‘A great, grrreat Piece of news is that little Chip-Chip is going to give a grrrreat concert,’ George Sand wrote to Pauline Viardot on 18 April 1841.1 The next day, Marie d’Agoult wrote to a friend: ‘A small malevolent coterie is trying to resuscitate Chopin, who is going to play at Pleyel’s.’2 The idea had indeed come from a group of friends, and Chopin had resisted it vigorously. He had only fallen in with it, according to George Sand, because he was certain that the various difficulties of arranging the event would eventually induce them to drop the plan, and he tried to cancel it when he realised that Pauline Viardot would be unable to take part. But things moved quicker than he expected, and in a couple of days everything had been prepared, while three-quarters of the tickets had been sold before the concert had even been announced in the press.
‘He then awoke as from a dream,’ writes George Sand, ‘and there can be no funnier spectacle than the meticulous and irreso lute Chip-Chip obliged not to change his mind any more. This Chopinesque nightmare will take place in Pleyel’s Salons on the 26th. He doesn’t want any posters, he doesn’t want any programmes, he doesn’t want anyone to talk about it. He is afraid of so many things that I have suggested he play without candles, without an audience on a mute piano.’3 It was only by retiring to his room and playing Bach fugues that he was able to calm his nerves.4
On 26 April Delacroix came to collect George Sand and drove with her to the Salle Pleyel, where they found an audience of some three hundred people filling the hall, most of them friends or acquaintances. The scene is described by Liszt in his review of the concert:
At eight o’clock in the evening, the Salons of M. Pleyel were splendidly illuminated. At the foot of a staircase covered with carpets and perfumed with flowers, numerous carriages continuously deposited the most elegant women, the most famous artists, the wealthiest financiers, the most illustrious aristocrats, a whole elite of society, a whole aristocracy of birth, fortune, talent and beauty. A grand piano stood open on the podium, the places closest to it were universally coveted, ears were strained in advance, people recollected themselves, telling themselves that they must not miss a single chord, a single note, a single intention, a single idea of the one who would come and seat himself there. And they were right to be so avid, so attentive, so religiously moved, for the one they awaited, the one they were going to see, hear, admire, applaud, was not just an able virtuoso, a pianist expert in the art of making notes; he was not merely an artist of great renown, he was all of that, and much more than that – he was Chopin!5
In this courtly atmosphere, Chopin was able to have things his own way in another sense. He played a selection of Mazurkas and Preludes, after which Madame Cinti-Damoreau sang a couple of pieces. He then played a duo with the violinist Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, and finished with more of his own works. This was a far cry from the variegated programme, with a dozen or so heterogeneous artists taking part, which was still the accepted form. This was a recital: Chopin used a singer only in order to provide himself with a breathing space. The only precedent was a series of recitals Liszt had given in Rome the previous year, which he had called ‘soliloquies’ rather than concerts.
The reviews were unanimous in their praise. Le Ménestrel asserted that in Chopin ‘heart and genius alone speak, and in these respects his talent has nothing to learn’.6 La France Musicale acclaimed him as the creator of a school of piano-playing and of composition, and added that he ‘should not and cannot be compared with anyone’.7 The reviewers wrote of him as though he had already been transported to Parnassus.
‘A complete silence of criticism had already established itself around his reputation, as though posterity had already arrived,’ wrote Liszt in the Gazette Musicale, ‘and in the brilliant audience which came running to hear the poet too long silent, there was no reservation, no hesitation; every mouth had only praise.’8 This was not strictly speaking true: a particularly rude intrusion into the silence was to be made later that same year by the critic of the Musical World of London in a review of some newly published Mazurkas. ‘Mr Frederick Chopin has, by some means or other which we cannot divine, obtained an enormous reputation, a reputation but too often refused to composers of ten times his genius,’ he wrote. ‘Mr Chopin is by no means a putter-down of commonplaces; but he is, what by many would be esteemed worse, a dealer in the most absurd and hyperbolical extravagances.’ The critic went on to call him ‘very crude and limited’, termed his harmonies ‘clumsy’, his melodies ‘sickly’, and concluded by stating that ‘The entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony.’9 Nor could he resist asking how George Sand could be ‘content to wanton away her dreamlike existence with an artistic nonentity like Chopin’.
He was by no means the only one in England who found Chopin difficult to accept. One Victorian writer on the subject declared that the Nocturnes ‘bewitch and unman’; another assured his readers that the Polonaise-Fantaisie ‘on account of its pathological contents, stands outside the sphere of art’. An early biographer warned the public against the B flat minor Sonata (the one which contains the famous Funeral March), stating that ‘the music grows more and more passionate and in the concluding portion transcends the limits of propriety’.10
Chopin’s music was utterly revolutionary and quite unlike anything being written at the time. Parisians, whether they were musicians or music-lovers, were better prepared to confront such modern works, for they lived in a world where the frontiers of novelty were continually being expanded. But people used to the more traditional musical fare of England or Germany found it deeply unsettling. Even Schumann, who admired Chopin greatly, was driven to question whether the B flat minor Sonata was actually music or not.11
That very year, while reviewing the two Nocturnes (op.37), Schumann exhorted Chopin to write a grand work such as a symphony in order to achieve greater effect than he was doing.12 As Elsner had pointed out to Chopin years before, a piece for piano compared to a piece for orchestra was like an engraving compared to an oil painting.13 What they were really saying was that they wanted him to work in more conventional ways.
Liszt, who understood him better, explains that Chopin was unable to achieve perfection in any form that he had not himself created, which is why, he argues, his Sonatas and Concertos are less successful than his Polonaises, Mazurkas and Ballades. ‘If Chopin never tried his hand at symphonic music in any of its forms, it was because he did not wish to,’ he writes. ‘It was not out of some extreme modesty or misplaced disdain; it was the pure and simple consequence of the form which suited his sentiment best.’14
‘But,’ according to Liszt, ‘that which for anyone else would have been a certain cause of total oblivion and obscurity, was exactly what assured him a reputation above the caprice of fashion, and what sheltered him from rivalry, jealousy and injustice.’15 Even Schumann, who did not condone the direction in which Chopin now began to move, wrote, in 1840, that ‘by now Chopin does not write anything which could as well come from another; he remains faithful to himself, and he has good reason for this’.16
As Debussy was later to point out, ‘by the very nature of his genius, Chopin eludes all attempts at classification’,17 and that particular genius, one might almost say that particular and highly personal art form that Chopin had developed, elicited a strong response throughout Europe, and particularly in France, where the decline of the exuberant Romanticism of the 1830s had left something of a void.
The craftsmanship of Chopin, which had been outshone in the Paris of the 1830s by Meyerbeer, Rossini, Liszt and Berlioz, now appeared to many as the ultimate in artistry, and seemed to embody something more essential than the bombast of the previous decade. The result was that, as Liszt explains, ‘in those days it was not so much the school of Chopin as the Church of Chopin’.18 ‘[Liszt] is the Paganini of the pianoforte,’ wrote Balzac, ‘but Chopin is totally superior to him.’19 In his novel Ursule Mirouet, Balzac described Chopin as not merely a musician but an artist with a heightened gift for expressing the lyricism in his soul.20 It was no coincidence that Custine, in the note he sent Chopin after another concert, spoke of his playing not a piano, but ‘the soul itself’, or that Delacroix called his music ‘nourishment for the soul’.21
Fifty years later, the archetype of the late Romantic musician, Anton Rubinstein, could not help wondering: ‘Was it the piano that gave him the soul? Or was it Chopin who transferred his soul to the keyboard? I do not know; but his works could only have arisen from total absorption of one by the other…Chopin truly was the soul of the piano.’22 Heine, whose position as a baptised Jew and an émigré from Germany made him sensitive on such points, discovered in Chopin a purer and therefore more universal artist than any other. ‘Yes, one must admit that Chopin has genius in the fullest sense of the word,’ he mused; ‘he is not only a virtuoso, he is also a poet; he can embody the poetry which lives within his soul; he is a tone-poet, and nothing can be compared to the pleasure he gives when he sits down at the piano and improvises. He is then neither a Pole, nor a Frenchman, nor a German, he reveals then a higher origin, one perceives then that he comes from the land of Mozart, Raphael and Goethe, his true fatherland is the dream-world of poetry…’23 Only in the light of such judgements can one understand the religious enthusiasm with which Chopin’s concert in the Salle Pleyel had been greeted. The public knew what they were coming for, and they got it; the press merely marked the event with appropriate solemnity.
There had been no comparable ceremony attendant on the event which took place on the day before at the Conservatoire – Liszt’s concert to raise money for a monument to Beethoven, in which he had played and Berlioz had conducted a performance of the Pastoral Symphony. The very different trajectory of these two giants of the keyboard is telling. Liszt was growing more and more overtly political, making patriotic tours of Hungary and delivering speeches at public events. ‘Liszt is bound to become a deputy – or maybe even a King in Abyssinia or the Congo,’ Chopin quipped in a letter to Fontana, ‘but as for the themes of his compositions, they will lie forgotten.’24
The moral victory implicit in Chopin’s recital was accompanied by material satisfaction, for, as George Sand wrote to her half-brother, ‘Chopin has put himself in the position of being able to loaf all summer, by giving a concert where, in a period of two hours, with a couple of flourishes of the hand, he put six thousand and several hundred francs in his pocket, amid applause, encores and the flutterings of the most beautiful women in Paris – The Rascal!’25 These sentiments were echoed by Witwicki, who had also been present. ‘You just try and recite your verse for a couple of hours and see if they give you six thousand francs!’ he wrote to a fellow poet.26
There was now nothing to stop Chopin accompanying George Sand to Nohant, where he hoped to be able to get down to his much-neglected compositions. He had plenty of ideas and rough sketches, but in Paris he could never achieve the degree of concentration or find the time to turn these into finished works, a process which he was finding more and more strenuous, as one of his pupils describes:
The other day I heard Chopin improvise at George Sand’s. It is marvellous to hear him compose in this way; his inspiration is so immediate and complete that he plays without hesitation, as though it had to be thus. But when it comes to writing it down and recapturing the original thought in all its details, he spends days of nervous strain and almost frightening desperation. He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly and walks up and down like a madman.27
Nohant provided the perfect conditions for this torment. Only ten days after his arrival there at the beginning of June, Chopin was able to send Fontana the first completed work, the Tarantella (op.43). This was followed over the next two months by a Prelude, two Nocturnes, and, most important, the A flat Ballade (op.47) and the Fantaisie in F minor (op.49). These ‘cobwebs and manuscriptical flies’ as he called his manuscripts, which did admittedly sometimes resemble the peregrinations of a spider through a series of ink drops, were dispatched to Fontana for copying with the apology that ‘the weather is beautiful and my music horrible’.28
The weather was indeed fine that summer, and Chopin’s health was good as a result. ‘But as he is still at least ten years too young to be a really good boy,’ wrote George Sand, ‘he often gets bored in this happy state and thinks he is being idle since he is not crushed by work.’29 It was not just boredom that made Chopin fear inactivity, but also a sort of nervous restlessness which manifested itself from the moment he arrived at Nohant, in the first place through a stream of finicky letters to Fontana asking him to procure quantities of things, most of which were declared to be unnecessary in the next letters. The following is an example:
My Dearest,
I enclose a hundred francs for various expenses, from which you can subtract what I owe you for the Charivari [a French satirical magazine], pay the rent, pay the postman for my letters, the flower-woman, who wants six. At Houbigant Chardin of Faubourg St Honoré you can buy me some benjoin soap, two pairs of Swedish gloves (take an old one from somewhere for the size), a bottle of patchouli, and a bottle of Bouquet de Chantilly. In the Palais Royal, in the gallery on the same side as the theatres, almost in the centre, you will find a shop with galanteria (as we say in Poland); it has two windows filled with various caskets, jokes, gifts, gleaming, elegant and expensive. There you can ask if they don’t have any ivory head-scratchers; you must know the kind; a white curled hand set on a black stick. I think I saw one like it there – ask them. Find one and send it to me, but don’t spend more than 10, 15, 20 or 30. Get Pleyel to give you a copy of my Preludes, and get Schles. to give you all my Études. If my little bust by Dantan is available at Suss’s, buy two and have them well wrapped, if not, then go to Dantan’s, who lives in St Lazare, near Alkan (give him my love if you see him), and ask where you can get them, at the same time ask him about the bronze one he was supposed to cast for me. Somewhere in the upper reaches of my cupboard you’ll find a Polish tin bottle covered in flannel for placing against the chest, also an inflatable new pillow which I bought for the journey. You can throw in Kastner [Théorie abrégée de Contrepoint et de la Fugue, by J. G. Kastner] and send it all, well-packed (there’s a packer opposite you), in a case of reasonable size through Lafitte et Cayard, addressed like the letters. Please hurry. Keep the rest of the money for other things I shall want sent. Don’t pay Schlesinger, and don’t delay the sending if he hasn’t got Kastner in stock, but don’t fail to send Cherubini’s Traité, I think, de Contrepoint (I can’t remember the title). If he won’t give you the Cherubini without money, pay him, as it may be that Cherubini paid for the printing himself. I shall write to Troupenas in a couple of days through you. I must finish now, as the post is going. Sorry about all this, but you’ll get this on Sunday; send everything on Monday.
CH.30
Another cause for agitation was the Pleyel piano which had been shipped to Nohant to coincide with his arrival, which turned out to have a poor tone. Chopin pounded it petulantly while trying to work on his music, and after a couple of weeks insisted that Pleyel have it taken away and a new one sent down. Next, he turned his attention to his servant, whom he fired and sent away in July. But there was something else that was irritating him more profoundly. It was that Marie de Rozières, a pupil whom he had introduced to George Sand as a piano teacher for her daughter Solange, had somehow managed to ingratiate herself with George Sand. This nettled Chopin, as she had also recently become the mistress of the feckless Antoni Wodziński, who was back in Paris. His sister Maria had recently married Count Józef Skarbek, son of Chopin’s godfather, a circumstance which had caused a certain amount of awkwardness and embarrassment between the two families in Warsaw. The last thing Chopin wanted was Marie de Rozières treading on delicate ground. ‘Between ourselves, she’s an unbearable old sow who has somehow managed to tunnel into my garden, and is rooting around looking for truffles among the roses,’ Chopin wrote to Fontana. ‘She is a person to avoid, for she only has to touch something to make an indiscretion. In a word, she’s an old maid. We bachelors are far better.’31
During that spring Marie de Rozières committed some sort of indiscretion which infuriated him. She and Wodziński were to have come down to Nohant, but in view of Chopin’s attitude George Sand wrote telling her not to come yet, and certainly not with Wodziński, whom she wrongly assumed to be the source of Chopin’s irritation. When Chopin heard this, he became frantic. ‘I thought he would go mad,’ George Sand wrote. ‘He wanted to leave, he told me I was making him out to be mad, jealous, ridiculous, that I was creating bad blood between him and his friends.’32 The reason for these histrionics lay in the fact that, coming hard on the news of Maria Wodzińska’s marriage, a sudden show of hostility towards Antoni would make Chopin look spiteful and foolish.
George Sand challenged Chopin on the subject, and a ‘bitter discussion’ ensued, but either he avoided giving an explanation or she failed to grasp his meaning.33 The situation continued tense, as she wrote to Marie de Rozières:
You will ask me why he is piqued and why indisposed towards you? If I knew that I should know where the sickness lay, and would be able to cure it; but with his exasperating nature, one can never know anything. He went through the whole of the day before yesterday without uttering a syllable to anyone. Was he ill? Had someone annoyed him? Had I said something to upset him? I searched and searched. I know his sensitive spots as well as anyone can, but I was unable to discover anything, and I shall never know, any more than I know about a million other little things, which he may not even know himself.34
Chopin’s near-hysterical reactions to minor vexations are attribut able in part to his illness, but his behaviour also suggests frustration. Those determined to pin down the date at which George Sand began to deny him her bed would do well to look at the spring of 1841; both his tense condition and their apparent alienation would appear to point in that direction. This is borne out by the tone of irony and impatience in which she now described his behaviour; there is something of the schoolmistress recounting the antics of a spoilt child in her letters on the subject.
Her feelings towards him altered perceptibly, and she began to humour him like a child rather than to challenge him like a lover. She failed to understand the cause of his neuroses, and saw them as symptoms of a ‘malady’, by which she meant a sickly mental attitude. This was a dangerous explanation, as it allowed her to put down every quirk and every fit of temper, whether it was understandable or not, to the ‘malady’. She thereby absolved herself of any part in provoking his behaviour or inadvertently encouraging his tantrums.
Another element of discord which had entered their relationship was politics. While his patriotism had often placed him alongside those attacking the status quo, Chopin was no revolutionary. He was not insensible to the plight of the downtrodden and was friendly with many ardent radicals, but he was too focused on his work to get involved. And his personal tastes drew him towards the refinement, elegance and luxury that he found in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy. The conservative capitalist regime of Louis Philippe and the prosperity it generated provided the conditions in which Chopin could flourish artistically and live comfortably, so he was not inclined to subvert it. George Sand, on the other hand, was by nature a political animal, and she was growing increasingly radical, which led her to despise Chopin’s outlook as shallow and reactionary.
The arrival of the new Pleyel at the beginning of August and a visit by Witwicki did much to restore Chopin’s serenity.35 The Viardots also came to stay, which helped to ease the tension. Louis Viardot joined George Sand and her friend the philosopher Pierre Leroux in discussing their project for a new independent newspaper. Chopin and Pauline went for long walks or played billiards with George Sand’s half-brother Hippolyte. Things went so much better that towards the end of September George Sand suggested that Chopin, who had been looking for a new apartment in Paris sunnier than the one in the rue Tronchet, give up the idea and come and live with her in the rue Pigalle. This seems to belie her later statements that she was desperately trying to loosen the bonds between them. Chopin liked the idea and agreed to take over a room in the pavilion occupied until now by Maurice, for which he paid her some rent. He would share her drawing room and give his lessons there.
Some of his pupils balked at the distance they now had to travel for their lessons, the rue Pigalle being a long way further out than the rue Tronchet. But Chopin politely explained that he gave better lessons in his own room at twenty francs, but that if they preferred to send their carriages and thirty francs, he was prepared to do his best at their houses. He could afford to play the grand seigneur, as people were queuing up for the privilege of taking lessons from him, and pianists from other countries travelled all the way to Paris to do so.
The most notable of these was the twelve-year-old Hungarian Karl Filtsch, who had arrived while Chopin was at Nohant and had taken a few lessons from Liszt while he waited for him. ‘When that boy starts to travel, I shall shut up shop!’ Liszt exclaimed after hearing him.36 Chopin was equally impressed, calling him ‘my little urchin who knows everything’, and showed him off everywhere, introducing him with the words: ‘That, ladies, is what is called talent!’ The boy had a remarkable touch, and on one occasion Chopin burst into tears after hearing him play his music. ‘No one in the world will ever play it like him…except myself,’ he once declared after listening to Filtsch playing one of the Nocturnes of op.48, written that summer. His view of Filtsch’s future was not even clouded by the appearance on the scene of that other twelve-year-old wunderkind Anton Rubinstein, to whose first concert in Paris he accompanied Liszt.37
Not long after his return to Paris, on 2 December 1841, Chopin was again asked to play to the royal family at the Tuileries and was rewarded with a sumptuous present. The previous year’s success and the financial gains involved had whetted his appetite, and in the New Year he once more decided to give a concert of his own. The event took place on 21 February 1842. Once again the whole of Paris fought for the expensive tickets, and once again it was ‘a charming soirée, a feast peopled with delicious smiles, delicate and pretty faces, small, shapely white hands; a magnificent occasion where simplicity was married to grace and elegance, and where good taste served as a pedestal to riches’.38 Chopin played a Ballade, various Nocturnes, Preludes, Études, Mazurkas and an Impromptu, alternating with Pauline Viardot’s singing of a song by Jozef Dessauer, some pieces by Handel, and a song of her own composition, in which he accompanied her. In the middle, Franchomme played one of his own pieces for the cello.
The reviews were ecstatic, going on for column after column of superlatives. ‘The great Chopin’s concert has been as beautiful, as brilliant, as lucrative as last year’s (more than 5000 francs profit, a unique result in Paris, which merely proves how eager people are to hear the most perfect and the most exquisite of musicians),’ George Sand wrote to Hippolyte Châtiron. ‘Pauline was admirable…Chopin is relaxing by giving his lessons.’39
Such relaxation could not quickly repair the damage caused by the strain of the concert, however. ‘He looks even worse than last year, there’s only skin and bones left,’ wrote a visiting compatriot who saw Chopin at the Marlianis’ shortly after the event.40 A few days later Chopin went down with an attack of what George Sand called rheumatism, and was bedridden for the best part of two weeks. ‘I have to lie in bed all day long,’ he wrote to Grzymała, ‘my mouth and tonsils are aching so much.’41 Hardly had he recovered from this than, towards the end of April, Jan Matuszyński died of tuberculosis. He died in Chopin’s arms, after ‘a slow and cruel agony’, which Chopin seemed to share. He showed himself ‘strong, courageous and devoted, more so than one could expect from such a frail being, but afterwards he was broken’.42 This is not surprising, as he saw such deaths as precursors of his own. As usual on such occasions, Chopin’s general condition deteriorated, and George Sand took him down to Nohant at the first opportunity, on 6 May.
On his arrival there he was examined by Dr Papet, who found his chest and larynx sound, and diagnosed that the choking and the coughing resulted from the fact that both throat and larynx were awash with mucus. Such a diagnosis must have been reassuring. Chopin had got quite used to living with his condition; he accepted the chronic breathlessness and occasional neural aches as part of his everyday life, and it was easier to bear them if they did not portend something more serious. As soon as the crisis receded, he began to feel much better and started working again. Only three weeks after their arrival, George Sand wrote to Delacroix that ‘Chopin has written two adorable Mazurkas which are worth more than forty novels and say more than the whole literature of this century.’43 He was indeed at the apex of his art, and that year saw the birth of the Ballade in F minor (op.52), the Polonaise in A flat major (op.53) and the Scherzo in E major (op.54).
Everyone at Nohant was cheered by the news that Delacroix was coming down for a stay. ‘My Chopinet is very happy and agitated as he awaits you,’ George Sand wrote to him. ‘He keeps wondering what we can do to amuse you, where we can go for walks, what we can give you to eat, what he can play you on his piano.’44 Even Maurice, a surly character ‘not generous with his affection’, in his mother’s own words, was happy, as he worshipped the painter.45
Delacroix was delighted with Nohant. ‘The place is very agreeable and the hosts could not be more pleasing,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘When one is not gathered together for dinner, lunch, billiards or walks, one is left in one’s room to read or laze around on a sofa. From time to time the window opening on to the garden admits gusts of music from Chopin, who is working in his room; it mingles with the songs of the nightingales and the scent of roses…’46
In the tranquillity of Nohant, Chopin paid more attention to Delacroix and his conversation, and began to feel respect for the artist as well as liking for the man. ‘I have never-ending conversations with Chopin, whom I love and who is a man of rare distinction; he is the most real Artist I have ever met,’ wrote Delacroix. ‘He is one of the very small number whom one can both admire and esteem.’47 It was during this stay at Nohant that Delacroix finally worked out his project for the ceiling of the library in the Palais du Luxembourg, a problem which had been worrying him ever since he had been given the commission. He now saw it clearly: Virgil presenting Dante to Homer, surrounded by the great poets of antiquity. The head of Dante was to be a portrait of Chopin.
Witwicki came for a few days towards the end of July, but Balzac, who had been expected, did not appear, to the great relief of Delacroix, for ‘he is a chatterbox who would have broken the spell of nonchalance in which I am indulging with great pleasure’.48
The weeks passed too quickly for Chopin, and when Delacroix had gone he was once again a little bored. But his relations with George Sand remained ostensibly harmonious. When the subject of moving from the rue Pigalle came up that summer, there was no question of their not living together, and when they started looking for new accommodation, she wrote to Charlotte Marliani that ‘Chopin could not decide on the apartment without me nor I without him.’49
For once the search was not being carried out by Fontana, nor indeed was any other part of Chopin’s business, which had been transferred to Grzymała’s shoulders. There are no extant letters from Chopin to his former factotum from this summer, and at some stage during the next year Fontana would leave Paris for America. What has survived is a letter from Fontana to his sister in Poland, written in Paris that May just as Chopin was setting off for Nohant, in which he tells her that he is at the end of his tether financially and psychologically. ‘I always relied on one friend, who was to open up my career for me, but who has been consistently dishonest and false,’ he wrote. ‘I even left Paris for a time to get away from his influence, and that did me a lot of harm. I only started composing again after my return…’50
It is difficult to see how the friend who was going to open up Fontana’s musical career could have been anyone but Chopin, and this is seemingly corroborated by the fact that Fontana was in dire poverty at a time when the proverbially generous Chopin had just pocketed thousands of francs from his concert. How far Chopin could have helped a musical mediocrity like Fontana is debatable, particularly as Fontana suffered from stage-fright to such a degree that he would fall ill before and after taking part in a concert. He was an awkward, bitter man who easily took offence, and he resented the efforts Chopin made on behalf of his admittedly equally mediocre pupil Adolf Gutmann.51 How Chopin repaid Fontana for his copying, his secretarial work and his devotion is not known, but at least he allowed him to live free at the rue Tronchet apartment until he gave it up in the autumn of 1841. It does appear that the unfortunate Fontana had let himself be used without getting much out of it, and however one chooses to look at it, Chopin’s treatment of him does not redound to his credit.
It was Charlotte Marliani who searched for new accommodation this time, and at the end of July Chopin and George Sand travelled up to Paris to see what she had found. Having decided which apartment to take, they returned to Nohant for the rest of the summer. The extreme heat of that August overwhelmed Chopin, and he could not compose. George Sand too suffered from the heat and had persistent migraines. ‘It is then that one has to see Chopin exercising his function of zealous, ingenious, devoted nurse,’ wrote Marie de Rozières, who had come down to look after Solange and recover from having been jilted by Antoni Wodziński. ‘He calls her his angel,’ she added, ‘but the angel has very large wings which sometimes hit you.’52 The Viardots came to Nohant for a couple of weeks, after which the whole party returned to Paris in the last days of September, and Chopin and George Sand settled into their new home.
This was situated in the Square d’Orléans, a large private courtyard off the street. George Sand had taken a mediumsized apartment on the first floor of No.9, which consisted of a large drawing room with a billiard table, a smaller salon with a piano, and accommodation for herself and Maurice, who had rented a studio in one of the other houses on the square. Across the gravelled courtyard, at No.5, Chopin had taken two rooms on the ground floor, with a view onto the courtyard on one side and gardens at the back. The Marlianis had an elegant apartment in one of the other houses in the square, and it was there that they all usually met for dinner, George Sand lending her cook and Chopin contributing financially. The square was nicknamed ‘La petite Athènes’, as it was favoured by artists and writers. When Chopin moved in, other apartments were occupied by Kalkbrenner and his family, the pianist Zimmermann, and his friend the young composer Alkan.
For Chopin it was an ideal arrangement. The rent was low, since he only needed two rooms and a little attic for his new servant, Jan, whom Witwicki had found for him. In these two rooms he was as independent of George Sand and her family as he could wish, while at the same time being close to her and other friends, whom he could call on whenever the need arose.
It was a busy winter: he was working harder than usual at his lessons, which now did not usually end before six o’clock. He was also going out a good deal more than in the last few years. There were receptions at the Czartoryskis’ and at the Rothschilds’, where he and Karl Filtsch played his E minor Concerto on two pianos before five hundred guests. A good deal less brilliant was the unfortunate Fontana’s matinee concert on 17 March 1843, to which Chopin took Thalberg, for, as one witness put it, the event ‘did not rise above mediocrity at any point’.53
Chopin fell ill in February, and this time a new doctor was called in. He was the homeopathic specialist Jean Jacques Molin, and he brought a radical change into Chopin’s treatment. Whether Molin thought that his patient had tuberculosis or not is not known, but he prescribed the gentlest regime, designed mainly to ease his respiration. ‘Every second day [Chopin] spends five minutes sniffing a little bottle of something,’ a Polish friend noted in his diary. ‘The result of this is that he breathes more freely, he can walk up stairs without becoming exhausted, and he no longer coughs. He has developed a rash from ear to ear which, according to some, augurs well.’54
In mid-May, Chopin and George Sand went down to Nohant, this time taking the newly built railway as far as Blois, and spent the next two months entirely alone, except for Pauline Viardot’s baby daughter, whom George Sand had taken in while her mother went on tour to Vienna. There was an element of sadness and resignation in their relationship, George Sand working hard on her writing, Chopin trying to work but spending most of the days playing with the child instead. ‘She says petit Chopin in a way that would disarm all the Chopins on earth, and Chopin loves her and spends his days kissing her little hands,’ George Sand reported to Pauline Viardot.55
It is tempting to think that it was now that he first had the idea of writing the Berceuse (op.57), a work full of intense, though restrained, feeling. It illustrates more clearly than most of the pieces written at this time how far Chopin had developed in the last few years. It is brimming over with sentiment and tenderness, and yet there is no trace of sentimentality in it, for the expression is reduced to the indispensable, contained in a form both simple and sophisticated. Along with a few Mazurkas, the Berceuse constitutes Chopin’s entire output for that year.
Physically, he was feeling well and made the most of the good weather. ‘Chopin and I go on long excursions, he on a donkey and I on my own legs,’ George Sand related. ‘The donkey is a fine creature. It will only walk with its nose in my pocket, which is full of crusts of bread. The day before yesterday we were pursued by an enterprising ass who wanted to make an attempt on her virtue. She defended herself like a real Lucretia, with hefty kicks. Chopin shouted and laughed, while I attempted to fend off the Sextius with my umbrella.’56
In July they were joined by Delacroix, who again spent whole days with Chopin ‘strolling along the avenues, talking of music, and the evenings on a sofa listening to it, when God descends upon his divine fingers’.57 When Delacroix left, Chopin went up to Paris to collect Solange for the holidays, and they were soon followed down to Nohant by the Viardots. They would explore the countryside on long excursions, Chopin on his donkey, sleeping on straw in stables, and he thrived on the exercise. But as soon as the guests had left he began to find the atmosphere of Nohant stifling and to long for Paris and the comfort of his own friends. When he realised that George Sand was planning to stay on in the country until the winter, he decided to go back to Paris on his own at the end of October.