rose." "Our journey," wrote George Sand,
"seems to be under the most favourable conditions." They then went on
to Barcelona and to Palma. In November, 1838, George Sand wrote a most
enthusiastic letter: "It is poetry, solitude, all that is most
artistic and _chique_ on earth. And what skies, what a country; we are
delighted."(26) The disenchantment was soon to begin, though. The first
difficulty was to find lodgings, and the second to get furniture. There
was no wood to burn and there was no linen to be had. It took two months
to have a pair of tongs made, and it cost twenty-eight pounds at the
customs for a piano to enter the country. With great difficulty, the
forlorn travellers found a country-house belonging to a man named Gomez,
which they were able to rent. It was called the "Windy House." The wind
did not inconvenience them like the rain, which now commenced. Chopin
could not endure the heat and the odour of the fires. His disease
increased, and this was the origin of the great tribulations that were
to follow.
Buloz:
_Monday 13th._
MY DEAR CHRISTINE,
"I have only been at Palma four days. My journey has been
very satisfactory, but rather long and difficult until we
were out of France. I took up my pen (as people say) twenty
times over to write the last five or six pages for which
_Spiridion_ has been waiting for six months. It is not the
easiest thing in the world, I can assure you, to give the
conclusion of one's own religious belief, and when
travelling it is impossible. At twenty different places I
have resolved to think it solemnly over and to write down my
conclusion. But these stoppages were the most tiring part of
our journey. There were visits, dinners, walks, curiosities,
ruins, the Vaucluse fountain, Reboul and the Nimes arena,
the Barcelona cathedrals, dinners on board the war-ships,
the Italian theatres of Spain (and what theatres and what
Italians!), guitars and Heaven knows what beside. There was
the moonlight on the sea and above all Valma and Mallorca,
the most delightful place in the world, and all this kept me
terribly far away from philosophy and theology. Fortunately
I have found some superb convents here all in ruins, with
palm-trees, aloes and the cactus in the midst of broken
mosaics and crumbling cloisters, and this takes me back to
_Spiridion_. For the last three days I have had a rage for
work, which I cannot satisfy yet, as we have neither fire
nor lodging. There is not an inn in Palma, no house to let
and no furniture to be bought. On arriving here people first
have to buy some ground, then build, and afterwards send for
furniture. After this, permission to live somewhere has to
be obtained from Government, and after five or six years one
can think about opening one's trunk and changing one's
chemise, whilst waiting for permission from the Customs to
have some shoes and handkerchiefs passed. For the last four
days then we have spent our time going from door to door, as
we do not want to sleep in the open air. We hope now to be
settled in about three days, as a miracle has taken place.
For the first time in the memory of man, there is a
furnished house to let in Mallorca, a charming country-house
in a delightful desert. . . ."
At that time Spain was the very last country in which to travel with a
consumptive patient. In a very fine lecture, the subject of which was
_The Fight with Tuberculosis_,(27) Dr. Landouzy proves to us that ever
since the sixteenth century, in the districts of the Mediterranean,
in Spain, in the Balearic Isles and throughout the kingdom of Naples,
tuberculosis was held to be contagious, whilst the rest of Europe was
ignorant of this contagion. Extremely severe rules had been laid down
with regard to the measures to be taken for avoiding the spread of
this disease. A consumptive patient was considered as a kind of
plague-stricken individual. Chateaubriand had experienced the
inconveniences of this scare during his stay in Rome with Madame de
Beaumont, who died there of consumption, at the beginning of the winter
of 1803. George Sand, in her turn, was to have a similar experience.
When Chopin was convicted of consumption, "which," as she writes, "was
equivalent to the plague, according to the Spanish doctors, with their
foregone conclusions about contagion," their landlord simply turned
them out of his house. They took refuge in the Chartreuse monastery of
Valdemosa, where they lived in a cell. The site was very beautiful. By a
wooded slope a terrace could be reached, from which there was a view of
the sea on two sides.
(27) L. Landouzy of the Academy of Medecine, _La Lutte
contre la tuberculose_, published by L. Maretheux.
"We are planted between heaven and earth," wrote George Sand. "The
clouds cross our garden at their own will and pleasure, and the eagles
clamour over our heads."
A cell in this monastery was composed of three rooms: the one in the
middle was intended for reading, prayer and meditation, the other
two were the bedroom and the workshop. All three rooms looked on to a
garden. Reading, rest and manual labour made up the life of these men.
They lived in a limited space certainly, but the view stretched out
infinitely, and prayer went up direct to God. Among the ruined buildings
of the enormous monastery there was a cloister still standing, through
which the wind howled desperately. It was like the scenery in the nuns'
act in _Robert le Diable_. All this made the old monastery the most
romantic place in the world.(28)
(28) George Sand to Madame Buloz. Postscript to the letter
already quoted:
"I am leaving for the country where I have a furnished house
with a garden, magnificently situated for 50 francs a month.
I have also taken a cell, that is three rooms and a garden
for 35 francs a year in the Chartreuse of Valdemosa, a
magnificent, immense monastery quite lonely in the midst of
mountains. Our garden is full of oranges and lemons. The
trees break under them. We have hedges of cactus twenty to
thirty feet high, the sea is about a mile and a half away.
We have a donkey to take us to the town, roads inaccessible
to visitors, immense cloisters and the most beautiful
architecture, a charming church, a cemetery with a palm-tree
and a stone cross like the one in the third act of _Robert
le Diable_. Then, too, there are beds of shrubs cut in
form. All this we have to ourselves with an old woman to
wait on us, and the sacristan who is warder, steward,
majordomo and Jack-of-all-trades. I hope we shall have
ghosts. The door of my cell leads into an enormous
cloister, and when the wind slams the door it is like a
cannon going off through all the monastery. I am delighted
with everything, and fancy I shall be more often in the cell
than in the country-house, which is about six miles away.
You see that I have plenty of poetry and solitude, so that
if I do not work I shall be a stupid thing."
The only drawback was that it was most difficult to live there. There
was no way of getting warm. The stove was a kind of iron furnace which
gave out a terrible odour, and did not prevent the rooms from being so
damp that clothes mildewed while they were being worn. There was no way
of getting proper food either. They had to eat the most indigestible
things. There were five sorts of meat certainly, but these were pig,
pork, bacon, ham and pickled pork. This was all cooked in dripping,
pork-dripping, of course, or in rancid oil. Still more than this, the
natives refused, not only to serve the unfortunate travellers, but
to sell them the actual necessaries of life. The fact was, they had
scandalized the Majorcan people. All Majorca was indignant because
Solange, who at that time was nine years old, roamed about the mountains
_disguised as a man_. Added to this, when the horn sounded which called
people to their devotions in the churches, these strange inhabitants
of the old Valdemosa monastery never took any more notice than pagans.
People kept clear of them. Chopin suffered with the cold, the cooking
made him sick, and he used to have fits of terror in the cloisters. They
had to leave hastily. The only steamboat from the island was used to
transport the pigs which are the pride and wealth of Majorca. People
were only taken as an extra. It was, therefore, in the company of these
squealing, ill-smelling creatures that the invalid crossed the water.
When he arrived at Barcelona, he looked like a spectre and was spitting
blood. George Sand was quite right in saying that this journey was an
"awful fiasco."
Art and literature did not gain much either by this expedition. George
Sand finished her novel entitled _Spiridion_ at Valdemosa. She had
commenced it before starting for Spain. In a volume on _Un hiver a
Majorque_ she gave some fine descriptions, and also a harsh accusation
of the monks, whom she held responsible for all the mishaps of the
Sand caravan. She considered that the Majorcans had been brutalized and
fanaticized, thanks to their influence. As to Chopin, he was scarcely in
a state to derive any benefit from such a journey, and he certainly did
not get any. He did not thoroughly appreciate the beauties of nature,
particularly of Majorcan nature. In a letter to one of his friends he
gives the following description of their habitation:--
"Between rocks and sea, in a great deserted monastery, in a cell, the
doors of which are bigger than the carriage entrances to the houses in
Paris, you can imagine me, without white gloves, and no curl in my hair,
as pale as usual. My cell is the shape of a large-sized bier. . . ."
This certainly does not sound very enthusiastic. The question is whether
he composed anything at all at Valdemosa. Liszt presents him to
us improvising his Prelude in B flat minor under the most dramatic
circumstances. We are told that one day, when George Sand and her
children had started on an excursion, they were surprised by a
thunderstorm. Chopin had stayed at home in the monastery, and, terrified
at the danger he foresaw for them, he fainted. Before they reached home
he had improvised his _Prelude_, in which he has put all his terror and
the nervousness due to his disease. It appears, though, that all this is
a legend, and that there is not a single echo of the stay at Valdemosa
in Chopin's work.
The deplorable journey to Majorca dates from November, 1838 to March,
1839. The intimacy between George Sand and Chopin continued eight years
more.
In the summer Chopin stayed it Nohant. Eugene Delacroix, who was paying
a visit there too, describes his presence as follows: "At times, through
the window opening on to the garden, we get wafts of Chopin's music, as
he too is at work. It is mingled with the songs of the nightingales and
with the perfume of the rose trees."
Chopin did not care much for Nohant. In the first place, he only liked
the country for about a fortnight at a time, which is very much like
not caring for it at all. Then what made him detest the country were the
inhabitants. Hippolyte Chatiron was terrible after he had been drinking.
He was extremely effusive and cordial.
In the winter they first lived in the Rue Pigalle. George Sand used to
receive Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc, Edgar Quinet, Etienne Arago, and
many other men. Chopin, who was not very intellectual, felt ill at
ease amongst all these literary men, these reformers, arguers and
speechifiers. In 1842, they emigrated to the Square d'Orleans. There
was a sort of little colony established there, consisting of Alexandre
Dumas, Dantan the caricaturist, the Viardots, Zimmermann, and the wife
of the Spanish consul, Madame Marliani, who had attracted them all
there. They took their meals together. It was a regular phalinstery, and
Chopin had very elegant tastes!
We must give George Sand credit for looking after him with admirable
devotion. She certainly went on nursing her "invalid," or her "dear
skeleton," as she called him, but her infatuation had been over for a
long time. The absolute contrast of two natures may be attractive at
first, but the attraction does not last, and, when the first enthusiasm
is over, the logical consequence is that they become disunited. This was
what Liszt said in rather an odd but energetic way. He points out all
that there was "intolerably incompatible, diametrically opposite and
secretly antipathetic between two natures which seemed to have been
mutually drawn to each other by a sudden and superficial attraction,
for the sake of repulsing each other later on with all the force of
inexpressible sorrow and boredom." Illness had embittered Chopin's
character. George Sand used to say that "when he was angry he was
terrifying." He was very intelligent, too, and delighted in quizzing
people for whom he did not care. Solange and Maurice were now older, and
this made the situation somewhat delicate. Chopin, too, had a mania
for meddling with family matters. He quarrelled one day with Maurice.
Another day George Sand was annoyed with her son-in-law Clesinger and
with her daughter Solange, and Chopin took their side. This was the
cause of their quarrel; it was the last drop that made the cup of
bitterness overflow.
The following is a fragment of a letter which George Sand sent to
Grzymala, in 1847: "For seven years I have lived with him as a virgin.
If any woman on earth could inspire him with absolute confidence, I am
certainly that woman, but he has never understood. I know, too, that
many people accuse me of having worn him out with my violent sensuality,
and others accuse me of having driven him to despair by my freaks.
I believe you know how much truth there is in all this. He himself
complains to me that I am killing him by the privations I insist upon,
and I feel certain that I should kill him by acting otherwise."(29)
(29) Communicated by M. Rocheblave.
It has been said that when Chopin was at Nohant he had a village girl
there as his mistress. We do not care to discuss the truth of this
statement.
It is interesting to endeavour to characterize the nature of this
episode in George Sand's sentimental life. She helps us herself in this.
As a romantic writer she neglected nothing which she could turn into
literature. She therefore made an analysis of her own case, worked out
with the utmost care, and published it in one of her books which is
little read now. The year of the rupture was 1847, and before the
rupture had really occurred, George Sand brought out a novel entitled
_Lucrezia Floriani_. In this book she traces the portrait of Chopin
as Prince Karol. She denied, of course, that it was a portrait, but
contemporaries were not to be deceived, and Liszt gives several passages
from _Lucrezia Floriani_ in his biography of the musician. The decisive
proof was that Chopin recognized himself, and that he was greatly
annoyed.
As a matter of fact, there was nothing disagreeable about this portrait.
The following fragments are taken from it: "Gentle, sensitive, exquisite
in all things, at the age of fifteen he had all the charms of youth,
together with the gravity of a riper age. He remained delicate in body
ind mind. The lack of muscular development caused him to preserve his
fascinating beauty. . . . He was something like one of those ideal
creatures which mediaeval poetry used for the ornamentation of Christian
temples. Nothing could have been purer and at the same time more
enthusiastic than his ideas. . . . He was always lost in his dreams,
and had no sense of reality. . . ." His exquisite politeness was then
described, and the ultra acuteness and nervosity which resulted in that
power of divination which he possessed. For a portrait to be living,
it must have some faults as well as qualities. His delineator does
not forget to mention the attitude of mystery in which the Prince took
refuge whenever his feelings were hurt. She speaks also of his intense
susceptibility. "His wit was very brilliant," she says; "it consisted of
a kind of subtle mocking shrewdness, not really playful, but a sort of
delicate, bantering gaiety." It may have been to the glory of Prince
Karol to resemble Chopin, but it was also quite creditable to Chopin
to have been the model from which this distinguished neurasthenic
individual was taken.
Prince Karol meets a certain Lucrezia Floriani, a rich actress and
courtesan. She is six years older than he is, somewhat past her prime,
and now leading a quiet life. She has done with love and love affairs,
or, at least, she thinks so. "The fifteen years of passion and torture,
which she had gone through, seemed to her now so cruel that she was
hoping to have them counted double by the supreme Dispenser of our
trials." It was, of course, natural that she should acknowledge God's
share in the matter. We are told that "implacable destiny was not
satisfied," so that when Karol makes his first declaration, Lucrezia
yields to him, but at the same time she puts a suitable colouring on
her fall. There are many ways of loving, and it is surely noble and
disinterested in a woman to love a man as his mother. "I shall love
him," she says, kissing the young Prince's pale face ardently, "but
it will be as his mother loved him, just as fervently and just as
faithfully. This maternal affection, etc. . . ." Lucrezia Floriani had
a way of introducing the maternal instinct everywhere. She undertook to
encircle her children and Prince Karol with the same affection, and her
notions of therapeutics were certainly somewhat strange and venturesome,
for she fetched her children to the Prince's bedside. "Karol breathed
more freely," we are told, "when the children were there. Their pure
breath mingling with their mother's made the air milder and more gentle
for his feverish lungs." This we shall not attempt to dispute. It is
the study of the situation, though, that forms the subject of _Lucrezia
Floriani_. George Sand gives evidence of wonderful clear-sightedness and
penetration in the art of knowing herself.
She gives us warning that it is "a sad story and sorrowful truth"
that she is telling us. She has herself the better _role_ of the two
naturally. It could not have been on that, account that Chopin' was
annoyed. He was a Pole, and therefore doubly chivalrous, so that such an
objection would have been unworthy of a lover. What concerns us is that
George Sand gives, with great nicety, the exact causes of the rupture.
In the first place, Karol was jealous of Lucrezia's stormy past; then
his refined nature shrank from certain of her comrades of a rougher
kind. The invalid was irritated by her robust health, and by the
presence and, we might almost say, the rivalry of the children. Prince
Karol finds them nearly always in his way, and he finally takes a
dislike to them. There comes a moment when Lucrezia sees herself obliged
to choose between the two kinds of maternity, the natural kind and the
maternity according to the convention of lovers.
The special kind of sentiment, then, between George Sand and Chopin,
Just as between Lucrezia and Prince Karol, was just this: love with
maternal affection. This is extremely difficult to define, as indeed
is everything which is extremely complex. George Sand declares that her
reason for not refusing intimacy with Chopin was that she considered
this in the light of a duty and as a safeguard. "One duty more," she
writes, "in a life already so full, a life in which I was overwhelmed
with fatigue, seemed to me one chance more of arriving at that austerity
towards which I felt myself being drawn with a kind of religious
enthusiasm."(30)
(30) _Histoire de via vie._
We can only imagine that she was deceiving herself. To accept a lover
for the sake of giving up lovers altogether seems a somewhat heroic
means to an end, but also somewhat deceptive. It is certainly true that
there was something more in this love than the attraction she felt for
Musset and for Michel. In the various forms and degrees of our feelings,
there is nothing gained by attempting to establish decided divisions
and absolute demarcations for the sake of classifying them all. Among
sentiments which are akin, but which our language distinguishes when
defining them, there may be some mixture or some confusion with regard
to their origin. Alfred de Vigny gives us in _Samson_, as the origin of
love, even in man, the remembrance of his mother's caresses:
_Il revera toujours a la chaleur du sein._
It seems, therefore, that we cannot apply the same reasoning, with
regard to love, when referring to the love of a man or of a woman. With
the man there is more pride of possession, and with the woman there
is more tenderness, more pity, more charity. All this leads us to
the conclusion that maternal affection in love is not an unnatural
sentiment, as has so often been said, or rather a perversion of
sentiment. It is rather a sentiment in which too much instinct and
heredity are mingled in a confused way. The object of the education of
feeling is to arrive at discerning and eliminating the elements which
interfere with the integrity of it. Rousseau called Madame de Warens
his mother, but he was a man who was lacking in good taste. George Sand
frequently puts into her novels this conception of love which we see her
put into practice in life. It is impossible when analyzing it closely
not to find something confused and disturbing in it which somewhat
offends us.
It now remains for us to study what influence George Sand's friendship
with some of the greatest artists of her times had on her works. Beside
Liszt and Chopin, she knew Delacroix, Madame Dorval, Pauline Viardot,
Nourrit and Lablache. Through them she went into artistic circles.
Some of her novels are stories of the life of artists. _Les Maitres
Mosaistes_ treats of the rivalry between two studios. _La derniere
Aldini_ is the story of a handsome gondolier who, as a tenor, turned the
heads of patrician women. The first part of _Consuelo_ takes us back to
the singing schools and theatres of Venice in the eighteenth century,
and introduces us to individuals taken from life and cleverly drawn.
We have Comte Zustiniani, the dilettante, a wealthy patron of the fine
arts; Porpora, the old master, who looks upon his art as something
sacred; Corilla, the prima donna, annoyed at seeing a new star appear;
Anzoleto, the tenor, who is jealous because he gets less applause than
his friend; and above and beyond all the others Consuelo, good kind
Consuelo, the sympathetic singer.
The theatres of Venice seem to be very much like those of Paris and
of other places. We have the following sketch of the vanity of the
comedian. "Can a man be jealous of a woman's advantages? Can a lover
dislike his sweetheart to have success? A man can certainly be jealous
of a woman's advantages when that man is a vain artist, and a lover
may hate his sweetheart to have any success if they both belong to the
theatre. A comedian is not a man, Consuelo, but a woman. He lives on his
sickly vanity; he only thinks of satisfying that vanity, and he works
for the sake of intoxicating himself with vanity. A woman's beauty is
apt to take attention from him and a woman's talent may cause his talent
to be thrown in the background. A woman is his rival, or rather he is
the rival of a woman. He has all the little meannesses, the caprices,
the exigences and the weak points of a coquette." Such is the note of
this picture of things and people in the theatrical world. How can we
doubt its veracity!
At any rate, the general idea that George Sand had of the artist was
exactly the idea adopted by romanticism. We all know what a being
set apart and free from all social and moral laws, what a "monster"
romanticism made of the artist. It is one of its dogmas that the
necessities of art are incompatible with the conditions of a regular
life. An artist, for instance, cannot be _bourgeois_, as he is the exact
opposite. We have Kean's speech in Dumas' drama, entitled _Kean, or
Disorder and Genius._
"An actor," he says, "must know all the passions, so that he may express
them as he should. I study them in myself." And then he adds: "That is
what you call, orderly! And what is to become of genius while I am being
orderly?"
All this is absurd. The artist is not the man who has felt the most, but
the man best gifted for imagining the various states of mind and feeling
and for expressing them. We know, too, that an irregular life is neither
the origin nor the stamp of extraordinary intellectual worth. All the
cripples of Bohemian life prove to us that genius is not the outcome
of that kind of life, but that, on the contrary, such life is apt to
paralyze talent. It is very convenient, though, for the artist and for
every other variety of "superior beings" to make themselves believe that
ordinary morals are not for them. The best argument we can have against
this theory is the case of George Sand. The artist, in her case, was
eminently a very regular and hard-working _bourgeois_ woman.