Frederick Chopin, as a Man and Musician Part 32

Madame Sand to Madame Marliani; Ma.r.s.eilles, April 28, 1839:--

The day before yesterday I saw Madame Nourrit with her six children, and the seventh coming shortly...Poor unfortunate woman! what a return to France! accompanying this corpse, and she herself super-intending the packing, transporting, and unpacking [charger, voiturer, deballer] of it like a parcel!

They held here a very meagre service for the poor deceased, the bishop being ill-disposed. This was in the little church of Notre-Dame-du-Mont. I do not know if the singers did so intentionally, but I never heard such false singing. Chopin devoted himself to playing the organ at the Elevation, what an organ! A false, screaming instrument, which had no wind except for the purpose of being out of tune. Nevertheless, YOUR LITTLE ONE [votre pet.i.t] made the most of it. He took the least shrill stops, and played Les Astres, not in a proud and enthusiastic style as Nourrit used to sing it, but in a plaintive and soft style, like the far-off echo from another world. Two, at the most three, were there who deeply felt this, and our eyes filled with tears.

The rest of the audience, who had gone there en ma.s.se, and had been led by curiosity to pay as much as fifty centimes for a chair (an unheard-of price for Ma.r.s.eilles), were very much disappointed; for it was expected that he would make a tremendous noise and break at least two or three stops. They expected also to see me, in full dress, in the very middle of the choir; what not? They did not see me at all; I was hidden in the organ-loft, and through the bal.u.s.trade I descried the coffin of poor Nourrit.

Thanks to the revivifying influences of spring and Dr. Cauviere's attention and happy treatment, Chopin was able to accompany George Sand on a trip to Genoa, that vaga gemma del mar, fior delta terra. It gave George Sand much pleasure to see again, now with her son Maurice by her side, the beautiful edifices and pictures of the city which six years before she had visited with Musset. Chopin was probably not strong enough to join his friends in all their sight-seeing, but if he saw Genoa as it presents itself on being approached from the sea, pa.s.sed along the Via Nuova between the double row of magnificent palaces, and viewed from the cupola of S. Maria in Carignano the city, its port, the sea beyond, and the stretches of the Riviera di Levante and Riviera di Ponente, he did not travel to Italy in vain. Thus Chopin got at last a glimpse of the land where nine years before he had contemplated taking up his abode for some time.

On returning to Ma.r.s.eilles, after a stormy pa.s.sage, on which Chopin suffered much from sea-sickness, George Sand and her party rested for a few days at the house of Dr. Cauviere, and then set out, on the 22nd of May, for Nohant.

Madame Sand to Madame Marliani; Ma.r.s.eilles, May 20, 1839:--

We have just arrived from Genoa, in a terrible storm. The bad weather kept us on sea double the ordinary time; forty hours of rolling such as I have not seen for a long time. It was a fine spectacle, and if everybody had not been ill, I would have greatly enjoyed it...

We shall depart the day after to-morrow for Nohant. Address your next letter to me there, we shall be there in eight days.

My carriage has arrived from Chalon at Arles by boat, and we shall post home very quietly, sleeping at the inns like good bourgeois.

CHAPTER XXIII.

JUNE TO OCTOBER, 1839.

GEORGE SAND AND CHOPIN'S RETURN TO NOHANT.--STATE OF HIS HEALTH.--HIS POSITION IN HIS FRIEND'S HOUSE.--HER ACCOUNT OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP.--HIS LETTERS TO FONTANA, WHICH, AMONG MANY OTHER MATTERS, TREAT OF HIS COMPOSITIONS AND OF PREPARATIONS TO BE MADE FOR HIS AND GEORGE SAND'S ARRIVAL IN PARIS.

The date of one of George Sand's letters shows that the travellers were settled again at Nohant on the 3rd of June, 1839. Dr. Papet, a rich friend of George Sand's, who practised his art only for the benefit of the poor and his friends, took the convalescent Chopin at once under his care. He declared that his patient showed no longer any symptoms of pulmonary affection, but was suffering merely from a slight chronic laryngeal affection which, although he did not expect to be able to cure it, need not cause any serious alarm.

On returning to Nohant, George Sand had her mind much exercised by the question how to teach her children. She resolved to undertake the task herself, but found she was not suited for it, at any rate, could not acquit herself of it satisfactorily without giving up writing. This question, however, was not the only one that troubled her.

In the irresolution in which I was for a time regarding the arrangement of my life with a view to what would be best for my dear children, a serious question was debated in my conscience. I asked myself if I ought to entertain the idea which Chopin had formed of taking up his abode near me. I should not have hesitated to say "no," had I known then for how short a time the retired life and the solemnity of the country suited his moral and physical health. I still attributed his despair and horror of Majorca to the excitement of fever and the exces de caractere of that place. Nohant offered pleasanter conditions, a less austere retreat, congenial society, and resources in case of illness. Papet was to him an enlightened and kind physician. Fleury, Duteil, Duvernet, and their families, Planet, and especially Rollinat, were dear to him at first sight. All of them loved him also, and felt disposed to spoil him as I did.

Among those with whom the family at Nohant had much intercourse, and who were frequent guests at the chateau, was also an old acquaintance of ours, one who had not grown in wisdom as in age, I mean George Sand's half-brother, Hippolyte Chatiron, who was now again living in Berry, his wife having inherited the estate of Montgivray, situated only half a league from Nohant.

His warmth of manner, his inexhaustible gaiety, the originality of his sallies, his enthusiastic and naive effusions of admiration for the genius of Chopin, the always respectful deference which he showed to him alone, even in the inevitable and terrible apres-boire, found favour with the eminently-aristocratic artist. All, then, went very well at first, and I entertained eventually the idea that Chopin might rest and regain his health by spending a few summers with us, his work necessarily calling him back to Paris in the winter.

However, the prospect of this kind of family union with a newly-made friend caused me to reflect. I felt alarmed at the task which I was about to undertake, and which I had believed would be limited to the journey in Spain.

In short, George Sand presents herself as a sister of mercy, who, prompted by charity, sacrifices her own happiness for that of another.

Contemplating the possibility of her son falling ill and herself being thereby deprived of the joys of her work, she exclaims: "What hours of my calm and invigorating life should I be able to devote to another patient, much more difficult to nurse and comfort than Maurice?"

The discussion of this matter by George Sand is so characteristic of her that, lengthy as it is, I cannot refrain from giving it in full.

A kind of terror seized me in presence of a new duty which I was to take upon me. I was not under the illusion of pa.s.sion.

I had for the artist a kind of maternal adoration which was very warm, very real, but which could not for a moment contend with maternal love, the only chaste feeling which may be pa.s.sionate.

I was still young enough to have perhaps to contend with love, with pa.s.sion properly so called. This contingency of my age, of my situation, and of the destiny of artistic women, especially when they have a horror of pa.s.sing diversions, alarmed me much, and, resolved as I was never to submit to any influence which might divert me from my children, I saw a less, but still possible danger in the tender friendship with which Chopin inspired me.

Well, after reflection, this danger disappeared and even a.s.sumed an opposite character--that of a preservative against emotions which I no longer wished to know. One duty more in my life, already so full of and so overburdened with work, appeared to me one chance more to attain the austerity towards which I felt myself attracted with a kind of religious enthusiasm.

If this is a sincere confession, we can only wonder at the height of self-deception attainable by the human mind; if, however, it is meant as a justification, we cannot but be surprised at the want of skill displayed by the generally so clever advocate. In fact, George Sand has in no instance been less happy in defending her conduct and in setting forth her immaculate virtuousness. The great words "chast.i.ty" and "maternity" are of course not absent. George Sand could as little leave off using them as some people can leave off using oaths. In either case the words imply much more than is intended by those from whose mouths or pens they come. A chaste woman speculating on "real love" and "pa.s.sing diversions," as George Sand does here, seems to me a strange phenomenon.

And how charmingly naive is the remark she makes regarding her relations with Chopin as a "PRESERVATIVE against emotions which she no longer wished to know"! I am afraid the concluding sentence, which in its unction is worthy of Pecksniff, and where she exhibits herself as an ascetic and martyr in all the radiance of saintliness, will not have the desired effect, but will make the reader laugh as loud as Musset is said to have done when she upbraided him with his ungratefulness to her, who had been devoted to him to the utmost bounds of self-abnegation, to the sacrifice of her n.o.blest impulses, to the degradation of her chaste nature.

George Sand, looking back in later years on this period of her life, thought that if she had put into execution her project of becoming the teacher of her children, and of shutting herself up all the year round at Nohant, she would have saved Chopin from the danger which, unknown to her, threatened him--namely, the danger of attaching himself too absolutely to her. At that time, she says, his love was not so great but that absence would have diverted him from it. Nor did she consider his affection exclusive. In fact, she had no doubt that the six months which his profession obliged him to pa.s.s every year in Paris would, "after a few days of malaise and tears," have given him back to "his habits of elegance, exquisite success, and intellectual coquetry." The correctness of the facts and the probability of the supposition may be doubted. At any rate, the reasons which led her to a.s.sume the non-exclusiveness of Chopin's affection are simply childish. That he spoke to her of a romantic love-affair he had had in Poland, and of sweet attractions he had afterwards experienced in Paris, proves nothing. What she says about his mother having been his only pa.s.sion is still less to the point. But reasoning avails little, and the strength of Chopin's love was not put to the test. He went, indeed, in the autumn of 1839 to Paris, but not alone; George Sand, professedly for the sake of her children's education, went there likewise. "We were driven by fate," she says, "into the bonds of a long connection, and both of us entered into it unawares." The words "driven by fate," and "entered into it unawares,"

sound strange, if we remember that they apply not to a young girl who, inexperienced and confiding, had lost herself in the mazes of life, but to a novelist skilled in the reading of human hearts, to a constantly-reasoning and calculating woman, aged 35, who had better reasons than poor Amelia in Schiller's play for saying "I have lived and loved."

After all this reasoning, moralising, and sentimentalising, it is pleasant to be once more face to face with facts, of which the following letters, written by Chopin to Fontana during the months from June to October, 1839, contain a goodly number. The rather monotonous publishing transactions play here and there again a prominent part, but these Nohant letters are on the whole more interesting than the Majorca letters, and decidedly more varied as regards contents than those he wrote from Ma.r.s.eilles--they tell us much more of the writer's tastes and requirements, and even reveal something of his relationship to George Sand. Chopin, it appears to me, did not take exactly the same view of this relationship as the novelist. What will be read with most interest are Chopin's directions as to the decoration and furnishing of his rooms, the engagement of a valet, the ordering of clothes and a hat, the taking of a house for George Sand, and certain remarks made en pa.s.sant on composers and other less-known people.

[I.]

...The best part of your letter is your address, which I had already forgotten, and without which I do not know if I would have answered you so soon; but the worst is the death of Albrecht. [FOOTNOTE: See p.27 foot-note 7.]

You wish to know when I shall be back. When the misty and rainy weather begins, for I must breathe fresh air.

Johnnie has left. I don't know if he asked you to forward to me the letters from my parents should any arrive during his absence and be sent to his usual address. Perhaps he thought of it, perhaps not. I should be very sorry if any of them miscarried. It is not long since I had a letter from home, they will not write soon, and by this time he, who is so kind and good, will be in good health and return.

I am composing here a Sonata in B flat minor, in which will be the Funeral March which you have already. There is an allegro, then a "Scherzo" in E flat minor, the "March," and a short "Finale" of about three pages. The left hand unisono with the right hand are gossiping [FOOTNOTE: "Lewa reka unisono z prawa, ogaduja po Marszu."] after the March. I have a new "Nocturne" in G major, which will go along with the Nocturne in G minor, [FOOTNOTE: "Deux Nocturnes," Op.37.] if you remember such a one.

You know that I have four new mazurkas: one from Palma in E minor, three from here in B major, A flat major, and C sharp minor. [FOOTNOTE: Quatre mazurkas, Op. 41.] They seem to me pretty, as the youngest children usually do when the parents grow old.

Otherwise I do nothing; I correct for myself the Parisian edition of Bach; not only the stroke-makers' [FOOTNOTE: In Polish strycharz, the usual meaning of which is "brickmaker."

Chopin may have played upon the word. A mistake, however, is likewise possible, as the Polish for engraver is sztycharz.]

(engravers') errors, but, I think, the harmonic errors committed by those who pretend to understand Bach. I do not do it with the pretension that I understand him better than they, but from a conviction that I sometimes guess how it ought to be.

You see I have praised myself enough to you.

Now, if Grzymata will visit me (which is doubtful), send me through him Weber for four hands. Also the last of my Ballade in ma.n.u.script, as I wish to change something in it. I should like very much to have your copy of the last mazurkas, if you have such a thing, for I do not know if my gallantry went so far as to give you a copy.

Pleyel wrote to me that you were very obliging, and have corrected the Preludes. Do you know how much Wessel paid him for them? It would be well to know this for the future.

My father has written to me that my old sonata has been published by Haslinger, and that the Germans praise it.

[FOOTNOTE: There must have been some misunderstanding; the Sonata, Op. 4, was not published till 1851.]

I have now, counting those you have, six ma.n.u.scripts; the devil take them if they get them for nothing. Pleyel did not do me any service with his offers, for he thereby made Schlesinger indifferent about me. But I hope this will be set right, f wrote to ask him to let me know if he had been paid for the piano sent to Palma, and I did so because the French consul in Majorca, whom I know very well, was to be changed, and had he not been paid, it would have been very difficult for me to settle this affair at such a distance. Fortunately, he is paid, and very liberally, as he wrote to me only last week.

Write to me what sort of lodgings you have. Do you board at the club?

Woyciechowski wrote to me to compose an oratorio. I answered him in the letter to my parents. Why does he build a sugar- refinery and not a monastery of Camaldolites or a nunnery of Dominican sisters!