Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician

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Dear me! this Pleyel who is such an adorer of mine! He thinks,
perhaps, that I shall never return to Paris alive. I shall
come back, and shall pay him a visit, and thank him as well as
Leo.

I enclose a note to Schlesinger, in which I give you full
authority to act in this matter.

I feel better every day; nevertheless, you will pay the
portier these fifty francs, to which I completely agree, for
my doctor does not permit me to move from here before summer.

Mickiewicz's "Dziady" I received yesterday. What shall you do
with my papers?

The letters you will leave in the writing-desk, and send the
music to Johnnie, or take it to your own house. In the little
table that stands in the anteroom there are also letters; you
must lock it well.

My love to Johnnie, I am glad he is better.

Chopin to Fontana; March 17, 1839:--

I thank you for all your efforts. Pleyel is a scoundrel,
Probst a scape-grace. He never gave me 1,000 francs for three
manuscripts. Very likely you have received my long letter
about Schlesinger, therefore I wish you and beg of you to give
that letter of mine to Pleyel, who thinks my manuscripts too
dear. If I have to sell them cheap, I would rather do so to
Schlesinger than look for new and improbable connections. For
Schlesinger can always count upon England, and as I am square
with Wessel, he may sell them to whomsoever he likes. The same
with the Polonaises in Germany, for Probst is a bird whom I
have known a long time. As regards the money, you must make an
unequivocal agreement, and do not give the manuscripts except
for cash. I send you a reconnaissance for Pleyel, it
astonishes me that he absolutely wants it, as if he could not
trust me and you.

Dear me, this Pleyel who said that Schlesinger paid me badly!
500 francs for a manuscript for all the countries seems to him
too dear! I assure you I prefer to deal with a real Jew. And
Probst, that good-for-nothing fellow, who pays me 300 francs
for my mazurkas! You see, the last mazurkas brought me with
ease 800 francs--namely, Probst 300 francs, Schlesinger 400,
and Wessel 100. I prefer giving my manuscripts as formerly at
a very low price to stooping before these...I prefer being
submissive to one Jew to being so to three. Therefore go to
Schlesinger, but perhaps you settled with Pleyel.

Oh, men, men! But this Mrs. Migneron, she too is a good one!
However, Fortune turns round, I may yet live and hear that
this lady will come and ask you for some leather; if, as you
say, you are aiming at being a shoemaker. I beg of you to make
shoes neither for Pleyel nor for Probst.

Do not yet speak to anyone of the Scherzo [Op. 39]. I do not
know when I shall finish it, for I am still weak and cannot
write.

As yet I have no idea when I shall see you. My love to
Grzymala; and give him such furniture as he will like, and let
Johnnie take the rest from the apartments. I do not write to
him, but I love him always. Tell him this, and give him my
love.

Wodzinski still astonishes me.

When you receive the money from Pleyel, pay first the
landlord's rent, and send me immediately 500 francs. I left on
the receipt for Pleyel the Op. blank, for I do not remember
the following number.

Madame Sand to Madame Marliani; Marseilles, April 22, 1839:--

...I was also occupied with the removal from one hotel to
another. Notwithstanding all his efforts and inquiries, the
good doctor was not able to find me a corner in the country
where to pass the month of April.

I am pretty tired of this town of merchants and shopkeepers,
where the intellectual life is wholly unknown; but here I am
still shut up for the month of April.

Further on in the letter, after inviting Madame Marliani and her
husband to come to Nohant in May, she proceeds thus:--

He [M. Marliani] loves the country, and I shall be a match for
him as regards rural pleasures, while you [Madame Marliani]
will philosophise at the piano with Chopin. It can hardly be
said that he enjoys himself in Marseilles; but he resigns
himself to recover patiently.

The following letter of Chopin to Fontana, which Karasowski
thinks was written at Valdemosa in the middle of February, ought
to be dated Marseilles, April, 1839:--

As they are such Jews, keep everything till my return. The
Preludes I have sold to Pleyel (I received from him 500
francs). He is entitled to do with them what he likes. But as
to the Ballades and Polonaises, sell them neither to
Schlesinger nor to Probst. But whatever may happen, with no
Schonenberger [FOOTNOTE: A Paris music-publisher] will I have
anything to do. Therefore, if you gave the Ballade to Probst,
take it back, even though he offered a thousand. You may tell
him that I have asked you to keep it till my return, that when
I am back we shall see.

Enough of these...Enough for me and for you.

My very life, I beg of you to forgive me all the trouble; you
have really been busying yourself like a friend, and now you
will have still on your shoulders my removal. I beg Grzymala
to pay the cost of the removal. As to the portier, he very
likely tells lies, but who will prove it? You must give, in
order to stop his barking.

My love to Johnnie, I will write to him when I am in better
spirits. My health is improved, but I am in a rage. Tell
Johnnie that from Anthony as well as from me he will have
neither word nor money.

Yesterday I received your letter, together with letters from
Pleyel and Johnnie.

If Clara Wieck pleased you, that is good, for nobody can play
better than she does. When you see her give her my
compliments, and also to her father.

Did I happen to lend you Witwicki's songs? I cannot find them.
I only ask for them in case you should chance to have them.

Chopin to Fontana; Marseilles, March 25 [should no doubt be April
25], 1839:--

I received your letter, in which you let me know the
particulars of the removal. I have no words to thank you for
your true, friendly help. The particulars were very
interesting to me. But I am sorry that you complain, and that
Johnnie is spitting blood. Yesterday I played for Nourrit on
the organ, you see by this that I am better. Sometimes I play
to myself at home, but as yet I can neither sing nor dance.

Although the news of my mother is welcome, its having been
originated by Plat...is enough to make one consider it a
falsehood.

The warm weather has set in here, and I shall certainly not
leave Marseilles before May, and then go somewhere else in the
south of France.

It is not likely that we shall soon have news from Anthony.
Why should he write? Perhaps to pay his debts? But this is not
customary in Poland. The reason Raciborski appreciates you so
much is that you have no Polish habits, nota bene, not those
Polish habits you know and I mean.

You are staying at No. 26 [Chaussee d'Antin]. Are you
comfortable? On what floor, and how much do you pay? I take
more and more interest in these matters, for I also shall be
obliged to think of new apartments, but not till after my
return to Paris.

I had only that letter from Pleyel which he sent through you--
it is a month ago or more. Write to the same address, Rue et
Hotel Beauveau.

Perhaps you did not understand what I said above about my
having played for Nourrit. His body was brought from Italy and
carried to Paris. There was a Requiem Mass for his soul. I was
asked by his friends to play on the organ during the
Elevation.

Did Miss Wieck play my Etude well? Could she not select
something better than just this etude, the least interesting
for those who do not know that it is written for the black
keys? It would have been far better to do nothing at all.
[FOOTNOTE: Clara Wieck gave a concert in Paris on April 16,
1839. The study in question is No. 5 of Op. 10 (G flat major).
Only the right hand plays throughout on black keys.]

In conclusion, I have nothing more to write, except to wish
you good luck in the new house. Hide my manuscripts, that they
may not appear printed before the time. If the Prelude is
printed, that is Pleyel's trick. But I do not care.
Mischievous Germans, rascally Jews...! Finish the litany, for
you know them as well as I do.

Give my love to Johnnie and Grzymaia if you see them.--Your

FREDERICK.

One subject mentioned in this letter deserves a fuller
explanation than Chopin vouchsafes. Adolphe Nourrit, the
celebrated tenor singer, had in a state of despondency, caused by
the idea that since the appearance of his rival Duprez his
popularity was on the wane, put an end to his life by throwing
himself out of a window at Naples on the 8th of March, 1839.
[FOOTNOTE: This is the generally-accepted account of Nourrit's
death. But Madame Garcia, the mother of the famous Malibran, who
at the time was staying in the same house, thought it might have
been an accident, the unfortuante artist having in the dark
opened a window on a level with the floor instead of a door. (See
Fetis: Biographie universelle des Musiciens.)] Madame Nourrit
brought her husband's body to Paris, and it was on the way
thither that a funeral service was held at Marseilles for the
much-lamented man and singer.

Le Sud, Journal de la Mediterranee of April 25, 1839, [FOOTNOTE:
Quoted in L. M. Quicherat's Adolphe Nourrit, sa vie, son talent,
son caractere] shall tell us of Chopin's part in this service:--

At the Elevation of the Host were heard the melancholy tones
of the organ. It was M. Chopin, the celebrated pianist, who
came to place a souvenir on the coffin of Nourrit; and what a
souvenir! a simple melody of Schubert, but the same which had
so filled us with enthusiasm when Nourrit revealed it to us at
Marseilles--the melody of Les Astres. [FOOTNOTE: Die gestirne
is the original German title of this song.]

A less colourless account, one full of interesting facts and free
from conventional newspaper sentiment and enthusiasm, we find in
a letter of Chopin's companion.

Madame Sand to Madame Marliani; Marseilles, April 28, 1839:--

The day before yesterday I saw Madame Nourrit with her six
children, and the seventh coming shortly...Poor unfortunate
woman! what a return to France! accompanying this corpse, and
she herself super-intending the packing, transporting, and
unpacking [charger, voiturer, deballer] of it like a parcel!

They held here a very meagre service for the poor deceased,
the bishop being ill-disposed. This was in the little church
of Notre-Dame-du-Mont. I do not know if the singers did so
intentionally, but I never heard such false singing. Chopin
devoted himself to playing the organ at the Elevation, what an
organ! A false, screaming instrument, which had no wind except
for the purpose of being out of tune. Nevertheless, YOUR
LITTLE ONE [votre petit] made the most of it. He took the
least shrill stops, and played Les Astres, not in a proud and
enthusiastic style as Nourrit used to sing it, but in a
plaintive and soft style, like the far-off echo from another
world. Two, at the most three, were there who deeply felt
this, and our eyes filled with tears.

The rest of the audience, who had gone there en masse, and had
been led by curiosity to pay as much as fifty centimes for a
chair (an unheard-of price for Marseilles), were very much
disappointed; for it was expected that he would make a
tremendous noise and break at least two or three stops. They
expected also to see me, in full dress, in the very middle of
the choir; what not? They did not see me at all; I was hidden
in the organ-loft, and through the balustrade I descried the
coffin of poor Nourrit.

Thanks to the revivifying influences of spring and Dr. Cauviere's
attention and happy treatment, Chopin was able to accompany
George Sand on a trip to Genoa, that vaga gemma del mar, fior
delta terra. It gave George Sand much pleasure to see again, now
with her son Maurice by her side, the beautiful edifices and
pictures of the city which six years before she had visited with
Musset. Chopin was probably not strong enough to join his friends
in all their sight-seeing, but if he saw Genoa as it presents
itself on being approached from the sea, passed along the Via
Nuova between the double row of magnificent palaces, and viewed
from the cupola of S. Maria in Carignano the city, its port, the
sea beyond, and the stretches of the Riviera di Levante and
Riviera di Ponente, he did not travel to Italy in vain. Thus
Chopin got at last a glimpse of the land where nine years before
he had contemplated taking up his abode for some time.

On returning to Marseilles, after a stormy passage, on which
Chopin suffered much from sea-sickness, George Sand and her party
rested for a few days at the house of Dr. Cauviere, and then set
out, on the 22nd of May, for Nohant.

Madame Sand to Madame Marliani; Marseilles, May 20, 1839:--

We have just arrived from Genoa, in a terrible storm. The bad
weather kept us on sea double the ordinary time; forty hours
of rolling such as I have not seen for a long time. It was a
fine spectacle, and if everybody had not been ill, I would
have greatly enjoyed it...

We shall depart the day after to-morrow for Nohant. Address
your next letter to me there, we shall be there in eight days.
My carriage has arrived from Chalon at Arles by boat, and we
shall post home very quietly, sleeping at the inns like good
bourgeois.

CHAPTER XXIII.

JUNE TO OCTOBER, 1839.

GEORGE SAND AND CHOPIN'S RETURN TO NOHANT.--STATE OF HIS HEALTH.-
-HIS POSITION IN HIS FRIEND'S HOUSE.--HER ACCOUNT OF THEIR
RELATIONSHIP.--HIS LETTERS TO FONTANA, WHICH, AMONG MANY OTHER
MATTERS, TREAT OF HIS COMPOSITIONS AND OF PREPARATIONS TO BE MADE
FOR HIS AND GEORGE SAND'S ARRIVAL IN PARIS.

The date of one of George Sand's letters shows that the
travellers were settled again at Nohant on the 3rd of June, 1839.
Dr. Papet, a rich friend of George Sand's, who practised his art
only for the benefit of the poor and his friends, took the
convalescent Chopin at once under his care. He declared that his
patient showed no longer any symptoms of pulmonary affection, but
was suffering merely from a slight chronic laryngeal affection
which, although he did not expect to be able to cure it, need not
cause any serious alarm.

On returning to Nohant, George Sand had her mind much exercised
by the question how to teach her children. She resolved to
undertake the task herself, but found she was not suited for it,
at any rate, could not acquit herself of it satisfactorily
without giving up writing. This question, however, was not the
only one that troubled her.

In the irresolution in which I was for a time regarding the
arrangement of my life with a view to what would be best for
my dear children, a serious question was debated in my
conscience. I asked myself if I ought to entertain the idea
which Chopin had formed of taking up his abode near me. I
should not have hesitated to say "no," had I known then for
how short a time the retired life and the solemnity of the
country suited his moral and physical health. I still
attributed his despair and horror of Majorca to the excitement
of fever and the exces de caractere of that place. Nohant
offered pleasanter conditions, a less austere retreat,
congenial society, and resources in case of illness. Papet was
to him an enlightened and kind physician. Fleury, Duteil,
Duvernet, and their families, Planet, and especially Rollinat,
were dear to him at first sight. All of them loved him also,
and felt disposed to spoil him as I did.

Among those with whom the family at Nohant had much intercourse,
and who were frequent guests at the chateau, was also an old
acquaintance of ours, one who had not grown in wisdom as in age,
I mean George Sand's half-brother, Hippolyte Chatiron, who was
now again living in Berry, his wife having inherited the estate
of Montgivray, situated only half a league from Nohant.

His warmth of manner, his inexhaustible gaiety, the
originality of his sallies, his enthusiastic and naive
effusions of admiration for the genius of Chopin, the always
respectful deference which he showed to him alone, even in the
inevitable and terrible apres-boire, found favour with the
eminently-aristocratic artist. All, then, went very well at
first, and I entertained eventually the idea that Chopin might
rest and regain his health by spending a few summers with us,
his work necessarily calling him back to Paris in the winter.

However, the prospect of this kind of family union with a
newly-made friend caused me to reflect. I felt alarmed at the
task which I was about to undertake, and which I had believed
would be limited to the journey in Spain.

In short, George Sand presents herself as a sister of mercy, who,
prompted by charity, sacrifices her own happiness for that of
another. Contemplating the possibility of her son falling ill and
herself being thereby deprived of the joys of her work, she
exclaims: "What hours of my calm and invigorating life should I
be able to devote to another patient, much more difficult to
nurse and comfort than Maurice?"

The discussion of this matter by George Sand is so characteristic
of her that, lengthy as it is, I cannot refrain from giving it in
full.

A kind of terror seized me in presence of a new duty which I
was to take upon me. I was not under the illusion of passion.
I had for the artist a kind of maternal adoration which was
very warm, very real, but which could not for a moment contend
with maternal love, the only chaste feeling which may be
passionate.

I was still young enough to have perhaps to contend with love,
with passion properly so called. This contingency of my age,
of my situation, and of the destiny of artistic women,
especially when they have a horror of passing diversions,
alarmed me much, and, resolved as I was never to submit to any
influence which might divert me from my children, I saw a
less, but still possible danger in the tender friendship with
which Chopin inspired me.

Well, after reflection, this danger disappeared and even
assumed an opposite character--that of a preservative against
emotions which I no longer wished to know. One duty more in my
life, already so full of and so overburdened with work,
appeared to me one chance more to attain the austerity towards
which I felt myself attracted with a kind of religious
enthusiasm.

If this is a sincere confession, we can only wonder at the height
of self-deception attainable by the human mind; if, however, it
is meant as a justification, we cannot but be surprised at the
want of skill displayed by the generally so clever advocate. In
fact, George Sand has in no instance been less happy in defending
her conduct and in setting forth her immaculate virtuousness. The
great words "chastity" and "maternity" are of course not absent.
George Sand could as little leave off using them as some people
can leave off using oaths. In either case the words imply much
more than is intended by those from whose mouths or pens they
come. A chaste woman speculating on "real love" and "passing
diversions," as George Sand does here, seems to me a strange
phenomenon. And how charmingly naive is the remark she makes
regarding her relations with Chopin as a "PRESERVATIVE against
emotions which she no longer wished to know"! I am afraid the
concluding sentence, which in its unction is worthy of Pecksniff,
and where she exhibits herself as an ascetic and martyr in all
the radiance of saintliness, will not have the desired effect,
but will make the reader laugh as loud as Musset is said to have
done when she upbraided him with his ungratefulness to her, who
had been devoted to him to the utmost bounds of self-abnegation,
to the sacrifice of her noblest impulses, to the degradation of
her chaste nature.

George Sand, looking back in later years on this period of her
life, thought that if she had put into execution her project of
becoming the teacher of her children, and of shutting herself up
all the year round at Nohant, she would have saved Chopin from
the danger which, unknown to her, threatened him--namely, the
danger of attaching himself too absolutely to her. At that time,
she says, his love was not so great but that absence would have
diverted him from it. Nor did she consider his affection
exclusive. In fact, she had no doubt that the six months which
his profession obliged him to pass every year in Paris would,
"after a few days of malaise and tears," have given him back to
"his habits of elegance, exquisite success, and intellectual
coquetry." The correctness of the facts and the probability of
the supposition may be doubted. At any rate, the reasons which
led her to assume the non-exclusiveness of Chopin's affection are
simply childish. That he spoke to her of a romantic love-affair
he had had in Poland, and of sweet attractions he had afterwards
experienced in Paris, proves nothing. What she says about his
mother having been his only passion is still less to the point.
But reasoning avails little, and the strength of Chopin's love
was not put to the test. He went, indeed, in the autumn of 1839
to Paris, but not alone; George Sand, professedly for the sake of
her children's education, went there likewise. "We were driven by
fate," she says, "into the bonds of a long connection, and both
of us entered into it unawares." The words "driven by fate," and
"entered into it unawares," sound strange, if we remember that
they apply not to a young girl who, inexperienced and confiding,
had lost herself in the mazes of life, but to a novelist skilled
in the reading of human hearts, to a constantly-reasoning and
calculating woman, aged 35, who had better reasons than poor
Amelia in Schiller's play for saying "I have lived and loved."

After all this reasoning, moralising, and sentimentalising, it is
pleasant to be once more face to face with facts, of which the
following letters, written by Chopin to Fontana during the months
from June to October, 1839, contain a goodly number. The rather
monotonous publishing transactions play here and there again a
prominent part, but these Nohant letters are on the whole more
interesting than the Majorca letters, and decidedly more varied
as regards contents than those he wrote from Marseilles--they
tell us much more of the writer's tastes and requirements, and
even reveal something of his relationship to George Sand. Chopin,
it appears to me, did not take exactly the same view of this
relationship as the novelist. What will be read with most
interest are Chopin's directions as to the decoration and
furnishing of his rooms, the engagement of a valet, the ordering
of clothes and a hat, the taking of a house for George Sand, and
certain remarks made en passant on composers and other less-known
people.

[I.]

...The best part of your letter is your address, which I had
already forgotten, and without which I do not know if I would
have answered you so soon; but the worst is the death of
Albrecht. [FOOTNOTE: See p.27 foot-note 7.]

You wish to know when I shall be back. When the misty and
rainy weather begins, for I must breathe fresh air.

Johnnie has left. I don't know if he asked you to forward to
me the letters from my parents should any arrive during his
absence and be sent to his usual address. Perhaps he thought
of it, perhaps not. I should be very sorry if any of them
miscarried. It is not long since I had a letter from home,
they will not write soon, and by this time he, who is so kind
and good, will be in good health and return.

I am composing here a Sonata in B flat minor, in which will be
the Funeral March which you have already. There is an allegro,
then a "Scherzo" in E flat minor, the "March," and a short
"Finale" of about three pages. The left hand unisono with the
right hand are gossiping [FOOTNOTE: "Lewa reka unisono z
prawa, ogaduja po Marszu."] after the March. I have a new
"Nocturne" in G major, which will go along with the Nocturne
in G minor, [FOOTNOTE: "Deux Nocturnes," Op.37.] if you
remember such a one.

You know that I have four new mazurkas: one from Palma in E
minor, three from here in B major, A flat major, and C sharp
minor. [FOOTNOTE: Quatre mazurkas, Op. 41.] They seem to me
pretty, as the youngest children usually do when the parents
grow old.

Otherwise I do nothing; I correct for myself the Parisian
edition of Bach; not only the stroke-makers' [FOOTNOTE: In
Polish strycharz, the usual meaning of which is "brickmaker."
Chopin may have played upon the word. A mistake, however, is
likewise possible, as the Polish for engraver is sztycharz.]
(engravers') errors, but, I think, the harmonic errors
committed by those who pretend to understand Bach. I do not do
it with the pretension that I understand him better than they,
but from a conviction that I sometimes guess how it ought to
be.