Frederick Chopin

It seems that it was about 1842 that life for Chopin began to lower its tone. For whom should he cultivate even the will to get well, now that love was no longer ahead, but behind him? Lovers who feel the power of suffering desiccating in them abandon themselves immediately to the soft call of Death. If they disappear, they are reproached for having been weaklings; if they survive, for having been cynics. They themselves do not suspect that they are emptied of their substance like those hollow trees still full of leaves which a gust of wind will vanquish. Chopin, dying, thought himself eternal.

In the spring of 1842, his childhood friend, Matuszinski, succumbed to tuberculosis. In May, 1844, his father passed away at Warsaw. It was the end of a just man. He closed his eyes looking at the portraits and the bust of his beloved son, and asked that after death his body should be opened because he feared being buried alive.

These two shocks were terrific for the artist, yet he wrote to his own people: “I have already survived so many younger and stronger people than I that it seems I am eternal.... You must never worry about me: God gives me His Grace.” In view of his persistent depression, George conceived the idea of inviting Frederick’s oldest sister and her husband, the Jedrzeïewiczs, to Nohant. It was necessary to warn them of the great changes they were to see in their brother’s health. George wrote to them:

“You will find my dear child very thin and greatly changed since the time when you saw him, yet you must not be too fearful for his health. In general, it has not changed for more than six years, during which I have seen him every day. A strong paroxysm of coughing every morning, and each winter two or three more considerable spells, each lasting only two or three days, some neuralgic pain from time to time, that is his regular state. For the rest, his chest is healthy, and his delicate organism has no lesion. I am always hoping that with time it will grow stronger, but at least I am sure that with a regulated life and care it will last as long as any other. The happiness of seeing you, mixed though it be with deep and poignant emotions, which may perhaps wound him a little the first day, nevertheless will do him immense good, and I am so happy for him that I bless the decision you have made.... For a long time he has cared for nothing but the happiness of those whom he loves, instead of that which he can no longer share with them. For my part, I have done everything I could to soften this cruel lack, and though I have not made him forget it, I have at least the consolation of knowing that, after you, I have given and inspired as much affection as is possible.”

George even wrote to Mme. Nicolas Chopin to assure her that henceforth she would consecrate her life to Frederick and regard him as her own son.

So Louise and her husband came in 1844 to spend part of the summer at Nohant, and the joy that Chopin experienced was translated into a new feeling of gratitude for his friend. Some of the bitterness left his soul, making him stronger and more courageous. Even confidence returned for a time. The filial and family side of his tenderness was thus reënforced.

When they had gone, Frederick clung even more closely to his “dear ones,” those pieces of himself. He saw them again in dreams. He looked for their places on the sofa, preserved like a relic an embroidered slipper forgotten by his sister, and used the pencil from her pocket-book as in other days Marie Wodzinska had used his. He sent them news of the autumn, of the garden. He entered into the most minute details, even to speaking of the tiny bear which went up and down on the barometer. How clearly one sees all that he lacked, this deficient lover!

On their walks he followed the others on a donkey so as to tire himself less. But the autumn was cold and rainy, and Chopin passed more time before the piano than out of doors. He returned to Paris and reinstalled himself in the Square d’Orléans at the very beginning of November. George was seriously concerned this time about “her dear corpse,” and recommending him to friends while she stayed in the country. This period is marked in one way and another by a blaze of affectionate solicitude. Chopin did not want her to worry, and continued to hide the progress of his malady. Without his knowledge, George got information about him. “He must not know....” “I cannot rid myself of these preoccupations which make up the happiness of my life....” “Decidedly I cannot live without my little sufferer.” She realized that “Chip’s” constitution was attacked in a very serious way. He was visibly declining. The bad winter, nerves, irritation, the persistent bronchitis were perhaps the causes. In any case, love was still powerful. But love had apparently taken refuge in family feeling. “... Let him never have the least inquietude about any of you,” wrote George to Louise, “because his heart is always with you, tormenting him at every moment and turning him toward his dear family.”

During the winter of 1845, and the spring of 1846, he was ill with influenza, yet he made none but the usual plans and proposed to spend the summer at Nohant. Before leaving, he gave a little dinner. “Music, flowers, grub.” For guests: Prince Czartoryski and his wife (the latter, it may be said in passing, was the most brilliant and the most authentic of the feminine pupils of her master); Princess Sapieha, Delacroix, Louis Blanc, Pauline Viardot; in short, old friends. But on his arrival at Nohant everything seemed strange to him, as in a house abandoned by life. He moved his piano and rearranged his table, his books of poetry, his music. “I have always one foot with you,” he wrote to Louise and her husband, “and the other in the room next door where my hostess works, and none at all in my own home just now, but always in strange places. These are without doubt imaginary places, but I don’t blush for them.”

His delight was to make Pauline Viardot sing the Spanish melodies that she had noted down herself. “I am very fond of these songs. She has promised me to sing them to you when she goes to Warsaw. This music will unite me with you. I have always listened to it with great enthusiasm.”

But we must look below the surface, because in the depths of all these beings who lived in common a drama was preparing. One can say that it had been brewing for several years. And neither George nor Frederick was to be responsible for its explosion, but the children.

First there was Maurice, the oldest, a young man of twenty-two adored and very much spoiled by his mother, wretchedly brought up, a dabbler, as the whim took him, in painting and literature, and a collector of lepidoptera and of minerals, he promised, in sum, to become a fairly complete type of the intelligent failure. He was not without talent; he had charm and gaiety, touched, however, with bitterness and gruffness. Since the trip to Majorca, he had had time to get accustomed to Chopin, having seen this friend of his mother every day, so to speak. But if there had been at first a certain sympathy between them, it quickly flagged, and for several years now they had not got on. No doubt, this is easily explained. Maurice loved his mother above everything, and he saw clearly that her life was not easy, or smooth; he came upon disputes, he was exasperated by the nervousness of the so-called great man, who was to him merely a difficult, reserved, and sometimes ill-natured invalid. Perhaps he even suffered from the ambiguous smiles that followed the two celebrated lovers. And then his father, the mediocre Dudevant, must occasionally have let fall outrageously gross witticisms when his son came to see him. Maurice was chilled also by the character of Chopin, by the aristocratic manners, the often disdainful eye of this puzzling and encumbering parasite. Children never forgive a stranger who allows himself a criticism, much less if it is well founded. Chopin made one, severe enough, concerning Maurice and Augustine. This Augustine was a relation of Mme. Sand, daughter of her cousin, Adèle Brault, who belonged to the side of the family that was entirely bourgeois and who was nothing else than a lady of easy virtue. Out of pity for the girl, George had taken her into her home, where Augustine, charming and tender-hearted, had become the favourite of all the young people with one exception, Solange. Chopin did not like Augustine. He took Solange’s side. As for Maurice, the born enemy of his sister, he was for Augustine to such a degree that he was suspected of having become her lover. George denied this vociferously, with authority, but Chopin willingly believed it, first because of his intuition, secondly because Solange tried, by all manner of means, to fix the idea in his head.

A strange child, this Solange. Physically, she was the image of her great-grandmother, Marie-Aurore of Saxe, that is to say, blonde, fresh, beautifully built. In character, she was cold, brilliant and lively, passionate, vain, very excitable, sullen, possibly false, certainly strong willed, vicious without any doubt, absolutely unbalanced. This neurotic, who might have developed in such a very interesting way, they always regarded as hard-hearted. They pestered her, they soured her, they made her ruthless. Pauline Viardot contended that she did wrong for the love of it. She was, in point of fact, innately ardent and unhappy. A nature such as this has need of being loved deeply, and her trials came above all through jealousy. Offences slowly recorded by her heart made it solitary and injurious. Her mother herself said: “She is nineteen years old, she is beautiful, she has a remarkable mind, she has been brought up with love under conditions of happiness, growth and morality, which should have made of her a saint or a heroine. But this century is damned, and she is a child of this century.... Everything is passion with her, an icy passion, that is very deep, inexplicable and terrifying.” Whose fault was that? It is only in families that one finds these refined hatreds which are one of the sad aspects of love.

For a long time the mystery of this soul had attracted Chopin. Solange was essentially a coquette. Ever since her puberty she had practised the power of her troubled age on him, and this man of nerves had not seemed insensible. Did he not rediscover in her the seductions and even that free and animal grace that George must have had at fifteen? A lover loves, in the daughter of his mistress, the happiness that he has missed, and the rejuvenated memory of his sufferings. Solange was less frank than her mother; she was even somewhat perverse. She tried a few games that were not altogether innocent; first from predilection, and also to appease the amorous rancour that she vowed against her own people. It would be fine to avenge her own spurned heart by stealing Chopin’s tenderness from her mother. Another of his attractions for Solange was his elegance, his distinction, his high worldly connections. For she was a snob, and it was delicious to flee to the great friend’s salon, which was filled with countesses, when that of her mother resounded with the roars of Maurice and his comrades, or the “great thoughts” of Pierre Leroux. Lately there had even been found there a herd of poet-workmen to whom the novelist was stubbornly attached.

Here then was a whole obscure drama daily averted but daily reawakened, sown with misunderstandings, and complicated by embarrassments. For Sand, many times, wanted to talk it out with her lover, to force him to interfere, but he shied away, or even openly took Solange’s part. George tried in vain to break her daughter. Rather she broke herself against the sharp edges of the character which in many ways were so like her own.

It was Chopin who suffered the most from these misunderstandings, because he could never relieve himself by words, by vain explanations, because he could never express anything except in music. His nervousness increased. He allowed himself to become exasperated to the point of tears by incidents affecting servants. He could not conceive that an old servant could be dismissed, and Mme. Sand, that good communist, was quite capable of reconstructing her household with a sweep of her arm. It was a calamity. Frederick’s Polish valet de chambre was dismissed “because the children (Read: ‘Maurice and Augustine’) did not like him.” Then it was the old gardener, Pierre, who was turned off after forty years of service. Next came the turn of Françoise, the chambermaid, to whom, nevertheless, George had dedicated one of her books. “God grant,” wrote Frederick to his sister, “that the new ones will please the young man and his cousin more.” He was tired. And, when he was tired he was not gay. That reacted on everyone’s spirits. He felt old.

George also felt old. She was forty-two. And even while correcting a passage in her Lucrezia Floriani, she was thinking so strongly of herself, and of her first lover, that she returned for the first time in fifteen years to the little wood she could see from her window, where she used to meet Jules Sandeau. It was in this “sacred wood” that her flight from the conjugal house had been decided, in 1831. There she searched, and there she found a tree under which her lover had been in the habit of waiting for her. Their initials cut into the bark were still faintly visible. “She went over in her memory the details and the whole story of her first passion, and compared them to those of her last, not to establish a parallel between the two men, whom she did not dream of judging coldly, but to ask her own heart if it could still feel passion and bear suffering.... ‘Am I still capable of loving? Yes, more than ever, because it is the essence of my life, and through pain I experience intensity of life; if I could no longer love, I could no longer suffer. I suffer, therefore I love and I exist.’” And yet she felt that she must renounce something. What then? The hope of happiness? “‘At a certain age,’ she finished by thinking, ‘there is no other happiness than that which one gives; to look for any other is madness.’... So La Floriani was seized with an immense sadness in saying an eternal farewell to her cherished illusions. She rolled on the ground, drowned in tears.”

This summer’s end of 1846 was a trying period, a period of crises. The sky itself was full of storm. Yet Chopin worked. He wrote to the loved ones at Warsaw. He told them all the stories which one must pack into a letter when one wishes to hide one’s true feelings. The giraffe at the Jardin des Plantes was dead. The Italians had reopened in Paris. M. Le Verier had discovered a new planet. M. Faber of London, a Professor of Mathematics, had built a machine that sang an air of Haydn, and God Save the Queen. “I play a little, and also write a little. I am one moment happy about my Sonata with the violoncello, and the next unhappy; I throw it in the corner and then take it up again. I have three new Mazurkas (in B major, F minor, and C sharp minor, dedicated to Countess Czosnowska. These are his last works—op. 63 and 65). When I am composing them I think they are good; otherwise one would never compose. Later on comes reflection, and one rejects or accepts. Time is the best judge and patience the best master. I hope to have a letter from you soon, yet I am not impatient, and I know that with your large family it is difficult for each one to write me a word, especially as with us a pen is not enough. I don’t know how many years we would have to talk to be at the end of our Latin, as they say here. So you must not be surprised or sad when you do not receive a letter from me, because there is no real reason, any more than there is with you. A certain sadness blends with the pleasure of writing to you; it is the knowledge that between us there are no words, hardly even deeds.... The winter does not promise badly, and by taking care of myself a little it will pass like the last, and God willing, not worse. How many people are worse off than I! It is true that many are better, but I do not think about them.”

Have we noticed those words: “Especially as with us a pen is not enough...?” There sounds the exquisite mute on Chopin’s plaints. For George the pen was enough. Everyone around Frederick, in default of being happy, was noisy. They played comedies. They got up tableaux vivants and charades. Pantomime, over which the whole world was soon to go crazy, was Chopin’s invention. It was he who sat at the piano and improvised while the young people danced comic ballets, with the assistance of a few guests: Arago, Louis Blanc. But no one suspected that between George and Frederick the break was complete. Desire had been dead for a long time. And now tenderness, affection, the attachment of the soul, no longer existed but on one side. In weeping over her lost youth in the “sacred wood,” George had shed her last tears.

Thenceforth she was to be only a mother, pitilessly a mother, and only of her two children. She was busy now in marrying off Solange. Two or three aspirants succeeded each other at Nohant, one after the other, among them Victor de Laprade, followed by a young Berry lad, with whom Solange flirted gaily.

Then one fine day, a dispute burst out between Maurice and Chopin over some silly question. One of those grave, irreparable disputes. The two wounded each other unmercifully. A moment later they embraced, “but the grain of sand has fallen into the quiet lake, and little by little the stones fall in, one by one,” wrote George. It soon began again. Maurice spoke of leaving the group and the house. His mother took his side, naturally. So Chopin bowed his head. It was he who would go. No one said a word to restrain him.

He started out in the first days of November. Seven years and a half before, he had arrived at Nohant for the first time, his physique already much deteriorated. That is nothing, however, when the soul is strong. But on this late autumn day that, too, had collapsed.

They saw the invalid, wrapped in rugs, getting into his carriage. With his hand, pale and dry, he made a sign of farewell. No one understood its meaning, not even himself. He was about to get into his grave.