Six inches of snow covering twenty feet of lava …
“DANIEL STERN”1
At the beginning of 1833 Liszt was introduced to the woman who changed the course of his destiny. When he first met Countess Marie d’Agoult she was twenty-eight years old, unhappily married to a man fifteen years older than herself, and the mother of two children. She was beautiful and elegant, with “a profusion of blond hair that fell over her shoulders like a shower of gold.”2 Despite the difference in their ages (Liszt was twenty-one), and still more the difference in their backgrounds, the couple were drawn violently together. The story of their ill-starred romance (which appeared to the world like a brilliant liaison, but which in reality bore all the marks of classical tragedy, generating untold misery in its wake) has been related so often that the reader may well ask if there is anything left to say. During the past thirty years or so, however, sufficient new material has come to light to call for a fresh examination of this turbulent relationship.
The first meeting between Liszt and Marie d’Agoult was carefully documented by Marie herself. It took place in the salon of the Marquise Le Vayer,3 who liked to surround herself with writers, artists, and “women of the world” in her spacious apartments in the rue du Bac. Her niece was Charlotte Talleyrand, whose love of music had led her to become a pupil of Liszt and who lost no time in telling her aunt of the phenomenal talents of her young mentor. One afternoon the marquise gathered together a female choir to perform a piece by Carl Maria von Weber. Marie d’Agoult was asked to participate because of her agreeable mezzo-soprano voice. The guest of honour was Liszt. Although Marie arrived late, Liszt arrived even later, and so she chatted to her hostess until the proceedings could begin. Marie herself picks up the story.
Madame L. V. was still talking when the door opened and a wonderful apparition appeared before my eyes. I use the word “apparition” because I can find no other to describe the sensation aroused in me by the most extraordinary person I had ever seen. He was tall and extremely thin. His face was pale and his large sea-green eyes shone like a wave when the sunlight catches it. His expression bore the marks of suffering. He moved indecisively, and seemed to glide across the room in a distraught way, like a phantom for whom the hour when it must return to the darkness is about to sound.4
Madame Le Vayer came forward and introduced the young man to her distinguished friend. Liszt seated himself next to the blond-haired beauty, and they began to talk as if they had known one another for a long time. The effect that this first encounter with Liszt had on Marie d’Agoult is evident from her Mémoires, in which she writes in romantic vein of “his flashing eyes, his gestures, his smile, now profound and of an infinite sweetness, now caustic,” which “seemed to be intended to provoke me either to contradiction or to intimate assent.” Suddenly the spell was broken. The piano was opened and the candelabra were lighted at each end of the music desk. Madame Le Vayer approached and whispered some words in Liszt’s ear that he did not let her finish. He rose abruptly and walked impatiently towards the piano, around which was grouped the small chorus of singers. Marie followed and took her place among the mezzo-sopranos. After the piece was finished, Marie joined the others in offering some complimentary remarks on Liszt’s accompaniment. He replied with a silent bow. Marie went home rather late, and that night, she tells us, her sleep was troubled by strange dreams. Prompted by Madame Le Vayer, who called on her the next day, Marie wrote to Liszt inviting him to visit her. She tore up three drafts of this troublesome note before getting it right—an indication of her confused state. Liszt did not reply. He turned up in person, and the instant he entered her salon she felt again his magnetic attraction. From that day he became a frequent visitor. After six years of marriage, as Marie points out, she enjoyed complete independence, and there were no barriers to their meetings.
From the begining our conversations were very serious and, by common accord, quite free from anything banal. Without hesitation, without effort, by the natural inclination of our souls, we embarked at once upon elevated subjects, which alone had any interest for us. We talked of the destiny of mankind, of its sadness and incertitude, of the soul and of God.… Franz spoke with a vivacity, an abundance, and an originality of impressions that awoke a whole world that had been slumbering in me; and when he left me I was sunk in reveries without end. The voice of the young enchanter, his vibrant speech, opened out before me a whole infinity, now luminous, now sombre, forever changing, into which my thoughts were plunged and lost.… Nothing of coquetry or of gallantry was blended with our intimacy, as so often happens between fashionable persons of opposite sexes. Between us there was something at once very young and very serious, at once very profound and very naive.5
In order to understand the origins of this love-affair, to say nothing of its tempestuous development, we must explore Marie d’Agoult’s personality and family background in greater depth than is usual in a biography of Liszt. Who was this woman, about to throw away every social advantage in order to link her life with his? She remains a stranger to most musicians, even to those who have a right to claim some acquaintance with the minutiae of Liszt’s daily life, being known mainly by her mundane title of “first mistress.” Yet the force of their initial encounter and their subsequent love-affair, followed by the violence with which they ultimately rejected one another, left them emotionally drained and produced psychological scars which they carried to the tomb.
Marie d’Agoult was descended from the powerful Bethmann family, one of the wealthiest banking dynasties in Germany. The enterprise on which the family fortunes were built had been founded by the brothers Simon Moritz and Johann Philipp Bethmann during the first half of the eighteenth century in Frankfurt-am-Main. In 1793 Johann died, leaving his massive inheritance to his Swiss-born widow, Katherina, and their two children, Moritz and Marie-Elisabeth. The family lived in a palatial mansion in Frankfurt called the Baslerhof, a name which emphasized the Swiss connection, where they were surrounded by servants and luxuries of all kinds. Frau Bethmann ruled over this household with a rod of iron. Although her son now ran the business, he was dominated by his mother. Her daughter, Marie-Elisabeth, had been married off at sixteen to her father’s elderly business partner, Jacob Bussmann, but within two years he had died and left his child-bride a widow. Frau Bethmann used to entertain lavishly at the Baslerhof; her business connections were worldwide and her dinner parties became famous. In the 1790s Frankfurt harboured large numbers of French émigrés, officers in the French army who were still loyal to the toppled monarchy and who were prepared to restore it by force of arms if necessary. Among these officers was the dashing young Viscount de Flavigny. In due course he received an invitation to one of the Baslerhof dinner parties, and when the eighteen-year-old widow Marie-Elisabeth met him she fell in love with him.
Frau Bethmann heard of the affair and was determined to stop it. It was easy for her to arrange for the authorities in Frankfurt to find something wrong with the papers of this young officer-refugee, and he was promptly sent to jail. But the old matriarch reckoned without the intransigence of her stubborn daughter. Marie-Elisabeth bribed her way into the prison and spent the night in her lover’s arms, under the watchful eye of his jailor. The next morning she returned to the Baslerhof, happily compromised, and confronted a horrified Frau Bethmann with reality: either allow the wedding to take place or face the unfortunate consequences. The young viscount was hastily released from jail and a wedding arranged. Three children were born of the marriage. The first was a son, Eduard, who died in infancy; then in 1799 came a second son, Maurice; six years later their daughter was born, and they gave her the grandiloquent name of Marie-Catherine-Sophie de Flavigny. Since the viscount refused to return to France while Napoleon ruled, Marie was brought up in the ancestral home of her grandmother in Germany. Marie’s childhood memories were dominated by Frau Bethmann dressed in black, sitting bolt upright in her enormous thronelike chair in the vast drawing room of the Baslerhof, from where she issued her orders to servants and family alike. Marie hated and detested her.
When Viscount de Flavigny led his eighteen-year-old bride to the altar, she was not only a widow but the mother of a small daughter, Augusta, Marie’s half-sister. Augusta was mentally unstable. Her new stepfather was unable to control her. She was allowed to grow up quite wild and several times amazed Frankfurt by her eccentric behaviour. When she was still in her mid-teens, and inspired by her mother’s example, she compromised the poet Clement Brentano, who was obliged to marry her. This disastrous match ended in divorce, but not before Augusta twice attempted suicide (once by stabbing herself with a penknife and once by drinking poison).6 A second marriage was no more successful, although it produced four children, about whom Marie writes in her Souvenirs. After a public quarrel with her husband in a Frankfurt restaurant, Augusta flung herself into the river Mainz and drowned. Marie knew well the instability in her family and sometimes feared that she herself might go mad. She became a lifelong victim of depression and psychosomatic illnesses, for which she regularly sought treatment in Paris at the clinic of Dr. Emile Blanche. In the spring of 1869 her private nightmare became reality: her reason snapped and she temporarily turned into a raving lunatic. Her son-in-law Emile Ollivier witnessed a dreadful scene in which Marie was forcibly put into a straitjacket and removed to Dr. Blanche’s clinic for observation.7 Not a word of this has crept into Marie’s biography, let alone the various accounts of Liszt’s own life. But enough is now known of her violent attacks of spleen, which contrast so sharply with the refined image of marbled beauty handed down to us, to make us wonder how Liszt was able to endure their ten years together. Her early childhood was tranquil enough, however. Though feeling little affection for her mother she adored her father, who brought her up on Horace, Ovid, and Voltaire. Her literary tastes were acquired early; she was familiar with Greek myths long before she knew her Bible. She never forgot that warm Sunday afternoon in September when, as a little girl, she was walking in the garden with a cousin and company unexpectedly arrived. Her mother called her indoors. A kindly old gentleman caressed her golden hair and spoke a few words of greeting to her. It was Goethe, whose ardent admirer she later became, and whose profile is today carved on her tombstone.
When Marie was thirteen years old her father died. She had been playing in the woods around her home and when she returned was told that he had fallen ill. She ran to his bedside and he asked her where she had been. “For a beautiful walk,” she replied. “I’m glad you have enjoyed yourself,” he said; “I’m in pain.” The remark was not intended to wound, but it cut the child to the heart; and when her father died three days later without having spoken to her again, Marie was devastated. Unable to confide in her mother, she hugged this private grief to herself throughout her adolescence. It was the first great trauma of her life, and she learned to handle it with the same self-restraint she exhibited in later life in times of stress. Her inability thereafter to find her “great man,” and the evident difficulty she had in choosing a husband, can be traced to the irreparable loss of her father during her formative years. Those who did not know her well thought her cold and heartless. But the icy exterior was a mask whose rigidity stood in inverse ratio to the boiling emotions it held in check. She was aptly portrayed in her womanhood as “six inches of snow covering twenty feet of lava,” a description she quotes in her Souvenirs without disapproval.8 When she was sixteen Marie was sent to a fashionable convent school in Paris, the Sacré-Coeur, which was run by Jesuits, in order to finish her education. As the heiress to the Flavigny fortune she was treated with deference, being allowed the privilege of her own room and a piano, which enabled her to continue the music lessons she had begun in her early teens. This was a consolation to her. Nonetheless, her years of adolescence were lonely. She writes with distaste of this period, hating the stifling routine and “the odour of sanctity.” One story stands out from this time. She befriended a younger pupil, an ugly and awkward child who was further handicapped by her slow intelligence. The other pupils cruelly tormented her until Marie, goaded beyond endurance at the young girl’s distress, rushed into the fray, scattering her tormentors in all directions.9 From that day no one dared touch the girl, and Marie was treated with new respect. It was an early indication in her of Flavigny chivalry. When she became “Daniel Stern” and developed Republican sympathies, she would break many a lance for the underprivileged and distressed.
In due course Marie, like other young ladies of her social class, “came out.” It was now expected of her that she marry. Such matters were usually negotiated by the families of the interested parties, and Madame de Flavigny and Marie’s brother, Maurice, who had entered the diplomatic service, proceeded to screen some possible candidates. Marie was now a dazzling blonde beauty, one of the most desirable debutantes in society. There was no shortage of suitors. Chaperoned meetings were set up, but the young Lorelei found no one with whom she felt compatible. Shy and reserved, Marie had come to resemble George Sand’s later description of her as “straight as a candle, white as a sanctified wafer,” and her suitors found her aloof. After three or four seasons had slipped by and Marie was still unmarried, her mother and brother began to worry. At last she showed an interest in a certain Count de Lagarde, aide-de-camp to the Duke of Richelieu. Lagarde was forty-five, more than twice Marie’s age, but after several visits she felt that he might offer her paternal affection. Unfortunately, Lagarde was as shy as Marie, and he found himself unable to express his feelings. The silence dragged on for several months. Lagarde finally decided he must end it. He paid one last visit to the salon of Madame de Flavigny, resolving that if Marie herself asked him to stay he would remain, the happiest of men; if not he would leave, never to return. Here is how Marie continues the story.
Marie d’Agoult, an oil portrait by Henri Lehmann (1839). (illustration credit 10.1)
M. de Lagarde had been in the salon with my mother for nearly an hour before I could bring myself to enter it. I had needed all this time to pluck up my courage. As I opened the door M. de Lagarde was on the point of leaving. I went towards him and held out my hand. “You’re going then?” I said, with tears in my eyes. “Yes, I’m going,” he said, as his eyes met mine. And as I could say nothing, “I’m going,” he repeated, emphasizing his words, “unless you yourself order me to stay.” Stay!… This short little word, which would have changed my whole existence, came to my lips more swiftly than thought; I felt it vibrate and tremble there … and die … in an incredible weakness of my love and my will-power.… Someone else came in; M. de Lagarde went.10
The departure of Count de Lagarde changed the course of her life. Marie relates in her Souvenirs that she was so upset that she resolved to marry the next suitor to present himself and told her family to arrange a suitable match. Their choice fell upon Count Charles d’Agoult. Born in 1790, and therefore fifteen years Marie’s senior, the count belonged to one of the oldest families in France. A distinguished military career lay behind him. He had joined the French army at seventeen and had risen to the rank of colonel. During the Battle of Nangis he had led a cavalry charge against Russian infantry and was shot in the left leg. Thereafter he always walked with a limp. Marie quickly perceived that Count d’Agoult was a man of great kindness and integrity. Although she did not love him, she came to respect him, and when he proposed to her she accepted. He told her that he would willingly give her back her freedom should she ever regret her decision. And eight years later, when that crisis came, he kept his word. The wedding took place on May 16, 1827, in the fashionable Church of the Assumption. A glittering assembly of aristocratic families gathered to mark the event. The marriage contract was witnessed by Charles X himself, and the dauphin and the dauphine. According to Count d’Agoult, his wife brought 300,000 francs to the marriage as her dowry.11 Shortly afterwards Marie was presented at court, where she created a sensation with her train of white silk and gold brocade, adorned with diamonds. The honeymoon was spent in London. The Channel crossing was rough, and the count retired below, indisposed. Marie stayed on deck throughout the voyage, however, admiring the turbulent seas. The event was symbolic of the manner in which their independent relationship was to unfold.
The unpublished memoirs of Charles d’Agoult offer us some rare insights into the character of his wife. She never travelled anywhere without trunkfuls of writing paper, which even accompanied the newlyweds on their honeymoon, to the count’s evident exasperation. Stranger still is the story the count relates concerning his wife’s experiment in transvestism. “One day,” he writes,
Madame d’Agoult came into the drawing room (where I was alone) wearing my military cap, dressed in my greatcoat, wearing a pair of my trousers, my boots with spurs, and my riding crop. At first I was somewhat taken aback. Then I hastened to tell her that the costume suited her very well—it was true—and that she even had the swashbuckling air of a musketeer. She looked at herself in the mirror, swished the air with her crop, and went out saying, “That’s what I needed, a pair of trousers and a crop!”12
As Marie d’Agoult scribbled away, covering reams of paper with her daily jottings about other people, memorabilia that she would one day incorporate into the account she gave of herself to the world, she had no idea that she herself was being closely observed—by her husband. Count d’Agoult had no literary talent; nor did he have any interest in “setting the record straight” (neither his wife’s Mémoires nor her correspondence with her lover were published during his lifetime). But he understood his wife’s difficult character through and through. His unpublished account is a straightforward description of their years together. It differs in detail from the received picture of Marie d’Agoult—calm, poised, unruffled—which was painted largely by herself.
After their return to France, Marie and Charles d’Agoult installed themselves in a mansion on the Left Bank of the Seine, almost opposite the Tuileries Palace. It was here that the countess held her first salon, scoring her greatest success with Rossini and his troupe of singers. From her balcony she witnessed the violent clash between workers and soldiers during the July Revolution. She recalled seeing soldiers running in all directions across the Tuileries and heard gunfire, screams, and breaking glass as furniture was thrown out of windows. Finally, to her astonishment she saw the tricolour flag run up over the Clock Pavilion. The monarchy had collapsed. It was Marie’s first encounter with “the people.”
Two children were born of the marriage: Louise in 1828, and Claire in 1830. In 1832 Marie d’Agoult bought a permanent home for her family: the Château de Croissy, a palatial residence built in the time of Louis XIV. Situated six miles from Paris and set in beautiful grounds, Croissy offered Marie an ideal retreat from the social whirl of the city. Her husband was frequently absent from Croissy for long periods of time. Posterity has not treated Count d’Agoult kindly. He is usually depicted in biographies of Liszt as an insensitive husband and an indifferent father, giving Marie ample reason to leave him. It is time to set this canard aside: Charles d’Agoult held his wife and small daughters in great affection. He had feared for the stability of his marriage from the start, rightly pointing out that in her youth Marie had been surrounded by bad models. The marriage was scarcely a year old when they had their first serious quarrel. Charles felt instant remorse and wrote Marie a soothing letter. Three years later a more serious rift occurred, resulting in a temporary separation. In one of his rare letters to Marie, Charles wrote:
I’m longing to hear from you, for the thought that you or my children are far away from me gives me no peace. I reproach myself for my last letter; it will have hurt you when you were ill, and that is far from my intentions! I was wrong to be so hard, forgive me that fit of bad temper. As you say, who among us does not have reproaches to make against themselves? It’s that sometimes I have moments which are a little sad, for my wife and children are everything to me and nothing can replace them.13
This was Marie d’Agoult’s background when the twenty-one-year-old Liszt entered her life. Her marriage was strained, her adolescence had contained many frustrations, her half-sister was suicidal, and Marie herself was neurotic and liable to bouts of depression and melancholia. It is a less flattering account of her personality than the one we are used to reading. Since her wedding day, she confessed, she had not enjoyed a single happy hour.
By the summer of 1833 the Liszt-d’Agoult affair had begun to develop rapidly. Liszt sometimes travelled out to Croissy, and Marie occasionally came to Paris, where they met secretly in his small apartment (referred to jocularly as the Ratzenloch, the “rat hole”). That fact alone makes it obvious that Marie was a willing partner in the liaison.14 In order to avoid detection, they resorted to elaborate subterfuge, writing to one another through intermediaries. As early as December 1833 Marie was urged by Liszt to forward her letters to one Madame Vial15 (“I am completely certain of her”). He, in turn, sometimes addressed his envelopes to “Marquise de Gabriac at the Château de Croissy,” and would then begin the letter in English (a language Marie could read), “This is not for the marquise. Do you understand?” His letters are studded with German and English phrases to obscure the time and place of their next tryst.16 At first their correspondence was formal and correct. But as the couple saw more of one another, their letters acquired intimate overtones. By January 1834 at the latest there was an open declaration of love. In the early summer Liszt spent an idyllic week at Croissy. On his return to Paris he wrote, “How ardent, how glowing on my lips is your last kiss!” And a short time later: “Write to me often. You write so divinely, so straight from the heart; your every word burns with an inner flame. There is only one name now that I repeat every hour.” Marie, for her part, had long since declared herself; although many of her letters are missing from the Correspondance, she had written as early as May 1833, “Sometimes I love you foolishly, and in these moments I comprehend only that I could never be so absorbing a thought for you as you are for me.”17 She had already addressed one of her letters “To a genius.”18
Even in these early days the course of their love-affair did not run smoothly. It seems that Marie had come into possession of some old letters that Liszt had written to Adèle Laprunarède and others. All of them dated from 1831, but her jealousy was aroused and she confronted him with them. He explained that these affairs were over long before he had met her. That did not satisfy Marie. She required him to confess to her in the greatest detail all the indiscretions of his past. He appears to have done so, but protested that he was not ashamed of these love-affairs and would never deny them.19 Marie “forgave” him, but the episode rankled. It was a dress-rehearsal for the many lovers’ quarrels that would typify their relationship in the years to come.
It is entirely in keeping with what we know of Marie d’Agoult’s character that she now consulted a clairvoyant to predict her future. The name of this fortuneteller was Mlle Lenormand, and she lived in the rue de Tournon, then one of the seamiest quarters in Paris. At the height of her fame Mlle Lenormand had numbered among her clients Alexander I of Russia and the Duke of Wellington, who consulted her in 1818 in order to discover who had attempted to assassinate him. She was now old, fat, and ugly, and she held her consultations in a dark, stuffy room, seated in a leather armchair in front of a table on which she shuffled some cards, while a black witch’s cat circled at her feet. So deeply did this eerie scene affect Marie’s impressionable mind that she was able vividly to recall the details even after a lapse of many years.
Your destiny [Mlle Lenormand told Marie] will be changed completely two or three years from now. What seems impossible today will come to pass. You will change your way of life entirely. Later you will even change your name, and your new name will become famous not only in France but in Europe. You will leave your country for a long time. Italy will be your country of adoption; there you will be loved and honoured. You will love a man who will make a sensation in the world and whose name will cause a great stir.20
This prophecy became true in all the essential details.
Throughout the summer of 1834 Marie had ample time to dwell on her destiny. Liszt was 200 miles away with the Abbé Lamennais at La Chênaie, where he remained for three months. It seems that the separation was planned in order to give the couple time to reflect on the consequences of their relationship. Whether Marie, under normal circumstances, could ever have mustered the courage to leave her home and husband in order to link her life with Liszt’s is uncertain. But the hand of fate now intervened. In October Marie’s elder daughter, Louise, fell ill; by December she was dead. Marie has left a moving account of this tragedy. The six-year-old child apparently contracted a fever at Croissy which turned into inflammation of the brain. She became delirious and went into long fainting fits. Marie took her to Paris for expert medical treatment, and did not leave her daughter’s bedside. Just before the end, and after three nights without sleep, it seemed to Marie that the crisis had passed, and she retired to the next room to tidy herself.
A facsimile of a letter from Liszt to his mother, dated Bernay, May 19, 1834. “My unfortunate piano has still not arrived. Go at once to Erard and give him my complaints and reproaches.” (illustration credit 10.2)
Hardly had I gone when some instinct drew me back to her bed. How terrible! The child was bolt upright, her eyes open and haggard. I rushed towards her. She threw her arms round my neck in terror as though to escape an invisible hand. I clasped her to me. She uttered a cry; I felt her body sag and hang limp against my breast.21
Prostrate with grief, Marie became severely depressed. Liszt called at the house every day for news, but she refused to see him. Nearly six months had elapsed since the pair had last seen one another, and we have a number of Liszt’s letters to Marie which tell of his anxiety and despair; they remained unanswered. Marie returned to Croissy in a suicidal frame of mind, threatening to drown herself.22 She had hardly any recollection of the days and weeks that followed. A sad footnote to the tragedy was that she was quite unable to bear the presence of her younger daughter, Claire, whose innocent laughter and playfulness during this period of mourning so jarred on her nerves that she placed the child in a convent. One morning, Marie relates, after she had begun her convalescence, she was given a pile of letters that had arrived at Croissy during her illness. Among them was one from Liszt announcing his intention of leaving France and expressing a desire to see her one last time before his departure. No such letter exists in the Liszt-d’Agoult Correspondance; Marie merely cites it in her Mémoires. Whatever the cause, Marie’s resistance crumbled. She travelled to Paris to see Liszt, and their emotional reunion took place in his apartment in the rue de Provence. That must have been no later than March 1835: their first child, Blandine, was born the following December.
It was now impossible for the lovers to remain in Paris. In order to avoid a scandal, they planned an elopement to Switzerland. The arrangements were made in absolute secrecy.23 The only two people Liszt confided in were his mother and his spiritual adviser, Abbé Lamennais, who hurriedly left his retreat in Brittany and travelled to Paris in an attempt to dissuade Marie from pursuing so radical a course. Their discussion lasted more than an hour, but Marie remained obdurate. She set out from Croissy at the end of May in the company of her mother, Countess de Flavigny, who had as yet been told nothing about the reasons for the journey. Liszt delayed his own departure until June 1, for appearance’ sake, having arranged to rendezvous with Marie in Basel a few days later.24 Just before leaving Croissy for the last time, Marie wrote a letter to Charles d’Agoult, perhaps the most difficult lines she ever penned.
I am going to leave, after eight years of marriage.… Whatever you may think, I have not been able to make such a decision without a cruel struggle, without bitter tears. I have no wrongs to reproach you with, you have always been full of affection and devotion for me; you have thought always of me, never of yourself, and yet I have been truly unhappy. I am not blaming you for this unhappiness. Perhaps (and I cannot reproach you for this opinion) you think that the blame for it lies solely in me. I do not think so. When fate has joined two people as dissimilar as we are in temperament and mind, without their knowing one another, the most constant efforts and the most painful sacrifices from both sides only serve to deepen the abyss which separates them.… I ask for your forgiveness on Louise’s grave.… Your name will never leave my lips except when it is uttered with the respect and esteem which your character deserves. As for me, I ask only for your silence in the face of the world, which is going to overwhelm me with insults.
M.25
Henceforth Charles d’Agoult’s lot was not easy. He continued to live at Croissy, cared for his daughter, Claire, and bore stoically the humiliation that Marie brought on him and his family. Not once did he attempt to deflect his wife from her purpose. And when, five years later, she returned to Paris, her illusions shattered, it is a measure of his devotion that he offered to take her back into the conjugal home.26
1. AS, p. 349.
2. RLKM, vol. 1, pp. 322–23.
3. AM, pp. 21–24. As the Marquise Le Vayer died in February 1833, Marie’s encounter with Liszt must have occurred no later than January of that year.
The episode was later confirmed by Hiller, who described it in his Künstlerleben as a “catastrophe.” (HK, p. 206.) He had great difficulty in dispersing the audience, some of whom were fearful that Liszt had expired. From Hiller we also learn that the concert took place in the assembly hall of the Hôtel de Ville.
4. AM, pp. 21–22.
5. AM, pp. 25–27.
6. VCA, vol. 1, pp. 18–19.
7. OJ, vol. 2, p. 362. As early as 1852 Marie’s medical condition had been diagnosed as “spleen,” an umbrella term which, in nineteenth-century parlance, covered a wide range of emotional disorders. “What is spleen?” wrote Marie in her unpublished “Journal.” “Can one see it as a gush of blood which leaves the brain, or else floods in in too great a quantity? (VCA, vol. 4, pp. 11–12.) She described her recurrent illness, which sometimes lasted for three months at a time and rendered her incapable of all physical activity, as “a bankruptcy of the nerves,” and she feared that it made her “the victim of stupidity and imbecility.” Her only remedy was to shut herself away in a darkened room in complete silence until the depression lifted.
8. AS, p. 349.
9. AS, p. 173.
10. AS, pp. 232–33.
11. ACS, p. 14.
12. VAMA, p. 14. When Barbey d’Aurevilly launched his savage attack on “Daniel Stern,” calling her not merely a bluestocking but a “blue-trousers” as well, he had no idea of the existence of this unpublished document, which, as Jacques Vier points out, lends unexpected weight to his description. The holograph of Charles d’Agoult’s “Souvenirs” is today in the possession of his descendant Count Saint Priest d’Urgel.
13. January 31, 1831. VAMA, p. 21
14. Liszt’s “seduction” of Marie d’Agoult is another canard that has become so deeply entrenched in the literature that it may never be eradicated. It has long been assumed, even by those biographers who are in other respects sympathetic to Liszt, that his “pursuit” of the countess wrecked her life by placing her in an impossible social position, and they hold him largely responsible for her plight. Yet even Marie’s own family, who knew her better than anyone, and who had had first-hand experience of her instability, never took such a position, holding her chiefly to blame for the liaison and its radical consequences on her life. In this connection see the letter from Maurice de Flavigny which not only virtually clears Liszt of the charge of “seduction” but makes allowance for his youth (p. 225). In old age, Liszt grew tired of defending himself against gossip and wrote his last word on this subject to Lina Ramann: “Madame d’Agoult was never seduced by me, and both her husband. Count d’Agoult, and her brother, Count de Flavigny, eventually held this to be true. ‘Liszt,’ they said, ‘is a man of honor.’ ” (WA, Kasten 327, unpublished letter dated November 14, 1880.)
15. Madame Vial appears to have been the mother of Herminie Vial, to whom Liszt had dedicated the “Clochette” Fantasy. Liszt had been a witness at the marriage of Herminie’s brother Charles Vial on November 28, 1833, in the church of St. Louis d’Antin, so he was intimately acquainted with the family.
16. “Ich werde ganzen Tag auf Sie warten, hier, 21 in der Strasse von Erard, zweiten Stock, die Türe rechts—ich bin immer allein” (“I will wait here all day for you, number 21 in Erard’s street, second floor, the door on the right—I am always alone”). (ACLA, vol. 1. p. 29.)
17. ACLA, vol. 1, p. 57.
18. ACLA, vol. 1, p. 53.
19. ACLA, vol. 1, pp. 72 and 83.
20. AS, p. 386. This consultation with Mlle Lenormand took place on June 23, 1834, at the very time that Marie came into possession of the Adèle Laprunarède letters.
21. AM, pp. 36–37.
22. ACLA, vol. 1, p. 133.
23. The following month, April 1835, Liszt gave a concert in Paris. It is an indication of the physical and mental strain under which he was labouring that he collapsed at the keyboard and had to be carried off the platform. This dramatic scene was witnessed by Henry Reeve, who left the following description: “Liszt had already played a great Fantasia of his own, and Beethoven’s 27th Sonata, in the former part of the concert. After this latter piece he gasped with emotion as I took his hand and thanked him for the divine energy he had shed forth.… My chair was on the same board as Liszt’s piano when the final piece began. It was a duet for two instruments, beginning with Mendelssohn’s ’Chants sans paroles’ and proceeding to a work of Liszt’s. We had already passed that delicious chime of the ‘Song written in a Gondola’ and the gay tendrils of sound in another lighter piece.… As the closing strains began, I saw Liszt’s countenance assume that agony of expression, mingled with radiant smiles of joy, which I never saw in any other human face, except in the paintings of our Saviour by some of the early masters; his hands rushed over the keys, the floor on which I sat shook like a wire, and the whole audience were wrapped in sound, when the hand and frame of the artist gave way; he fainted in the arms of the friend who was turning over for him, and we bore him out in a strong fit of hysterics. The effect of this scene was really dreadful. The whole room sat breathless with fear, till Hiller came forward and announced that Liszt was already restored to consciousness, and was comparatively well again. As I handed Mme. de Circourt to her carriage, we both trembled like poplar leaves, and I tremble scarcely less as I write.” (RML, vol. 1, p. 49.)
24. Details of Liszt’s journey from Paris to Basel will be found in his unpublished Pocket Diary for this period, recently discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale. See EDW.
25. YAMA, pp. 22–23.
26. In 1849 Charles d’Agoult was forced to leave Croissy when Claire, who had married Count Guy de Charnacé earlier that year, claimed her inheritance and took over the chateau as her matrimonial home. Charles moved into modest lodgings in the Batignolles and eked out his declining years on a small pension. Marie carried her guilt and remorse with her to the grave. That she never lost her respect for Count d’Agoult is borne out by a letter she wrote forty years later, on April 5, 1875, a few days after hearing of his death: “M. d’Agoult passed away on the 18th of last month, in his eighty-fifth year. He had foreseen his end for a long time, and waited for it with a soldier’s simplicity and a gentle Christian philosophy. But the agony of the last hour was spared him. Neither he nor even the doctor had foreseen the danger near. He had no apparent suffering or death agony. He leaves in the memory of those who knew him the image of a most gallant man. In the most delicate relations I found him constantly loyal, impartial, generous. I wear mourning for him with respect, and the regret of having been unable to equal him in the spirit of abnegation and devotion.…” (VAMA, p. 16.)