A deflowering was just dandy, as far as the former Aurore Dupin was concerned.
Chopin lay in his bed, deep in thought. He had offered this as an excuse, and it had turned out to be a prediction. His lungs hurt from the smoke he had inhaled throughout dinner.
How wrong he had been about George Sand! He had thought her vulgar and unwomanly. Tonight, he discovered an original, eloquent thinker. There was an overpowering aura about her, a musky sense of womanhood bursting through the mannish clothes. It might have been what the writers called ‘sensuality’; he couldn’t be sure.
She was magnificent. And if she had stayed? What then? He knew, of course. But it was too much to contemplate.
He would put those distasteful visions to one side and consider instead how and when he could see her again – in the safety of company.
Or else he would work on the idea for a scherzo that had burst from his fingers while he was improvising the previous morning. Yes, the distraction of people would always take second place while he was able to work – however long that turned out to be.
There was also the matter of little Maria, back in Dresden. He could not bear the thought of Parisian tittle-tattle finding its way back to her mother, Countess Wodzinska.
If only George hadn’t put her hand on his leg.
13 DECEMBER
George knew she had made a supreme impression on Chopin the moment she swept into his salon for the party wearing white pantaloons and a blouse with a red sash.
Chopin’s friend Count Grzymala leaned down to the composer at the piano and said, ‘Your admirer has arrived, Fryderyk. My God – she’s dressed like the Polish flag.’
Liszt had never seen his housemate look more beautiful: her hair glossy, the skin around her décolletage glowing bronze.
‘I’ll say this for George,’ he whispered to Marie, ‘when she presents as a woman, it’s very impressive. She’s the most beautiful man in the room.’
The hubbub resumed with loud conversation in Polish among Chopin’s circle of Paris-based compatriots, together with the pop of champagne corks and clink of glasses. George strode over to some of the men on a corner sofa, reaching into her pocket.
‘Gentlemen, who would like a poetic cigar?’ she offered.
‘What makes a cigar poetic, mon frère?’ said the tenor Nourrit, putting one to his lips.
‘More than a touch of opium,’ said George, lighting it. ‘You’ll be spouting verse within minutes.’
‘What about me singing some verse, with a little musical help from Schubert? Franz! Move Fred off that piano stool. Let’s do a couple of songs. Friends! Listen to these lieder from Vienna. The poor bastard who wrote these died nearly ten years ago, barely in his thirties. Tragic. The good die young, eh?’
‘I hope not,’ said Chopin. ‘Being bad is not my style.’
‘That is the most perceptive thing I’ve heard you say about yourself, Frédéric,’ said George from across the room. She drew hard from her cigar and fixed him with her eyes.
Sombre eyes, singular eyes, he thought. What are they saying tonight? His heart was captured, just for now. Would it be opened by the captor?
Nourrit sang, and then Chopin joined Liszt to play a four-hand sonata.
Grzymala walked across to George and introduced himself. He gestured to the two white apparitions at the keyboard.
‘The two greatest pianists of the age, and we are able to hear them at play. It is a privilege, is it not – madame, or monsieur?’ he said, with a grin.
‘Either, monsieur,’ she said. ‘The mind has no sex.’
Liszt embroidered his primo part at the top end of the piano with glittering roulades, throwing musical fireworks into the air above their heads. Chopin gave his friend an admonishing smile; this sort of display was not his way, but Franz was a phenomenon.
George noticed the expression, sensing a rare moment of transparency in a person who remained a mystery to her despite the range of feelings he appeared able to express – all except one.
This was Chopin’s happiness: the small room, the intimate circle of friends, the discourse of music, the bittersweet tang of transience. It explained him; it explained his music, full of regret for whatever might happen.
‘Have some ice-cream, George,’ said Marie, motioning to a table. ‘It will cool your throat after the heat of your cigar.’
George’s eyes were reddening as the cigar’s poetry made its effect.
‘I will savour the heat for now, Marie,’ she said. ‘And do me a favour: don’t offer any to Frédéric. He’s cool enough.’
Liszt stood up at the piano at the end of the duet, cigar propped between his lips, and reached for his coupe of champagne.
‘Gentlemen, ladies, and lady-gentleman,’ he announced, glancing at George. ‘Let’s drink to us all, philosophers every one of us – coming from doubt, journeying towards truth.’
‘That’s his second poetic cigar,’ Marie said to George.
Chopin slid back to the middle of the piano stool and launched into a polonaise. Grzymala grabbed the hand of one of his friends and attempted some awkward steps.
‘I love these artistic parties,’ Nourrit called out to the room. ‘The women pass out the cigars, and the men dance with each other.’
This time George stayed after the last guest had departed.
Together they surveyed the disarray of the room. She walked across to Frédéric and took the face she had adored from the first between her hands, bringing it to hers.
She felt a brief tremor of resistance before he yielded with what felt to her like relief.
She reached around to his thin buttocks and pressed his groin into her while they kissed. Yes, there was something there, she noticed. The dear child is reluctant, but he is not a eunuch.
He had been partying in a loose shirt, the same clothing he wore while composing. She attempted to undo several buttons, to see the air of desire fill that emaciated chest.
He drew back. ‘No, Aurore – no,’ he whispered.
She took his left hand and placed it on her breast.
‘Frédéric,’ she murmured. ‘Feel me. Look at me. I am dressed in the colours of Poland. This is an appeal to your patriotism. Show me the love of your country. Come to the motherland.’
‘Aurore, it is distasteful to me that you conflate patriotism with carnal desire.’ He almost spat out the adjective.
‘My child, I am not talking about desire; I am talking about love. Is it wise or useful to despise the flesh of the people one loves?’
‘I do not despise that prospect at all.’
‘Then I will change the word. “Fear”, perhaps.’
‘I prefer “respect”. The night has been so perfect, and you look so beautiful. There is so much for me to cherish already. Certain deeds could spoil the remembrance.’
George stepped back. What a stupidity. There must be a mistress who doesn’t deserve him; maybe such a disappointment between the sheets he doesn’t know how good it could be.
At least he had mentioned respect.
‘That’s the word used by someone who invokes their morality,’ she said. ‘Someone who wishes not to be unfaithful. Is there another?’
Maria Wodzinska. It had been a long time, and her mother ensured it was completely chaste – but those few weeks last year in her company had been so beautiful. He hoped they would meet again next summer …
‘Perhaps. Well – almost.’
‘It sounds like a situation that needs to be resolved one way or the other.’
Frédéric was not familiar with resolve, even if he was in the middle of composing a piece; some of them took him years. Vacillation was a way of extending time. It was one way he could banish all the other signs that his own time might be running out.
‘I can’t resolve it as quickly as that. We need more time together. Her family are aristocrats. They need to be persuaded …’
‘Oh dear, Frédéric. The family? Let me tell you this: the pressure of f
amily approval and the obligations imposed by society are the things that drove me from life with two children and an approved husband on a country estate to the liberty of an artist’s life. To me, that was a positive step. You are already an artist – and you want to go in the opposite direction?’
‘Only for a few weeks next summer.’ He already felt less convinced.
‘Then let someone who cares for you offer an alternative. Several times a year I go back to my estate to take the air, feel the sun and write as much as I can. Friends come and go; my children Maurice and Solange are there. Why don’t you come and stay? You can compose while I write. Any countryside worth its salt needs music like yours to mingle with birdsong. You will make Nohant live. It might do the same for you.’
Chopin tried to repress his suspicion. Surely George Sand had made it clear in all their brief discourse that she wanted more from him than merely good health? And if she was motivated more by altruism than love, not even the appearance of health was something he could give her.
Still, it was a very therapeutic proposal. The notion of George Sand as his nurse appealed to him. Nurses and patients had to observe a certain propriety.
But leave the city? Friends, parties and flirtations, where he could carve out time for work entirely on his terms? Compared to this, the country would feel like a prison. He was fond of most routine, excepting the routine of being a houseguest.
Frédéric was overwhelmed by George’s presence. In just three meetings, she had burrowed more deeply into him than any woman he had ever known. If this was love, it felt uncomfortably like a violation. He didn’t know if he could endure a more prolonged exposure to those eyes. They would seek out everything, cast a light into the most remote corners of his soul. It was better that his music did that sort of work.
‘Goodnight, George, and thank you for the offer,’ he said. ‘I will be in touch.’
NOHANT, SUMMER 1837
The afternoon sun slanting through the shutters of the bedroom drew lines of light across the bronzed back of the woman as she straddled the figure beneath her. A large pile of handwritten manuscript lay on the bedside table, the ink still wet on the topmost page where a sentence had been broken off by more pressing concerns.
George closed her eyes, partly because some men’s faces looked most unflattering when they were about to empty themselves inside her. Félicien’s was decent enough in repose, but as soon as he began puffing during his animal function, clutching her hips and pulling her down to him (as if gravity wasn’t efficient enough), he developed a twitch, almost a palsy, on the left side of his face that had the fleeting effect of making him look considerably older than his twenty-four years. The beard didn’t help either.
What a combination, she noted, riding him more quickly: the guttural moaning below her, and the sound of Chopin’s E major study from the Opus 10 set filtering up from the distant piano, one describing a complete loss of control, the other the summit of refinement.
Love songs were so sweet, so melodious. Why, then, should the ultimate expression of love descend into such cacophony? Perhaps that explained Chopin’s resistance to the prospect of sex; as a musician he was less concerned about the sensations he might feel than the noise he might make.
The playing stopped mid-bar when Félicien bellowed one long hoarse note. George felt the blossoming of his warmth inside her. It was just like the opera; the orchestra halting while the singer unleashed a cadenza. How considerate of Franz to allow the climax of this aria its own unaccompanied moment, she thought. He overheard the crescendo; he understands. As Félicien groaned more quietly and shuddered slightly, the music resumed.
George slid up and off the huge sprawled figure. She reached over to her table, opened a drawer, extracted a thin cigar and lit it.
‘Sometimes I feel I could renounce all this,’ she said. ‘Old age is coming. But then you reveal that extraordinary cock imported all the way from Mauritius and I think: there is so much to see in this world.’
Mallefille smiled, his face straightened now, the years acquired during his orgasm falling away. He took the cigar from her fingers for a puff.
‘Aurore, you’re only nine years older than I am. Are you suggesting I have so little youth left?’
‘My dear child, if you keep fucking me as often as this you’ll bring a premature end to us both.’ She glanced at the papers next to her. ‘You’re making it hard enough as it is to keep the words coming on The Master Mosaic Workers. My publisher is expecting a completed book by July.’
He handed the cigar back to her. ‘We both have things to write. But it is spring, and old age is further away than you think.’
‘Not when I see how quickly my children are growing. I should stay here and get back to work. And you should get back to tutoring Maurice and Solange some more before the summer’s over. After all, that is theoretically why you’re here.’
He swung his muscular frame out of the bed and dressed. George admired his shoulders as he pulled on a shirt. Félicien had been brought to the estate to teach her children, and was doing a very good job; her headstrong fourteen-year-old son was concentrating for a change. Félicien had literary ambitions, he was attractive and didn’t try to conceal his interest in her as the country around Nohant burst into life. She had just ended a fling with one of her visitors, the actor Bocage, when she realised he only wanted her to write a play for him. Franz and Marie were staying; one still night she had overheard them making love in their guestroom, Marie squealing something in German during her climax.
What else was a chatelaine to do amid this convulsive cycle of nature? George had followed the natural cycles of the earth ever since childhood, when she ran through the fields around this house. She was aware of the same forces at play inside herself. So, one night she had waited until the children were asleep, and then knocked softly on Félicien’s door.
‘It’s a nice tune, that music. I can even remember the first few notes,’ Félicien said, running a hand over his close-cropped hair.
‘It’s by a friend of Franzi’s – and mine, Monsieur Chopin.’
‘Chopin? Liszt has mentioned a Zo-pin.’
‘A little joke on Chopin’s accent. He’s a Pole. Franz and Frédéric aren’t as close as they used to be. Faded friendships are a pattern in Frédéric’s life,’ she said. A pale face and tender spirit flashed through her mind. The poor darling boy.
‘Liszt sure likes playing it.’
‘He admires it, and he’s sentimental about it. All of those Opus 10 Etudes are dedicated to him.’
‘Seems a pity Chopin’s not here in person, when his music floats through the place every day.’
‘I’ve invited him several times, and I’ve had Franz and Marie do the same,’ said George. ‘But he’s never replied.’
PARIS
Chopin held the unopened letter with one hand while the other gently rubbed his chest, still sore from the exertion of the previous night’s coughing. His damned grippe had plagued him through the end of winter, and with it the return of those awful dreams in which Death stood behind the doors of his apartment.
There had been a time not so long ago when such thoughts were obliterated by the memory of eyes locked onto his in a room full of flowers, the warmth of a breast under his hand.
With those thoughts came guilt about Maria. The Chopin and Wodzinski families were friends from Poland; he had known Maria ever since she was a child. She had grown into a striking, articulate teenager who called him ‘Frycek’. When her family relocated to Geneva and then Dresden after the fall of Warsaw, he visited them from Paris. Maria adored him; everyone could see it, and her mother encouraged it. ‘Make sure you wear your long socks to bed, Frycek!’ she wrote to him when she heard of his illnesses during the many months that had gone by since his last visit.
He was engaged to her in everything but name, as far as he was concerned. Not enough to ask, but enough to believe. George Sand was out of the way, and he would see Maria in Dresd
en again that summer. It had been some time since any news from her, he realised. Now those anxieties of absence were gone; Maria’s handwriting was on this envelope. It had changed from her childish scrawl into the assured style of an eighteen-year-old. A woman who knew her own mind.
Chopin opened the envelope and read the letter.
The message was brief. There was no mention of a future meeting. It ended with the words: ‘Adieu! Remember us!’
Frédéric looked at the single page for a long time.
Then he collected all of Maria’s other letters over the years, plus those of her mother, who used to remind him about staying warm.
He found a large envelope, carefully placed the wad of correspondence into it with the dried remnant of a rose Maria had once given him, and tied it closed with a blue ribbon.
He seized his composing pen, and wrote two words on the front of the envelope before placing it in a drawer.
My Grief!
He dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief. There were no tears. He noticed, however, that the linen was flecked with blood.
It was back.
There was so little time left for him to be happy.
PARIS, 25 APRIL 1838
Chopin’s new second scherzo filled the opulent salon in the Spanish consul’s apartment, and once again George Sand stared into the face she had not seen for well over a year.
Its sensitivity struck her as much as ever, even though Chopin looked to have aged more than one would expect in that time. Illness, she thought. He looks so exhausted, the dear child.
The music itself gave no sign. This new piece glowed with a greater sense of affirmation than anything else of his she had heard, leaping out of its minor tonality as soon as it could to sing passionately in the major, its second theme arcing upwards over and over, reaching for life, grasping at fulfilment.
Something inside Frédéric had changed. Was he preparing to open himself to the world, to become more receptive to the feelings of others?
Symphony of Seduction Page 13