Daguerreotype: The Mystery of Frédéric Chopin

by Lucyna Olejniczak

  “Makes sense, I suppose.” Tadeusz still seemed unconvinced “How did he not see it, though? It’s pretty huge.”

  “It was dark, maybe that’s why. He probably assumed it was a table, since there are a couple of broken chairs.”

  Suddenly, we all seemed to realize simultaneously that we were discussing something completely pointless, as if we were all afraid to open the mysterious trunk.

  Which was true. We didn’t dare.

  Tadeusz pulled himself together first.

  “A grand moment has arrived…” he muttered in Polish, and gave me a wink.

  “What?” Claude asked, since he didn’t speak Polish. “What does that mean?”

  “I said ‘It’s time to find out what’s inside.’ You do the honors. It’s your house.”

  Claude touched trunk’s lid carefully. For a moment that seemed to last an eternity, we held our breath, afraid or would be locked and the key long gone. But no, the lock just made a hideous crunch and crumbled as the lid was raised. All three of us leaned over the opened trunk, banging our heads together in the process, but none of us cared.

  The chest was filled, nearly to the brim, with clothes.

  “Clothes?” I moaned, disappointed. “I was so sure—”

  “Wait!” Claude slipped his hand in, all the way to the elbow. “There is something else in here. It could be the paintings, but we’ll have to remove the layers one by one, so we don’t damage anything.”

  We agreed, and so we began. On the very top was a faded blue gown, finished with an intricate lace at the neck.

  “Look at this beautiful pattern,” I said, reverently touching the embroidered fabric. The men looked at me without comprehension. I sighed and hung the dress off to one side, silently wishing that Sophie was there with us. A woman would have understood what I meant.

  The next gown was black and much more modest, made of simple gabardine and free of any unnecessary embellishments. It was followed by several large petticoats, which had probably once rustled around Marie’s ankles with every step, then a woolen cape that most likely used to be pure white. Deep inside, we found a small straw hat with black ribbons, which crumbled between our fingers.

  “These are probably her maiden clothes,” I said, more to myself than the others. I fell silent as Claude pulled out a rectangular shape wrapped in a shawl. He glanced at us, then began to unwrap the bundle with shaking hands. The tell-tale glisten of oil paint glinted in the flashlight’s glow.

  “Let’s pack it all back up, and take the whole trunk downstairs,” Tadeusz suggested. Claude and I agreed.

  That turned out to be easier said than done. The heavy chest barely fit through the opening, and there was a very real risk that the ladder wouldn’t hold its weight – not to mention the fact that the person below wouldn’t be able to support its weight alone.

  “They had to get it up here somehow, so it must be possible,” I pointed out, trying to be encouraging.

  “Yes, but there were some rather sturdy stairs here before,” Claude reminded me.

  “True, I’d forgotten. Mr. Singh mentioned that, too.”

  The men wouldn’t let me help with the task of moving the trunk downstairs, so they called Hari to help them. He came immediately, and climbed the ladder up to the loft.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to just take everything out of the trunk and bring it down empty?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  We glanced at one another, startled. None of us had thought of that. Total brain fart.

  After that realization, the work began in earnest. Claude removed items from the trunk one at a time and handed them to Hari, who stood on the ladder and passed them to Tadeusz on the floor. My job was to be the passive observer.

  Well almost passive, because there was no force on earth that could stop me from unwrapping at least one of the paintings. I lifted the old fabric, probably a piece of a curtain or a tablecloth, to reveal an exquisitely-rendered still-life of a bouquet of roses wilting in a crystal vase. A scattering of soft pink petals lay atop a fine lace doily, and some kind of insect with incredibly delicate translucent wings perched atop one of the fading blooms.

  “Look how beautiful this is,” I groaned, lifting the painting up to get a better look.

  Claude’s dirty face appeared in the opening above us. “Hey! Put that back! We’re agreed that we were all going to look at them together!”

  “Claude’s right,” Tadeusz scolded gently, taking the painting from my hands. “That’s not fair.”

  I immediately felt guilty, but tried to convince myself that they would have done exactly the same in my place. To keep myself busy, I turned my attention to the clothes, piling them up carefully.

  In addition to the gowns I’d already seen upstairs, there was also a short cape trimmed with mottled fur, in a color that could no longer be truly determined, and a pair of tall button-up boots. There was also a pack of papers, probably sketches and drawings, tied with string.

  When the trunk was finally empty, the men managed to bring it down with almost no effort. Claude decided that it was still in good enough shape to be conserved, and once it had been restored it could be used to decorate one of the rooms of the chateau.

  We carefully transported everything into the library, the largest room on the first floor. There, we were able to lay out all our treasures side by side on the pastel-colored Turkish rugs.

  “My friends,” Claude said, looking at us triumphantly. “I think this discovery deserves celebration, no matter what we find now. I’m going to get the champagne.”

  We went off to wash the black dust from our hands, then returned to the library to find Claude opening a bottle of the local wine. Claude was good friends with one of the neighboring wine-makers, who produced an excellent champagne. He poured us each a glass, and we raised them in a toast.

  “To Marie!”

  “And to whatever we’re going to find in there…” I said, glancing meaningfully at the treasures spread out across the floor.

  “To that, too!”

  After the toast, Hari excused himself to attend to some urgent garden work, and we returned our glasses to the tray so that we could focus on the still-wrapped bundles.

  Our first target was the paintings, of course, which we could identify by the distinctive shape of the canvases. They were mostly still-life, but there were also some landscapes depicting the area around Trigny. I recognized them immediately: the vineyards, the hills, even my familiar cliff – though it was larger and taller in the painting than it was now. The forest looked younger, but it was definitely the same one.

  I wondered if Marie had dug for fossils in that cliff, too. I smiled to myself; the more I learned about her, the more similar we seemed to be.

  One of the paintings depicted a spring garden, judging by the blooming flowers, but it wasn’t the chateau’s garden. A young girl in a white gown and straw hat sat on a bench near a tree. In one hand, she held a small, frilly parasol. In the other, a book. The sun’s rays shining through the fabric made it seem as though the girl’s parasol glowed with a light of its own. The expression of concentration on the girl’s face was beautifully well-rendered. I sighed in delight.

  “That’s probably Marie’s sister,” Claude said. Apparently he was so overwhelmed that his mouth had gone dry, and he had to reach for his glass again. “Or perhaps it’s a self-portrait?”

  One on the paintings was clearly unfinished. Marie had probably decided to work on another one and leave it for later, or maybe she’d just decided she didn’t like it enough to finish it. It was a small picture depicting a bouquet of lily-of-the-valley in what was probably going to be a green vase, but the vase was only a few strokes on the canvas.

  “I wonder why she didn’t finish it?” Claude commented, reaching for the bottle to refill his glass. All three of us stared at the painting, sipping our nice, refreshing bubbles. All kinds of questions rushed to our lips, but they were questions no one knew the answers to.

&
nbsp; “Why were these paintings in the attic?” I wondered out loud. “They’re so beautiful, they should have been hanging on the walls all these years.”

  “It looks like someone hid them up here,” Tadeusz said, expressing what we were all thinking. “Maybe to forget about her, or to punish her. I suspect it may have been her father.”

  “Yes, but he didn’t have the courage to destroy them,” I commented thoughtfully. “After all, he could have burned them, chopped them up, thrown them in the river, but he didn’t. He hid them away up here so they wouldn’t remind him of her, don’t you think? Maybe he was suffering, too. She disappointed him somehow, and this was how he coped with it.”

  Tadeusz burst out laughing and pulled me into a hug.

  “Oh you. You can explain and forgive anyone’s sins, can’t you? She was his daughter. Whatever she did, he should have forgiven her.”

  “Those were different times, honey,” I pointed out. “If things went as we suspect and she had a child out of wedlock, it was a stain on the whole family’s honor. He had another daughter he needed to find a way to marry off, and nobody decent would marry her if the family had that kind of reputation. Fear of public opinion turning against them could well have driven him to actions we’d never even consider today, even if it hurt him in the process. And I suspect it did hurt him, since he kept the mementos of his daughter instead of throwing them out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he secretly came up here and…”

  Both men were grimacing as if their teeth hurt, so I trailed off, offended. I didn’t stay mad for long, though, because we soon discovered something that made me forget all about Marie’s father.

  We put the paintings aside and moved on to the package of papers tried with string. As I’d suspected, they were drawings and sketches for paintings. I recognized the garden scene in one of them. Delicate lines clearly depicted the same young woman, but without the parasol in her hand. Apparently, Marie had decided to add that detail later.

  A sketch slipped from the pile that made my breath catch in my throat. It was the interior of a living room, sketched out with economical lines, with a much more detailed illustration of a pianist sitting at a piano in the center. His slim-fingered hands hovered above the keys like a pair of birds of prey. The illustration was more of a caricature than a true sketch, but there were some definite similarities.

  “Look at his nose,” I whispered, barely able to force the sound out of my throat. “Do you see it?”

  “That is a pretty long nose,” Tadeusz said, sounding skeptical, “but since it’s a caricature…”

  “The whole point of caricature is to take the defining features of a face and exaggerate them,” I replied, not about to give up yet. “A long nose must have been one of his defining features, since she overdrew it so.”

  “I don’t know…”

  Tadeusz still wasn’t convinced, which made me angry. Why couldn’t he just accept that there was a possibility it might have been Chopin?

  “Wait, wait,” Claude interrupted. “There’s some kind of note here.”

  “Where?!” I immediately forgot my anger and bent over the drawing to get a better look. Sure enough, there was a note at the bottom of the page, barely visible beneath a layer of grime.

  Claude took the drawing to the window and turned it in different directions, struggling to read the note.

  “Hmm… something…” he muttered. “’P’? Or maybe ‘R’? During concert. It’s hard to decipher it.”

  “What ‘something’? Maybe ‘someone’?” I stood on tip-toes to look over his shoulder.

  “Yes, that’s probably ‘someone’ and not ‘something’, you’re right.”

  “But who? Are there any initials? First or last name?”

  “No, it looks like the first letter of a name. I think it’s ‘P’… Although… no, wait, it could be ‘F’.”

  “’F’?! ‘F’ as in… ‘Frederic’?”

  “It could be ‘F’ as in ‘Formica’.” Tadeusz laughed nervously, but it was obvious our excitement was starting to rub off on him.

  “Who’s Formica?” Claude asked, pronouncing the word slowly and carefully, looking very serious.

  “Never mind, it was a joke. I’m sorry. Let me take a look.” He came over and took the paper from Claude. “Yes, it could be ‘F’. Damn, could you actually be right?”

  “’F’ as in ‘Frederic’!” I said gleefully. “I got you, honey!”

  “It might be Chopin, but don’t get so excited about it.” Tadeusz replied. I felt myself bristling for a fight, but before I could say anything he shook his head. “Honey, don’t make that face. I’m not denying that this sketch is probably him, but what does that indicate? It only means she saw his concert and took the opportunity to draw him.”

  “But…” I started to protest, but half way through forming my argument I realized that he was probably right.

  “Don’t forget, it was 1832 or 1833,” he continued. “We know that Chopin was in Paris then, so there’s a good chance they met at some stage. We know Marie was an art-lover. She probably attended lots of concerts. Maybe they even knew one another personally – but that’s not evidence of them being lovers.”

  “But it doesn’t disprove the theory, either,” I grumbled.

  “No, it doesn’t disprove it,” he agreed graciously. “But it doesn’t confirm it, either.”

  Claude was observing our discussion with a smile.

  “Are you two always like this?” he asked. “Always quarreling, I mean?”

  “We’re not quarrelling, we just have differences of opinion on occasion. She tends to react spontaneously and runs off on wild tangents. I just try to keep her grounded in reality, because if her theories don’t pan out when she’s got her heart set on them, it just about gives her a nervous breakdown.”

  Joking and finishing the champagne, we resumed looking through the contents of the trunk. Aside from a few more sketches for paintings we’d already seen and a some interesting drawings, we didn’t find anything special. No personal notes, letters, or any more renderings of that mysterious Mr. ‘F’.

  Claude decided to have the paintings restored and mounted, so that he could give them their rightful place in the chateau, the place where Marie had been born.

  “What about the prayer book?” Claude asked suddenly during supper. “I hope you brought it back with you from Paris?”

  I panicked for a moment, until I remembered that I’d brought it back with me and put it on the bedside table as soon as I’d arrived back in Trigny.

  “Yes, I’ve got it. Do you want to go have a look?”

  “Not tonight,” Claude said, muffling a yawn behind one hand. “I’m sorry, but I’ve had enough excitement for one day. Tomorrow is a new day. You just have to promise that you’ll wait for me to get home from work.”

  We promised willingly, because we were exhausted as well. We retired to our bedroom right after supper.

  “I’ll be waiting right here for you,” Tadeusz said with a seductive smile, patting the space next to him in bed. “Hurry up, baby…”

  I dashed off to the shower and bathed quickly. By the time I’d finished and was toweling myself off, I could hear the sound of him snoring.

  I finished drying myself off and slipped under the covers, snuggling up against his back. He moved sleepily, then suddenly seemed to come fully awake. He rolled to face me, and smiled again.

  “Ah, there you are. I’ve been waiting so long for this…”

  Country Estate Near Paris, 1832

  The coach arrived late in the evening.

  Before it’s arrival, everyone had been standing around worrying about the possibility that it might have been attacked by robbers in the woods. Someone even shared a chilling story about a werewolf that preyed on young men. Concerned family members and guests alike stared out the windows at the road leading to the country estate. They all knew that the young man had been scheduled to leave Paris that morning, before noon. He was very, very
late.

  “What could have happened to him along the way?” Marie wondered, nervously picking at the loose threads on the lace shawl her aunt had loaned to her for protection against the evening chill. “He promised he would come. Something must have happened…”

  She fell silent just in time to hear the tail end of a gruesome story being told with great relish by one of her cousins. “…and apparently, those young lads were later found—”

  “Oh would you please stop with that nonsense about werewolves!” Auntie interrupted him impatiently. “The only werewolf here is you. Let’s go sit in the drawing room and play cards. I’m sure he’ll be here any moment – and I’m certain that there were no werewolves involved!” She shot a threatening glance at her nephew, just as he opened his mouth to speak. He closed it again and lowered his head, looking appropriately abashed.

  The family, along with several invited guests, had spent the last few weeks holed up at their country estate a few miles outside of Paris. Everyone who could had fled the city, for fear of the terrible cholera epidemic ravaging Europe. They’d lingered in the city a little longer than most, until news that the epidemic had reached Paris arrived. The first outbreak was in the poor districts, but there was no telling when it might reach the wealthier ones as well.

  “It’s a disease of the dirty poor, we have nothing to worry about,” Uncle had insisted, in an attempt to keep the family calm. Every day he’d equipped himself with a bag of camphor – which was supposed to protect against the disease – and gone out into town to listen to the latest news.

  One day, he returned with the news that a good friend of the family, a woman from a wealthy neighborhood and frequent attendee of their high-society gatherings, had died in terrible agony just a few hours earlier. The whole family packed up and left Paris shortly after, along with a few chosen friends who weren’t lucky enough to have country estates of their own.