CHAPTER XII

“If music be the food of love, play on”

Nietzsche, on a very dark day, wrote to a friend: “Isn’t it a work of art: to hope?” In landing at Marseilles in the early spring of 1839, Chopin and George Sand built a work of art, because they hoped, because they were overflowing with that inexplicable enthusiasm that the most banal things inspire at certain predestined hours. Anything sufficed: an expected letter, a beautiful face, the shadow of a church on the street, the reassuring words of a doctor, to convince them that this was the dawn of a convalescence that would dry their almost rotted love and ripen it, transmute it into a peaceful and lasting friendship. Sometimes nothing more than a chance landscape is enough to change the rhythm of souls.

At Majorca, one might wonder if the deserted monastery was not a sort of Dantesque Purgatory from which Sand explored the Hells and the invalid felt himself already rising towards Heaven. “This Chopin is an angel,” George had written. “At Majorca, while he was sick unto death, he wrote music that had the very smell of Paradise; but I am so used to seeing him in Heaven that neither his life nor his death seems likely to prove anything for him. He does not know himself on which planet he exists.”

At Marseilles, a good town of grocers, perfumers, soap sellers, their feet were once more on the earth. They settled at the Hôtel de Beauvau, saw a physician, and decided to await the summer in the south. This resolution was not carried out without a certain amount of boredom, but boredom itself contributes to rest, which was so necessary after their voyage of miscarried love. They had, besides, to shut themselves up against the mistral and the pests that entered by all the doors. But they lay hidden. Dr. Cauvières regularly sounded Chopin’s lungs, made him wear cupping glasses, put him on a diet and pronounced him well on the way to cicatrization. He could begin to play again, to walk, to talk like anybody else, he whose voice for weeks had been nothing more than a breath. He slept a great deal. He busied himself with the publication of his works, wrote to Fontana on the subject of their dedications, and discussed with him the price of his new compositions. For he had to think of the future, about the Paris apartment he had decided to re-rent: “Take Schlesinger the 500 francs you will receive from Probst for the _Ballade_.” “Schlesinger is trying to cheat me, but he makes enough out of me; be polite to him.” “Tell him I shall sell the _Ballade_ for France and England for 800 francs and the _Polonaises_ for Germany, England and France for 1,500.” He grew angry. He stood out against the publishers and would cede nothing. “As for money, you must make a clear contract and not hand over the manuscripts except for cash....” “I should rather give my manuscripts as I did before, for a low price, than stoop to these....” He returned to the charge in April: “Keep everything till I come back since they are such Jews. I have sold the _Preludes_ to Pleyel and have so far received only 500 francs. He has the right to do as he pleases about them. As for the _Ballade_ and the _Polonaises_, do not sell them either to Schlesinger or to Probst... get them back... Enough. Enough for you and for me. My health improves but I am angry.” “It is not my fault if I seem like a toadstool that poisons you when you dig it up and eat it. You know perfectly well that I have never been of any use to anyone, not even myself. Meanwhile, they continue to regard me as not tubercular. I drink neither coffee nor wine, only milk. I keep in the warmth and look like a young lady.”

In March the famous singer Nourrit died at Naples and it was rumoured that he had committed suicide. His body was brought to Marseilles the following month, and a funeral service was arranged at Notre-Dame-du-Mont. To honour the memory of a friend whom he had seen so often at Liszt’s and had even entertained himself, Chopin agreed to take the organ during the Elevation. Although the instrument was squeaky and out of tune, he drew from it what music he could. He played _The Stars_ of Schubert, which Nourrit had sung a short time before at Marseilles: and, renouncing all theatricality, the artist played this melody with the softest stops. George was in the organ stall with a few friends, and her fine eyes filled with tears. The public did not recognize the novelist in this little woman dressed in black.

In May, Chopin was strong enough to take a short trip to Genoa with his mistress. It was a beautiful interlude. They visited the palaces, the terraced gardens, the picture-galleries. Did she think of that journey of almost four years earlier, when with Musset she first put foot on this Italian soil? Genoa is perhaps the only town where their love was not overcast. She has written that to see it again was a pleasure. I do not know if the word is sincere but it does not ring true. Something like a wrinkle of fatigue, however, can be seen in the statement which she made, on her return, to Mme. Marliani: “I no longer like journeys, or rather, _I am no longer in such condition that I am able to enjoy them_.” One hopes, too, that Chopin knew nothing of that first Genoese visit, because, for a distrustful heart, such a picture would have been terrific.

On May 22nd, they left Marseilles and started for Nohant, where they planned to spend the entire summer. After a week of jolting, they at last reached the wide, well-cultivated district of Berry, “studded with great round walnut trees” and cut by shady roads that George loved. All at once, there was the modest village, the church with its tiled roof, and, bordering the square, the château. A country château that symbolized the double origin, royal and plebeian, of this woman of thirty-five years whom all Europe regarded with admiration, and who brought to the nest her _little one_, her new little one, a noble and diaphanous young man who seemed to have dropped down like a sea-bird into this ancient French country-side.

Dear woman, must we admire you for the period of rest you accorded to this beautiful weary soul? We know that you were bad for him, sometimes, because you were sound, ardent, and, in spite of everything, curious about that inviolable mind, about those limbs without desire. But we have seen too that you knew your rôle of guardian. “Of whom shall I take care?” you cried, when your other invalid had left you because he could no longer bear the sufferings with which you seasoned your pleasure. Dear woman, nevertheless! You cannot be judged by any common standards, you with your hot blood and your heart always so soon feasted by the very strength of its own hungers. The enormous labour you accomplished was but the result of your own energies. They burdened you with work. They tired you out like a man. You never found those horrible mental tasks too stupid, those tasks from which they feigned to derive an elastic and libertarian moral, when you were really made but for love and travail and the old human order. This is all rather amusing, and sad as truth. But we must thank you for having in some sort made Musset and broken that easy fop to healthy sorrows. We cannot blame you, as others do, for having finished Chopin. You fought for him a long time against his malady. If you bruised him further, it is because even your friendship was costly. But always, it was your best that you gave.

Now that we have seen you enter Nohant with this new prey to your tenderness, let us say with Shakespeare: “If music be the food of love, play on.”

* * * * *

Chopin never liked the country. Yet he enjoyed Nohant. The house was comfortable. After Majorca and Marseilles, it was a joy to have a large room, fine sheets, a well-ordered table, a few beautiful pieces of furniture. Without being luxurious, the big house had a pleasant air. There was a sense of ease. He was spoiled, petted. An old friend of George’s, Dr. Papet, ran up at once to examine the invalid thoroughly. He diagnosed a chronic affection of the larynx: he ordered plenty of rest and a long stay in the country. Chopin submitted with no difficulty to this programme, and adopted a perfectly regulated, wise way of living. While George went back to the education of her children and her job as a novelist, he corrected a new edition of Bach, finished his _Sonata in B flat minor_, the second _Nocturne_ of op. 37 and four _Mazurkas_ (op. 41). They dined out of doors, between five and six o’clock. Then a few neighbours dropped in, the Fleurys, the Duteils, Duvernet, Rollinat, and they talked and smoked. From the first, they all treated Chopin with respectful sympathy. Hippolyte Chatiron, George’s half-brother, who lived with his wife in the immediate neighbourhood, a kind of squireen, good-natured and convivial, formed a passionate friendship for him.

When they had gone Chopin played the piano in the twilight; then at Solange’s and Maurice’s bedtime, he too went to bed and slept like a child. As for George, she took up the Encyclopædia and prepared the lessons for the next day. Truly a family life, such, exactly, as Chopin understood best; such also as he needed during his working periods.

“I am composing here a _Sonata_ in B flat minor,” he wrote to Fontana, “in which the _Funeral March_ you already have will be incorporated. There is an _allegro_, then a _scherzo_ in E flat minor, the _March_, and a short _finale_ of about three pages. After the _March_ the left hand babbles along _unisono_ with the right. I have a new _Nocturne_ in G major to accompany the one in G minor, if you remember it. You know I have four new _Mazurkas_: one from Palma in E minor, three from here in B major, in A flat major, and C sharp minor. To me they seem as pretty as the youngest children seem to parents who are growing old. Otherwise, I am doing nothing; I am correcting a Paris edition of Bach’s works. There are not only misprints, but, I believe, harmonic errors committed by those who think they understand Bach. I am not correcting them with the pretention of understanding him better than they, but with the conviction that I can sometimes divine how the thing ought to go.”

Every evening, during that hour of music that Chopin dedicated to George alone, she listened and dreamed. She was a choice listener. Without doubt, it was in those moments that these two souls, so impenetrable to each other, understood each other best. She fully realized that he was the extreme artist type; that it would never be possible to make him accept any jot of reality; that his continued dream was too far from the world, too little philosophic for her to be able to follow into those unpeopled regions. But it was, nevertheless, sweet to be the object of such a man’s preference. Cruel also, because if Chopin kept usurious account of the least light given him, “he did not take the trouble to hide his disappointment at the first darkness.” His fantastic humour, his profound depressions, at once interested and worried the amateur of emotions in George. But a kind of terror gripped her heart at the thought of a new obligation she would assume if Frederick were definitely to install himself with her. She was no longer under the illusion of passion. She was afraid of having some day to struggle against some other love that might conquer her and prove the death of this frail being she had torn from himself. Then she stiffened. One more duty in a life already so burdened, would this not be precisely a defence against temptation—an even greater chance for her to attain to that austerity towards which she felt herself drawn by the old depths of religious enthusiasm of which she had never freed herself? How should she settle the matter? She compromised by leaving it for time to tell.

As for Chopin, this peaceful lot was too perfectly fitted to the measure of his strength for him to dream of any change. He was radiating all his gentleness, he was creating; such was his beautiful present, his only possible future. While he improvised George opened a scrapbook and wrote: “The genius of Chopin is the most profound and pregnant of feeling and emotions that has ever existed. He makes a single instrument speak the language of the infinite. He knows how to gather into ten lines that even a child could play poems of immense elevation, dramas of unequalled power. He never needs great material means.... He needs neither saxophone nor bass horns to fill the soul with terror; neither Cathedral organs nor the human voice to give it faith and exultation. There must be great advances in taste and artistic intelligence if his works are ever to become popular.... Chopin knows his strength and his weakness. His weakness lies in the very excess of that strength, which he cannot control. His music is full of delicate shades of feeling and of the unexpected. Sometimes, rarely, it is bizarre, mysterious, and tormented. In spite of his horror of the unintelligible, his overpowering emotions sometimes sweep him unconsciously into regions known to him alone.”

* * * * *

Towards the end of the summer, they all decided to return to Paris. Sand was persuaded that she could not manage to finish the education of her children without assistance. Maurice was eager to learn drawing; Solange was difficult, a little sullen, stubborn. George also had to see her publisher, Buloz, the editor of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Chopin wanted to get to his pupils again and resume their lessons, the main source of his revenue. So they bombarded friends with letters, asking them to find two apartments not too far from each other. Grzymala, Arago and Fontana started a search. From Nohant, instructions rained on the heads of the three friends.

Chopin asked them to choose a _dove-like_ wallpaper, glowing and glossy, for his rooms. Something else for the vestibule, but still _respectable_. If there was anything more beautiful, more fashionable, they were not to hesitate to get it.

“I prefer something simple, modest, elegant, to the loud, common colours the shopkeepers use. That is why I like pearl-grey, because it is neither striking nor vulgar. Thank you for the servant’s room, because it is really essential.”

For George, it was vital that the house should be quiet. There must be three bedrooms, two next to each other, and one separated by the drawing-room. Close to the third there must be a well-lighted work-room. Drawing- and dining-room must be next each other. Two servants’ rooms and a cellar. Inlaid floors in good condition if possible. But most of all, quiet,—“no blacksmith in the neighbourhood.” A decent staircase, windows facing south. “No young ladies, no smoke or unpleasant odours.” Chopin even took the trouble to sketch the plan of this imagined suite.

Soon they had good news. Chopin was to live at 5, rue Tronchet, while George was to have two small pavilions in a garden at 16, rue Pigalle. Nohant was in a state of joy, and Frederick, always so particular about matters of elegance, now began to think of his clothes. He wrote again to Fontana: “I forgot to ask you to order a hat for me at Duport’s, rue de la Chausée d’Antin. He has my measure and knows what I want. Show him this year’s shape, not too exaggerated, because I don’t know how you are dressing now. Also, drop in on Dautremont, my tailor, on the Boulevards, and tell him to make me a pair of grey trousers. Will you choose a dark shade, for winter trousers, something good, not striped, but plain and soft. You are English; so you know what I ought to have. Dautremont will be glad to know that I am coming back. I also need a black velvet waistcoat, but one with very little ornament and not loud,—a plain waistcoat, but elegant. If he has no very fine velvet, let him make a waistcoat of fine wool, but not too open....” In recompense for all these errands: “... I shall keep changing the second part of the _Polonaise_ for you till the end of my life. Yesterday’s version may not please you either, though it put my brain on the rack for eighty seconds. I have copied out my manuscripts in good order. There are six with your _Polonaises_, not counting the seventh, an impromptu, which may be worthless. I can’t judge of it, myself, because it is too new. Titus advises me to compose an oratorio. I have asked him in reply why he is building a sugar mill rather than a Dominican monastery. As you are such a clever fellow, you can arrange so that neither black thoughts nor suffocating cough shall bother me in my new rooms. Arrange for me to be good. Erase, if you can, many episodes of my past. And it would be no bad thing if I set myself a task that will last me several years. Finally, you would oblige me by growing much younger, or in finding a way of arranging for us to be not yet born.

“Your old Frederick.”

Both Frederick and George settled in Paris in October of that year, 1839. But they were soon convinced that after a whole year of existence together it would be difficult to live apart. Chopin still had need of attentions, precautions. He gave up his lodging to Dr. Matuszinski, and moved with his furniture to the lower floor of one of the two pavilions in the rue Pigalle.

So these longed-for years of great and perfect work, unrolled themselves in about the desired rhythm. During the morning, the professors for Maurice and Solange succeeded one another. In Chopin’s part of the house it was a procession of pupils. His lessons lasted at least an hour, sometimes more. It often happened that the master would play the pieces himself. On one occasion he played from memory to one of his pupils fourteen _Preludes_ and _Fugues_ of Bach. And as the young girl expressed her admiration for this _tour de force_, “One can never forget them,” he said, smiling. “For a year I have not practised a quarter of an hour at a time. I have no strength, no energy. I am always waiting for a little health to take all that up again, but—I am still waiting.” Such efforts exhausted him. He used to take a little opium in a glass of water, and rub his temples with _eau-de-Cologne_.

“The final triumph,” he continued, “is simplicity. When you have exhausted all the difficulties, and have played an immense quantity of notes, simplicity emerges in all its charm, as the final seal of art. Anyone who expects to achieve it at the outset will never succeed in so doing; you cannot begin at the end.”

The afternoon was generally devoted to the personal work of the two artists. In the evening they met at George’s, and dined together; then someone or another of the intimates of the household came to see them. The salon was _café au lait_ in colour, decorated with very fine Chinese vases always filled with flowers in the Chopinesque mode. The furniture was green; there was a sideboard of oak laden with curiosities and, on the wall, the portrait of the hostess by Calamatta and several canvases by Delacroix. The piano was bare, square, ebony. Chopin almost always sat at it. At one side, George’s bedroom could be seen, where two mattresses on the floor covered with a Persian rug served as a bed.

Sand arose late, because she sat up most of the night. Chopin polished and put the final touches to his works, the first versions of which had in general come to him during the summer. His creation was entirely spontaneous. It gushed forth during a walk, an hour of meditation, or it might unfold sudden and complete, while he was sitting before his piano. He played it to himself, sang it, took it up again, modified its accents. Then began that immensely laborious quest of perfection, which will always be, whatever people may say, the essential mandate of the artist. “He locked himself in his room for whole days at a time, weeping, walking up and down, shattering his pens, repeating or changing a single bar a hundred times, writing it down only to rub it out again, and beginning all over again the next day with minute and despairing perseverance. He spent six weeks on one page, only to write it finally as he had jotted it down in the first flush.” In noting these things, George was exasperated with the genuine surprise of facile creators who are not tortured by any yearning for finality. But, like Giotto, who, when the Pope asked for a perfect example of his knowledge, wanted to send only a true circle, so Chopin, having filled one line with all the ornament of his thought, came back to exquisite nudity, the final and sufficient symbol of the idea. So a poet works. So he squeezes his universe into the smallest possible limits, makes it as heavy as a crystal, but gleaming from a thousand facets. That is what made that great blackener of paper, Sand, say that Chopin could compress into a few bars “poems of immense elevation, dramas of unequalled power.” Mozart alone, she thought, was superior to him, because he had the calm of health, and so the fullness of life. But who knows what happy accidents illness may bring to art? It is certain that Chopin’s breathlessness, his nervousness, brought to his virile inspiration those qualities of languor, those weary echoes by which he touches us most finely.