Liszt had spent the past year in Switzerland with his mistress, the comtesse d’Agoult. She was an aristocratic bluestocking who had rebelled against convention and left her husband in order to live with the man she viewed as a great artist, and therefore a kind of god. They had been leading a quiet existence, insofar as the celebrity and style of Liszt would allow, and she was hoping to steer him away from the life of a virtuoso pianist towards that of the Olympian composer. But it was not to be. That summer, while Chopin was in Marienbad, they had been joined by a friend and admirer of Liszt, the novelist George Sand.
George Sand, or rather Aurore Dupin, was one of the most famous and certainly one of the most notorious women of the time. Fatherless since the age of four and rejected by her mother, she had spent much of her childhood and adolescence in a convent, and escaped from a loveless home into a loveless marriage, to the baron Dudevant. Unable to stand it any longer, she left him and went to Paris, where she led a precarious existence trying to survive on journalism. She had written a novel in collaboration with another journalist, Jules Sandeau, which was published under his name and proved a success. Sandeau realised that the merit was hers and backed out of the partnership, leaving her to write her next book on her own. The upshot was the feminist novel Indiana, which came out in 1832 under her new pseudonym of George Sand and made her famous overnight.
She continued writing, and her fame spread, helped along by the titillating ambiguities that surrounded her person. Her masculine pen-name sat uneasily with the feminine Aurore, and she was apparently happy to be referred to as Madame Sand, the baronne Dudevant or plain George. As a child, she had worn boys’ clothes in order to go riding, and when she settled in Paris she took to dressing as a man, both because it was cheaper and more practical, and because it allowed her to go to the theatre alone without fear of being molested. ‘Madame Sand was very small, and was made to look smaller still by the men’s clothes that she wore with ease and not without a certain youthful virile grace,’ recorded Marie d’Agoult. ‘Neither the swelling of her bust nor the protrusion of her hips betrayed her sex.’1
In the circumstances, it would have been surprising if George Sand had not been a little confused about her own identity, and her books convey a perplexity of messages that both delights and disappoints feminists. Not surprisingly, this ‘hermaphrodite genius’, as Alexandre Dumas called her, fascinated her contemporaries. What is more surprising to anyone who reads her works today is that they took her very seriously; she was looked up to with respect by most of the progressive intellects of Europe.2
In 1833, the same year as she met Liszt, George Sand had fallen in love with Alfred de Musset, the enfant terrible of French Romantic literature, and they proceeded to have a tempestuous and destructive affair. Its high point came with their ‘honeymoon’ in Venice, where he fell ill and she took off with the doctor called to his bedside, whom she brought back to Paris. After Musset’s return to Paris the affair went through several more convulsions of extraordinary violence, and finally burnt itself out in a blaze of sadomasochistic passion. George Sand then had to face her husband, and managed, by the beginning of 1836, to obtain a legal separation, to reclaim her dowry and her small country estate, and to get custody of her two children, with whom she now arrived in Switzerland.
The little group roamed Switzerland, behaving, with the exception of Marie d’Agoult, like a gang of students on holiday. In one hotel register, Liszt filled in the questionnaire as follows: Place of birth: ‘Parnassus’, Occupation: ‘Musician-Philosopher’, Coming from: ‘Doubt’, Going to: ‘Truth’. They dressed to shock, and provoked respectable travellers by setting up what must have looked like a gypsy encampment in their hotel rooms. An English tourist, horrified to see himself sitting opposite a long-haired, strangely clad, gesticulating youth, asked his neighbour who that ‘fellow’ might be, and thenceforth Liszt and his countess were ‘the Fellows’, while George Sand gave herself a sobriquet based on the slang word for nose, pif, with a Swiss twist to it: Piffoël.
There could hardly be a greater contrast between the noisy, flamboyant and often childish behaviour of the Fellows and Piffoël on their holiday and Chopin’s ingenuous courtship in Marienbad. And while Chopin returned to Paris to work, look after his health and dream of the ‘grey hour’, Liszt and particularly his lady had very different ideas on how they were going to spend their next few months. Having forfeited her place in Parisian society by running off with her pianist, Marie d’Agoult was determined to create a new position for herself, as hostess of an artistic salon.
When she returned to Paris in the first week of October 1836, she took an apartment with a large reception room in the Hôtel de France on the rue Lafitte and sent Liszt out to haul in the celebrities. The coterie he mustered included Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Chopin, Adolphe Nourrit and various other musicians, the poets Heinrich Heine and Adam Mickiewicz, and representatives of some of the more interesting ideo logical movements of the time: the famous renegade Catholic priest and editor of Le Monde the abbé de Lamennais; the baron d’Eckstein, a converted Jew who had become a militant Catholic; and the Saint-Simonian philosopher Pierre Leroux. In October 1836 this company was swelled by George Sand, who moved into a small room at the Hôtel de France, attended by her latest lover, the Swiss poet Charles Didier.
Chopin did not much like Marie d’Agoult and was no longer very friendly with Liszt, whose style, both musical and social, irritated him. Liszt had transgressed against his code when one day he had used his apartment to make love to Marie Pleyel, the celebrated pianist and wife of Chopin’s favourite piano-maker and friend.3 The atmosphere at the Hôtel de France was hardly calculated to appeal to Chopin. Sainte-Beuve described it as ‘a mass of affectation, vanities, pretentiousness, of bombast and uproar of every kind’, produced by people whose talent was ‘out of control’.4 ‘We wanted to reform everything…the theatre, poetry, music, religion and society,’ Marie d’Agoult later wrote.5
Music and philosophy were strongly represented, and the inevitable consequence was much talk of the social and political relevance of music. Liszt yearned to recapture ‘the political, philosophical and religious power’ that he imagined music had in ancient times.6 The outcome was a woolly theory of ‘humanitarian art’, which involved Nourrit and others going off to the slums of Paris and conducting choirs of hundreds of workers as they sang hymns to words by Lamartine. Nourrit lamented the fact that he had become a singer, affirming that if he had concentrated on other studies, he ‘would have directed humanity along the path of progress’.7 This ‘Humanitarian Parnassus’ was nicely parodied by Musset in the press:
Inspiration descends, the eye of the God [Liszt] lights up, his hair shudders, his fingers arch and pound the keys with fury. He plays with his hands, his elbows, his chin, his nose. Everything that can strike hammers away…‘Sublime!’ they exclaim. ‘That’ll cost me twenty francs in repairs!’ moans the Divinity of the House [Marie d’Agoult].8
Even Berlioz was later forced to admit that ‘we talked too much…We did not listen, we philosophised.’9 But Marie d’Agoult defended their enthusiasm. ‘It was all very febrile and sickly, but it was generous.’ It stemmed from ‘a love of the people, of the poor, of the suffering, from a Christianity that would not wait for the afterlife’.10
It was a symptom of the times and the place, for Paris was a breeding ground of new pseudo-religions seeking to fill the void left by the retreat of the Catholic Church. Some of the Hôtel de France regulars were adepts of the nouveau christianisme of the Saint-Simonians, which predicated a highly spiritual materialist system for the reorganisation of the world and the regeneration of mankind. Others subscribed to a variety of similar cults, which veered perilously between the comic and the scandalous.
Chopin found most of this ridiculous, but he did frequent the Hôtel de France, and it was there that he met George Sand for the first time, probably in the last week of October 1836. A few days later, on 5 November, he entertained her, Liszt and his countess, Mickiewicz, Grzymała and the writer and traveller Ferdinand Denis at his own apartment. Denis noted that Liszt played magnificently, making a great effect on George Sand, who ‘really felt that powerful music’, but that the host merely clowned about on the piano.11 On 9 November, Chopin went to dinner at the house of Count Marliani (an expatriate Italian who was the Spanish consul in Paris), where he again spent the evening in the company of George Sand, Liszt and his countess. The following day the three dined at Chopin’s. On 13 December, Józef Brzowski, a visiting composer from Warsaw, received a card from Chopin which ran:
Today I shall have a few guests, Madame Sand amongst them; Liszt will play, Nourrit will sing. If this pleases Mr Brzowski I await him this evening.12
Brzowski was more than pleased, and he duly arrived to find a dazzling array of people. There was the effervescent, long-haired Liszt; the huge, scruffy Custine with his regal manner; the plump and gentle Nourrit; the staid middle-aged legitimist deputy Pierre Antoine Berryer, in impeccable white tie and tails; the seedy pianist Pixis, whose nose Heine described as ‘one of the curiosities of the musical world’; the splendidly mustachioed Grzymała; the fashionable playwright Eugène Sue; the republican journalist Victor Schoelcher; Włodzimierz Potocki, nephew of Delfina’s husband; Heinrich Heine; Jan Matuszyński; Ferdinand Denis and Bernard Potocki, son of the author of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.
There were only two women present. ‘Both of them, though close in sympathy, were striking by their apparent diversity,’ recorded Brzowski. ‘The Countess, blonde, lively, attractive, with a humorous and graceful manner, dressed with exquisite taste, was a typical high-class Parisian lady. George Sand was quite the opposite, dark-haired, solemn and cold, not at all French, with regular features and a calm, rather dead physiognomy, in which one could read only intelligence, thought and pride; her dress was fantastic, and betrayed a desire to show off. Her white smock was bound by a wide crimson sash, her little white tunic of strange cut had crimson facings and buttons. Her black hair, parted evenly in the middle, fell on either side of her face in curls and was tied with a gold band across her forehead.’13
‘While the Comtesse d’Agoult was entertaining the guests with her sparkling, witty and enchanting conversation, and a sweet smile lit up her face framed by blonde locks à l’Anglaise,’ continues Brzowski, ‘George Sand ensconced herself on the little sofa placed diagonally before the fireplace, and, lightly puffing out clouds of smoke from her cigar, replied sparingly and solemnly to the questions of the men who sat down beside her.’14 Liszt drew attention to himself, prowling about, gesticulating and trying to start a philosophical debate, which Chopin deflated with cynical observations. When a bored Brzowski asked Chopin if he would make Liszt play, Chopin suggested a Moscheles sonata for four hands. The two sat down side by side, Chopin as always taking the bass part, while Pixis turned the pages, occasionally looking up to cast glances of profound admiration in the direction of Brzowski, who had never heard anything like this.
After the sonata, Chopin served ices to his guests, followed by tea which was poured by Marie d’Agoult, while George Sand remained ‘nailed to her sofa and did not leave her cigar’, as the diarist records. ‘She would occasionally cast a glance at the person talking to her, but mostly just stared into the fireplace at the dancing flames.’15 Accompanied on the piano by Liszt, Nourrit then sang several Schubert lieder, but Liszt, whom Brzowski so much wanted to hear on his own, got involved in a heated philosophical discussion with Bernard Potocki. At length the tedious talk irritated Chopin, spoiled Marie d’Agoult’s temper and even bored George Sand, who normally loved such conversations.
In a period of under six weeks, Chopin had spent the evening in the company of George Sand at least as many times, but while he had no objection to being in the same room as Europe’s most celebrated woman writer, he was not impressed by her. Quite apart from the fact that his heart was set on Maria Wodzińska, George Sand did not answer to Chopin’s ideal of womanhood. ‘What an unattractive person La Sand is,’ he commented to Hiller as they walked home from the Hôtel de France one evening, ‘but is she really a woman?’16 He echoed these sentiments in a letter to his parents, adding that there was something verging on the repellent about her.17
He was not the only one to have reservations. Heine thought that her body was too short and plump, her eyes rather dull, and that ‘her slightly hanging lower lip seems to suggest exhaustion of the senses’.18 Marie d’Agoult dwelt on her eyes, which ‘seemed to see without looking, and although they were powerful, did not emit anything; a calm which made one anxious, something cold as one imagines the Sphinx of antiquity’.19
George Sand was far too dazzled by some of the other people in the group to take much notice of Chopin. Liszt had alerted her to Chopin’s genius, which is why she bothered with him at all, but she herself could not see it. Musically, she was more impressed by the breathtaking acrobatics of Liszt, whose talent was more evident; by Meyerbeer, whose spectacular operas were all the rage at the time; by Berlioz with his romantic ebullience; and by Nourrit’s philanthropy. To be Polish in Paris at that time was glamorous in itself, but even here Chopin was outshone in her eyes by Mickiewicz, the elemental bard who seemed to speak and suffer for his nation.20 She was fascinated by the poet’s ability to work himself into a kind of trance and improvise verse for an hour or two before collapsing in a fit of exhaustion, and his interest in the interrelation between religion, culture and politics fitted with the ideological climate at the Hôtel de France. In Grzymała, whom she had dubbed her ‘dear exile’, George Sand saw the archetype of the defeated Polish patriot, and found a kindred soul in a more personal sense.
The reticent, refined Chopin, who avoided philosophical or political discussion, who refused to compete with Liszt, who hid his genius behind a façade of irony and jest, was eclipsed by this galaxy. And while Heine, Hiller, Custine and Liszt himself considered Chopin the greater artist, the more politically minded of the group, including Mickiewicz and Grzymała, rated him as a salon musician, and lavished their admiration instead on Liszt, in whom they saw a political force.
Soon after the soirée described by Brzowski, George Sand returned to her country estate and the Hôtel de France circle was gradually eclipsed in Chopin’s life by the usual demands of the Paris season. At the end of the month there was a joint concert given by Liszt and Berlioz, there was the annual Polish Ladies’ jumble sale, there were dinners and dances, while Christmas Eve was spent at the house of an émigré Polish publisher. The guests included Aleksander Jełowicki, Mickiewicz and old Julian Niemcewicz, who got drunk and kept them up till one o’clock with reminiscences of eighteenth-century Poland. Afterwards, Chopin played, and ‘everyone was so taken up by his playing and the good cheer that nobody had noticed it had dawned half an hour before’.21
This was hardly the way to heed Mrs Wodzińska’s instructions, and although Chopin kept writing to her protesting his good behaviour, she was aware of the life he was leading through the gossip of other Poles in Paris. Chopin wrote letters, sent presents to mother and daughter, and complained: ‘Why is it not true about those mirrors in which one can see everything, about those magic rings which can transport one to the place in which one’s thoughts would like to wander…’22 He also went to see a fortune teller, who predicted the happy fulfilment of all his marital dreams, but this turned out to be a poor prediction.
Since her return to Poland in October, Mrs Wodzińska had had ample time to talk the matter over with her husband and let Chopin know whether his suit had been accepted. But Christmas came and went with no news, while the tone of the letters Chopin was receiving altered as time passed. Mrs Wodzińska’s now made no mention of ‘the grey hour’ and, although full of references to the Chopin family, whom she had seen once or twice in Warsaw, grew more impersonal. Maria’s were even more revealing. ‘Adieu, mio carissimo maestro, do not forget Dresden, or, soon, Poland. Adieu, au revoir…Au revoir, au revoir, au revoir! It gives one hope,’ she had ended a letter in October 1836.23 By the end of January 1837, however, the references to ‘May or June at the latest’ had been dropped, and replaced by a forlorn ‘when we meet again’. And a couple of months later, she was signing off: ‘Adieu, I hope you will not forget us.’24 The Wodzińskis were stalling.
The reason usually adduced is that the aristocratic Wodzińskis (who are graced with a title in most biographies of Chopin) thought too highly of themselves to give their daughter away to a commoner, however famous. This is based on a misunderstanding. The Wodzińskis were no more distinguished by birth than Chopin’s mother, and could have had no grounds for comparison with his father, a foreigner of some standing in Warsaw whose origins were kept scrupulously quiet. They were, it is true, much wealthier, but they would not have been remotely disgraced by marrying their daughter to the artist who was everywhere proclaimed as one of Poland’s greatest geniuses and had the entrée to the houses of the Czartoryskis and the Radziwiłłs, before whom people of the standing of the Wodzińskis bowed low. Moreover, when Maria had returned to Poland that autumn, there had been a conspicuous lack of interesting suitors.
The circumstances point to other reasons, such as Chopin’s poor health, his refusal to take care of himself, the gossip reaching Poland about his contacts and possible relations with ‘scandalous’ women such as Marie d’Agoult and George Sand, the obvious conflict between his life in Paris and theirs in Poland, and a general feeling that a match with a country neighbour would be less fraught with problems. Mrs Wodzińska, who had encouraged the whole project, was now in an awkward position, particularly as she genuinely liked Chopin. She let the matter drift, no doubt hoping it would die a natural death.
Chopin certainly had plenty to distract him from his broodings, as a veritable musical duel unfolded in Paris. His old Viennese rival Sigismund Thalberg had turned up at the beginning of 1837, and Liszt published a vitriolic attack on the pianist and his repertoire, which he judged facile, in the Revue et Gazette Musicale on 8 January. He followed this up by turning up late at his rival’s concert, coming in noisily while Thalberg was playing and making mocking asides throughout the performance. He then announced a series of concerts he would give at the Salle Érard in order to teach the Parisian public what real music was.
The first of these took place on 28 January, with a programme including Beethoven Trios hitherto not heard in Paris, Schubert lieder sung by Nourrit, and Liszt himself playing some Beethoven, Chopin’s new Études and several pieces of his own. The next three were equally impressive, both in the repertoire and its performance. Thalberg admitted defeat, saying publicly that if he possessed a tenth of Liszt’s talent, he would consider himself a great artist. But Liszt was not satisfied, and was only just dissuaded by Marie d’Agoult from writing another article rubbing the point in. Thalberg proceeded with his programme and gave a concert at the Conservatoire on 12 March, the success of which annoyed Liszt so much that he booked the large Conservatoire hall on a Sunday and managed to fill it at short notice for a magnificent performance. But the affair was not to rest there.
The flamboyant Italian revolutionary Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, now an expatriate in Paris where she held a notable position in society, had asked Liszt, Thalberg, Pixis, Chopin, Czerny and Herz to help her collect money for refugee Italian patriots. The event was to take place in her Pompeian music room, and they were all to improvise on themes from Bellini’s opera I Puritani. Even at the staggering price of forty francs a seat the room was full to bursting on 30 March for this duel which only needed weapons to become deadly.25
Liszt’s playing was by all accounts stupendous, and Heine was appalled at the effect it had on the audience, which was hypnotised. Princess Belgiojoso declared him the only pianist in Europe. The victor shook hands with his rival and invited him to dinner, but with such hauteur that Thalberg left Paris the next morning.
Chopin had been happy enough to see Thalberg brought down a peg, for the memory of Vienna still rankled, but Liszt’s vicious persecution of the man horrified him. According to Brzowski, he did not mince his words when he reproached Liszt for it after Thalberg’s departure.26 It was typical of everything that Chopin disliked about Liszt. Chopin had been confined to his bed several times during the last couple of months, but never seriously, and it is difficult to tell whether the plea of illness which he invoked as an excuse for not taking part in Liszt’s concert a few days later, on 9 April, was genuine or not.
But as Chopin cooled towards Liszt and his countess, they grew increasingly eager to draw him into their coterie. While he sat in Paris, ‘coughing with infinite grace’, as Marie d’Agoult put it, and waiting for news from the Wodzińskis, great efforts were being made to drag him down to Nohant, George Sand’s estate. She was now living there, enjoying a stormy physical relationship with Michel de Bourges, a left-wing lawyer from a neighbouring town, alongside her affair with Charles Didier, and trying to help Liszt by keeping Marie d’Agoult in the country while he performed in Paris.
In the interests of keeping her happy, George Sand was prepared to have anyone down to stay, though she herself hoped for Mickiewicz, whom she had promised to help with the French translation of one of his works. When, at the beginning of April, Marie d’Agoult had gone to Paris to assist at Liszt’s concert and then bring him down to Nohant, George Sand wrote: ‘Tell Mick. (non-compromising manner of spelling Polish names) that my pen and my house are at his disposal and only too happy to be so, tell Grzzz…that I adore him, Chopin that I idolise him, all whom you love that I love them, and that they will be welcome if brought by you.’ On the next day she added: ‘I want the Fellows, I want them as soon and for as long as possible. I want them madly. I also want Chopin and all the Mickiewiczes and Grzymałas on earth. I even want [Eugène] Sue, if you like. What else would I not want, if it was your whim? Even M. de Suzannet or Victor Schoelcher – anything, except another lover!’27
But, as Marie d’Agoult pointed out, ‘Chopin is irresolute; with him only his cough is dependable.’28 Although Chopin wrote to a friend that he might go to Nohant, he never did, much to the disappointment of the Countess, who seems to have conceived a plan to pair him off with George Sand. His thoughts were elsewhere. It was now April, and ‘May and June at the latest’ were approaching without his having heard a word from the Wodzińskis about their plans for the summer in Germany. At the beginning of June he heard that Antoni Wodziński had been wounded in Spain, and although Chopin kept the wound secret from Antoni’s mother, hoping to be able to break the news gently when he saw her, this gave him an excuse to write again, as Antoni needed money. In his letter he dropped heavy hints about not knowing what he was going to do that summer. Mrs Wodzińska’s reply was cordial and chatty, but made no mention of any plans. Nor was there the usual postscript from Maria.
Chopin’s physical condition was not good, and the nervous agitation caused by the baffling behaviour of the Wodzińskis made things worse. ‘You are at the limit between the torments of the mind and sickness of the body,’ Custine wrote to him that spring, advising him to spend a couple of months quietly at Saint-Gratien, at the same time offering to lend him money for a journey to the waters in Germany. Chopin did avail himself of Custine’s invitation to Saint-Gratien several times, but the visits were hardly calculated to restore his health.29
Brzowski’s diary describes one such excursion, on a Sunday at the beginning of June.30 It was a fine day, and Brzowski admired the countryside as they rolled out of Paris through the Porte de Clichy in their hired cabriolet and then drove through Saint-Denis to Saint-Gratien, where they were met by Custine and a lady, as well as his two catamites, Edward Saint-Barbe and Ignacy Gurowski. Having arranged to meet Gurowski for dinner at Enghien at six and then return to Saint-Gratien for the evening, Chopin and Brzowski set off for Montmorency, a small village which was full of trippers from Paris come to spend the day in the beautiful adjoining park.
After a copious breakfast of bread, butter and fresh milk, they went to hire donkeys, the accepted conveyance for visiting the countryside. Chopin was immediately accosted by two young girls who remembered him from the previous year, and they and their donkeys were duly hired. They set off, each mounted on his ass with the two girls on foot leading them. Brzowski was taken up by ‘the May green of the trees, the delicious smell of the forest, the unexpected vistas between trees or along valleys’, while Chopin was engaged in flirtatious conversation with the girl leading his donkey. At length they reached the Hermitage, where they were shown Rousseau’s work room, the desk on which he had written La Nouvelle Héloise and the decrepit piano on which Grétry had composed.
On their return journey they were caught by a sudden downpour and had to hurry back, Chopin expertly trotting along on his donkey and laughing at the disconsolate Parisian ladies in their flowery dresses. Back at Montmorency, they took their leave of donkeys and girls and climbed back into their cabriolet, which made for Enghien and the inn where Gurowski should have been waiting. There was no Gurowski in sight, and Chopin wanted to while away the time at the piano which stood in the corner, but the landlady refused to unlock it, fearing that the long-haired gentleman from Paris might damage it.
Gurowski eventually showed up, driving a carriage himself, and insisted that since it was such a fine evening they must go and call on a rich Englishman who lived by the lake. They drove over to the place, only to find that the Englishman was out in a boat. When at length he rowed back to the shore, Gurowski decided to go boating himself, so it was some time before they got back to the inn and sat down to dinner. As they were all in high spirits and hungry, they ate well and put down several bottles of champagne, some good hock and fine claret. It was a completely drunk Gurowski who drove them back to Saint-Gratien at breakneck speed, sending other vehicles rolling off the road. Custine was annoyed at their lateness, as he had arranged a musical evening and everyone was waiting.
After a change of clothes and an attempt to sober up a little, they came down and entered the drawing room, whose white walls, decorated with large flowers, were hung not with pictures but with two huge mirrors in heavy gilt frames. Comfortable sofas and armchairs covered in white brocade to match the curtains were scattered informally around the room, and the only touch of colour was lent by the Oriental vases standing on the white marble fireplace and the Pleyel grand piano. The assembled company included the duchesse d’Abrantès, the social journalist Sophie Gay, the comtesse Merlin, Berlioz and his wife Harriet, the tenor Louis Duprez and his wife, and several others, including one Brzowski termed ‘an old writer’, who was almost certainly Chateaubriand. Victor Hugo and his wife were expected but failed to appear. The whole group clustered around Chopin, who found it difficult to hide his lingering intoxication, and after a while the music started.
First Duprez and his wife sang a duet from a Donizetti opera. Duprez had recently arrived from Italy and quickly supplanted Nourrit as the leading tenor in Paris, with the result that Nourrit had to quit the capital. Duprez then sang a duet from one of Bellini’s operas with the comtesse Merlin. She was a perfect fit for the Custine salon – born in Havana, she had escaped from a convent and led a tempestuous life. Beautiful, clever and cultivated, she was an excellent musician who gave concerts and presided over a musical salon of her own.
When they had finished, Custine invited Chopin, who played a couple of new Études and his second Ballade. Then everyone begged him for a Mazurka, and he obliged, after which, ‘like some kind of prophet inspired’, he started on a warlike improvisation.31
The company then adjourned to the dining room for supper, after which some of the guests left. The remainder begged the comtesse Merlin to sing some Spanish songs. Custine dug up some castanets, Chopin sat down at the piano and began to improvise on the melody and tempo she gave him, and the Countess was soon dancing around the room as she sang. When she had finished, Custine insisted that it was ‘the magician, the Sylph of Saint Gratien’ who must round off the evening, and Chopin once more launched into a long improvisation. It was well after midnight when the last notes died away, and in spite of being pressed by Custine to stay the night, the two Poles climbed back into their cabriolet and returned to Paris. Chopin could not have been in bed before two.
Before Brzowski left for Warsaw in June, Chopin took him and Matuszyński out to dinner, typically at one of the grandest restaurants in Paris, the Rocher de Cancale in the rue de Montorgeuil. The occasion was meticulously recorded by Brzowski:
One climbs to the first floor, and already on the stairs leading out of the lower room there are relays of garçons, one of whom counts how many there are in the party and shouts to the others to prepare a room suitable for the number. So we found ourselves in a cabinet for three in which we settled ourselves comfortably. On the table in the centre of the room lay a book listing the dishes, a sheet of clean paper, and pen and ink. The elegant, slim but comprehensive volume, listing everything most refined that Paris can offer the gourmet, became the object of our scrutiny and discussion. Finally we gave complete freedom of choice to Chopin. He wrote out what we wished to eat and the waiting garçon was handed the note. We were soon served. We started with oysters – excellent! Next came soup, a cream of game – wonderful! Next they served us Matelot [probably a matelotte, a fish stew]. This dish, equal only to nectar, by its wonderful texture and exquisite taste seemed to be trying to proclaim with pride that we were indeed dining at the Rocher de Cancale. The next dish was asparagus – beyond all praise. Then came other savoury dishes, and the whole repast was noisily accompanied by the most magical champagne…With cigars in our teeth we set off for coffee at Tortoni’s.32
Although he still bandied about names like Ems and Wiesbaden in a note to Mrs Wodzińska, fishing for a response, Chopin remained in Paris, or rather, hopped about between Paris and Enghien. In mid-June Custine tried to take him along when he left for Wiesbaden, while Marie d’Agoult encouraged him to ‘come and create a new motherland at Nohant’ with Mickiewicz and Grzymała, but Chopin refused to stir from Paris. Then, suddenly, he made a decision. It was, from the point of view of his health, the worst he could have made, and one cannot help feeling that he made it to spite himself. His friend the piano-maker Camille Pleyel was going to London for a couple of weeks, and Chopin elected to join him.
They arrived on 7 July 1837. Fontana had told Chopin that England had an ‘Italian sky’ in the summer, but Chopin found it grey and sooty and was soon racked by fits of coughing. Yet while London assaulted his senses, it also fascinated him. ‘The English women, the horses, the palaces, the carriages, the wealth, the luxury, the space, the trees, everything, from the soap to the razors – everything is wonderful – everything ordered, everything cultivated, everything well-scrubbed,’ he wrote to Fontana.33
He took up residence in Bryanston Square, and as his guide he took Stanisław Koźan, a London-based friend of Fontana. ‘Chopin has been here for two weeks incognito,’ Koźmian related to his brother. ‘He knows nobody and wishes to see nobody but me. I spend the whole day with him, and sometimes even the whole night, like yesterday. He is here with Pleyel, famous for his pianos and his wife’s adventures…They have come to “do” London. They have put up at one of the best hotels, they keep a carriage; they are simply looking for ways of spending money. One day we go to Windsor, another to Blackwall, another to Richmond.’ This hectic activity was presumably dictated by Chopin’s need to obliterate mortifying reflection on his marital plans.34
He did not call on Moscheles, which was rude to say the least, as the older composer was bound to (and did) find out that he had been in London. He was not very good at maintaining his incognito. On one evening that Pleyel spent with his English counterpart, the piano-maker James Broadwood, Chopin accompanied him, but insisted on being introduced as ‘Mr Fritz’. But after everyone had played the piano a little, he could not resist the urge himself, and, sitting down at the instrument, had everyone gaping in astonishment after a few bars, and the truth was out. Nobody else played like that.35
After almost three weeks of frenetic activity, Pleyel and Chopin left London, reaching Paris in the last week of July. While in London, Chopin had received a letter from Mrs Wodzińska which informed him that the family were not going to Germany or anywhere else that summer. The letter has not survived, and it is possible that it contained something more definite, for when he wrote back to her on 14 August (he now had to inform her of Antoni’s wound), the final paragraph suggests that he had understood. ‘Your last letter reached me in London, where I whiled away the past month,’ he wrote. ‘I had thought that from there I might travel through Holland to Germany…I returned home, the season is getting on, and for me it will probably come to an end in my room – I await a less sad letter from you than the last. Perhaps my next will only be a postscript to Antoni’s.’36
The season did indeed end for Chopin in his rooms, in the middle of a deserted Paris, with Custine in Germany, the Czartoryskis in Brittany, Liszt and his countess in Italy. George Sand spent most of the summer in Paris looking after her dying mother, but then returned to Nohant in a gloomy state of mind. Looking back over the past few years, she felt horrified by her own emotional as well as physical promiscuity, doubtful of her ability to feel or sustain real love, and prematurely spent.37 She decided to remain in the country and work, took a tutor for her children who doubled as her lover, and settled down to ‘no longer count the bad days or look forward to better ones’.38
The autumn of 1837 was a time of reflection for Chopin too. He was smarting from the dénouement of the Wodziński affair, and did not get over it for a long time. He made a packet of all Maria’s letters and on the envelope wrote two words which can only be translated as ‘my tragedy’. But this was not enough to bury the episode, and he kept Maria firmly in his mind just as he had Konstancja, as an image and an object for emotional self-indulgence.
His finances too must have been in a pitiful state, for his lifestyle had lately become regal. At some point he had engaged a servant, he entertained often in his rooms, and he was always buying people expensive presents. The chaotic summer must have made it impossible for him to give lessons regularly, and the trip to London proved expensive. He now had to work hard at the lessons and also to sell a few compositions.
His life during most of that year had been far too hectic to permit the concentration he needed in order to write. He had been working on the Preludes and had written some Mazurkas and Nocturnes, but it was only in the autumn that he could concentrate enough to polish up some of them for publication. Of the longer works produced that summer and autumn, the most important are the famous Funeral March, which he did not publish then but later included in a sonata, and the B flat minor Scherzo, op.31. Both of these are highly dramatic, though restrained, pieces, and they provide a good example of the direction in which he was moving.
Chopin’s position in Parisian artistic and social life was, by 1837, unassailable. But the price paid for this had been high; his health had given way, and as he approached his twenty-eighth birthday he felt rudderless and isolated. Playing the part of the fashionable, cosmopolitan artist had been something of a failure. He had little in common with Berlioz and Liszt, less still with their intellectual friends. As for the French aristocracy, he realised better than anyone that his relationship with it was on the most superficial level. The few exceptions, such as Custine or the King’s Director of Music the comte de Perthuis, could not obscure this fact. He had one or two humbler French friends, such as the journalist Legouvé and the cellist Franchomme, and a few sincere admirers like the banker Auguste Léo, the Hanoverian ambassador Stockhausen, and the wine merchant and Saxon consul Thomas Albrecht, perhaps the closest of all his non-Polish friends, to whose daughter he had stood godfather.
Chopin was not a self-sufficient person, and this collection of friends did not constitute the ‘family’ that he needed. What is more, they could not speak Polish, which was more important than one might suppose. Chopin’s French was not good: he spoke haltingly and with a strong accent, while his letters reveal that he could neither spell nor construct his sentences properly in that language. He found speaking French continually a strain, and needed to resort to his mother tongue for a relaxed chat. The style of his letters to Polish friends like Grzymała or Fontana is effortless and allusive: sentences often lack an ending, thoughts are not carried through or explained, and layers of meaning are hinted at. With friends like these, he did not need to develop his thoughts or feelings, and the same was to some extent true of all Poles. It was with them that he preferred to spend the evening when he was tired or depressed. As he explained to one French lady, ‘One’s greatest solace in a foreign land is to have someone who carries one’s thoughts back to the homeland every time one looks at him, talks to him or listens to his words.’39
Chopin was not as committed to the Polish cause in the political sense as many of his countrymen would have liked. Most of them were cut off not only from their country, but also from their position in society and their means of livelihood. This tended to make their patriotism more visceral, and drove many of them, particularly the intellectuals, towards mysticism of one sort or another. Gripped by the tyranny of the national cult, and having no option but to sacrifice themselves to it, they saw the world, and life itself, as a national Gehenna. Chopin was cut off from home and family through his own choice, and he would almost certainly have spent most of his life in Paris whether the insurrection had taken place or not. The poets Mickiewicz and Słowacki used to reproach him for wasting his talent ‘caressing the nerves of the French aris tocracy’ instead of sowing rebellion with his music.40
His patriotism was never in question: he gave generously to all Polish charities and never failed to offer his services to the cause. But he also gave lessons to members of the Russian aristocracy passing through Paris, and he could not be accused of chauvinism. His patriotism and nostalgia for Poland were metaphysical. They remained the primary inspiration for most of his music, but they did not translate into political action. He was an exile certainly, but in the sense in which every artist of the Romantic movement saw it: he was an exile from Arcadia.
The rude awakening from the dreams woven round his love for Maria Wodzińska forced him to face up to the fact that he would never return to some kind of ‘normal’ life in Poland. The end of his fifth year in Paris also brought home a number of truths. He had come to see that he had to stand on his own, with only his art to support him. And just as he rejected the exclusive and narrow patriotism of some of his compatriots, he also rejected the political tendencies of the French Romantics, and with them the concert platform, in favour of a spiritual ascent, and a more intimate communion with his listeners.
Shortly before Christmas that year there was another Polish bazaar for Chopin to help with, and it was a busy season for him in other respects. Musical attractions included the first performance, on 5 December, of Berlioz’s Requiem at the Invalides. In the last days of February 1838, Chopin was called to the Tuileries to play before the royal family. Each time he did this he was presented with a gift: a silver-gilt tea set for one performance, a pair of Sèvres vases for another, and a dinner service for a third, all inscribed ‘Louis Philippe, Roi des Français, à Frédéric Chopin’. A few days later, on 5 March, he took part in a concert given by the young pianist Charles Morhange, who had adopted the pseudonym Alkan. Chopin, Zimmermann, Gutmann and Alkan played Alkan’s arrangement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony for eight hands on two pianos, a typically publicity-oriented concert piece. Later that month Chopin travelled down to Rouen, to help his friend Antoni Orłowski, who had settled there and needed to make his mark by giving a concert. What Chopin had not anticipated was that all the Paris music critics would go to Rouen as well for the occasion. The result was that Orłowski was the Cinderella of the evening. ‘Here is an event which is not without importance in the musical world,’ wrote Legouvé in the Revue et Gazette Musicale of 25 March. Chopin played at length before an audience of five hundred, who were ‘penetrated, moved, enraptured’. The review concluded with the exhortation:
Forward then, Chopin! Forward! Let this triumph decide you; do not be selfish, give your talent to all; consent to pass for what you are; put an end to the great debate which divides the artists; and when it shall be asked who is the greatest pianist in Europe, Liszt or Thalberg, let all the world reply, like those who have heard you: It is Chopin!41
Instead of persuading him to return to the life of a performing pianist, this seems to have put Chopin off for good. His appearance in Rouen was his last in public for a long time. This was not the result of laziness, reticence or even of his proverbial dislike of having to take on responsibility for organising the events. It was because he could not communicate with an indiscriminate audience in such an atmosphere. That was why he had not shone at the Hôtel de France – not because he was overshadowed by Liszt, but because he did not feel the atmosphere or the audience to be appropriate. When it was, he responded quite differently, and literally gave of himself. In November 1836, at the very time that he was clowning about before Marie d’Agoult and George Sand, Chopin played before Charles Hallé, a dedicated young musician who had just arrived from Germany. ‘Chopin! He is no man, he is an angel, a god (or what can I say more?),’ Hallé wrote home to his parents. ‘There is nothing to remind one that it is a human being who produces this music. It seems to descend from heaven – so pure, and clear, and spiritual.’42
‘Concerts never create real music,’ Chopin later confided in one pupil, ‘they are a form which one has to renounce in order to be able to hear what is most beautiful in art.’43 Heinrich Heine, who had written an article on Chopin just before the Rouen concert, had understood his feelings and his intention better than Legouvé. ‘Chopin does not derive his satisfaction from the fact that his hands are applauded by other hands for their agile dexterity,’ he wrote. ‘He aspires to a greater success; his fingers are the servants of his soul, and his soul is applauded by those who do not merely listen with their ears, but also with their souls.’44