Chopin’s relief at finding himself back in his Parisian world is evident. Those of his letters to George Sand that survive make him sound a little distant, although full of good wishes and tenderness. He felt well, in spite of the bad weather, and the treatment he had just started to receive from a Swedish masseur was doing him good – it seems likely that apart from anything else, he suffered from poor circulation. He did not lack attention and care, as Charlotte Marliani was still living in the Square d’Orléans, and he could drop in for dinner whenever he felt too lazy to go out. Marie de Rozières was in almost daily attendance, as were Grzymała and Franchomme, while friends such as Delacroix and Delfina Potocka, now back in Paris, did their best to distract him.
He resumed his lessons and tried to write, but, as he complained to Ludwika, ‘I write a little and cross out a lot.’ He was still wrestling with the Sonata for Piano and Cello. ‘I’m sometimes happy with it, sometimes not,’ he wrote. ‘I throw it into a corner and then take it up again.’1 In November, he wrote a Veni Creator for the wedding of his friend Bohdan Zaleski to his former pupil Zofia Rozengardt. This now lost piece, presumably for choir and organ, is the only religious work Chopin is known to have composed, and an astonishing new departure for him at this stage in his life.
He now clung more than ever to his ties with Poland, even seeing a good deal of his fellow musician Józef Nowakowski, who had come from Warsaw, though the man had gone a little senile: Chopin ‘often knocked at his soul, but there was nobody there’.2 Grzymała’s soul, however, could be depended on, and Delfina Potocka was as affectionate as ever, while the Hôtel Lambert in itself represented a small kingdom of Poland. On 24 December, Prince Adam’s name day, Chopin went to a reception there, during which the venerable Soliva conducted a choir of girls from the Princess’s institution, which must have brought back poignant memories. It was there too that Chopin saw in the New Year of 1847, wearing every overcoat he could find, and probably wishing that he could have been in Italy with George Sand instead of in snowbound Paris.
George Sand arrived in Paris on 7 February, accompanied by Solange and Augustine, in order to settle the legal aspects of her daughter’s marriage to the young Fernand de Preaulx. She was busy with these matters and behind in her work, so Chopin did not see much of her. But she was naturally present, along with Grzymała, Delacroix and her friend Emmanuel Arago, when on 17 February Chopin and Franchomme played through the final version of the Sonata, and three days later she accompanied Chopin and Delacroix to Franchomme’s concert at the Conservatoire.
A few days before, at the Marlianis’, she had been introduced to a sculptor by the name of Auguste Clésinger. She took Solange to visit his studio, and was impressed by his work. He showered mother and daughter with compliments, presents and flowers, and begged to be allowed to carve busts of them both. This involved further visits, during which he overwhelmed them with his artistic temperament. Before the end of February Solange told Preaulx that she had to reconsider her decision to marry him.
‘She’s changed her mind,’ Chopin wrote to Ludwika. ‘I regret it and I’m sorry for the boy, who is decent and loving, but I suppose it’s better it happened before than after the wedding.’3 Clésinger was a feckless drunkard and a gambler, but George Sand was overwhelmed by his exuberance and saw in him a sort of Delacroix in marble. Delacroix himself summed up the sculptor’s talents as ‘daguerrotype in sculpture’, and disliked his manner.4 The Marlianis disapproved of him, and the man who had introduced him to George Sand wrote to her warning that he was not to be trusted. Chopin thought him odious. He wondered at all the admiration heaped on him by George Sand and Solange, but assumed that the infatuation would pass.
On 1 April Delacroix took George Sand and Chopin to see the finished ceiling of the library in the Palais du Luxembourg, in which Chopin could recognise himself in the figure of Dante. A few days later George Sand left Paris with Solange, and Chopin was to join them at Nohant at the beginning of June with Delacroix. But he felt little enthusiasm. ‘I honestly don’t feel like it, as, apart from the lady of the house, the son and the daughter, the other people will be new faces I shall have to get used to, and I can’t be bothered any more,’ he wrote home. ‘Of all those Ludwika saw there, not a single one is left. Five new servants.’5 He was in half a mind to try to meet up with some of his family or with Tytus in Germany instead.
To George Sand he wrote: ‘Be happy, well disposed, look after yourself and write a few words when you have the time.’6 He was making an effort to distract himself, as his suddenly rather more detailed letters to Ludwika reveal. On 13 April he gave several lessons and went to a soirée at Auguste Léo’s; on the fourteenth he gave five lessons and then went to Ary Scheffer’s studio to pose for a portrait; he did the same on the following day, and on his way home dropped in on Delacroix for a chat. When he got home, he did not feel like dressing for dinner, ‘so I spent the evening playing to myself…I played it away with melodies from the banks of the Vistula.’7 The following day he gave seven lessons, after which he went to a vaudeville with Alkan, who lived next door. Next morning he received a letter from George Sand announcing that she would be coming up to Paris for a few days at the end of the month, so he gave orders for her rooms to be prepared. He gave four lessons and spent the evening at the comte de Perthuis’s soirée.
Instead of arriving in Paris, George Sand sent Chopin a letter in which she announced that Solange was to be married to Clésinger. She professed herself happy with her prospective son-in-law, whom she described as ‘bold, well-read, active and ambitious’. ‘I suppose she thinks those are virtues!’ Chopin wrote to Ludwika.8 ‘All her friends – Marliani, Arago, Delacroix and Myself – have had the worst reports concerning the person; that he’s in debt; that he’s a brute who beats his mistress, whom he has abandoned in pregnancy now that he’s getting married, etc., etc.; that he drinks (we all knew that, but of course it’s put down to genius)…I don’t give them a year after their first child – and the mother will have to pay the debts.’9 But he kept his opinion to himself, for he was ostentatiously not being encouraged to give it.
‘I think Chopin, standing outside all this, must feel upset at being kept in ignorance of the persons and factors involved, and from not being able to advise,’ George Sand wrote to Grzymała. ‘But his advice in the real business of life cannot possibly be considered. He has never looked straight at realities, never understood human nature on any point; his soul is pure poetry and music and he cannot tolerate anything that is different from himself. Moreover, his interference in the affairs of my family would mean total loss of all my dignity and love both from and towards my children.’10
George Sand was now doing all she could to hurry along her seventeen-year-old daughter’s marriage to the thirty-three-year-old sculptor. ‘It is impossible not to like him,’ she assured Delacroix. As Chopin wrote to his sister: ‘Madame Sand is a dear, but she hasn’t a ha’pence worth of common sense.’ ‘A pity really,’ he added meditatively, ‘or perhaps not at all, looking at it from the point of view that Madame Sand always acts in remarkable ways, and that everything always works out well for her – even things that look impossible at first sight.’11
On 2 May the painter Franz Winterhalter came to Chopin’s rooms to make a pencil portrait, but found him suffering from an attack of something like asthma, which lasted four days. Chopin begged Gutmann and Marie de Rozières, who were looking after him, to keep his illness secret from George Sand so as not to worry her needlessly, but Princess Czartoryska mentioned it in a letter to Nohant. George Sand was ‘sick with worry’ and would have come up to Paris but for the fact that she could not leave her daughter unchaperoned with her fiancé in the country. Even though Chopin wrote telling her he was well and happy, she remained anxious, more for her own sake than for his. ‘For the last seven years I have been living with the certainty that I shall not see him age at my side, but one never gets used to these horrible certainties, and one goes on suffering,’ she wrote to her publisher. ‘He has done me so much harm with his sickness that for a long time I hoped to die before him.’12 On the same day she wrote to Grzymała, saying that:
It is all very difficult and delicate, and I can see no way of helping a sick mind which is irritated by the very efforts one makes to cure it. For a long time now the disease which gnaws at the body and soul of this poor creature has been killing me, and I see him fading away, without ever having been able to do him any good, since it is this anxious, jealous and touching affection he bears for me which is the main cause of his misery. For the last seven years I have lived like a virgin with him and with other men. I have made myself old without any effort or sacrifice, for I was weary of passion and disillusioned beyond hope. If there is a woman on this earth who should inspire him with confidence it is me. He has never understood that. I know that people accuse me, some of having killed him by the violence of my passion, others of having exasperated him with my temperance. I think you know the real state of affairs! He complains that I have killed him by denying him, while I was certain that I would kill him if I acted otherwise. Look at my position in this fatal friendship, in which I have made myself his slave in every situation I could without actually showing a wrongful and impossible preference for him over my children, and in which the dignity I have had to maintain before my children and my friends has been so delicate and difficult to preserve! On that score I have achieved miracles of patience of which I did not believe myself capable, I who am not endowed with the nature of a saint like the Princess [Czartoryska]! I have achieved martyrdom, but the heavens are implacable towards me, as though I had great crimes to expiate; for in the middle of all these efforts and all these sacrifices, the man I love with an absolutely chaste and maternal love is dying, the victim of the ridiculous love he bears me!13
There is a curious discrepancy between her view of the situation, and particularly of her supposed enslavement to Chopin’s needs, and his apparently relaxed equanimity. On 15 May, in answer to her letter containing the details of Solange’s impending wedding, he wrote thanking her and sending his best wishes to Solange. He signed off: ‘God support you always in your purpose and your deeds. Be happy and serene. Your completely devoted Ch.’14
Solange was married quietly to Clésinger a few days later, while Chopin went off to Ville d’Avray near Paris to spend a week with Thomas Albrecht. When he returned, he found that the young couple were back in Paris, so he called on them and gave Solange a bouquet of roses and carnations. ‘Sol was polite to me, as always, he was also as polite as he could be, I was my usual self – but I felt sad inside,’ he wrote to Ludwika.15 He rarely saw the Clésingers after that. George Sand herself arrived in Paris on 1 June to arrange the marriage between Augustine Brault and the young painter Théodore Rousseau, but he did not see much of her either. Two weeks later she returned to Nohant, looking forward to a long, restful summer, and to the arrival of Chopin and Delacroix, who were to come down together.
She had apparently recovered her serenity of mind. ‘I am neither as crazy, nor as good, nor as great [as Lucrezia], for if I were united to Prince Karol, I must admit that I would not let myself be killed, but would politely dump him there and then,’ she wrote to a friend who naïvely wondered whether Lucrezia Floriani was about her and Chopin. ‘However, I am feeling very well, and would never dream of separating from a friend who has become invaluable to me through eight years of mutual devotion.’16
Chopin was in good spirits, in spite of the news of Witwicki’s death in Italy, which reached him in June. He was beginning to get used to the way in which death seemed to be encroaching, and merely acquiesced with sadness, as he had done when he had heard of Antoni Wodziński’s demise a couple of months earlier. He must have realised that others thought he too would be dying soon, for he was now posing for the fourth portrait of himself specially commissioned by a friend – in this case Auguste Léo – during the last two months. By the beginning of July he had stopped most of his lessons and was busy copying and correcting the Cello and Piano Sonata for the printers, feeling that it was, at long last, ready. He had decided he would go to Nohant after all, since Delacroix was prepared to go with him, and he aimed to set off halfway through July.
Meanwhile, the Clésingers, who had gone down to stay at Nohant, began to make trouble. The sculptor had married mainly for what he believed to be George Sand’s riches and, having been given very little, began to suspect everyone, particularly Maurice and Augustine, of plotting against him. Solange seconded him ably, and did all she could to spite the rest of the family. Clésinger eventually had a row with Maurice, threatened to kill him with a hammer, hit George Sand who interposed herself, and nearly had his head blown off by Maurice, who had fetched his gun.
George Sand threw the Clésingers out of the house, saying she never wanted to see either of them again, whereupon they moved into the neighbouring town of La Châtre and began spreading the foulest slanders against all the inhabitants of Nohant. To Chopin, Solange wrote:
My dear Chopin! I am ill and the journey by the Blois mail coach would tire me out. Will you lend me your carriage for my return journey to Paris? Please answer immediately. I await your answer at La Châtre, where life is difficult for me. I have left Nohant forever, after the most horrible scenes by my mother. Wait for me, I beg you, before leaving Paris. I need to see you urgently. I was positively refused your carriage, so if you wish me to use it, send me a note with your permission, which I can send on to Nohant. Goodbye, until soon, I hope. Solange.17
Chopin received this on 13 July, and immediately wrote a letter to George Sand, which has not survived but which seems to have enquired about what had happened and clearly expressed some sympathy for Solange. It also stated that she could use his carriage if she wished. Next day he wrote Solange a laconic note, telling her the carriage was at her disposal. George Sand had already written to Marie de Rozières and Delacroix, describing the events at Nohant in detail and enjoining them to keep as much from Chopin as possible. ‘Don’t tell him how far things went, we shall try to hide as much as possible from him.’18 Her reply to Chopin is lost, but some of its contents can be deduced with certainty. She described the scene at Nohant only in the vaguest terms, but went on at some length about Chopin himself and his place in her life. She announced to him that Clésinger was a bounder, and even seems to have reproached Chopin for not having warned her. Finally, she ordered him to keep his doors closed to Solange when she turned up in Paris, and not to mention her name at all when he and Delacroix came down to Nohant the following week.19
Chopin immediately told Delacroix of the letter, and a few days later, on 20 July, showed it to him. ‘One has to admit that it [the letter] is horrible,’ the painter noted in his diary. ‘Cruel passions and long-pent-up impatience erupt in it, and by a contrast which would be amusing if it did not touch on such a tragic subject, the author from time to time takes over from the woman, and launches into tirades which look as though they were borrowed from a novel or a philosophical homily.’20 Chopin did not answer the letter for some ten days.
Meanwhile the Clésingers had turned up in Paris. Solange wasted no time in calling on Chopin and telling him about the events at Nohant, and her version was by now becoming increasingly lurid. Whether he believed it or not, it was the only account he had been given, since George Sand was determined to keep him out of her family affairs. She had been expecting Chopin and Delacroix daily, but time passed and there was no sign of either. She grew anxious about Chopin’s health, thinking that perhaps he had had another attack, and considered rushing to Paris to see him. Then, two weeks after she had written, she received his reply:
I have nothing to say to you about M. Cl[ésinger]. I had not heard the name of M. Cl until the day you decided to give him your daughter. As for her, she cannot be indifferent to me. You will remember that I interceded with you on behalf of your children, without preference, whenever the opportunity presented itself, in the certitude that you were destined to love them always – for those are the only affections that do not change. Misfortune can cloud them but never alter their nature. The misfortune must be very great at this moment if it forbids your heart to hear the name of your daughter, at the beginning of her mature life, at the moment when her physical condition requires more than ever the care of a mother.
In the face of such a serious matter, which concerns your most sacred affections, I shall not go into the matters concerning myself. Time will act. I shall wait always the same. Your wholly devoted, Ch.21
This letter could not have reached George Sand at a worse moment. Exhausted by work, which she had stepped up in order to cover the expenses of Solange’s wedding, she had endured terrifying scenes at Nohant, and watched the marriage she had arranged turn into a fiasco. Her efforts to marry off Augustine had also come to nothing, the young painter having heard rumours spread by Solange and backed out. Maurice was not only useless as a support, he was going through a personal crisis and needed his mother’s help. To Marie de Rozières she wrote that were it not for him, she would end her own life.22 She was longing for the arrival of a calm Chopin and an affable Delacroix, and when she perceived treason in that quarter too, she overreacted.
Chopin’s reply found her in the middle of a letter to her friend the republican lawyer Emmanuel Arago, which turned into one of the longest ever written, as she began setting down her reactions and venting her thoughts on paper. The astonishing seventy-one-page document is of immense value in revealing her state of mind.23
What stung her to the quick in Chopin’s letter was its cool, collected and slightly pompous tone. And its contents could not fail to exasperate her: he pointed out that the match with Clésinger was her doing, at the same time turning against her her own hobby-horse of the sanctity of maternal instincts. From the ‘impractical’ Chopin who ‘has never understood a thing about human life’, she found such observations downright insulting, and indeed disloyal. ‘If I had committed faults, even crimes, Chopin should not have believed them, should not have seen them,’ she later complained to Louis Viardot. ‘There is a certain degree of respect and gratitude past which we no longer have the right to examine the behaviour of those beings who have become sacred for us.’24
In her search for an explanation of his perfidy, she hit on the ‘revelation’ that Chopin had been in love not with her but with Solange all along: the two had always got on well, and during the last couple of years they had enjoyed an intimacy which excluded her and Maurice. Chopin’s attack of asthma the day after he heard of Solange’s engagement to Clésinger was proof of his jealousy (the fact that there had been no similar fit after her engagement to de Preaulx, a union which he had warmly encouraged, was conveniently forgotten). Chopin’s dislike of Augustine Brault, too, was seen as emanating from Solange’s influence (although his dislike predated Solange’s). Now George Sand saw clearly that Chopin’s jealousy of other men who approached her, which had irritated her so much over the years, was in fact not jealousy over her, but Solange. Clear as daylight too was the fact that Chopin’s feelings for her had in fact been not love but hatred all along.
There had indeed been something between Chopin and Solange, and Arago, on whom Solange had tried her charms as well, had witnessed it. ‘For several years, he has been fascinated by her and accepted from her with pleasure behaviour that would have exasperated him coming from another,’ wrote Arago in his reply to George Sand’s interminable letter. ‘I could see, did see, and saw often that he had for her a deep feeling which at first resembled paternal affection, and which changed, probably under her influence, when she turned from a child into a young girl and from a young girl into a woman.’25 There was, however, a great difference between the bored and ageing Chopin’s no doubt somewhat prurient appreciation of the golden-haired Solange’s coquetry, and the lurid sexual passion suggested by George Sand (who could not resist making crude observations on his possible sexual performance with her daughter).
The crux of the matter was that George Sand was deeply wounded by what she saw as Chopin’s desertion, and mortified that a man she had taken for granted and considered an importunate lover could show such independence. Her answer to his letter, dated 28 July, was no less icy and pompous than his own had been:
I had ordered post-horses for yesterday and was about to leave by cabriolet in this awful weather, although very ill myself; I was proposing to spend a day in Paris in order to find out how you were. Your silence had worried me on the score of your health. Meanwhile you were reflecting calmly, and your answer is very composed. That is fine, my friend, do what your heart dictates, and take its instinct for the language of your conscience. I understand perfectly.
As for my daughter, her illness is no more worrying than last year’s [There are in fact two letters from George Sand to other people from the same period expressing deep concern over her daughter’s health], and neither my zeal nor my care, nor my entreaties have ever been able to dissuade her from defying her constitution and behaving like someone who wishes to make herself ill. She can hardly be saying that she needs the love of a mother whom she slanders and loathes, whose most sacred actions and whose house she sullies with her hideous insinuations. You are happy to listen to all that and perhaps to believe it. I shall not enter into a battle of that nature, it repels me. I prefer to see you go over to the enemy rather than to defend myself against an enemy born from my womb and nourished with my milk.
Look after her, since it is to her that you think you should devote yourself. I shall not hold it against you, but you will understand that I am cast in the role of outraged mother, and that nothing from now on can make me abandon the authority and the dignity of this role. It is enough to be fooled and made a victim. I forgive you and will not address any reproaches to you, since your confession is sincere. It surprised me a little, but since you feel more at ease and freer now, I shall not suffer from this extraordinary volte-face.
Goodbye, my friend, may you be rapidly cured of your malady, as I believe you will (I have my reasons for that), and I shall thank God for this strange dénouement to nine years of exclusive friendship – Give me news of yourself sometimes. It is pointless to ever come back on the rest.26
Chopin was dumbfounded by this letter, with its talk of his ‘going over to the enemy’ and of his ‘confession’. He was informed that he was being forgiven, though it was not at all evident why forgiveness should be called for. But the greatest shock was that this was a final and irrevocable dismissal. It was the last letter that passed between them.
Chopin thought that George Sand had gone a little mad, and that the attack of hysteria would subside. He saw his own behaviour as being perfectly correct throughout, as his letters home make clear. Sooner or later George Sand would surely recognise this and their friendship would resume. Pauline Viardot, who had been told of the events by George Sand, went to see Chopin, and although she had always been primarily a friend of George Sand, felt obliged to take Chopin’s part in a letter she wrote to Nohant. ‘There is in your good letter one passage that I cannot allow to pass over in silence,’ she wrote. ‘It is that in which you state that Chopin is a member of a Solange faction, representing her as a victim and denigrating you. This is absolutely false, I swear to you, at least as far as he is concerned. On the contrary, this dear and excellent friend is afflicted by one thought only: the harm that this whole un fortunate business has done you and is still doing you. I have not found the slightest change in him – he is as kind, as devoted as ever – adoring you as always, rejoicing only in your joy, afflicted only by your sufferings.’ Her husband’s postscript was even more specific: ‘I may sum up what Chopin said as follows: Solange’s marriage is a great misfortune for herself, her family and her friends. Daughter and mother were both deceived and realised their mistake too late. But since they both shared in the mistake, why should only one bear the blame? The daughter wanted, insisted on, an ill-assorted match; but had the mother, who consented, no share in the fault? With her great gifts and experience, could she not have enlightened a girl who was led more by mortification than love?…one should not be pitiless towards a mistake to which one has contributed. I, pitying both from the bottom of my heart, try to console the only one I am allowed to see.’ He add ed that Chopin spoke of her ‘without reproach or bitterness, only with deep sorrow’.27
This rubbing in of her own rash behaviour, of the way she had let herself be taken in by Clésinger in the face of so many warnings, only wounded George Sand’s pride deeper. She almost included the Viardots in ‘the enemy camp’, which was already impressively crowded: Delacroix, who had written to say that he was not coming down to Nohant after all, the ‘silly goose’ Marie de Rozières, the ‘weak and frivolous’ Grzymała, the Marlianis, and even the ‘saintly’ Princess Anna Czartoryska were all ruthlessly relegated to it.28
With time, George Sand did come to realise that Chopin had not been disloyal or motivated by lust for Solange, but by then she had moved on to the view that the break with him had been a good thing. She dredged up every piece of unfavourable evidence concerning his behaviour over the past nine years and convinced herself that she had been imprisoned by him and his ‘coterie’, who had made her responsible for his health and happiness. As she concluded, in her letter to Arago, she would now at last be able to ‘Work, Run, Sleep!’29 To Marie de Rozières, who suggested a reconciliation, she replied that she had ‘no cause to regret the loss of his affection’.30
In her later writings on the subject, she depicted Chopin as a hopeless neurotic with whom she had had a chaste relationship, based only on her admiration for the artist and her feeling of maternal duty towards a lost and unhappy soul. With the help of her son she destroyed all the letters between herself and the composer on which she could lay her hands. This was in marked contrast to Chopin’s behaviour: he kept her letters amongst his most valued possessions, and carried the first note he had received from her with him everywhere until his death.
George Sand’s behaviour ensured that the affair and its dénouement were widely discussed. While some believed her version, many more saw Chopin as a victim and her as a sort of man-eating harpy. Before ten years were out, Liszt, in the first biography of Chopin to appear, summed up the relationship as ‘a prison in which he found himself being garrotted by bonds saturated with venom; their corrosive suppuration could not touch his genius, but they consumed his life and took him off too soon from the earth, from his motherland, from Art!’31
Chopin did not realise what was going on in George Sand’s head. He was sure that there would soon be a reconciliation between mother and daughter, and pressed Solange to bring it about, not realising quite how badly she had behaved. He lent her money and tried to help Clésinger get work, for his debts had now overtaken him. To Chopin’s great relief, the couple left Paris to go and stay with Solange’s father. Neither Grzymała nor Delacroix, Marie de Rozières nor the Marlianis had any news from Nohant. But Chopin remained confident that all would be well in the end. ‘Madame Sand cannot but find a good memory of me in her soul when one day she looks back,’ he wrote to Ludwika.32
It was not a happy time for him. He stayed a few days with Thomas Albrecht at Ville d’Avray and a weekend at the Rothschild mansion at Ferrières, but otherwise spent the summer and autumn in Paris. Grzymała had crashed financially, the Marlianis were getting divorced, and Delacroix was in a doleful mood. Other friends tried to keep Chopin busy, and the void left in his life by the absence of George Sand was filled by a gaggle of women eager to mother him. The Czartoryski ladies were joined by Delfina Potocka, Marie de Rozières, his pupil Elise Gavard, Princess Obreskoff, mother of another pupil, and by Jane Stirling, who vied with the others in her zeal. She was a generous and motherly Scottish spinster, six years older than Chopin. She was not one of his favourite pupils, and his joy was all the greater when he acquired a new one whose talent and personality were more to his taste. This was the six-foot beauty Countess Maria Kalergis.
Born in Warsaw to a Russian father and a Polish mother, she had married a Russian diplomat of Greek extraction, whom she soon deserted. Her father, Count Nesselrode, was the Chief of Police in Warsaw, and her uncle was Chancellor of the Russian Empire. Countess Maria enjoyed embarrassing them by her unorthodox behaviour and manifestations of pro-Polish feeling. She was only twenty-five years old, but had already managed to have affairs with Liszt, Musset, the future Napoleon III and Théophile Gautier, who wrote a poem for her entitled ‘Symphonie en Blanc Majeur’ (she always dressed in white). Heine, who disliked her, retaliated with another poem called ‘L’Éléphant Blanc’ and described her as a ‘Pantheon in which so many great men lie buried’.33 She was a talented pianist and just the sort of person Chopin enjoyed teaching, and she helped to distract him as he sat in a state of limbo, waiting to see what would happen next.
Nothing did happen. George Sand made no overtures, even though some measure of reconciliation had taken place with her daughter. By December she had taken on a young lover, who was duly installed in Chopin’s old room at Nohant. ‘I am like an old cobweb, and the walls are beginning to fall away,’ Chopin moaned to one Polish friend.34 Mendelssohn’s death in November reinforced the feeling that something was coming to an end, for they had been almost the same age. As usual, it provoked a bout of self-pity in Chopin. When the subject was raised over dinner with Jane Stirling’s sister Katherine Erskine, he said that ‘there was something almost enviable in his fate, dying in the midst of his family surrounded by love – and with his wife beside him’.35
The cold winter and the influenza epidemic intensified the lugubrious mood of that season. ‘I have my own habitual splutterings to think about, so I don’t fear the grippe,’ Chopin wrote to his family. ‘I occasionally sniff at my homeopathic bottles, I give a lot of lessons at home, and somehow I’m managing not too badly.’36 He was even capable on occasion of recovering a childlike enthusiasm, and one young English girl recorded his ‘making rabbits on the wall’ and performing other tricks one evening in December.37 But to Solange he wrote: ‘This horrible year must end,’ a sentiment echoed in a note from Princess Czartoryska, which ended: ‘What sadness everywhere!’38