Daguerreotype: The Mystery of Frédéric Chopin

by Lucyna Olejniczak

  Marie wrapped her arms around herself and left her bedroom. Muffling her coughs in her thick shawl, she crept up the steep stairs to her studio in the tower. The cold penetrated her to her core, but she ignored it. When she reached her studio, she looked around with new-found energy. Her long-neglected easels were covered in dust, her brushes webbed by some opportunistic spider that now lay in hiding near his home.

  I’ll paint myself spring, she thought, clearing away the dust and cobwebs, then mixing her paints on her abandoned palette. I need to see lilies again.

  Her mind drifted back to those lilies-of-the-valley, which had been so abundant that spring. That spring, when everything had been so simple and beautiful.

  She would paint to her memories, of times so wonderful, when kisses and dreams smelt of flowers.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sophie and I spent whole morning looking through the contents of the trunk we’d found in the attic. Finally, I had someone to talk to about Marie’s gowns and other clothing.

  Tadeusz spent the time with Claude, neglecting me complete. The two men seemed to really like one another. As it turned out, Claude used to write for one of the professional legal journals, so for Tadeusz it was almost like speaking with another journalist.

  “Look, what a beautiful pattern!” Sophie sighed, thrusting the lace insert on a velvet dress under my nose. “They just don’t make things like this anymore.”

  “And those shoes? Just look.” I picked a pair of exquisitely well-preserved button-up boots. “They look comfortable, and could still be worn today.”

  “Yes, beautiful,” she agreed. “You know, I’m kind of disappointed that you discovered everything during my absence. I just had to have that blasted conference now, didn’t I? It must be my punishment for having so little interest in my family’s history before now.” She laughed and shook her head. “Especially the daguerreotype from living room, gazing down on me all these years without me caring much. I’m glad you came over.”

  “Good thing Claude decided to keep that old desk for conservation, huh?” I replied. “The whole story would have stayed buried forever otherwise.”

  Sophie looked through the paintings with awe. They were almost perfect. Even the paint hadn’t crumbled or faded, since they’d been so carefully wrapped in thick fabric.

  “Who do you think hid it all up there?” she asked, tenderly stroking the surface of one canvas. “Her sister or her father?”

  “I think it was probably the father,” I said without hesitation. “If it had been up to her sister, she would have framed the paintings and hung them around the house. There are a couple of reasons why her father might have done it: he either wanted to forget about his daughter as quickly as possible, or he was so traumatized by her death that he buried everything that might have reminded him of her. After what he did, there’s a good chance he may have been tormented by his conscience. Look at the way everything was so carefully wrapped and protected from damage. That makes me think it was the second reason. He just couldn’t bear to look at the paintings his daughter created while she was trapped in the exile he forced her into. I’m just guessing, and we’ll probably never know for sure, but that’s what I think.”

  “A logical conclusion,” Sophie said. After that, she fell into deep thought for some time.

  Our introspective moment was interrupted by the sound of the bell calling us to lunch. We washed up and changed out of our dusty clothes, then went into the dining room to join our men and our guests. We’d invited Paul Vieillard to join us, and he’d brought along some of his family as well.

  Paul - Sophie’s cousin, and perhaps one of the descendants of Marie and Frederic Chopin - grinned widely upon seeing us.

  “Hello!” he greeted, rising from his seat at the table. “Allow me to introduce my son, Stanislas, and my grandson, Cyril.” He turned and called out to a young boy, who was busy chasing a large puppy around the yard. “Cyril! Come here and say hello.”

  Cyril reluctantly scampered over to the table, gave us a quick greeting, then went right back to playing again.

  Stanislas sighed and gave me an apologetic smile. “Sorry about that. We’re trying to teach him manners, but so far the results aren’t showing much.”

  “He’ll grow out of it,” I reassured him as we shook hands. “It’s a strange, awkward age for children. They hate being treated like babies, but still act like them.”

  We all sat around the table, and after a some of the customary small talk, we switched to the topic that had everyone’s interest.

  “Unfortunately,” Paul began, “I couldn’t find anything interesting in my father’s papers. It seems like only the women in the family left behind letters and diaries.”

  “Marie didn’t leave any diaries,” I clarified. “Which is a pity. I bet we could have learned a lot from them if she had.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry, I have no idea why I thought there were diaries.” Paul waved his hand. “Anyway, let’s summarize what we already know. I gave Stanislas the gist of it already, but I might have missed something, or added something myself, like the idea of a diary. So, let’s start at the beginning.”

  Throughout lunch, Claude, Tadeusz and I divulged the tale of our discoveries. Luckily, like most educated Europeans these days, Stanislas spoke decent English and there was no need to translate anything for him.

  Not for the first time, I found myself thinking that we’d had a lot of luck with finding English-speaking people in France. There was a common misconception that French people were convinced of their language’s superiority and refused to learn anyone else’s, but our experience certainly told a different story. Tadeusz, however, seemed to feel some discomfort.

  “Damn,” he muttered between stories, in Polish. “I think I’ll start learning French, I’m feeling a little out of place around here.” His voice dropped lower, though no one besides us spoke the language. “Especially since their English is terrible…”

  I muffled a chuckle behind a cough. It was true, though. Apart from Claude, whose mother was English, everyone spoke with a very thick accent. I thought the accident was adorable, but it was clear at times that they rarely practiced their skills. I gave him a knowing smile and nodded my understanding.

  After lunch, we all moved to the library, where all the things we’d found in the trunk were still on display, spread carefully across the soft carpets. Paul and Stanislas studied them all with a combination of fascinated curiosity, and disbelief.

  “It’s hard to believe that all this belonged to my great-grandmother,” Paul said, shaking his head slowly. “I lived my whole life right next door, and I never suspected… It’s too bad my father didn’t live to see this. He searched and searched, but never found anything like this.”

  “Can I see the daguerreotype?” Stanislas asked, looking around in search of the photograph.

  “Of course,” Claude agreed immediately. “I’ll go fetch it, one moment.” He rose to his feet and headed off to the living room. Meanwhile, Paul and Stanislas leaned over Marie’s paintings. They handed them back and forth with extreme care, as if they were afraid that the old canvases might crumble in their hands. When they reached the unfinished lily-of-the-valley painting they stopped and stared for the longest time.

  “I have a theory about that one,” I said when Claude came back with Marie’s old photo. “If you want, I’ll read you what I wrote last night. You can tell me whether you think it’ll fit into the book.”

  “So you are going to write a book about it?” Sophie asked, exchanging pleased looks with Claude.

  “I am planning to, yes,” I admitted with an uncertain smile. “But I don’t know what, if anything, will come out of it. So far I only have a small fragment, trying to explain the origins of the daguerreotype and that unfinished painting. We’ll never find out the truth, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to explore a fictional explanation.”

  “When did you write it? Last night?” Tadeusz glanced at me, looking aston
ished. “But we went to bed together, and I didn’t take my eyes off you.”

  “Yes, until you closed those eyes and started snoring,” I replied, laughing.

  “I don’t snore, do I?”

  “Oh yes, you definitely snore, honey. Last night it was irritating me a little, so I went downstairs after you’d fallen asleep to look at the paintings again, and to study the daguerreotype. I hoped I’d find something on it, something that might serve as a clue. A signature, anything…”

  “It would have had to be engraved, since it’s metal,” Tadeusz said, sounding a little sulky now. He hated it when things happened without his knowledge.

  “You’re right, of course. I was looking for anything like that, but to no avail. There might be one inside, under the frame, or somewhere else, but I didn’t want to take the photograph apart.” I glanced at Claude, who was now studying the image closely. He glanced at me and gave me a relieved smile. I smiled back, and resumed my discourse. “Once I gave up on that, I tried to imagine what could have happened, to fill in the blanks that we’ll never be sure of. I wrote it all in here.” I picked up my notebook from the desk, where I’d left it the night before. “Would you like to hear it?”

  They all agreed, so I got comfortable in a chair, put my glasses on, and enjoyed the sound of my own voice for a while.

  “But...” Paul was the first one to speak up once I’d finished reading. “From what you said before, there’s no certainty that it was Chopin at all. It could have been Liszt, but you specifically wrote about Chopin.”

  “It could have been just about anyone,” I agreed. “If I’m going to write a book about it, though, I want it to be interesting. Who would be interested in the romantic adventures of plain old Joe Nobody? Liszt wouldn’t be as interesting either, if you ask me. But Chopin? Chopin is something entirely different.” My voice took on a harder edge for a moment, a touch of extra force. “Besides, in my gut I’m sure it was our Frederic. I knew it from the very beginning, and I think everything we’ve found just supports that theory all the more.”

  “I think it’s a beautiful story,” said Sophie, who had been silent up until that moment. “I could believe it really happened, it sounds so plausible. I’m even convinced by your theory about her father holding onto the letters. It could have happened.”

  “It could,” both Vieillards agreed, looking down at Marie’s faded image with no small amount of tenderness. Despite the damage and the tarnished patches on the silver plate, you could still see the extraordinary beauty of the woman depicted upon it.

  “I think I have her chin,” Stanislas said playfully. He held the daguerreotype up beside his face, and thrust his chin forward. “Look! Don’t you see the resemblance?”

  We all laughingly agreed with him, though you couldn’t really see that kind of detail in the aging image. Though, who knows? Maybe if we’d been able to look closer, there would have been some similarity between them.

  A little while later, my cell rang suddenly in my jacket pocket. I excused myself and went out into the garden, with my phone at my ear. It was Vladislav, and he sounded very, very excited. In my imagination, I saw him pacing the room, waving his free hand in the air.

  “My dear Lucy…” he began very solemnly, which could only mean that the news he was about to give me would surely be of the most extraordinary importance. “Something exciting has happened, something so exciting that I felt I must interrupt your well-deserved holiday to share the news! Such a beautiful country, France. Truly beautiful. Why, I—”

  “You were going to tell me about the thing of extraordinary importance?” I interrupted him quickly, afraid that if I let him ramble I’d end up being forced to listen to a long discourse on which historical personages had spent time in the country and under what circumstances.

  “Oh, right.” He cleared his throat, sounding a little embarrassed, though that had probably been part of his plan all along. “What was I… Oh, yes. Do you remember, perhaps, that I mentioned I was planning to hold a séance?”

  With the events of the last few days, I’d nearly forgotten about it, but when he mentioned it I suddenly remembered our previous conversation.

  “So, did you hold it, then?” I asked.

  “Yes, my dear, yes. The séance took place yesterday.”

  “Was it successful?”

  “Yes and no,” Vladislav admitted, apparently wanting to be absolutely honest with me. “But something truly extraordinary did happen, and I’m convinced that Monsieur Chopin visited us. I’ll start at the very beginning, if you allow me.”

  “Of course. I’m dying of curiosity.”

  For few minutes, I listened to the story about how Vladislav and a few of his friends had arranged the séance. He’d been with the same group of people for many years, who sat around in a circle and tried to interpret the tapping, knocking, and other manifestations that appeared during those séances. One of the women was well-known as a medium, and he claimed that sometimes otherworldly beings spoke through her mouth. Vladislav had informed his friends that he was interested in calling on Chopin’s spirit, so that he could help a friend writing a book. I smiled in spite of everything, deeply touched by his words. Regardless of whether he succeeded or failed, he always put a huge amount of enthusiasm into everything he did.

  “This time, however, nothing went as planned, right from the beginning,” he mused. “One of our circle didn’t show up, so the circle was incomplete. Maybe that’s why, the spirits seemed reluctant to appear for us. The first spirit was someone claiming to be Chopin, but it wasn’t him.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “He spoke nonsense, and when I asked him whether he’d had a child with his lover in France, he vehemently disagreed and denied everything. He said it was all rumors and slander, that it absolutely wasn’t him and nobody could prove anything.”

  “He tapped all that out on a plate?” I asked incredulously. “Forgive me, but I find that rather hard to believe. That sounds more like the reaction of a man being dragged through the courts for child support, not the ghost of a nineteenth century artist.”

  “That’s why I said it wasn’t him. And about the plate…” Vladislav laughed indulgently. “My dear, it’s clear you’ve never attended a séance. Nothing taps on a plate. The plate has an arrow drawn on it, and it rotates to point at different numbers and letters. It’s too complicated to explain over the phone. One day, I’ll just invite you to a séance. There are ghosts who manifest their presence by banging and other such noises, but I’ll tell you more about that later. Anyway, this ghost spoke through our medium, Mrs. Halina.”

  “Oh, that does change things,” I agreed. “What else did he say? Anything interesting?”

  “Him? No, nothing interesting. But, what happened next made all my hair stand on end!”

  For a moment, the image of Vladislav’s thinning comb-over flashed through my mind. Curiosity won out in the end, so I pushed the thought aside and asked the question my friend was clearly waiting for.

  “Well, don’t go keeping me in suspense, here. What happened?”

  Sounding pleased with the effect of his dramatic pause, Vladislav happily continued his story. “While the fake Chopin was yabbering on through our medium’s lips, the real Frederic spoke to us. I’m nearly certain of it.

  “What do you mean, spoke? The medium changed voices?”

  “Oh, no, no,” he answered briefly. “He didn’t speak as in speak with a voice, but rather he tapped, very loudly, clearly quite annoyed by the impostor’s presence.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well…” Vladislav sounded uncertain, which set off warning bells in the back of my mind. “We’re not sure yet, we haven’t had time to analyze it all. We wrote it all down and are working on deciphering it, because it seems he was speaking in different languages. Perhaps he was nervous?”

  “So he was tapping in Morse code?”

  “It looks that way, but there were some words that do
n’t seem to make sense,” he admitted. “Something about land, or potatoes – you see, it makes no sense. He kept changing the strength and intensity of his taps, and sometimes even the tempo. It’s as if he really wanted to convey a message, and grew increasingly frustrated that we didn’t understand what he was trying to say. But, he wouldn’t accept our invitation to speak through our medium. Very strange behavior. We haven’t had a spirit use Morse Code before…” There was another moment of hesitation, then he sighed and seemed to deliberately brighten up again. “Don’t worry, we’ll crack this case. I’m sure it was none other than Chopin himself. He showed up right when we were listening to that impostor.”

  “Riiight…” I sighed, skeptical. “I thought you would have at least deciphered one word that would confirm it.”

  “Unfortunately, no, but we’re working on it.” Even now, Vladislav didn’t lose his enthusiasm. “It’s all because our circle was incomplete, you see. If our friend had shown up on time, it would have been different. You can never change something about these kind of gatherings.”

  “Why didn’t your friend show up?” I asked, mostly to be polite, since I didn’t really care

  “Apparently the tram he was riding on collided with a car. No one was hurt, but they had to wait for the police and all the traffic was stopped. He claims he was only fifteen minutes late, and that he knocked at the door but nobody came. Nonsense. We were all inside, and we would have heard him knocking. He claimed he knocked for a while, and loudly enough that he woke one of our neighbors. We would have heard him. I don’t have a bell, because—”

  For a moment, there was dead silence on both sides. I heard Vladislav’s rapid breathing, and the soft chime that warned me my battery was going flat.

  “And you don’t think,” I suggested carefully, “that those mysterious knocks—”