When Chopin left Nohant at the end of October 1843, he was followed by a torrent of letters from George Sand to various friends in Paris, urging them to look after him. Grzymała was begged to see him and take him out in the evenings, Marie de Rozières was told to keep an eye on his health and mood, Maurice was to report on his everyday condition, and Charlotte Marliani also received her instructions:
Here is my little Chopin, I entrust him to you, look after him in spite of himself. He doesn’t look after himself when I am not there, and his servant is good but stupid. I am not worried about his dinners, for he will be invited on all sides, and it is no bad thing for him to have to wake up a little at that time of day. But in the morning, in the rush of his lessons, I am afraid that he will forget to swallow a cup of chocolate or bouillon which I usually force down his throat when I am there…Nothing could be easier than for his Pole to make him a little broth or a cutlet, but he will not order it and may even forbid it. You must therefore lecture and threaten…1
Her apprehensions were not misplaced, for Chopin did fall ill halfway through November, during a cold damp spell. ‘He is all right during the daytime, but at night he coughs, chokes and spits,’ Maurice informed his mother. Dr Molin confined Chopin to his room for a couple of days and gave him some homeopathic potions.2 His appetite remained good, and after a few days he felt quite well again.
But George Sand was not convinced. ‘I know very well that he suffers without me, I know that he would be happy to see me,’ she wrote to Grzymała, ‘but I also know that he would be saddened and almost humiliated in the delicacy of his heart if he saw me abandon my important work in favour of being his sick-nurse, as he puts it, the poor child! although I am his sick-nurse so willingly.’ Her concern for him was by no means selfless. ‘I miss him as much as he misses me, I need to look after him as much as he needs my care,’ she continued. ‘I miss his face, his voice, his piano, his slight sadness, and I even miss the heartrending sound of his cough. Poor Angel! I shall never abandon him, you can be sure of that; my life is consecrated to him for ever.’3
It is difficult to reconcile these sentiments with those expressed only a couple of days later in a letter to her friend Ferdinand François. ‘Chopin’s love for me is of an exclusive and jealous character,’ she wrote. ‘It is a little fantastic and sickly, like him, the poor angel. If he were strong enough to bear the suffering it creates in him, I should combat it with mockery and I should laugh it off. But it hurts him so much that I find myself forced at the age of forty to put up with the ridicule of having a jealous lover at my side.’4
George Sand had always shown protective and motherly instincts towards her friends. In the early 1830s she had steered Liszt through a psychological crisis, and within days of meeting Grzymała she was mending his shirts for him. A couple of years later she took up the young Pauline Garcia, engineered her marriage to Louis Viardot, and organised her career. She invariably referred to Pauline as her ‘daughter’, and bestowed similar epithets on other favourites, such as the young revolutionary Louis Blanc. By the mid-1840s these tendencies had grown into a real need to play the mother, and by the end of the decade into something of an obsession.
She had looked after and pampered Chopin from the start. She had often referred to him as her ‘little one’ or her ‘child’, but it was only now that she began to call him her ‘son’ – a word that can hardly be seen as a term of endearment. Having cast him as one of her children, she tried to laugh off his continuing love for her, and branded it as ‘sickly’.
‘No soul could be nobler, more delicate, more disinterested; no friendship more faithful and loyal, no wit more brilliant in its gaiety, no intelligence more complete and more serious in its own domain,’ she writes of Chopin in her autobiography, ‘but on the other hand, alas! no temper was more unequal, no imagination more umbrageous and more delirious, no susceptibility more difficult not to irritate, no demand of the heart more impossible to satisfy. And none of this was his fault. It was the fault of his malady…’5
It does not seem to have occurred to her that her treatment of him might have been at fault, and instead of examining her own behaviour or reassessing the state of the relationship, she merely indulged her instincts more and more. ‘The net result of my total devotion is to render his life at best bearable!’ as she explained to Charlotte Marliani. ‘But that is something at least, and I shall not grow tired of it because he deserves it and because all devotion carries its own reward. It has almost become a necessity for me to assist and nurse him.’6 Her devotion was double-edged, for while it made Chopin increasingly dependent on her, it also made him more insecure, as it became more obvious that she acted less out of love than kindness. Her refusal to acknowledge his love made him jealous and suspicious, and his neurotic tendencies flourished in this climate.
Nowhere can this be seen as well as in the pages of the meticulously kept diary of Zofia Rozengardt, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Warsaw restaurateur who had come to Paris to take lessons from him. The diary is that of an exalted girl who, having nurtured visions of garrets and dedication to art, was put out to find Chopin so worldly, and who took things very personally. It is nevertheless a priceless document, for it provides an outside view at the moment of crisis in his emotional life.
Miss Rozengardt took lessons from Chopin at irregular intervals throughout November, December and January, and his mood was different every time she saw him. One day he would be cold and distant, another charming, another angry and frightening. On 2 January 1844 she arrived at the wrong time, owing to a mix-up by his servant, which threw Chopin into a rage. He shouted and stamped his feet ‘like a spoilt child’, and she was sorely tempted to ‘administer a sound rap across those divine fingers’.7 Having vented his rage for a while, he started the lesson and she sat down at the piano, but then it turned out that she had not brought the score of the Nocturne she was studying, meaning to play it from memory. He was furious and upbraided her at length, telling her she did not know how to take lessons and that he had no time for others to waste. When he had calmed down again, she started playing the Nocturne, but it was not to Chopin’s liking, and he walked up and down the room nervously. His manner was so peremptory and hostile that she finally burst into tears, at which point he melted and became charming. At the end of the lesson, he gave her the score of one of his works. ‘What shall I write on it for you?’ he asked, to which she replied: ‘Write that I am a very poor pupil and that you scold me too much.’ He picked up a pencil and wrote: ‘To Miss Zofia Rozengardt, because she is a great baby, F. Chopin.’ When she saw this, she thought to herself: ‘The scoundrel, he knows the world – he knows how to make it up when he has hurt someone!’8
‘Strange, incomprehensible man!’ she wrote of him in a letter home. ‘You cannot imagine a person who can be colder and more indifferent to everything around him. There is a strange mixture in his character: vain and proud, loving luxury and yet disinterested and incapable of sacrificing the smallest part of his own will or caprice for all the luxury in the world. He is polite to excess, and yet there is so much irony, so much spite hidden inside it! Woe to the person who allows himself to be taken in. He has an extraordinarily keen eye, he will catch the smallest absurdity and mock it wonderfully. He is heavily endowed with wit and common sense, but then he often has wild, unpleasant moments when he is evil and angry, when he breaks chairs and stamps his feet. He can be as petulant as a spoilt child, bullying his pupils and being very cold with his friends. Those are usually days of suffering, physical exhaustion or quarrels with Madame Sand…’9
All such portraits are perforce subjective, and this one brings together the most negative aspects of the composer’s character and behaviour, but all of these are corroborated by other accounts. Two separate sources tell of an occasion on which Meyerbeer dropped in on Chopin during a lesson and pointed out that one of the pieces being played was in a different time to that printed in the score. Chopin icily replied that he was mistaken, but Meyerbeer insisted he was right. Chopin played the piece through, beating time as he went, but Meyerbeer was adamant. Chopin grew angry, and after another attempt at convincing his visitor, left the room slamming the door. One of Chopin’s pupils said that he always felt he had to treat him like a lady he was eager to please. But most reminiscences dwell only on his charm, good manners, kindness and consideration. And when he was not prey to some violent mood, he was still the most painstaking and inspiring teacher.10
Although he complained to Zofia Rozengardt that he was more easily tired than in previous years and was permanently short of breath, Chopin never let up in his teaching work. He also went out often. The Czartoryskis, who had just moved into the magnificent Hôtel Lambert on the Île Saint-Louis, entertained on a grand scale. There were musical soirées like that given by the baron de Rothschild in December, and there was the opera, where Donizetti was in vogue that season. Liszt turned up towards the end of the season and gave the usual couple of concerts to which Chopin had to go in order to maintain the appearance of friendship, and in March there was the concert of his own pupil Gutmann to be attended and supported.
In February Chopin had caught the influenza which brought down half of Paris, but to him the slight deterioration in his condition was less noticeable and less aggravating than to healthy people, like George Sand, whom he helped to nurse when she too caught it. Nor did it stop him from having himself driven on a freezing day to the cemetery of Père Lachaise for the burial of Camille Pleyel’s mother.
On 25 May 1844 he went, with George Sand, Victor Hugo and Lamartine, to a performance at the Théâtre de l’Odéon of Sophocles’ Antigone set to music by Mendelssohn; on their return home he received news from Warsaw that his father had died. He shut himself up in his room and refused to speak to anyone, neither George Sand, nor Franchomme nor Dr Molin, whom she had called over to help her break in on his grief. It was not so much a question of the loss he had sustained, for he had not seen his father for some nine years, and had in any case not been particularly close to him either temperamentally or intellectually, but it was another link with home and family that had broken, and another death to be taken personally. Although he soon came out of his isolation (a severe toothache forced him to admit Dr Molin), he would not stop brooding, and wrote off to one of his brothers-in-law begging for a detailed description of the last hours of his father’s life.
George Sand looked after him admirably, wrote to his mother, and tried to reason with him, but soon realised that the best cure would be activity. She took him down to Nohant, where she dragooned him into long walks and rides through the countryside, and managed at length to break down his melancholy through sheer exhaustion. But while her care and attention made him more dependent on her, he began to long with ever greater intensity for some kind of ideal of his lost family and home.
Exiles generally pine more ardently for their own country the longer they live in an adopted one, in spite of or partly because of the fact that the memory of their original home becomes more disembodied, unreal and confused. This was true of Chopin, and news like that of his father’s death tended to alienate him from his actual surroundings by bringing to mind the lost and increasingly idealised environment.
In these circumstances, nothing could be more welcome than the news that Chopin’s favourite sister, Ludwika, was coming to Paris for the summer with her husband. George Sand hastened to write to her explaining Chopin’s state of health, for she feared the shock Ludwika would experience on seeing how much her brother had changed in fifteen years. She assured her that although there had been illness, there had been no marked deterioration in the last six years (since they had been together), and that Chopin was now set on a steady course and would ‘last as long as any other, given a regular way of life and some care’.11
On 15 July Chopin travelled up to Paris to meet Ludwika and her husband, Józef Kalasanty Je?drzejewicz, a professor of law and now a judge in Warsaw, a practical and dull man of forty-one. They stayed in George Sand’s apartment in the Square d’Orléans, and Chopin spent the next ten days with them, showing them the sights and taking them to the opera. On 25 July he went back to Nohant, whither they were to follow him in a couple of days, after they had finished their sightseeing. But Kalasanty, who was interested in technology and viewed his stay in Paris as a golden opportunity to see things of which he could only dream in Warsaw, was not eager to go down to Nohant, and made Chopin wait another two weeks before bringing down his wife.
‘We’ve gone mad with happiness,’ Chopin wrote to Marie de Rozières when, on 9 August, the Je?drzejewiczes did eventually arrive at Nohant.12 George Sand had feared that Ludwika would turn out to be a more provincial version of Chopin, whom she regarded as backward and bigoted in everything except music, but to her delight she found in her ‘a woman totally superior to her age and her country, and with an angelic character’. She spent most of her free time with them, going for walks or sitting around talking, and later remembered that summer as ‘one of the happiest periods in our life’.13
On 28 August the Je?drzejewiczes left Nohant, accompanied by Chopin and Maurice, who were to bring Pauline Viardot back on their return journey. Chopin spent a couple of days with them in Paris, took them to the opera again, and on their last evening played for them with Franchomme. It was with a heavy heart that he saw them leave for Warsaw, and his mood was not improved when, instead of returning with him, Maurice followed Pauline Viardot down to her country house, where he proceeded to have an affair with her.
On 4 September Chopin was back at Nohant, where the mood of happiness persisted throughout the rest of the stay. ‘Without irony and without exaggeration, Chopin is all that is purest and best on earth,’ George Sand wrote to Pauline Viardot, for, once harmony had been re-established the old affection returned.14
They both worked hard, she at her writing, he on the B minor Sonata (op.58) and on teaching a Beethoven Sonata to the sixteen-year-old Solange, who had now finished at her boarding school. Apart from a flying visit to Paris towards the end of September, he spent the next three months at Nohant. He was working on ‘quite a little baggage of new compositions, saying, as usual that he cannot seem to write anything that isn’t detestable and miserable’, George Sand informed Delacroix, adding that ‘the funniest thing is that he says this in perfectly good faith!’15
Once again he returned to Paris ahead of George Sand, on 28 November, but he kept his return quiet so as to have a few days of peace before would-be pupils started laying siege to his apartment. He called on old friends like Franchomme and Thomas Albrecht, and was delighted to find Grzymała recovered from a fall and ‘dancing like a twenty-year-old’. This was in marked contrast to his own health, which began to make him feel ‘mummifically old’ and helpless, for he now often had to be carried up stairs or in and out of his carriage by his devoted Jan.16 It was a bitterly cold December and he found himself sitting in front of the Franchommes’ fire with three layers of flannel underclothes, nevertheless feeling ‘yellow, wilted and frozen’, while their baby son, ‘pink, fresh, warm and barefoot’, played at his feet.17
He clung to the discipline imposed by having to give lessons, and this kept him going. Lindsay Sloper, an English musician who had begun taking lessons from him, recorded that when he came for them, at eight o’clock in the morning, he would invariably find Chopin perfectly dressed and ready to start, even though he was sometimes so weak that he had to conduct the whole lesson reclining on a sofa and sniffing his bottles. Music, whether he was listening to it or playing it, always eased his suffering. Charles Hallé accompanied Franchomme to Chopin’s rooms one day, and they found him ‘hardly able to move, bent like a half-opened penknife and evidently in great pain’. They begged him to postpone the performance he had promised them, ‘but he would not hear of it; soon he sat down at the piano, and as he warmed to his work, his body gradually resumed its normal position, the spirit having mastered the flesh’.18
Among the new pupils Chopin acquired during this winter, two were to play an important part in his life. One was Jane Stirling, an energetic and earnest Scottish lady, an undistinguished pianist but an ardent admirer of his music. The other was Princess Marcelina Czartoryska. She was born Princess Radziwiłł and had married Prince Adam Czartoryski’s nephew Aleksander, an amateur musician of note who lived in Vienna. Princess Marcelina had studied under Czerny, and was, according to Berlioz, ‘a musician of wide knowledge and exemplary taste, and a distinguished pianist’.19 She was to become one of Chopin’s best pupils, and by general consensus the most faithful to his style. She was also a striking young woman of twenty-three, and although not beautiful in the conventional sense, she was, according to Delacroix, the sort of woman with whom one could fall hopelessly in love. Chopin appreciated the grande dame in her as well as the fine musician, and a deep affinity quickly developed between them.
This was all the more welcome to him, for not only was the harsh winter preventing him from recovering his strength, but his relations with George Sand were growing more difficult during the first months of 1845. She was beginning to face with trepidation the prospect of being lumbered for the rest of her days with somebody who was turning into a physical and, in her view, emotional invalid – she was still convinced that it was not his health but his ‘malady’ that lay at the root of his condition. She consoled herself as best she could by having a short affair with Louis Blanc, and at the same time heaped more devotion on Chopin, who for his part sought consolation in music and in his friends.
The lack of warmth Chopin sometimes met with at George Sand’s apartment in the Square d’Orléans was made up for by that he found at the Hôtel Lambert, which had grown into a sort of Polish court in exile. The various members of the Czartoryski family and some of their relations had apartments in different parts of the great building. There was also an institute for Polish young ladies run by the Princess in an adjoining house. The Hôtel Lambert served as a rallying point for Grzymała and many other friends. During the spring of 1845 Chopin celebrated Easter there, and he often went there for soirées and musical evenings, at some of which he played.20
He was not, however, to be tempted to play outside the homes of friends, except for one occasion in April, when the dying republican Godefroi Cavaignac expressed a wish to hear music before his end. Louis Blanc, to whom the request was made, immediately went to beg Chopin for the favour, which Chopin readily granted, knowing and liking the young man and apparently ignorant of the affair he was having with George Sand. He played for hours to the dying man, who listened with tears running down his face.21
That season Chopin kept away from most of the concerts. He had to go to Gutmann’s in March, and in April Stamaty begged him to come to the debut at the Salle Pleyel of his own pupil, the thirteen-year-old American pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk. This turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The boy was exceptionally gifted, and his pièce de résistance that day was Chopin’s E minor Concerto, which he played beautifully. Chopin went to his dressing room after the concert to congratulate him, and is supposed to have said: ‘Give me your hand, child – I tell you, you will become the king of pianists.’22 But apart from these, Chopin only went to two concerts during the first months of that year. Their nature is eloquent: Mozart’s Requiem and Haydn’s Creation. No less telling is the fact that Chopin chose Delacroix to accompany him to both.
However independent their behaviour may have seemed during the winter and spring of 1845, there was still no hint of Chopin and George Sand parting, and on 12 June they drove down to Nohant together in Chopin’s new calèche. Not only were they going to spend the summer together as usual, but George Sand had made up her mind to scrape together as much money as possible in order to go to Italy or the South of France with him for the winter.
Chopin sat around ‘cooking in the sun’ with Pauline Viardot, who had accompanied them, but after three weeks she left for Paris, and Chopin relapsed into listlessness.23 ‘I am not made for the country,’ he wrote in one of several letters to Ludwika. The notoriously lazy letter-writer, who preferred to drive across Paris rather than pen a note of three lines, who often kept his parents waiting up to six months for a letter from him, now spent hours writing long, rambling epistles to his sister. They spread over several days, and clearly reveal that they were written in order to kill time:
I’m not playing much, as my piano has got out of tune, and I’m writing even less. I feel strange here this year; I often look into the room next door [where Ludwika and her husband had stayed in the previous year], but there’s nobody there. It is sometimes taken over by some guest who comes down for a couple of days – And I don’t drink my chocolate in the morning – and I’ve moved the piano to a different place; by the wall, where the sofa and the little table used to be, where Ludwika used to sit and embroider my slippers while the lady of the house worked at something else. In the middle of the room stands my desk, on which I write, to the left are some of my musical papers, M. Thiers and poetry; on the right, Cherubini; in front of me the repeater you sent me, in its case (4 o’clock). Roses and carnations, pens, and a little piece of sealing wax Kalasanty left behind. I have always one foot in your world – the other in the room next door, where the lady of the house is working – but I am not at all with myself at the moment, only, as usual, in some strange space…24
During the first month at Nohant he had managed to write three new Mazurkas (op.59), but by the beginning of July he was incapable of putting his mind to anything. He spent whole hours pacing his room or staring idly out of the window, or else he would play the piano for a moment with Solange. She was the only person who seemed to have time to go for drives with him, and they would set off aimlessly, accompanied by the huge dog Jacques, whose head stuck out of one side of the cabriolet, while his rump and tail hung out on the other. Chopin would then come back to his room and sit down once more to his letter to Ludwika, adding the latest gossip about Victor Hugo’s amorous adventures, jumbled up with snippets gleaned from the papers about the opening of the telegraph between Washington and Baltimore and Liszt’s antics at the unveiling of the Beethoven memorial.25
Chopin’s mood had much to do with the tensions that were building up at Nohant. While George Sand kept to her room and her work most of the time, Maurice now began, imperceptibly at first, to assume the role of master of the house. He had been a rather shy boy, but encouraged by his mother’s doting admiration, he had grown in self-assurance. ‘Maurice paints, teases, twirls his moustaches, sniggers, swaggers, wears his boots outside his trousers, and smells of the stable,’ George Sand proudly wrote to Marie de Rozières that summer.26 He also began to question, at first only by his manner, the composer’s position and rights in the Sand household.
Solange, who was illegitimate, had never been George Sand’s favourite, and had been packed off to boarding school as a child. Later attempts to make up for this early neglect by spoiling her had been predictably counter-productive. ‘It was not dresses and a horse that I needed, but love,’ Solange would later write.27 What little she did get came from Chopin, who had from the start taken a liking to her and stood in for her absent father. Now that Chopin himself began to feel that he was being excluded from George Sand’s affection in favour of Maurice, he and Solange were naturally thrown together. She was as bored as he was at Nohant. ‘Solange gets dressed, then undresses, climbs onto her horse and then gets off it, scratches, yawns, opens a book and then closes it, combs her hair…’ George Sand wrote to Marie de Rozières.28
What often happens in this kind of situation occurred here too, for while Maurice grew more aggressive and protective of his mother, and she began to treat Chopin with a certain tolerance that suggested a weakening of his position, Solange began to court him, and, since he was not her father, did not fail to use all the appeal that a nubile seventeen-year-old girl can hold for a depressed, insecure and prematurely ageing man of thirty-five.
Already having one daughter who felt unloved and wronged, George Sand proceeded to do the worst thing she could have done: she ‘adopted’ another. This was Augustine Brault, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a cousin of hers, a wretched and loutish character unable to pay for his daughter’s education and unwilling to look after her. Augustine was pretty and intelligent, and George Sand thought the world of her. She had helped the Braults on the girl’s behalf before, and now decided to take her into her own family, knowing Maurice to be extremely partial to her, and ignoring Solange’s dislike of her.
Maurice and Augustine soon became inseparable. George Sand looked on benignly as they flirted, and thought them both charming, while Solange lowered in sullen resentment, supported only by Chopin, who did not take to Augustine either. But while Nohant divided into two camps over the girl, the only rumblings of war that summer took place over Chopin’s servant.
Jan was not popular in the kitchen, as he vented his antipathy towards the cook in the crude but direct French he had picked up: the more mentionable examples were ‘ugly like pig’ and ‘mouth like arsehole’.29 He was not popular with George Sand either, and Chopin had for some time been thinking of getting rid of him. But he was loath to do so, for he had got used to him, and needed to have someone around with whom he could speak Polish. But Jan soon fell foul of Maurice, and that settled the matter.
Outwardly, relations between Chopin and George Sand remained unchanged, and when, in September, he had to go to Paris briefly to settle some business, they wrote to each other every day, as was usual when they were apart. Hardly any of her letters to him survive, but one of those that do dates from this trip, and ends with the words: ‘Love me, my dearest angel, my dearest happiness, I love you.’30
Chopin returned to Nohant at the end of the month, and spent the whole of October and November there. His health was quite good, but he was, according to George Sand, ‘worrying, like all sickly people, and burying himself in advance all the time, with a certain relish’. This view was echoed by Dr Papet, who again made a full examination and found no signs of illness, but thought him ‘inclined to hypochondria and destined to be perpetually alarmed until he reaches the age of forty and his nerves lose some of their excessive sensitivity’.31 One cannot help wondering at Papet’s opinions. By now the thirty-five-year-old composer looked moribund to most people, and there was clearly something other than ‘excessive sensitivity’ at the bottom of his condition. But Papet’s invocation of the magic age of forty found favour with George Sand, who soldiered on in the belief that all the neuroses would vanish when this was reached.
It is true that Chopin’s condition was aggravated by anxiety, particularly on account of his work. ‘Oh, how time does fly!’ he wrote to Ludwika. ‘I don’t know why, but I just do not seem to be able to do anything good, and it’s not that I’m being lazy; I don’t spend my time wandering about like I did with you, but stay in my room for whole days and evenings. I must finish some manuscripts before I leave here, because I cannot compose anything during the winter.’32 His anxiety was understandable, for although in terms of quality he was at his peak (he had just started work on the Barcarolle, which some consider to be his greatest achievement), there was a marked falling-off in the facility with which he could work, and therefore in the quantity produced.
The last and greatest stage of his output had begun in 1841, when he had produced a dozen important works, including some of his best. The next two years saw a progressive drop in the quantity being produced, with half a dozen substantial pieces in 1842 and the same number of shorter ones in 1843, while in the whole year of 1844 he could only finish one work, the B minor Sonata (op.58). In the following year, he wrote three Mazurkas and started on the Barcarolle. He was putting more and more thought into these later works, self-critically reviewing them many times before allowing them to go to the printer. Their composition represented weeks of agonised reworking and frustration. His powers of concentration were failing and his inspiration was beset by anguish, both emotional and intellectual.
On the other hand, he was being more adventurous in his composition. The Barcarolle, most of which he wrote after his return to Paris at the end of November, was a new departure, both in form and content. Another was the Sonata for Piano and Cello which he had been thinking of for some time. The last time he had written anything for an instrument other than the piano had been over ten years before, and then he had let Franchomme write most of the cello part. But, having spent many hours over the last years playing pieces with him, he had developed a familiarity with the instrument. At the same time he was embarking on ‘something else which I don’t know what I’ll call’, as he described it to Ludwika.33 He would call it the Polonaise-Fantaisie (op.61), and it was to be the final and logical step in Chopin’s development of the Polonaises of the late 1830s and early 1840s, so evocative of past grandeur and so declamatory in their rebelliousness, into the pure musical fantasy couched in the language of the Polonaise.
His attempts at working in Paris were thwarted by the constant flow of visitors to his rooms. Liszt was back, Meyerbeer was on a visit from Berlin, August Klengel, a musician Chopin had known in Dresden, had also come. Christmas was lugubrious in Paris that year, with half of society brought low by an influenza epidemic, and the first months of 1846 were hardly more lively. Apart from a grand ball at the Hôtel Lambert, to which he went with George Sand, Solange and Delacroix, Chopin did not go out much, for he felt fragile and tired easily. While the epidemic carried off many far healthier people than him, including his favourite pupil, Karl Filtsch, who had died in Venice aged fifteen after an exhausting year giving concerts around Europe, the influenza barely affected Chopin. ‘I’ve outlived so many people who were younger and stronger than me that I’m beginning to think I’m eternal,’ he wrote to Ludwika.34 His evenings were most often spent with Delacroix, Grzymała, the poet Zaleski and Franchomme, with whom he kept trying out pieces of the sonata he was writing. In April he went to stay with Franchomme’s family near Tours, but was back towards the end of the month in order to prepare for his journey to Nohant. Before leaving Paris he held a musical evening at his own apartment, to which he invited the Czartoryskis, Princess Sapieha, Delacroix, Louis Blanc and the Viardots. It was a typically Chopinesque evening: the rooms were filled with flowers and beautifully lit, ices and delicacies were served, and he played for hours.
On 27 May Chopin arrived at Nohant, whither George Sand had preceded him a couple of weeks before. He came with presents for her and an ingenious new ice-making machine so they could have cold drinks when the heatwave started. Concessions had been made on both sides. Chopin had acquired a French servant who was quiet and polite; George Sand had invited a friend of Chopin’s sister, Laura Czosnowska, whom she did not particularly like. But the spirit of conciliation was at odds with what was really taking place at Nohant that summer.
For the last couple of months George Sand had been engaged in writing a new novel, Lucrezia Floriani. It tells the story of a famous actress who, disillusioned with love and fame, retires to the seclusion of a lakeside villa hidden away in the depths of the countryside, where she avoids all contact with the world and devotes herself to the upbringing of her illegitimate children. Chance brings two travellers into her wilderness: one an erstwhile friend and admirer, the other a delicate, virginal and melancholy prince. The prince falls ill and cannot be moved in the morning, and by the time Lucrezia has nursed him back to life, they are in love. There follows a period of bliss, but gradually the prince’s restless mind, his jealousy and his ‘malady’ begin to torment him and drive her mad. One day she simply ‘dies’ of sorrow and exasperation.
Lucrezia is sagacious, understanding, strong yet supremely feminine, unaffected and noble. She is eminently practical as well as being spiritually on a higher plane. Her guiding principle in life has been love, and she has been misunderstood and reviled for this. Disappointed in her various lovers, she has abjured sexual love and has concentrated all her affections on her children, to whom she intends to devote the rest of her life. Although some stress is laid on the fact that Lucrezia is still highly attractive, she does not want to have any more affairs with men, and the fact that the prince is an intruder into her retreat, albeit an unintentional and passive one, is represented as a violence done to her. The novel clearly depicts her as a victim.
The prince is a disembodied creature exuding refinement and nervousness, an exquisite work of art hopelessly unsuited to normal life. As a character he is insipid and unconvincing, little more than a stage prop used to create the conditions for the author’s descriptions of Lucrezia’s emotional martyrdom. But there are occasional passages describing particular traits in his character which have a ring of truth about them.
The book is unmistakably about George Sand and Chopin (the prince has a Polish name, Karol, and his travelling companion is the spitting image of Grzymała). This was clear to most readers in Paris as soon as the first instalments began to appear in the press in June, and even in faraway St Petersburg, the novelist Ivan Turgenev was in no doubt as to whom it referred.35 Most people were profoundly shocked, for while George Sand was known to enjoy carrying out vicious autopsies on her dismissed lovers, this was the only instance of her going in for vivisection. There was an abundance of intimate detail, and the book was a public humiliation of Chopin. Delacroix, Heine and even Liszt were appalled.
‘One should never put those one loves or those one hates into a novel,’ George Sand later wrote, and although she rarely put anything else into her own, one must assume that she did so subconsciously.36 In the introduction to a later edition of Lucrezia Floriani, she wrote that in literature it is not possible to portray a character, only ‘a sentiment’. ‘One therefore has to create the characters to suit the sentiment one wishes to describe, and not the sentiment to the characters.’37 By ‘sentiment’ it seems she meant the reactions of a character to a situation, for that is indeed what the book is about. George Sand wrote so much, so quickly and so subjectively, and the line separating personal experience from fantasy in her novels is so thin, that it is possible she was not aware of the fact that she was describing her own relationship with Chopin. She certainly denied it vehemently when accused. This enhances the value of the book as a document, for it provides an insight into how she saw the relationship at this stage.
The central theme of the novel is the gradual transformation of Prince Karol’s gentle character by his ‘malady’, which in turn kills Lucrezia. The traits of this character are well drawn, if a little one-sidedly, as the following passage illustrates:
As he was polite and reserved in the extreme, nobody could even suspect what was going on inside him. The more exasperated he was, the cooler he grew, and one could only judge the degree of his fury by his icy contempt. It was then that he was truly unbearable, as he wanted to reason and to subject real life, of which he had never understood a thing, to principles he could not define. Then he would find wit, a false and brilliant wit, in order to torture those he loved. He would become supercilious, stiff, precious and aloof. He seemed to nibble playfully, yet inflicting wounds which penetrated to the depths of one’s soul. Or else, if he lacked the courage to contradict and mock, he would wrap himself in disdainful silence, in a distressing sulk.38
The various neuroses which one can recognise as Chopin’s are presented by George Sand as symptoms of some spiritual evil, and not as the result of any human emotional tangle. Prince Karol is also shown to be invariably wrong, whether on matters of principle or on practical ones. When he stands by his judgements or opinions, he is merely being ‘sickly’. This combination of physical, emotional and spiritual ineptitude not only makes the character of Prince Karol hard to believe; it also demonstrates that George Sand was making no effort to understand Chopin as a person.
Lucrezia’s reactions to Prince Karol’s neuroses reveal the main reason for the disintegration of the Chopin-Sand ménage. Lucrezia feels smothered by the situation, and her continual allusions to being ‘murdered with pinpricks’ are echoed in George Sand’s contemporary correspondence with reference to Chopin. The same is true of the almost pathological way in which Lucrezia uses her children as a pretext for all her actions, labouring the idea that they have a sacred priority in her life to which everything else must be sacrificed. George Sand was suddenly becoming very conscious of her duty towards her own children, whom she had hitherto not only neglected but ruthlessly subordinated to her own priorities.
Although the message of the book is full of menace for Chopin, it is unlikely that it was written as a warning. If it was, it failed to get through. As was her wont with new works, George Sand read out instalments before Chopin and her house guests that summer, and while the others listened in horror, Chopin failed to spot the obvious. ‘I was in agony during the reading,’ recalled Delacroix, ‘the victim and the executioner amazed me equally. Madame Sand seemed to be completely at ease, and Chopin did not stop making admiring comments about the story.’39 It seems more likely that the plot of the book crystallised by itself, without any intentional direction from George Sand, under the influence of her growing paranoia. Lucrezia’s identification of a conflict between children and lover mirrored a similar one emerging in George Sand’s own consciousness, which demanded discussion.
Whatever the intention behind it, the book shows how she viewed her relationship with Chopin. She was convinced that he was in some way stifling and tormenting her. In this she was not alone, as many of her friends felt that she was being trapped, and even Mickiewicz believed that Chopin was her ‘moral vampire’, and that he would kill her in the end.40 What is also clear from a reading of the book is that she had come to see her children as her main responsibility, and that she was going to make use of them in order to escape from the perceived trap.
The first step in this was a hardly perceptible transference to Maurice of the rights which Chopin, as the man in the family, had come to consider as his. Soon after his arrival that spring, Chopin was dismayed to find that the old gardener, who had been at Nohant for twenty years, had been sacked, and two more old retainers were dismissed during the course of the summer. Chopin saw this as Maurice’s doing, and showed his disapproval. Halfway through June he had a difference of opinion with Maurice on a domestic matter, and was mortified when George Sand took her son’s side. ‘I lost my temper, which gave me the courage to tell him a few home truths, and to threaten to get sick of him,’ she wrote to Marie de Rozières, adding that ‘since then, he has been sensible, and you know how sweet, excellent, admirable he is when he is not mad’.41
Augustine Brault and Maurice had begun having an affair. Solange was bored. She was jealous of Augustine, who seemed to be attracting more attention than her, and she therefore began to actively flirt with Chopin, whose frustrated feelings for George Sand were gradually transferred to her. In these circumstances, the arrival of Grzymała and Laura Czosnowska, a coquettish thirty-six-year-old friend of Ludwika’s from Warsaw, did little to ease the tension. Everybody liked Grzymała, but neither George Sand nor Augustine nor Maurice could stand Laura. Snide comments were made and there was sniggering behind her back, which Chopin noticed and attributed to Augustine’s influence. Solange agreed with him, and provided the sympathy he was not getting from the rest of the family.
That summer there was a terrible heatwave which enervated everyone, most of all Chopin. ‘Chopin is amazed to find himself sweating,’ George Sand reported to Marie de Rozières. ‘He’s quite upset by it and claims that, however much he washes, he still stinks! We laugh to the point of tears to see such an ethereal creature refusing to sweat like everyone else, but don’t ever mention it – he would be furious. If the world or even just you were to know that he sweats, he could not go on living. He only reeks of Eau de Cologne, but we keep telling him he stinks like Pierre Bonnin the carpenter, and he goes scuttling back to his room, as though he were being pursued by his own smell.’42 After the heat came swarms of little bugs which bit everyone, gradually working their way up the legs. Soon everyone was sitting around scratching unashamedly, particularly Delacroix, who had come down for the last two weeks of August.
His visit brought relief to Chopin, and they spent some delightful moments together, talking of Mozart’s operas and Beethoven’s sonatas, some of which Chopin played to his friend. Chopin was so glad to be with Delacroix that he now, for the first time, uttered a phrase of recognition of his talent, calling him, in a letter to Franchomme, ‘an artist worthy of the highest admiration’. He entered into Delacroix’s metaphysical speculations about colour and contour in painting and their relationship to rhythm and tone in music, and ‘painted’ pictures on the piano at his dictation.43
Chopin was desolate to see him go, and wished he could go back to Paris with him, but his habitual inertia kept him at Nohant. As he and George Sand saw Delacroix aboard the mail coach at Châteauroux on 30 August, carrying Chopin’s entire work for the summer, three Mazurkas (op.63), they met her friend Emmanuel Arago and a young friend of Maurice’s off the incoming coach. As they drove back to Nohant, Chopin felt more isolated than ever.
But he put on as brave a face as possible. When the English poet Matthew Arnold dropped in to visit George Sand, he found Chopin very much in evidence, and he could be counted on whenever the house party needed entertaining. A typical evening was recorded by another visitor, who describes how Chopin started with a take-off of a Bellini opera, which produced general mirth, ‘such was the finesse of the observation and the witty mockery of Bellini’s musical style and habits’. He then played a ‘prayer for Poles in distress’, followed by an Étude and a funeral march, after which he roused everyone with a lusty rendition of a bourrée, a local peasant dance of which he had made some transcriptions. He finished off the evening with another joke, an imitation of a defective musical box. ‘If we had not been in the same room we could not have believed that it was a piano tinkling under his fingers,’ the visitor wrote.44
At other times, Chopin would invent musical mimes: he would use the piano to mimic an argument between two people, or a drunk walking down the street. As he did so, younger members of the household would pick up his cue and mime or dance comic scenes and ballets. ‘He would lead them as he wanted, and would, according to his whim, make them pass from the pleasant to the severe, from the burlesque to the solemn, from the graceful to the passionate,’ George Sand wrote. ‘Costumes were improvised in order to play the successive roles, and as soon as the artist saw them appear, he would vary his theme and his accent wonderfully to suit their character.’45
In spite of this, Chopin could not help feeling left out much of the time, and when in September the whole house party went away on excursions, he remained at Nohant, writing letters to Ludwika and trying to work, with only one of the dogs for company. The work did not come easily, however, and he complained to Franchomme that ‘I do everything I can in order to work but it’s no good. If this goes on, my new compositions will not resemble the chirruping of warblers or even the sound of smashing china.’46 He was probably referring to the Sonata for Piano and Cello, which had already taken him longer than any other work, and was still not finished. He had managed to complete the Polonaise-Fantaisie, a couple of Nocturnes and the Three Mazurkas, but he was not quite satisfied. ‘When you write something it seems good – otherwise one would never write anything,’ he explained. ‘Later on, reflection comes, and one either accepts or rejects. Time is the best censor and patience the best teacher.’47 But he felt time was running out; he could no longer concentrate and was beginning to feel that he was drying up.
As he watched the way of life he had grown used to gradually falling apart, Chopin was haunted by the old fear of being alone. ‘Now I don’t have a single one of my school friends left alive in Paris,’ he complained to Ludwika.48 In his entire extant correspondence, the subject of dreams crops up only three or four times; yet two of the dreams, related almost twenty years apart, centre round the theme of dying away from home, family and friends. In the last couple of years of his life, the image of dying in a poorhouse is conjured up several times in his letters. He had never been an independent or self-sufficient person, and eight years of George Sand’s tenderness had made it impossible for him to envisage life on his own.
There was little he could do, except wait, as the plan of spending the winter in a warmer place had been shelved at the insistence of Maurice, who had decided that the whole family, including his mother, should remain at Nohant. The only ray of hope for Chopin was that Solange had met a young man who wanted to marry her, and that Maurice seemed to be thinking of espousing Augustine, a match that George Sand was encouraging. Chopin thought that when the children were married off and settled, the mother would return to him, and so, thinking it best to be out of the way, he left for Paris alone on 11 November. George Sand was taken in by his apparent serenity, and felt that he was finally going to ‘round the cape’ and settle down to a quiet middle age.
While they were both deceiving themselves, Parisian society had already jumped to various conclusions. Coming not long after the publication of Lucrezia Floriani, Chopin’s return to Paris alone set tongues wagging. ‘Is the break between Chopin and Madame Sand definite? And for what reasons?’ Liszt quizzed Marie d’Agoult from the depths of Ukraine.49 Although there had been no dramatic break, he was not wrong to make such surmises, for the affair had come to an end.