Chopin composed half of his oeuvre at Nohant. And at the end of 1841, I served as his manager, in spite of his general unwillingness to perform in public. Liszt had just returned from a wildly successful solo tour, and so a jealous Chopin grudgingly allowed me to arrange for a concert for him, albeit with a violinist and a singer to share the bill. From the moment he agreed to do it, he plagued me with doubt and questions and demands I found hard to tolerate. At first, I laughed off his concerns, but then one day I got angry and stood inches from his face to tell him of my frustrations.
“You don’t want posters. You don’t want programs. You don’t want too big an audience. You don’t want anyone talking about the concert to you. I suggest when the day comes, you play in total darkness, on a silent keyboard!”
At this, he finally stopped interfering and let me go on with my plans.
The concert was a great success. I arranged for hothouse flowers to bank the double grand staircase of the Salle Pleyel, and it was an illustrious audience that ascended the red carpet up to the concert hall. When Chopin first came out on stage, I could feel his nervousness as though it were my own. But when he began playing, he disappeared into his own genius. He closed his eyes, and I closed mine. Then it felt as though the audience breathed as one. He had chosen an extremely challenging program featuring pieces he had written since we had come together, among them the four mazurkas of Opus 41 and the extremely difficult Third Scherzo, which he played with such force I feared he would break the piano.
His performance was met with calls for encores, with loud bravos, with women actually fainting from appreciation. Liszt published a review in which he spoke politely of the other performers that night, but he called Chopin the king of the evening. (About which my oversensitive Chopinet said, “Yes, I am the king for one night, raising the question of who is the king for all the other days! I am king, but only within his empire!”)
The “king” netted six thousand francs from the concert and immediately dispatched orders to his manservant, Jan, asking for suede gloves, two new colognes, a pair of dark gray pants—in the current fashion, but with no stripes!—and two new waistcoats, velvet, with a minute pattern.
—
IN 1842, finding that our apartments on Rue Pigalle were cold and damp, and that the climb up to them made Chopin short of breath, we moved to Square d’Orléans. It was just off Rue Saint-Lazare and, to my proletariat heart’s delight, was a kind of commune, presided over by Countess Charlotte Marliani and her husband, Emmanuel. There were eight structures built around a central courtyard. Other artists lived here, among them dancers, painters, actors, and musicians. I rented the roomiest place and painted my drawing room walls a coffee brown. Frédéric’s quarters, much smaller but quite elegant, were across the courtyard. Maurice had a tiny studio on a high floor, as befitted his bachelor status.
I relished the stimulation of being around like-minded people, and, as I became increasingly politicized, I began spending more and more time away from Frédéric, going to the kinds of meetings that led me to start my own journal, La Revue Indépendante.
Most summers, we returned to Nohant, and I worked continuously to make it better for my family and my guests. Chopin devised a tiny puppet theater; I created an art studio for Delacroix, and he and his cat, Cupid (whom I daresay he loved better than any woman), came to stay for ten days. What a joyful time we had then, the house noisy with talk and laughter and the echo of footsteps coming down the stairs. There were hikes around the grounds and through the forests, horseback rides in the fields; there was eating and drinking all hours of the day.
Whenever we were at Nohant, I invited people to visit, lest Chopin become bored. Whereas I could be content for long periods of time in the quiet of nature and was, in fact, restored by it, Frédéric needed constant stimulation. He needed the theater and the opera, the business of the streets. To the extent that I could, I created that for him in the country. He loved it when the famous soprano Pauline Viardot came, as she often did. He would play Mozart’s operas and she would stand at the piano and sing, and at those times I thought the angels in heaven envied us mortals who sat transfixed before her.
When Frédéric’s father died, he isolated himself in his room and fell into a black despair from which I began to think nothing would lift him. But then I invited his sister Ludwika to come from Poland. During her visit, she and I got on famously, each of us deeply appreciative of the other not only for the ways in which we cared for Chopin but for each other’s beings. Something about our mutual regard restored Frédéric’s spirits. After Ludwika went back to Poland, our friendship continued—and deepened—in letters.
The years went by, and I breathed easily; I thought I was done with looking for happiness and peace.
July 1844
NOHANT
I turned forty, the age at which one was considered officially old. And Maurice turned twenty-one, the age for becoming a man and stepping into his role of master of Nohant. With this he developed a certain animosity toward Frédéric, for it seems men lack the ability to live peacefully side by side when their need to dominate is challenged. Frédéric had a generally kind nature, but he also had his distinct preferences. A kind of tension announced itself: Maurice began to hold his head a different way when he was around Frédéric, and the lift in his chin spoke volumes.
In Maurice’s first act as master, he fired Frédéric’s manservant. Then he fired the ancient gardener at Nohant, who had been there when my grandmother was in charge, and finally he discharged a housekeeper whom we all knew as lazy but tolerated for her musical laugh and cheerful high coloring.
I understood that Maurice needed to make some dramatic decisions, both to establish his claim and to be financially responsible. I sent away with generous compensation the people he had discharged. I hurt for them, but I had to let my son run Nohant the way he saw fit. He also asked me not to take Frédéric away for the winter; he said he needed my help to complete the transfer of power from me to him.
As for Solange, her animosity toward me grew. This was because I took into my care a distant cousin on my mother’s side, a twenty-year-old girl named Augustine Brault whose mother was a prostitute and who I feared was being pressured into becoming the same: I had heard that her mother frequently brought her daughter along on her assignations. I knew the girl to be bright, kind, and talented, with a remarkable singing voice. She had unruly black hair, clear green eyes, and the classical kind of bone structure that would assure her beauty into old age. She was tall for a woman and moved with an easy grace. What I thought best about her was that she was full of energy. I could not help but feel it would be a pleasure to have her in the household, and in any case, I wanted her not to fall to circumstances that would ruin her life.
I spoke to Maurice about taking her in. He, too, cared very much about her and agreed that she would be a welcome addition. And so I offered to pay her parents to allow me to assume her care.
I had often worried that Solange felt alone in the family and that she seemed not to be skilled at making or keeping friends. I hoped that Augustine might serve as an older sister to her, a confidante, but after she arrived, all Solange seemed to feel for her was jealousy and contempt.
Frédéric did not like Titine, as we called her, either. He found her uncouth: too loud, too outspoken, too direct, and he thought she was calculating and scheming. He was openly rude to her. “She is only here because of her desire to marry Maurice,” he told me one night as we sat alone in the drawing room after dinner.
“I would welcome it.”
“Surely you are not sincere in saying this!”
I kept silent.
He turned in his chair to face me more directly. “You agonize about your relationship with your daughter, and then you do this. Can you not see that she will view this as a threat? She will feel that you prefer this relative stranger to her!”
To be honest, I had to admit that I did prefer someone whose gaze went out into t
he world rather than focusing relentlessly on herself. Deep in my heart was a stubborn—if battered—love for Solange, but I could not say that I admired her. I attributed her narrow vision, her constant preening, and her self-adulation to her youth, and hoped that she would soon grow into the capable and giving young woman I still believed she could be.
“You may think you are arranging to have two daughters who can help and learn from one another,” Frédéric said. “In fact, you are only arranging to lose one. Solange is desperate for your attention, and again and again you turn her away.”
It is she who turns from me! I wanted to say, because it was true. It had always been that way between her and me.
Generally speaking, it is the adult’s place to side with the child, who is not well equipped with tools for self-defense, and whose needs and vulnerabilities are great. I would do the same myself. But Arabella had been correct in saying that my daughter was highly skilled in manipulation. Frédéric could not see it. And in the end, he sided with an increasingly voluptuous and flirtatious—and, yes, ever more manipulative—Solange against me. Thus were the battle lines drawn for what would prove to be our undoing.
—
IN MAY OF 1846, in what I believed was an effort to get away from me, seventeen-year-old Solange made a rapid match, agreeing to marry the first suitor she had, a Berry man named Fernand de Preaulx. I found him pleasant but nothing more. On the evening she accepted him, Frédéric congratulated her warmly. I asked her to come into my room so that we might have privacy.
There, I sat her on the bed with me and took her hands into mine. I looked directly into her eyes to say, “There is something I must ask you, and I hope that you will answer truthfully. Woman to woman, I will tell you that I married your father without being in love with him, and nothing but trouble followed. Trouble and heartbreak.”
“As I very well know.”
“I don’t want the same for you. And so it is in this spirit that I ask you to tell me truly if you love Fernand.”
She pulled her hands from mine and spoke in a flat voice, devoid of warmth or feeling. “Yes. I love him.”
“Solange, whatever has been between us…it is important that you speak honestly now, that you not betray yourself simply to leave here. Our differences can be resolved, as they have been in the past. Perhaps we are too much alike. Perhaps we have both been too headstrong to—”
“I told you that I love him! Why must you now insinuate that I do not? Does it suit your own peculiar need for drama? I love him and I will marry him!”
I waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. Finally, I said, “Very well. Then I, too, offer you my congratulations. And if you like, I shall take you to Paris for your trousseau.”
“Is that all?”
I nodded. She brushed roughly past me and was gone.
I was the first woman to become a bestseller in France and had achieved worldwide fame. My work had been praised to the skies by critics who found fault with Victor Hugo. Almost every day’s post brought letters of praise. But my own daughter despised me. What had I done, I wondered. What had I done?
Maman! I suddenly heard Solange’s child’s voice say. Watch me! Look, Maman, look at me, why aren’t you watching? I pushed my face into my hands and wept.
February 1847
PARIS
Solange was sitting before her mirror when I entered her room.
“I have been invited to the studio of the sculptor Auguste Clésinger,” I told her. “Why don’t you come with me?”
“Why are you visiting him?” she asked my image in the mirror. She finished with her hair and turned around.
“He is an admirer. He has asked to do a bust of me.”
Her face filled with scorn. I saw that she was ready to refuse me, so I told her quickly, “But I would like him to do you, instead.”
It wasn’t true, at least not until that moment. For a year, I had been flattered by this young artist’s requests to sculpt me, and finally I had agreed that when I next went to Paris I would accommodate him. He sent a letter expressing what seemed to be sincere gratitude. It was full of misspellings, but it had a rough charm. And it showed the sort of unselfconscious passion I was ever unable to resist.
I had seen the thirty-three-year-old sculptor once in a café with Marie Dorval; she had pointed out the man with the dark good looks and muscular build who was hunched over his coffee, gesturing dramatically to the man with whom he was speaking. “Paris’s latest irresistible rogue,” Marie said. “He is a sculptor of some distinction, and his most recent work caused a scandal: it was of a writhing nude lying on her back. He called it Woman Bitten by a Serpent, but we all know it was more properly Woman in the Throes of an Orgasm.” Staring at him and biting into a pastry as though it were his shoulder, she added, “He is a former cavalryman; you can see the evidence. One can forgive a questionable reputation when one can enjoy such a physique.”
Bad reputation or not, I had looked forward to seeing how he would sculpt me. But now I seized on another opportunity to try to make Solange shine.
I was trying to bring my daughter back to me somehow. I’d used various methods to downplay myself, including letting myself go in a way that would have horrified my mother. I’d gained weight—my formerly enviable waist was long gone, and I had an extra chin. I did not speak of my work, and I hid away the letters of admiration I received. No matter what I did, though, it was never enough; I seemed ever to be a stone in her shoe. I had wished for shared joy when we selected things for her trousseau, but instead I felt I was along with her only to pay the cost of her expensive selections.
But she took me up on this offer, and we went to the studio together.
I made the introduction and proposed that Clésinger sculpt Solange in my place. I saw his attraction to her immediately: she was, after all, a beautiful, buxom young blonde with smoldering blue eyes and a glowing complexion; one of my radical journalist friends had described her as looking overly ripe for the picking.
“I should be honored if you would accept as my gift my sculpting both of you,” Clésinger said with easy gallantry, and both of us agreed. I was asked to leave Solange alone in the studio with him so that he could get started with her right away. I looked over at her—Are you comfortable with this?—and she nodded at me, smiling. A few days later, she told me at dinner that she had put her engagement on hold indefinitely.
“Because of Clésinger?” I asked. “Have you fallen in love with him?”
“It is because of you. Because of what you said to me about being sure. I am no longer sure.”
“But because of Clésinger?” I persisted.
“I am putting my engagement on hold, and that is all. Stop pestering me.”
In April, a week after Solange and I had returned to Nohant, Clésinger showed up at our door, telling me that I had twenty-four hours to agree to him having my daughter’s hand in marriage and demanding that I secure her father’s permission as well. There was something thrilling about it for both Solange and me. That night, for the first time in a long time, she kissed me before she retired.
I sent a letter to Maurice requesting that he accompany Clésinger to make the request of Casimir, in person, and in it I wrote of the ardent suitor:
He will get his way because his mind is set on it. He gets everything he wants by dint of sheer persistence. He seems to be able to go without sleep or food. He was here for three days, and slept no more than two hours. I am amazed, I am even rather pleased by the spectacle of such strength of will. I think he will be the saving of your restless sister.
I confess that I was more than “rather pleased.” This situation seemed to have brought Solange and me together. Both of us knew that Casimir would voice no objection but that Chopin, who was in Paris, would not be happy about this turn of events. It was a breach of good manners, of good taste! Solange would be abandoning an aristocrat for a commoner!
“I think we must not tell Frédéric, yes?” I said to Sol
ange one evening when I sat in her room with her. She was in her nightclothes, her beautiful hair tumbled down upon her shoulders in advance of her braiding it.
“Heavens, no!” She giggled.
I kissed the top of her head. “Our secret, then, yours and mine together.”
She nodded almost shyly, and I saw a flash of the little girl she used to be.
Frédéric heard of the upcoming marriage when he read the announcement in the newspaper. He was conspicuously absent at the wedding that followed in May, two weeks later. Although he sent a warm note to Solange, wishing her great happiness, I knew he was furious. As soon as I returned to Paris, he was in my apartment, pacing like a caged animal. I half expected him to pick up a chair and throw it, as he had reportedly done with his students when he was displeased at their efforts and his usual foot stamping would not suffice. “You know of this artist’s egregious reputation, do you not?” he asked me.
“I hardly think it is egregious.”
“He is a drunkard. He is deeply in debt—he owes hundreds of thousands of francs. He has just abandoned his pregnant mistress—whom he regularly beat!”
“Who told you this?”
“Delacroix. But it is well known, George. You must have heard these things!”
“I have not. And unlike these gossips, I have met the man, and he is charming.”
“I won’t have it.”
I stared at him. “First of all, it is not your place to have or not have the marriage of my daughter to the man she loves.”
He opened his mouth to speak.
“No,” I said. “I shall not listen to you go on about how to be a good mother, to insinuate, as you always do, that I am anything but. What do you know about raising a child? It is all well and good for you to play entertaining friend, sympathetic ally, but when you tire of the children, what then? Off you go to one well-appointed place or another, where those who love you will guard your right to be alone so long as you desire.