CHAPTER XX
An Epitaph for a Poet
The death of an artist is the moment of his transfiguration. There are many who were thought great, whose work nevertheless returns at once to the dust. For others, on the contrary, the state of glory only begins with death. Perhaps, as Delacroix said, in art everything is a matter of the soul. We have not yet reached agreement as to the meaning and value of that little word. But if it were necessary to give a working idea of it, nothing would furnish it better than music. “A cry made manifest,” Wagner called it. Doubtless that means: the most spontaneous expression of oneself. The artist is he who has need to give form to his cry.
Each one sets about it in his own manner. With a life expended sumptuously like that of Liszt, contrast that of Chopin, entirely reserved, not to be plucked by any hand, but so much the more filled with perfume. All that he did not give forth, his love which none could seize, his modesty and his timidity, that constant fever for perfection, his elegancies, his exile’s home-sickness, and even his moments of communication with the unknowable,—all these things are potent in his work. To-day that is still the secret of its strength; music received what men and women disdained. It is for music that he refused himself. How one understands the desolation of Schumann when he learned of the death of the swan, and this beautiful metaphor gushed spontaneously from his pen: “The soul of music has passed over the world.”
Just this must the crowds have dimly felt as they pressed to the Temple of the Madeleine on the 30th of October, 1849. Thirteen days had been required to prepare for the funeral that they wished to be as solemn as the life of the dead had not been. But he was not even a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, this Monsieur Frederick Chopin! No matter. “Nature had a holiday air,” reported the papers. Many lovely toilettes. (He would have been flattered.) All the leaders of the musical and literary world, Meyerbeer at their head, Berlioz, Gautier, Janin. Only George Sand was missing. M. Daguerry, the Curé of the Madeleine, spent two weeks in obtaining permission for women to sing in his church. It is to the obsequies of Chopin that we owe this tolerance. Without that, it would have been impossible to give Mozart’s Requiem. It was played by the orchestra of the Conservatoire, conducted by Giraud. The soloists were hidden by a black drapery behind the altar: Pauline Viardot and Mme. Castellan, Lablache and Alexis Dupont. Lefébure-Wély was at the organ. During the Offertory, they played two Preludes, that in E minor (no. 4) and the 6th, in B minor, written at Majorca in that dusk when Chopin had seen death while the rain fell in torrents on the Chartreuse of Valdemosa.
The coffin was then lowered in the midst of the congregation, while the famous Funeral March, orchestrated by Reber, sounded for the first time. The cords of the pall were held by Prince Czartoryski, Franchomme, Delacroix and Gutmann. Meyerbeer walked behind the hearse. They set out, down the Boulevards, for the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. There the body of Chopin was buried, except the heart, which was sent to Warsaw, where it has since remained in the church of the Holy Cross. A beautiful symbol which accords with that faithful heart.
No eulogy was pronounced. In the moments of meditation that followed the descent of the bier a friendly hand was seen to throw on the coffin that Polish earth that had been given to Chopin on the day he left his country. Exactly nineteen years had passed since then. During all those years the native soil had remained in the silver cup awaiting this supreme use. But now Poland no longer existed. Nowhere but in this delicate handful of earth,—and the work of Chopin: a few score pages in which were to burn for three-quarters of a century the mysticism of a Nation.
On the next 17th of October, in 1850, Miss Stirling went early in the morning to Michon, the florist, who had served Chopin, and bought all the violets she could find. Then she went to Père-Lachaise and placed them on the tomb with a wreath in the name of the family of the dead. At noon, Mass was celebrated in the chapel at the cemetery. Those who were present then went back to the tomb, where Clésinger’s monument was unveiled. It is a mediocre allegory, made by a man who hated Chopin. How could such a thing have been beautiful? Only the medallion has a little life. These words are engraved on the pedestal: “To Frederick Chopin, his friends.” Deputy Wolowski tried to make a speech, but his throat tightened and nothing was heard. All those who were brought together there had been friends of the dead. They were still listening to his voice, his piano, his consumptive cough. One of them recalled a saying of his: “None can take from me that which belongs to me.”
To-day, these remains, pelted by the rain, this sorry Muse bent over its lyre with broken strings, blend well enough with the trees of Mont St.-Louis. There are strollers in this park of the dead. They stop before the bust of de Musset, the handsome boy-lover who spelt his sorrows into such charming rhymes. They make a little pilgrimage to the tomb of Abélard and Héloïse, where a pious Abbess has had these words cut: “The love that united their spirits during their life, and which is preserved during their separation by the most tender and spiritual of letters, has reunited their bodies in this tomb.” This reassures the silent lovers who come secretly to throw a flower at the foot of these two stone symbols lying side by side. But no one is seen on the narrow path that leads from the central avenue to the grave of Chopin. For he did not exemplify the career of a great lover, this musician of souls. No soul was found that could be attuned to his. It never found its lute-maker.
That word makes me think of a letter he wrote to Fontana fourteen months before he died, and in which he throws some light on the depths of his being: “The only unhappiness,” he wrote, “consists in this: that we issue from the workshop of a celebrated master, some sui generis Stradivarius, who is no longer there to mend us. Inexpert hands do not know the secret of drawing new tones from us, and we push back into our depths what no one has been able to evoke, for want of a lute-maker.”
There is a beautiful epitaph for a poet: dead for want of a lute-maker. But where is he, this lute-maker of our lives?
Etoy, October 17, 1926.
77th Anniversary of the death of Chopin.