VI: A CASE OF MATERNAL AFFECTION IN LOVE
CHOPIN George Sand; Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings | ||
6. VI: A CASE OF MATERNAL AFFECTION IN LOVE
CHOPIN
We have passed over George Sand's intercourse with Liszt and Madame d'Agoult very rapidly. One of Balzac's novels gives us an opportunity of saying a few more words about it.
Balzac had been introduced to George Sand by Jules Sandeau. At the time of her rupture with his friend, Balzac had sided entirely with him. In the Lettres à l'Étrangère, we see the author of the Comédie humaine pouring out his indignation with the blue stocking, who was so cruel in her love, in terms which were not extremely elegant. Gradually, and when he knew more about the adventure, his anger cooled down. In March, 1838, he gave Madame Zulma Carraud an account of a visit to Nohant. He found his comrade, George Sand, in her dressing-gown, smoking a cigar by her fireside after dinner.
"She had some pretty yellow slippers on, ornamented with fringe, some fancy stockings and red
This is George Sand in her thirty-fifth year, as she was at the time of the fresh adventure we are about to relate.
Balzac continues by giving us a few details about the life of the authoress. It was very much like his own, except that Balzac went to bed at six o'clock and got up at midnight, and George Sand went to bed at six in the morning and got up at noon. He adds the following remark, which shows us the state of her feelings:
"She is now in a very quiet retreat, and condemns both marriage and love, because she has had nothing but disappointment in both herself. Her man was a rare one, that was really all."
In the course of their friendly conversation, George Sand gave him the subject for a novel which it would be rather awkward for her to write. The novel was to be Galériens or Amours forcés. These "galley-slaves" of love were Liszt and the Com
Balzac accordingly wrote it, and it figures in the Comédie humaine as Béatrix. Béatrix is the Comtesse d'Agoult, the inspirer, and Liszt is the composer Conti.
"You have no idea yet of the awful rights that a love which no longer exists gives to a man over a woman. The convict is always under the domination of the companion chained to him. I am lost, and must return to the convict prison," writes Balzac in this book. Then, too, there is no mistaking his portrait of Béatrix. The fair hair that seems to give light, the forehead which looks transparent, the sweet, charming face, the long, wonderfully shaped neck, and, above and beyond all, that air of a princess, in all this we can easily recognize "the fair, blue-eyed Peri." Not content with bringing this illustrious couple into his novel, Balzac introduces other contemporaries. Claude Vignon (who, although his special work was criticism, made a certain place for himself in literature) and George Sand herself appear in this book. She is Felicité des Touches, and her pen name is Camille Maupin. Camille is an artist," we are told; "she has genius,
The cause of the coolness between them was George Sand's infatuation for Chopin, whom she had known through Liszt and Madame d'Agoult. George Sand wrote to Liszt from Nohant, in March, 1837: "Tell Chopin that I hope he will come with you. Marie cannot live without him, and I adore him." In April she wrote to Madame d'Agoult: "Tell Chopin that I idolize him." We do not know whether Madame d'Agoult gave the message, but she certainly replied: "Chopin coughs with infinite grace. He is an irresolute man. The only thing
At the time when he came into George Sand's life, Chopin, the composer and virtuoso, was the favourite of Parisian salons, the pianist in vogue. He was born in 1810, so that he was then twenty-seven years of age. His success was due, in the first place, to his merits as an artist, and nowhere is an artist's success so great as in Paris. Chopin's delicate style was admirably suited to the dimensions and to the atmosphere of a salon.
He confessed to Liszt that a crowd intimidated him, that he felt suffocated by all the quick breathing and paralyzed by the inquisitive eyes turned on him. "You were intended for all this," he adds, "as, if you do not win over your public, you can at least overwhelm it."
Chopin was made much of then in society. He was fragile and delicate, and had always been watched over and cared for. He had grown up in a peaceful, united family, in one of those simple homes in which all the details of everyday life become less prosaic, thanks to an innate distinction of sentiment and to religious habits. Prince
About this time, she was anxious about the health of her son Maurice, and she thought she would take her family to Majorca. This was a lamentable excursion, but it seemed satisfactory at first. They travelled by way of Lyons, Avignon, Vaucluse and Nimes. At Perpignan, Chopin arrived, "as fresh as a rose." "Our journey," wrote George Sand, "seems to be under the most favourable conditions." They then went on to Barcelona and to Palma. In November, 1838, George Sand wrote a most enthusiastic letter: "It is poetry, solitude, all that is most artistic and chique on earth. And what skies, what a country; we are delighted."
But the disenchantment was soon to begin, though. The first difficulty was to find lodgings, and the second to get furniture. There was no wood to burn and there was no linen to be had. It took two months to have a pair of tongs made, and it cost twenty-eight pounds at the customs for a piano to enter the country. With great difficulty, the forlorn travellers found a country-house belonging to a man named Gomez, which they were able to rent. It was called the "Windy House." The wind did not inconvenience them like the rain, which now commenced. Chopin could not endure the heat and the odour of the fires. His disease increased, and this was the origin of the great tribulations that were to follow.
At that time Spain was the very last country in which to travel with a consumptive patient. In a very fine lecture, the subject of which was The Fight with Tubcrculosis,
Dr. Landouzy proves to us that ever since the sixteenth century, in the districts of the Mediterranean, in Spain, in the Balearic Isles and throughout the kingdom of Naples, tuberculosis was held to be contagious, whilst the rest of Europe was ignorant of this contagion. Extremely severe rules had been laid down with regard to the measures to be taken for avoiding the spread of this disease. A consumptive patient was considered as a kind of plague-stricken individual. Chateaubriand had experienced the inconveniences of this scare during his stay in Rome with Madame de Beaumont, who died there of consumption, at the beginning of the winter of 1803. George Sand, in her turn, was to have a similar experience. When Chopin was convicted of consumption, which," as she writes, "was equivalent to the plague, according to the Spanish doctors, with their foregone conclusions about contagion," their landlord simply turned them out of
"We are planted between heaven and earth," wrote George Sand. "The clouds cross our garden at their own will and pleasure, and the eagles clamour over our heads."
A cell in this monastery was composed of three rooms: the one in the middle was intended for reading, prayer and meditation, the other two were the bedroom and the workshop. All three rooms looked on to a garden. Reading, rest and manual labour made up the life of these men. They lived in a limited space certainly, but the view stretched out infinitely, and prayer went up direct to God. Among the ruined buildings of the enormous monastery there was a cloister still standing, through which the wind howled desperately. It was like the scenery in the nuns' act in Robert le Diable. All this made the old monastery the most romantic place in the world.
The only drawback was that it was most difficult to live there. There was no way of getting warm. The stove was a kind of iron furnace which gave out a terrible odour, and did not prevent the rooms from being so damp that clothes mildewed while they were being worn. There was no way of getting proper food either. They had to eat the most indigestible things. There were five sorts of meat certainly, but these were pig, pork, bacon, ham and pickled pork. This was all cooked in dripping, pork-dripping, of course, or in rancid oil. Still more than this, the natives refused, not only to serve the unfortunate travellers, but to sell them the actual necessaries of life. The fact was, they had scandalized the Majorcan people. All Majorca was indignant because Solange, who at that time was nine years old, roamed about the mountains disguised as a man. Added to this, when the horn sounded which called people to their devotions in the churches, these strange inhabitants of the old Valdemosa monastery never took any more notice than pagans. People kept clear of them. Chopin suffered with the cold, the cooking made him sick, and he used to have fits of terror in the cloisters. They had to leave hastily. The only steamboat from the island was used to transport the pigs which are the pride and wealth of Majorca. People were only taken as an extra. It was, therefore, in the company of these squealing, ill-smelling creatures that the invalid crossed the water. When he arrived at Barcelona, he looked like a spectre and was spitting blood. George Sand was quite right in saying that this journey was an "awful fiasco."
Art and literature did not gain much either by this expedition. George Sand finished her novel entitled Spiridion at Valdemosa. She had commenced it before starting for Spain. In a volume
"Between rocks and sea, in a great deserted monastery, in a cell, the doors of which are bigger than the carriage entrances to the houses in Paris, you can imagine me, without white gloves, and no curl in my hair, as pale as usual. My cell is the shape of a large-sized bier. . . ."
This certainly does not sound very enthusiastic. The question is whether he composed anything at all at Valdemosa. Liszt presents him to us improvising his Prelude in B flat minor under the most dramatic circumstances. We are told that one day, when George Sand and her children had started on an excursion, they were surprised by a thunderstorm. Chopin had stayed at home in the monastery, and,
The deplorable journey to Majorca dates from November, 1838 to March, 1839. The intimacy between George Sand and Chopin continued eight years more.
In the summer Chopin stayed it Nohant. Eugene Delacroix, who was paying a visit there too, describes his presence as follows: "At times, through the window opening on to the garden, we get wafts of Chopin's music, as he too is at work. It is mingled with the songs of the nightingales and with the perfume of the rose trees."
Chopin did not care much for Nohant. In the first place, he only liked the country for about a fortnight at a time, which is very much like not caring for it at all. Then what made him detest the country were the inhabitants. Hippolyte Chatiron was terrible after he had been drinking. He was extremely effusive and cordial.
In the winter they first lived in the Rue Pigalle.
F. CHOPIN
(From a photograph)
[Description: Greyscale image of F. Chopin, head and shoulders,
three-quarter profile.
]
We must give George Sand credit for looking after him with admirable devotion. She certainly went on nursing her "invalid," or her "dear skeleton," as she called him, but her infatuation had been over for a long time. The absolute contrast of two natures may be attractive at first, but the attraction does not last, and, when the first enthusiasm is over, the logical consequence is that they become disunited. This was what Liszt said in rather an odd but energetic way. He points out all that there was "intolerably incompatible, diametrically opposite and secretly antipathetic between two natures which seemed to have been mutually drawn to each other
The following is a fragment of a letter which George Sand sent to Grzymala, in 1847: "For seven years I have lived with him as a virgin. If any woman on earth could inspire him with absolute confidence, I am certainly that woman, but he has never understood. I know, too, that many people accuse me of having worn him out with my violent sensuality, and others accuse me of having driven him to despair by my freaks. I believe you know how much truth there is in all this. He himself complains to me that I am killing him by the priva
It has been said that when Chopin was at Nohant he had a village girl there as his mistress. We do not care to discuss the truth of this statement.
It is interestinog to endeavour to characterize the nature of this episode in George Sand's sentimental life. She helps us herself in this. As a romantic writer she neglected nothing which she could turn into literature. She therefore made an analysis of her own case, worked out with the utmost care, and published it in one of her books which is little read now. The year of the rupture was 1847, and before the rupture had really occurred, George Sand brought out a novel entitled Lucrezia Floriani. In this book she traces the portrait of Chopin as Prince Karol. She denied, of course, that it was a portrait, but contemporaries were not to be deceived, and Liszt gives several passages from Lucrezia Floriani in his biography of the musician. The decisive proof was that Chopin recognized himself, and that he was greatly annoyed.
As a matter of fact, there was nothing disagreeable about this portrait. The following fragments
Prince Karol meets a certain Lucrezia Floriani, a rich actress and courtesan. She is six years older than he is, somewhat past her prime, and now leading a quiet life. She has done with love and love affairs, or, at least, she thinks so. "The fifteen years of passion and torture, which she had gone through, seemed to her now so cruel that she was hoping to have them counted double by the supreme Dispenser of our trials." It was, of course, natural that she should acknowledge God's share in the matter. We are told that "implacable destiny was not satisfied," so that when Karol makes his first declaration, Lucrezia yields to him, but at the same time she puts a suitable colouring on her fall. There are many ways of loving, and it is surely noble and disinterested in a woman to love a man as his mother. "I shall love him," she says, kissing the young Prince's pale face ardently, "but it will be as his mother loved him, just as fervently and just as faithfully. This maternal affection, etc. . . ." Lucrezia Floriani had a way of introducing the maternal instinct everywhere. She undertook to encircle her children and Prince Karol with the same affection, and her notions of therapeutics were certainly somewhat strange and venturesome, for she fetched her children to the Prince's bedside. "Karol breathed
She gives us warning that it is "a sad story and sorrowful truth" that she is telling us. She has herself the better rôle of the two naturally. It could not have been on that, account that Chopin' was annoyed. He was a Pole, and therefore doubly chivalrous, so that such an objection would have been unworthy of a lover. What concerns us is that George Sand gives, with great nicety, the, exact causes of the rupture. In the first place, Karol was jealous of Lucrezia's stormy past; then his refined nature shrank from certain of her comrades of a rougher kind. The invalid was irritated by her robust health, and by the presence and, we might almost say, the rivalry of the children. Prince Karol finds them nearly always in his way, and he finally takes a dislike to them. There comes a moment when Lucrezia sees herself obliged to choose between the two kinds of maternity, the
The special kind of sentiment, then, between George Sand and Chopin, Just as between Lucrezia and Prince Karol, was just this: love with maternal affection. This is extremely difficult to define, as indeed is everything which is extremely complex. George Sand declares that her reason for not refusing intimacy with Chopin was that she considered this in the light of a duty and as a safeguard. "One duty more," she writes, "in a life already so full, a life in which I was overwhelmed with fatigue, seemed to me one chance more of arriving at that austerity towards which I felt myself being drawn with a kind of religious enthusiasm."
We can only imagine that she was deceiving herself. To accept a lover for the sake of giving up lovers altogether seems a somewhat heroic means to an end, but also somewhat deceptive. It is certainly true that there was something more in this love than the attraction she felt for Musset and for Michel. In the various forms and degrees of our feelings, there is nothing gained by attempting to establish decided divisions and absolute demarcations for the sake of classifying them all. Among sentiments
It seems, therefore, that we cannot apply the same reasoning, with regard to love, when referring to the love of a man or of a woman. With the man there is more pride of possession, and with the woman there is more tenderness, more pity, more charity. All this leads us to the conclusion that maternal affection in love is not an unnatural sentiment, as has so often been said, or rather a perversion of sentiment. It is rather a sentiment in which too much instinct and heredity are mingled in a confused way. The object of the education of feeling is to arrive at discerning and eliminating the elements which interfere with the integrity of it. Rousseau called Madame de Warens his mother, but he was a man who was lacking in good taste. George Sand frequently puts into her novels this conception of love which we see her put into practice in life. It is impossible when analyzing it closely not to find something confused and disturbing in it which somewhat offends us.
It now remains for us to study what influence George Sand's friendship with some of the greatest artists of her times had on her works. Beside Liszt and Chopin, she knew Delacroix, Madame Dorval, Pauline Viardot, Nourrit and Lablache. Through them she went into artistic circles. Some of her novels are stories of the life of artists. Les Maîtres Mosaistes treats of the rivalry between two studios. La dernière Aldini is the story of a handsome gondolier who, as a tenor, turned the heads of patrician women. The first part of Consuelo takes us back to the singing schools and theatres of Venice in the eighteenth century, and introduces us to individuals taken from life and cleverly drawn. We have Comte Zustiniani, the dilettante, a wealthy patron of the fine arts; Porpora, the old master, who looks upon his art as something sacred; Corilla, the prima donna, annoyed at seeing a new star appear; Anzoleto, the tenor, who is jealous because he gets less applause than his friend; and above and beyond all the others Consuelo, good kind Consuelo, the sympathetic singer.
The theatres of Venice seem to be very much like those of Paris and of other places. We have the following sketch of the vanity of the comedian. "Can a man be jealous of a woman's advantages?
At any rate, the general idea that George Sand had of the artist was exactly the idea adopted by romanticism. We all know what a being set apart and free from all social and moral laws, what a "monster" romanticism made of the artist. It is one of its dogmas that the necessities of art are incompatible with the conditions of a regular life. An artist, for instance, cannot be bourgeois, as he is the exact opposite. We have Kean's speech in Dumas' drama, entitled Kean, or Disorder and Genius.
"An actor," he says, "must know all the passions, so that he may express them as he should. I study them in myself." And then he adds: "That is what you call, orderly! And what is to become of genius while I am being orderly?"
All this is absurd. The artist is not the man who has felt the most, but the man best gifted for imagining the various states of mind and feeling and for expressing them. We know, too, that an irregular life is neither the origin nor the stamp of extraordinary intellectual worth. All the cripples of Bohemian life prove to us that genius is not the outcome of that kind of life, but that, on the contrary, such life is apt to paralyze talent. It is very convenient, though, for the artist and for every other variety of "superior beings" to make themselves believe that ordinary morals are not for them. The best argument we can have against this theory is the case of George Sand. The artist, in her case, was eminently a very regular and hard-working bourgeois woman.
The art in which George Sand gave evidence of the surest taste was music. That is worthy of notice. In one of her Lettres d'un voyageur, she celebrates Liszt attacking the Dies irae on the Fribourg organ. She devotes another letter to the praise of Meyerbeer.
Langue que pour l'amour inventa le génie,
Qui nous viens d'Italie, et qui lui vins des cieux,
Douce langue du coeur, la seule ou la pensée,
Cette vierge craintive et d'une ombre ofensée,
Passe en gardant son voile et sans craindre les yeux,
Qui sait ce qu'un enfant peut entendre et peut dire
Dans tes soupirs divins nés de l'air qu'il respire,
Tristes comme son cœur et doux comme sa voix?
George Sand, who agreed with Musset, claimed
As examples of music in literature we have George Sand's phrase, more lyrical and musical than picturesque. We have, too, the gentle, soothing strophes of Sully Prudhomme and the vague melody of the Verlaine songs: "De la musique avant toute chose." It would be absurd to exaggerate the influence exercised by George Sand, and to attribute to her an importance which does not belong to her, over poetical evolution. It is only fair to say, though, that music, which was looked upon suspiciously for so long a time by classical writers of sane and sure taste, has completely invaded our present society, so that we are becoming more and more imbued with it. George Sand's predilection for modern art is another feature which makes her one of us, showing that her tendencies were very marked for things of the present day.
As regards Chopin, I have consulted a biography by Liszt, a study by M. Camille Bellaigue and the volume by M. Elie Poiree in the Collection des musiciens celèbres, published by H. Laurens.
The following is an unpublished letter to Madame Buloz:
Monday 13th.
MY DEAR CHRISTINE,
"I have only been at Palma four days. My journey has been very satisfactory, but rather long and difficult until we were out of France. I took up my pen (as people say) twenty times over to write the last five or six pages for which Spiridion has been waiting for six months. It is not the easiest thing in the world, I can assure you, to give the conclusion of one's own religious belief, and when travelling it is impossible. At twenty different places I have resolved to think it solemnly over and to write down my conclusion. But these stoppages were the most tiring part of our journey. There were visits, dinners, walks, curiosities, ruins, the Vaucluse fountain, Reboul and the Nimes arena, the Barcelona cathedrals, dinners on board the war-ships, the Italian theatres of Spain (and what theatres and what Italians!), guitars and Heaven knows what beside. There was the moonlight on the sea and above all Valma and Mallorca, the most delightful place in the
L. Landouzy of the Academy of Medecine, La Lutte contre la tuberculose, published by L. Maretheux.
George Sand to Madame Buloz. Postscript to the
letter already quoted:
"I am leaving for the country where I have a
furnished house with a garden, magnificently situated for
50 francs a month. I
VI: A CASE OF MATERNAL AFFECTION IN LOVE
CHOPIN George Sand; Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings | ||