LINE 7 RUNS STRAIGHT to the Opera. While Châtelet -Les Halles is incontestably the central point of Paris, Haussmann's exercise of drawing straight lines through the western sections of the capital did create at the Opéra what many consider the most striking crossroads in town. The Avenue de l'Opera, opened in 1870, created a direct link between the Louvre and the grands boulevards, behind which was struck the westward extension of the Rue Réaumur, justly named Boulevard Hauss-mann, where Paris's main department stores grew up. From the doorway of Brentano's bookshop on Avenue de l'Opera, as Andrew Hussey remarks, one gets a fine view of "the 'Second Empire' at work in all its monumental and strangely impressive vulgarity" Zola would have agreed that the Opéra district was as magnificent as it was inhuman, a land of pleasures for the fat bourgeoisie. And that was precisely what the Opera's architect, Charles Gamier, intended. "Let your eyes rejoice at the golden rays, your soul warm itself to the vibrations of colour," he wrote with the same pomposity as he built. "Mesdames, you will appear at the Opéra with shoulders naked, diamonds around the neck and silk about the body!" Garnier's Opéra house boasts of being the largest theatre in the world and it still draws a gasp from a visitor emerging for the first time from Metrostop No. 9.
Most Parisians, when they hear the word "Opera," think of this huge square with its imperial boulevards stretching out in every direction. Folk memory has a lot to do with this. It was here that the wildest celebrations at the end of the First World War occurred—Marthe Chenal, wrapped in a tricolour flag, sang the Marseillaise from the Opéra steps while searchlights in red, white and blue scanned the ground, buildings and roofs. Picnic tables were laid out on the same square for a somewhat soberer celebration on 8 May 1945. Strictly speaking, however, the term "Opera" refers not to a place but to the troupe of performers whose origin goes back to the seventeenth century The same confusion is made over the term "Opera Comique" which most people would identify as the lusciously gaudy building a short way up the Boulevard des Ca-pucines on Rue Favart. The "Opera Comique" was a troupe of entertainers founded in 1714 to perform pantomimes and parodies of opera. Bear in mind, however, that all "comique" means in this context is French Opéra with spoken dialogue—it can include the most tragic plots, such as Bizet's Carmen.
It is worth taking that stroll up the Boulevard des Capucines from the Opéra to the Opéra Comique. The subsidiary industry to music was, of course, restaurants—a hundred years ago the restaurants straddling this boulevard were the most famous and expensive in town, such as Tortoni's, the café Hardy or the café Riche next door. "Ilfaut être bien riche pour dÎner chez Hardy et bien hardi pour dÎner chez Riche," one used to say in the last decades of the nineteenth century—"You have to be rich to dine at Hardy's and hardy to dine at Riche's." Hardiness was not, on the other hand, the principal quality of the directors of the Opera. Over the last decades of the nineteenth century the repertoire for Garnier's bare-shouldered ladies consisted of no more than a dozen operas, four of them being by Giacomo Meyerbeer—Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, L'Africaine and Robert le diable. Mozart's Don Giovanni made it to the top, as did Carl Maria von Weber's Freischütz. But La Favorite could scarcely be considered Donizetti's best opera. And it is a rare Opéra house today which will risk a performance of Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet. In 1887 a frustrated subscriber wrote to the directors: "I shall not be subscribing again. Last winter I swallowed twelve performances of Patrie on Fridays, and I need a rest."
The Opéra Comique was altogether different. Its directors were a good deal more sympathetic to the wild fantasies of composers: they took risks. One of the most famous flops at the Opéra Comique was Bizet's Carmen, which was booed off the stage at its premiere in 1875. Poor Bizet died without ever knowing that he had composed the world's best known opera. Eight years later the Opéra Comique reinstalled Carmen on its winter programme. By 1891 over 400 performances had graced its stage—"the best box on the ears the critics have had," noted Claude Debussy, a composer destined to create, within eleven years, another scandal on the stage of the Opéra Comique.
Some of the greatest battles over Opéra during those years were due to Richard Wagner. It is difficult today to understand the total hold Wagner operas had at the time on the imagination of artists—not just Opéra fanatics, but also poets, painters, novelists, playwrights, creative people of all persuasions. Pilgrimages to Bayreuth, Wagner's Bavarian home, were organized from every corner of Europe. Wagner had created a new religion. But the great paradox was that, in Paris, Wagner was rarely performed. In 1861 the Opera—then housed in a plain, neoclassical edifice on Rue Le Peletier—put on a performance of Tannhäuser: the harangue of the critics assured that it would not be played again in the French capital for another generation. In May 1887 Charles Lamoureux, a conductor who had launched six years earlier a highly successful series of concerts (the Orchestre Lamoureux is still very active today), organized ten performances of Lohengrin at the Eden Theatre; a riot on the first night put a prompt end to that. Wagner lovers in Paris were reduced to listening to private solo performances accompanied by two pianos or—as in the case of Debussy—reading in silence the orchestral scores, stupefied by their brilliance. They could also, again like Debussy, take the crowded train to Bayreuth.
How could a young composer break out of this operatic world so dominated, despite the popular censure, by this god, Richard Wagner?
It was Claude Debussy who broke the spell with his opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, which premiered on the stage of the Opéra Comique at the end of April 1902. It was, by all accounts, one of the greatest events in the history of opera.
But the first few days of Pelle'as's life on stage were rough. The libretto was drawn from Maurice Maeterlinck's play of the same name, which had been performed just once in Paris, at the Bouffes Parisiens on 17 May 1893, Trve days after Wagner's Die Walküre opened, to much applause, at the Opéra Gamier. Many at the time saw an affinity between Pelléas and Wagner's Tristan, including the Gothic-sounding names of its characters and its distant, medieval setting. A tender and naive Mélisande is drawn into marrying the Prince Golaud. Her life, spent languishing in a bleak seaside castle, is transformed by the love of Golaud's younger half-brother, Pelléas : an incestuous quarrel is born, leading to the death of the two lovers. Something like the belligerence in the play emerged in real life after Debussy and the Opéra Comique's director Albert Carré refused Maeterlinck's mistress the part of Mélisande, giving it instead to the twenty-five-year-old Scottish soprano Mary Garden. Maeterlinck wrote an open letter to Le Figaro in which he expressed the hope for the opera's "prompt and resounding collapse." Maeterlinck, an expert with a sword, then challenged Debussy to a duel; Debussy wisely refused.
In the meantime the performers became totally absorbed in the beauty of Debussy's half tones. In her memoirs, Mary Garden recalls how the singers first sang through their parts in the drawing room of the conductor André Messager. As Debussy played the piano, she was taken over "by the most extraordinary emotions I have ever experienced in my life . . . I seemed to become someone else." There they sat, the singers bowed in their scores as if at prayer. "When Debussy got to the fourth act I could no longer look at my score for the tears. It was all very strange and unbearable. I closed my book and just listened to him and as he played the death of Mélisande, I burst into the most awful sobbing."
By the end the whole cast was crying "as if we had just lost our best friend, crying as if nothing would console us again."
The scenery in greys and blues by Eugene Ronsin and Lucien Jusseaume—"At the front of a cave," "A well in the park," 'A terrace at the exit of the vaults," 'A room in the castle"—contained all the refined brilliance one has come to expect of that short-lived belle époque. Though the Opéra Comique appeared vast from the exterior, its corridors were hardly equipped to handle the large canvases. There was an average of three transformation scenes with each act, and Debussy had not foreseen the amount of time this would take, so he spent, between rehearsals, a large part of his time fretting away in his two-room flat at 58, Rue Cardinet, composing the wonderful interludes that have moved audiences for generations since.
The first reviews were mixed, some of them terrible: the music was "sickly and practically lifeless," Debussy sacrificed "music to vague conceptions and dangerous compromises," "rhythm, song and tonality are three things unknown to M. Debussy." Undoubtedly the poisonous atmosphere at the full dress rehearsal had contributed to this. The auditorium had been packed, while, in the reception rooms and corridors, there was a general to-and-fro of critics and musicians. Debussy hid himself in Messager's office, chain-smoking. The first two acts passed by in relative peace. But after Golaud had dragged Mélisande around the stage by the hair, trouble began. Mélisande ended the scene by chanting, "Je ne suispas heureuse"—or, according to some accounts, missing her line with a "Je suis malheureuse"—"You can say that again!"
screamed out somebody from the back of the theatre. General hilarity broke out in the last scene of Act III, "Before the castle," in the encounter between little Yniold and Golaud, which had given Debussy nightmares to compose.
Messager's precise execution and the performers' disciplined devotion—along with the fantastic spectacle of Ronsin andjusseaume's decor—were what saved Pelléas. The premiere on 30 April saw an uncomfortable repetition of the screams and charivari among the audience. Perhaps it was just out of curiosity that the numbers increased.
But as those numbers grew, so did the fascination of Paris for Debussy's opera. The critics shifted from cold indifference to a cheering endorsement. Young musicians, like Maurice Ravel, sat night after night in the auditorium mesmerized by the opera's beauty. "Third performance,"
noted Henri Btisser, who was directing the off-stage chorus, in his diary for 3 May. "Large audience, more responsive and sympathetic. At the end there are calls for Debussy, but he refuses to appear on stage."
He remained in Messager's office, puffing away at his cigarettes. A Pelleas cult was developing.
By then Debussy was facing another problem: what to do after the completion of what had been his life's work. "To complete a work, is a little like the death of someone one loves, no?" he had written in 1895 to his artistic friend Pierre Louÿs (pronounced "Louee"). There was obviously a relationship here with what Debussy defined in another long letter, written to his benefactor, Prince André Poniatowski, in 1893, as the "Cult of Desire": "One has the most mad and sincere desire for an object of art (a Velasquez, a Satzouma vase or a new form of tie). What joy there is at the moment of possession; it is a true love. Then at the end of a week, nothing. The object stands there for five or six days without receiving as much as a glance. One will regard it again with the former passion only after an absence of several months . . ."
This is probably why Debussy never completed a second opera, though the operatic and theatrical projects that he embarked on went in all directions. His friends used to remark that he did make life difficult for himself: every time he had some success he had to make a complete break with the work he had just produced and slog away at something completely different. Debussy had to distance himself from Pelléas. "The realization of a work of art, beautiful as it may be, almost always contradicts the inner dream," he wrote in the review Musica one year after the opera's premiere. By then he was working on the orchestration of his three Estampes, beginning with "Pagodes," which played on the memory of oriental harem dancers that he had seen on the Champ de Mars during the World Expositions of 1889 and 1900; and on three orchestral "sketches" that cost him nearly two years of sweated labour, "On the sea from dawn to midday," "The play of waves" and "Dialogue between the wind and sea": La Mer.
Debussy was experimenting with the new sounds and rhythms he had created in Pelléas. And the press did not let up in its criticism of the sounds of Claude Debussy Like the composer himself, the commentary became increasingly cerebral. Soon the country's most thoughtful writers entered the fray, most notably Romain Rolland and Marcel Proust. In January 1904 Jean Lorrain, afin-de-siècle poet and columnist who passed himself off as a "dandy of perversity," began a series of articles in Le Journal entitled Les Pelle'astres. Debussy, as always, wanted to send in a long reply. "Reply to him? One hundred times no!" wrote Louys, quite beside himself. "You do not argue with a journalist. No artist does that." So Debussy maintained his silence. But the articles went on and on, eventually appearing in book form in 1910. The main gist of Lorrain's argument was that Debussy and his followers had created a new religion much worse than the Wagnerian faith because it catered exclusively to effete and exorbitantly precious snobs. 'At least the followers of Wagner are sincere," he noted. Debussystes, on the other hand, were "beautiful young men with long hair who skilfully turned their curls into a fringe along the forehead."
One could dismiss Lorrain's columns as a prolonged piece of journalistic nastiness. But Lorrain did hit a dissonant chord that resonated with the cultural quarrels of the day. On one side were the romantic idealists, the Wagnerians, on the other the symbolists, the Debussists;
it was the difference between "German music" and "French music." It was precisely this that defined the difference between Romain Rolland and Marcel Proust in the way they approached Debussy's music.
RoUand, the pacifist, essayist, mystic and idealist, did not like Debussy His early writings had been devoted to music and, at thirty-five, he had become the Sorbonne's first professor of the history of music just at the time Pelléas premiered. Rolland's basic view was that music was the one dimension of the arts which could bring all nations together; the great tragedy of his time was that all music since around 1850 had become decadent and nationalist. He had a slight preference for the ideals of German music, "strong" and thematic, but he was even critical of Wagner.
French music was all too refined. Rolland's best known work of fiction is his ten-volume roman fleuve, Jean-Christophe, published between 1904 and 1912. Its hero, Jean-Christophe, is a Beethoven trying to come to terms with the disasters of Rolland's contemporary world. "To the devil with your manufactured chords!" criés out Jean-Christophe in Paris, in an obvious allusion to Debussy Jean-Christophe and two Parisian musical critics set off to the Opéra Comique to hear Pelléas et Mélisande.
After the first act Jean-Christophe leans over to one of the critics and asks, "Is it like that all the time?" "Yes," replies the critic. "But there is nothing there," says Jean-Christophe. "Nothing at all. No music. No development."
His private diary shows that Rolland was repeating a real experience he had had in 1907. Rolland was in a box at the Opéra Comique with Maurice Ravel, the critics Jean Marnold and Lionel de la Laurencie, and Richard Strauss, whose German operatic version of Oscar Wilde's Salome premiered in Paris that year. After the first act, Strauss leant over and whispered in Marnold's ear, "Is it always like that?" "Yes." "Nothing more? There's nothing to it. No music, no development." Marnold made a long-winded attempt to explain the combination of Maeterlinck's poetical phrases with Debussy's subtle musical phrases. Rolland himself pointed out the sobriety of Debussy's art. Strauss replied, "But I am a musician, and I don't hear anything." He repeated, "I, I am a musician before all else. From the moment the music is in a work, I want it to be mistress, I don't want it to be subordinate to anything else." After the show, the group went down to the popular musicians" café, the Taverne Pousset, on Rue de Chateaudun. Strauss tried to elaborate. "Fine," he said, weighing the word. His French was not terribly good: "It is very fine, very..." he waved his hands, "verygekiinstelt [artful], but it is never spontaneous; it lacks Schwung."
Schwung in German, meant verve or energy, rather than "swing." For Rolland, with his preference for "German" music over "French," the great quality of the former was that it was schwungvolt, or energetic and stirring. This was certainly what made Strauss's Salome different from Debussy's Pelléas. But Rolland did not like that either. For those who think all contemporary music is a trial to listen to, Romain Rolland is their man.
For those who love Debussy, it is Marcel Proust. The playwright René Peter introduced Debussy to Proust sometime in the late 1890s, which would not have been difficult since they frequented the same cafés near the Opéra and had the same circle of friends. Proust, probably at this early date, must have felt the affinity of his own ideas of time and memory with those of the composer. Debussy, many times in his correspondence, writes of the pleasure of the moment and the effort to refine this through memory. "When you don't have the means to travel," he wrote to Messager in September 1903, "you have to make up for it with your imagination." And so he began, in landlocked Burgundy, composing La Mer—which he himself admitted was based on a childhood memory of his long holidays by the Mediterranean with his aunt. One cannot imagine a more Proustian theme. Proust wrote that the "only true voyage of discovery is not visiting different sceneries but possessing other eyes"—the whole of his huge, seven-volume A la recherche du temps perdu is based on that idea, an attempt, through the working of memory, to evoke the pleasure of a past instant. One could not find a better definition of Debussy's music. Proust sought to go behind the traditional plot of a novel. Debussy adventured into the back stages of melody.
Late in his life Proust told the writer Jacques Benoist-Méchin—a lover of things German—that music had been one of the great passions of his life. "Had been," he added, "for today I have little opportunity to listen to it." Proust's chronic timidity undoubtedly explained why he did not develop a closer relationship with Debussy. It was not, apparently, for want of trying. According to his English biographer, Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy used to meet Proust frequently at Weber's on Rue Royale, a smart café where many of the musical and literary world used to gather before the First World War. One evening, apparently in 1895, Proust proposed to Debussy to take him round to his home in his carriage. Debussy did not like Proust's way of speaking, with the unending sentences that characterized his writing. Proust, in his generous manner, proposed a large reception in the musician's honour. "Pardon me," replied Debussy, "I'm just a bear. Perhaps it would be best if we continued to meet by chance, as we have been doing up to now."
Proust had a horror of theatres and public concerts. According to the novelist André Maurois, he had the Quatuor Capet round to his apartment on Rue Hamelin to play to him alone at night as an inspiration for his work. They came and performed Debussy's Quatuor. Debussy's correspondence does indeed indicate that in 1901 the Quatuor Capet was giving private performances of his Quartet. In Maurois' account Proust insisted that no one else attend: "If there are others present I would be obliged to be polite and I would not Usten . . . I need absolutely pure impressions for my book." While the musicians played, Proust lay down on a couch, his eyes closed, searching in the music for some mysterious communion. In 1911, more and more a recluse, he employed the Théâtrephone—a telephone that broadcasted live musical and theatrical performances—to Usten, night after night, to Pelléas et Mélisande.
"LOVE," WROTE PROUST, "is space and time made sensitive to the heart." This was not so very different from Debussy's notion of the "Cult of Desire," the joy of the moment which he had described to Prince Poniatowski. Debussy's problem is that he not only fed this into his music; he lived like that. Debussy's private life was a drama, a story fit for the composer of Pelléas.
One of the friends Debussy and Proust had in common was Robert Godet, a man of immense learning who made his name in the press as a Wagnerian zealot, but could speak on any subject one chose. He had travelled with Debussy to Bayreuth in 1889 and remained one of Debussy's correspondents for the rest of his life—a most unusual case. Just before their trip to Bayreuth, Godet had given Debussy a copy of his youthful first novel, Mal à aimer: é'tats d'âme. Love, as Proust would have put it, was the most intense of all sensations but also the most dangerous. Godet presented his hero, a sensitive Swiss musician, like Godet himself, as being faced with two life plots: that of Wagner's Tristan, which concludes with the death of the two lovers, or Tolstoy's Katia, in which the hero puts all passions aside and marries for reason. "Does one prefer the end of Tristan or the end of Katia?" asks Godet in his novel. "One must choose." Godet, like his hero, chose Katia by marrying a dull and sensible Dutch woman. Debussy wrote ecstatically to Godet on Saturday morning, 13 July 1889: "Dear Friend, I read you all this night!... Don't feel wounded if I declare immediately my sympathy for your 'unhappy prose.' At places I had the rare sensation of'Real Beings' whose sufferings were clear to me." Debussy chose Tristan.
His friendships and his love affairs were always of the most passionate kind. And they always ended with sorrow and, usually, complete rupture. He told both Ernest Chausson, the composer, and Pierre Louÿs that he had never enjoyed such friendship; he broke with them both. His mistress, Gaby Dupont, with whom he shared a fifth-floor flat on Rue Gustave-Dore, attempted to kill herself. Debussy himself showed certain suicidal traits. 1898 was a bleak, impecunious year. "I never arrive at doing anything without some event happening in my life," he wrote to Louÿs at the end of March; "this is what gives superiority to memory, from that at least one can redeem a few valuable emotions'—a most Proustian thought. "I need something to love, something to which I can hook on to, without which I should go mad, and might as well commit suicide, which is a bit stupid." A month later he was writing again to Louys, "I feel alone and distraught, nothing has changed in the black sky that forms the backdrop of my life, and I do not know where I am going if it is not towards suicide ."Gaby moved out of the flat in December. Debussy moved to another tiny fifth-floor flat at 58, Rue Cardinet, today classified by the City of Paris as a historic monument, with its plaque inaccurately stating: "Claude Debussy installed himself here in 1901 and composed Pelléas et Mélisande: it was a disaster, followed by a triumph."
In the 1890s Debussy, like all his friends, had been bathed in the poetry and prose of the American inventor of terror, Edgar Allan Poe, thanks largely to its able translator, as great a giant as Poe, the symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire. Prior to attending Maeterlinck's Pelléas at the Bouffes Parisiens, Debussy had been working on an operatic version of Poe's Fall of the House of Usher—he was still working on it during the First World War. It was undoubtedly because Poe was exercising such an influence on both Maeterlinck (who admitted that his play was derived from The House of Usher) and Debussy that the latter decided immediately to begin work on Pelléas. The old castle was modelled after Usher's crumbling ruin. The gloomy colours, the cold cellar, the working of events the characters are powerless to control are all borrowed from Usher. So too are the fateful words Pelléas utters to Mélisande:
"You are strangely beautiful when I kiss you like that. You are so beautiful that one would say you are going to die."
Debussy's choice of Tristan, and his subsequent adoption of Poe, took him to Poe's women—innocent, sickly creatures like Ligeia or Morella. Gaby, after leaving Debussy, fell into a state of poverty. In her eighties she was seen in Rouen, under the German occupation, collecting cigarette butts in the streets to satisfy a nicotine habit she had picked up from Debussy. More poignant still were the events that happened on the fifth floor of Rue Cardinet as Debussy prepared for the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande.
On 3 April 1899 Debussy wrote from Rue Cardinet to his editor Georges Hartmann, 'After so many bad and sad days, I believe I have rediscovered a little moral tranquillity." On the nth he was asking him for 200 francs, "which I will reimburse as soon as possible"; Debussy would always remain in Hartmann's debt, as he would with all subsequent editors.
Sometime that month he had met the beautiful Liliy* Texier, who worked as a model at Paris's elite fashion shop right behind the Opera, Mesdames Sarah Mayer et A. Morhange, on the corner of Rue Auber and Rue Boudreau. Their correspondence suggests the encounter had taken place on a tram. "My dear little Lili," he wrote on Friday, 21 April, "If you are really kind you will put on your pink skirt and your black hat and come and say bonjour Sunday around 2.30." He noted there was no lift to the fifth floor. On Monday, 24 April, he wrote, "My dear little Lili, Claude is not yet cured of the bites from your dear little mouth . . . Impatient of your mouth and your body, I love you. Your Claude."
For six months it was "Ma Lili jolie," "Ma Lili amé'e," "Lili ché'rie et très adore'e" and even "Si adorablement Lilly si délicieusement Mimi"—after the heroine of Puccini's La Bohéme (who died): "I send you my longest and best kiss," "I alone in this huge bed look vainly for a little corner that has not been embalmed in your memory," "I drink at your mouth" and "never has anyone loved you with such absolute abandon." All the objects in his two-room flat, exquisitely decorated in art nouveau, bore her presence; the great old Japanese toad on the mantelpiece "looks obstinately at the door through which he is accustomed to see you enter." She suspended time: "You who have abolished all the Past... you know my insufferable need to see into the Future." But she did not suspend his debts: two weeks before Louÿs married Louise, the daughter of the poet Jose-Maria de Heredia, Debussy was asking him desperately for fifty francs—"I am in the blackest mess, without even mentioning my 300,000 francs of debt." He told Lilly of an anonymous letter, "bête et mé'chante, "menacing him for payment. She did seem to invite on the household malady Debussy could not attend Louÿs ' marriage because he was so ill and, in September, he asked Proust's doctor, Abel Desjardins, to come round to the flat "to see my little Lilly... only don't damage her." There was a Mimi and a Mélisande living in little Lilly: "You have made me love you more than is perhaps permitted to a man; there is in me a need to destroy myself that almost overrides my need for joy—a tension so violent that it almost resembles a desire for Death" (3 July).
Claude and Lilly Debussy were married in a civil ceremony at the mairie of the Dix- Septième Arrondissement, on Rue des Batignolles; five witnesses were present, including Pierre Louys. "Debussy is married," remarked Arthur Fontaine, a civil servant and friend, facetiously.
"A pretty woman is always a pretty woman, and a great musician is a great musician."
She never opened her mouth when the couple were seen together in the cafés of musical Paris. The poet Paul-Jean Toulet, who would become one of Debussy's close friends after the premiere of Pelléas, called them "Saint-Roch [pronounced with a hard "ch" so that it is almost 'Rock'] and his dog."
In November, Debussy told Hartmann that "Mermaids," the third movement of his Nocturnes, was not ready because "Madame Debussy has been sick this night and she is still not well this morning." He added a week later, "I have furiously little money!" And a few days later: "Do you want to help me? I have piles of medicines to buy for Lilly." He tried to earn a little by taking on a student—teaching was not Debussy's greatest talent. Once more he got behind in his composition of Pelléas ; the Opéra Comique must have "the score under its eyes" before it can commit itself, Hartmann warned him. "Can you advance me two hundred and fifty francs?" Debussy asked Hartmann in January 1900. On 12 April Hartmann wrote to Debussy: "I have been in bed for twelve days suffering like a martyr from gout in my arms, my knees and both feet! I scream and am broken with pain . . . My friend, you come banging at my cash box at a moment when it is very empty" Eleven days later, Hartmann was dead. His family declared that all advances made to Debussy must be treated as loans and repaid: Debussy had to carry the heavy debt for the remainder of his short life.
In August Lilly suffered a miscarriage and during her two weeks of hospitalization it was discovered she had contracted tuberculosis—a killer in those days. "You see this means moral pain," he wrote to Louys, "and added to that is a material side that is absolutely miserable." "We don't count for much," he told his friend in October. "You surely think like me that the most passionate will is feeble and how virtually useless is this intense desire to live. How ironic it is that all we give—all the blood we spill—is for this."
Carré announced to Debussy, on 3 May 1901, that the Opéra Comique had finally committed itself to a production of Pelléas in April 1902. But the health problems of "Madame Mimi" did not abate. Worse, boredom was setting in. In the summer of 1901 the couple spent three months in Burgundy with Lilly's parents. Debussy had as much love of green chloroform as would Jean-Paul Sartre. "This stay in the countryside is perfectly unbearable!" he wrote to his new editor. "The minutes pass by without one ever knowing exactly why," he explained to his old pupil Raoul Bardac on 31 August. Raoul took note, and when Debussy was back in Paris he invited him over to his home on Rue Bassano to meet his mother, Emma, who, as an accomplished soprano and the former mistress of Gabriel Fauré, had a high regard for musical talent. "Remember me to your mother," wrote Debussy in a note to Raoul three weeks before the opera's premiere.
Henri Biisser, who took over the conducting of Pelléas from Mes-sager after the third performance, recorded in his diary a visit to Debussy's flat that early spring of 1902 when the maestro was slaving away at the orchestral interludes: "This little room we're in, with oil paintings, watercolours and drawings on the walls, radiates happiness. The delightful Lilly [his wife] is its source. She's happy that Pelléas is being produced. 'It's my work too,' she says, 'because I gave Claude encouragement when he was despairing of ever seeing his work reach the stage.'" In fact, illness continued to haunt that little home.
In July Debussy was writing to Messager that a "cruel and ironic God, who controls our destinies, really makes us pay hard for our purest joys!" That August Debussy turned forty He spent another long summer with his in-laws in lifeless Burgundy, from which he escaped by plunging himself in a new operatic project, Shakespeare's As Tou Like It—"art is the most beautiful of lies," he wrote in the journal Musica that autumn.
The winter was relieved by the resumption of Pelléas and the bestowal of the Legion d'honneur; but "I am sadly troubled by the health of my wife," he wrote to a friend. Debussy was now calling her his "petit être mystérieux" his Mélisande: "we are united by ties a thousand times stronger than the traditional ties of marriage."
That June, 1903, Raoul Bardac invited Debussy over to Rue Bassano again to have tea with his mother. Debussy dedicated one of his piano scores, Ariettes oubliées, to her: "To Madame S. Bardac whose musical sympathy is precious to me—infinitely so." She was born Emma Moyse, from a respectable Jewish family in Bordeaux, and had married at the age of eighteen Sigismond Bardac, a rich banker who believed wealth would keep his wife by his side. In the case of Gabriel Fauré he proved right; the composer of Pelléas, however, was another matter.
Another summer in Burgundy, another winter. Debussy could share with Emma his musical humour as a picture postcard, dated 19 June 1904, of the Château de Dampierre with a declining scale in D and the Debussy monogram scribbled on the back shows. Lilly left for Burgundy alone that July His letters to Lilly began to reveal the truth. "I was wondering in what state the pretty places of your poor little body could be in," he began one letter, and went on: "Don't believe it was a pleasure for me to put you so dryly on the wagon . . . But I have to find new things, under the pressure of deadlines . . ." He was now addressing her as "Lily-Lilo" as he launched into a series of lies: "If La Mer is prepared to let me go, I will be able to join you around 15 August." It was not the sea of his dreams that was holding him, but the real thing. Debussy had just begun the composition of Lisle joyeuse, an ecstatic little piano piece, and at the end of July he took the ferry to Jersey, with his Emma, "petite Mienne adoré'e." "I am working in complete liberty," he wrote from Saint Helier to his new editor, Jacques Durand. "The Sea is very good for me, and she is showing me all her apparel." He asked Durand to keep his address secret "from everybody, including my charming family."
A week later Emma and Debussy moved to the seaside resort of Pourville, near Dieppe. He wrote to Lilly on n August that he was leaving for England with his painter friend Jacques- Émile Blanche—Blanche was not in sight. "If I have an invincible need to be alone it is because.
I can no longer work as I wish." It was a farewell letter and Lilly understood it too well. She returned to Paris, where, in their empty flat, she uncovered the correspondence with Emma. On 22 August Debussy wrote to her, "It seems to me that it would be quite useless for us to see each other at this moment, that would be too sad."
Debussy remained in Pourville with Emma right through to mid-October. He then rented a small flat on Avenue Alphand, complaining of being "horribly short of money." Lilly hardly emerged from the flat on Rue Cardinet; Debussy showed little sympathy—she was now a "petit etre" with the mystery knocked out. He imagined she was starving herself to death. But that was not true. On 13 October, a week before their fourth wedding anniversary, Lilly laid her blonde head on the famous white pillow and shot herself in the chest.
"IT WOULD NOT be from such a little wound as this that she might die," chants the doctor to the orchestral strings and a harp as he gazes down at Mélisande stretched out on a bed. "It's not grave enough to kill a bird."
Miraculously the bullet from Lilly's revolver passed by every vital organ and lodged in her spine; it remained there for the rest of her life. She was taken to the Clinique Blomet in the Septième, where Proust's doctor took care of her. Mary Garden found her lying alone, helpless. "This young girl never knew anything else in her life but her love of Debussy,"
recalled Garden in her memoirs. Lilly recounted her version of the story and then the surgeon came in to dress her wound, opening her nightdress: "In my Ufe I have never seen anything so beautiful as Lilly Debussy from the waist up. It was just like a glorious marble statue, too divine for words! Debussy had always said to me, "Mary, there is nothing in the world like Lilly's body" Now I knew what he meant. And lying underneath Lilly's left breast was a round dark hole."
Lilly lived until 1932, alone on Avenue de Villiers, accepting the odd interviews and writing notes in red ink on the back of the huge correspondence she had collected on her husband—some of it most compromising. She was not poor. According to the divorce terms pronounced on 17 July 1905, Debussy paid alimony to Lilly of 400 francs a month and every year had to turn over a sum of 3,600 francs for a pension fund in her favour. It was another great debt on his shoulders.
All his friends turned against him: André Messager, René Peter, Maurice Curnonsky Paul Dukas and Robert Godet. "I have seen such desertions around me!" he wrote to the music scholar Louis Laloy who at last broke his silence in April 1905 to become a real friend. Debussy's estrangement from Pierre Louÿs was the cruellest of them all: "I went to see poor Madame Debussy yesterday," Louÿs wrote with venom to his brother shortly after the suicide attempt. "The husband has gone off with a Jewess of forty years and more, Mme S. Bardac. You know Bardac, very much accustomed to the elopements of his wife . . . Jolie race!" Robert Godet and Paul Dukas would eventually rally to Debussy, but their friendship was never the same. "Madame Lily Debussy is very interesting and Claude Debussy a miserable wretch," Debussy wrote to the painter Paul Robert. "I have the terrible defect of loving music for its own sake, and not for its success . . . I shall go into exile."
And for a year that is precisely what he did. He eventually found peace of mind in the summer of 1905 with Emma and her daughter,
Dolly, on the English coast at Eastbourne, in Sussex. "This place is peaceful and charming," he told Durand. "The sea unfurls
itself with a most British sense of correctness." There he put the finishing touches to his Burgundy production of La Mer, completed his Jersey production of Lislejoyeuse and began an exotic series of piano pieces known collectively as Images. Debussy was at last a happy man. He finally married Emma in January 1908 just after, on a rare occasion, he had himself conducted
a performance ofLa Mer. "You really feel yourself to be the heart of your own music," he told Durand.
* Is it Lili, Lily or Lilly? The sources, including Debussy's own correspondence, are inconsistent. Most of the time Debussy refers to his wife as "Lilly," and so we shall call her. She was baptized "Rosalie."
