Claude Debussy (1862–1918) in a letter to his first wife, Lilly, July 1904
58 RUE CARDINET, PARIS, JUNE 1903
The two young women slept together naked, as nymphs do on a hot day. He put down his flute and swept them up, laying them on a dry bed of reeds to proceed with the seduction.
The pair woke in a flash, took fright and ran off, leaving him there half-drunk, scratching his goat flank, wondering if they’d been there at all. Picking up his instrument again, he tried to resume his tune, but it came out sounding droopy. The shimmering air around him turned day into night, his flute sounding now like women’s voices floating over a sea tinted silver by the moon, singing a siren song to him, gloating over their abandonment of him to the waves, laughing as they passed into the darkness. The sea became a river, rushing off to eternity. Nature shivered, telling him to taste all the charms of the world before his youth was swept away by the churning waters.
There was music in all this, sounding very familiar.
Daylight pierced his eyes. He rubbed them and sat up, aware of clattering coming from the kitchen nearby and the crunch of wheels on the avenue de Villiers five floors below.
A young woman’s head poked gingerly through the door of the study, her fair hair tied back, her pale face smiling when she saw him.
‘Hello, sleepy head,’ she said. ‘Another late night, I see.’
‘What time is it?’ His voice was gruff, as always.
‘Eleven,’ she said.
He’d had a good eight hours of sleeping like a baby. Apart from the dreams.
‘Pleasant dreams?’ she asked.
‘Nothing I can remember,’ he said. There was no point in telling your wife about dreams involving naked women. But what in the hell was all that about? All the charms of the world, rushing away to eternity, the soundtrack of his own music: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, the final section of his Nocturnes, and one of his old songs, written years ago … what was it?
‘Erik will be here in an hour for lunch.’
‘He’ll want the usual: lamb cutlets and eggs. I’ll do them.’
‘That’s fine, Claude. Nobody does eggs as well as you.’ The pretty head withdrew.
Debussy looked around his small study, past the upright piano in Brazilian rosewood against the far wall and the Oriental rugs on the floor, to the work desk where piano sketches of his latest project for orchestra were stacked in front of the blotters, pens and Chinese figurines he always kept so carefully placed. La Mer had filled his mind with childhood memories of the Normandy coast, recollections of Turner paintings, and prints of Japanese seascapes as he wrestled with the notes at two o’clock that morning, and he’d taken the teeming visions into sleep when he took a break on the chaise longue. No wonder he’d been dreaming.
Watery dreams; sexy too, he observed, running the yellowing fingertips of his left hand through the thick jet-black hair plastered across his large head, the fringe pushed to one side by the oddly projecting forehead; his right hand scratching the profuse goatee attached to his sideburns by a thin ridge of beard. Not actual sex, but the possibility of sex.
Debussy thought it an odd dream for someone who’d been married for less than four years to an ex-model with the most perfect body he would ever know. Lilly would never engage him in any meaningful discussion about music – or anything, for that matter – but he hadn’t thought twice about dropping green-eyed Gaby after all those years together once he’d taken Lilly to bed, writhing in a frenzy while she nibbled every part of his body like fresh pastry. It was such a pity that Gaby had shot herself.
Claude hated most talk, especially small talk. Why on earth would he rush anyone off to the altar for mere conversation? He’d said to a friend’s wife only the other day that artists gave themselves to Love without calculation, their eyes closed. Claude found closing his eyes difficult when Lilly took her clothes off.
Not once in those four years had Lilly shown herself to be anything other than completely devoted to him, despite their poverty. They couldn’t even afford to get married back in 1899 until Debussy banked the proceeds of that morning’s music lesson. Things were beginning to improve since the success of his opera Pelléas and Mélisande, but it was still a stretch. Lilly took it in her stride: the daily haul of shopping up five flights of stairs, the preparation of food treats to keep him going through the day, turning unwanted visitors away while he worked.
Claude knew he couldn’t ask for more from his wife. He remembered the gushing prose he had lavished upon her in letters just before their marriage; all that business about wanting the ‘happiness within the beauty and charm of everyday things’. Lilly delivered the everyday in spades. He’d been happy for a while, telling his friends it was ‘a time of spring’.
But this spring had turned into autumn. He could feel the temperature of their relationship dropping – at least on his part; Lilly, he was sure, had no idea. Perhaps that was to be expected from a childless marriage no longer new. It was better they didn’t have to speak about serious things, or even speak all that often, because when they did the sound of her voice made his blood run cold.
‘Erik! You must scold Claude for me,’ Lilly said over lunch. Debussy winced.
‘Very well, madame,’ said Satie. He wore the same corduroy suit as in all the previous lunches chez Debussy. Glaring at his friend through pince-nez, he said in a falsetto, ‘Claude, you are naughty. This is your mother speaking.’ He looked back at Lilly. ‘There – you have it. Now, why the reprimand?’
‘Claude has a pupil whose mother runs one of the most fashionable salons in Paris.’
‘Who is this, Claude?’
‘Emma Bardac. Her son Raoul comes here for lessons.’
Satie sat forward in his chair.
‘Emma Bardac? The wife of that rich banker? Wasn’t she Fauré’s …?’
‘Friend?’ said Debussy, with a faun’s grin. ‘Yes indeed. Very, very good friend back in the ’90s. It went on for years. He wrote music for her to sing, piano pieces for her daughter, Dolly. He was almost like a father to the girl.’ He looked at Satie from the corner of his dark eyes, and the two sniggered.
‘She has these wonderful musicales where all the important people go,’ Lilly continued. ‘Sometimes they play Claude’s music, and she very much wants him to be there too.’
‘Given her history, I’m not surprised,’ said Satie. ‘Pelléas and Mélisande made adultery very fashionable in Paris. Not that it’s ever really been out of fashion. Look at Fauré. Pushing sixty, and he still keeps a mistress in her own apartment.’
‘That sort of thing costs money,’ said Debussy. ‘Which is why we’re still together, chérie.’
He looked blankly at his wife, and they all laughed after an awkward pause.
‘I’d like to think that love has something to do with it,’ Lilly said.
‘That it does, my dear,’ her husband replied, the face once likened to that of an Assyrian prince a complete mask.
‘Madame Bardac has invited Claude any number of times, and he won’t go.’
‘Claude, we are talking about a banker’s wife,’ said Erik. ‘Why won’t you go?’
Debussy shrugged the question aside with a child’s reply. ‘I don’t know.’
I know, old friend, Satie thought. You just don’t like more than a handful of people at a time – and then only the ones you know. ‘Give it a try, Claude. It might be a good thing. Success in Paris is about making connections. That is why I have no success; I don’t like to connect. Besides, Madame Bardac is reputed to be an excellent singer; Fauré composed his La bonne chanson for her. She might pick up some of your songs.’
Debussy remembered the last song in that cycle, set to poor dead Verlaine’s poetry: ‘L’hiver a cessé’. Some affairs stripped one’s branches bare; Madame Bardac had obviously put the leaves back on Gabriel Fauré’s tree.
He noticed Lilly and Erik staring at him, and shrugged again.
ONE WEEK LATER
‘Monsieur Debussy! This is too marvellous!’ said the petite woman with curly auburn hair. Her topaz eyes twinkled at him. ‘Raoul said you might be coming, but I never hoped —’
‘It’s nothing,’ grunted Claude, bowing slightly. ‘Excuse me.’ He melted away to the far side of the room.
Emma Bardac collared Raoul and nodded in Debussy’s direction. ‘He doesn’t say much, does he?’
‘Only in select company,’ her son replied.
‘It doesn’t get much more select than this,’ she said drily. ‘I thought you said he was poor. He looks pretty strapping to me.’
‘He says he takes after his mother. Debussy is more of a gourmet than a gourmand. He never eats to excess, and whatever he prepares must be of the highest quality. I think that’s where all the Pelléas receipts went: good food, and books, engravings, Oriental knick-knacks.’
Debussy found a chair near the piano and affected an air of ennui while nursing a cigarette. Shy, clumsy at hiding the fact, fastidious in his tastes, a connoisseur in most things, she read in his face. I know the type: Not very tall, dark, handsome in a strange way, imperious. Completely brilliant – and married. As am I. Don’t go there again, Emma.
She had a little surprise for him, though.
‘Dear guests, mesdames et messieurs,’ she announced, standing next to the piano, ‘we can’t have a musicale without music! Today I would like to sing for you one of the most beautiful chansons from the creator of Pelléas, who honours us with his presence today.’
Surely not the reclusive Debussy? The gathering murmured its surprise and applauded.
When Emma launched into ‘Beau soir’, Debussy sat up with a start. That was what he’d heard in his bizarre dream the other week. How old was he when he wrote it – nineteen, twenty? So long ago. Memories of Marie Vasnier came flooding back: the ‘mature’ singing student married to an inspector of buildings, the older woman who was the first to seduce him. Claude had worshipped her, writing more than twenty songs for her – including that one.
It wasn’t bad, he realised. The harmonies would have appalled his Paris Conservatoire teachers – they still did – but the sense of vanishing youth, time already ebbing away, tasting ‘all the charms of the world’ (that’s the phrase that came back in the dream!) as Bourget’s poem said; it all felt sincere, a slightly cloying perfume from the enraptured heart of a teenager.
Emma Bardac’s voice was small, but true; pitch good, no playing about with the rhythms. When she arrived at the climax, the high long F-sharp on the word ‘beau’, it filled the room, exhausting itself before falling back almost an octave to an undertone, the message of youth followed so quickly by death. He wondered if those around him would think that too. No matter. He didn’t care either way if his music made people think; it was enough for him if his music made them listen. Only listen. If that broke the Conservatoire’s rules, so be it. That was his motto: Pleasure is the law.
His reverie was broken by applause. Madame Bardac came over; Debussy stood to kiss her on both cheeks. Although not a great singer, she had the instincts of a true artist, her intelligence shining through.
‘May I, monsieur?’ She motioned to the chair next to his.
‘Mmm.’
There was a pause of a minute or two.
‘You say nothing, monsieur. It doesn’t bother me.’
‘I could say thank you, naturally, madame, and I would mean that most sincerely. But I find there are only two types of people. The first are those with whom one has nothing in common, usually because they are ignorant. Talking to them is pointless. The second are those with whom one might have some true commonality. In this case, they already know as much as you do, in which case talking to them is unnecessary.’
‘That makes perfect sense,’ she said, knowing already that he was testing her. ‘You realise that obliges you to say nothing to most people.’
‘It does, fortunately,’ he said. ‘You see, the trouble with most people, madame, is that they don’t very much like things that are beautiful. Beauty is so far from their nasty little minds.’
‘That being the case, you may have to make room for a third category of person. A small one, admittedly, with just enough room for me.’
‘And that category would be …?’
‘The person who lives for beauty, reveres those who make it, and whose little mind would give anything to share even a small part of their knowledge.’
He smiled. ‘These are the charms of the world you talk about.’
‘I know. I heard about them in a song.’
‘Agreed, then. For you alone, I will make a special place.’
‘We can talk, then?’
‘With pleasure, Madame Bardac.’
‘How would you like to begin?’
‘I suppose I should say thank you.’
When Debussy climbed the five flights of stairs to the apartment late that evening, Lilly was waiting up to ask how things had gone at the Bardac salon.
‘Fine, my dear, fine. Madame Bardac even sang one of my songs. You should have been there.’ No, you shouldn’t.
‘Did you and she have any chance to talk?’
‘Hardly a word.’
‘That’s a pity, Claude. Are you going to work now? Jump back and swim in La Mer?’ She giggled at her own joke.
He felt a sudden lust for her. The words of that old song made him nostalgic. Somewhere close was the Claude Debussy who’d praised those red lips of hers a few years before.
‘We’ll all be in that sea soon enough, Lilo. Look outside – the night is beautiful. We are both in the stream. As it goes to the sea, so we go to the grave.’ That’s what ‘Beau soir’ says. Funny how the words are more banal when you take the music away.
‘That’s a no, then? Would you like me to stay and talk to you?’
‘It’s a no to work, and a no to talk. Stay there a moment with your mouth open a little – just like that.’
He pulled her lips to his, running his hands up under her dress.
FOUR DAYS LATER
‘Claude told me he loved me this morning,’ Mary Garden said to Lilly.
The Scottish soprano had been a trusted friend of the Debussys since her stellar incarnation of Mélisande in the opera’s premiere the year before. Lilly knew Claude doted on her.
‘That should be no surprise, Mary!’ Lilly said. ‘We both love you; you know that.’
‘We’re not talking about that sort of love, darling. To be precise – and it’s not as if I would forget such a thing – Claude said he was obsessed with love for me.’
‘Obsessed? That sounds rather more serious.’ Lilly looked strangely unperturbed.
‘It is. It is.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘You know what Mélisande sings at the beginning of the opera? Her first lines? Don’t touch me, don’t touch me. I told him he was in love with Mélisande, not me. I said we three were friends and this was most precious to me. And I told him I would always love him as a great musician, but not as anything else.’
Lilly breathed a sigh of relief and took Mary’s hand.
‘I’m so glad you shared this with me, Mary,’ she said. ‘I’m relieved you think it’s Mélisande he’s besotted with, and not you. And even if it was you, you’re the only woman in the world I could bear to take Claude away. I can’t imagine what I’d do if he left me for anybody else.’ Her smile was serene.
Mary Garden looked at Lilly Debussy with a stab of pity. My poor Lilly – where does this leave you?
JUNE 1904
‘Your letter asked that I come, Claude. Here I am.’
Emma Bardac looked around Debussy’s small study for the first time. All their previous meetings during the past year had taken place at her apartment over dinners and teas, usually with her husband or the staff nearby.
She remained the sole occupant of Claude’s third category of person, the one to whom he devoted as much time as he did to the surging waves of La
Mer, now putting on its orchestral clothes. Green and gold eyes, blue sea, fluttering like bats around the steeple of his iron-grey soul.
‘Where is your wife?’ she said.
‘Visiting her parents,’ he replied. ‘These days I ask her to give me some peace when my thinking meets a block.’
‘Has your thinking met a block?’
‘Not at all. I spend a long time collecting impressions before I write them down. Right now, I’m just – collecting.’
‘It looks as if you’re collecting Verlaine’s poetry again. Your letter quotes him: “It rains on the town …”’
‘You know the beginning? I’m using that one in some new songs I’m dedicating to you.’
‘“It rains in my heart” – of course. You mention wanting to talk to me alone.’ Her gaze softened. ‘Why is it raining in your heart? What is it you want to tell me that requires such privacy?’
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Nothing?’ She was puzzled.
‘Not words, anyway,’ he said. ‘Increasingly, I find words are useless.’
‘Sounds like we’re back to where we started a year ago.’
‘I would like to play for you,’ he said, indicating the piano. ‘Nothing in particular, nothing on paper, nothing I or anybody else has written. Just – everything that can’t be said. It will be more tasteful this way.’
Tasteful? ‘You will improvise, Claude?’
‘Something like that. Take a seat.’
He closed the windows and drew the curtains to shut out the street clamour and the light of the afternoon. In the darkened room, his hands glowed as pale as the ivory keys.
The music was strange, buoyed by harmonies even stranger than the ones Claude ever allowed into print. She knew they would never find their way onto paper. He was making colours, applying paint to a door that, once passed through, would be closed firmly behind them both. He was making an invitation. More than that, he was seducing her. There was no doubt about it.
Emma had done this before: the meaningful stares over soup at her husband’s table, the way an admirer watched her lips when she spoke one of her celebrated bon mots, the exquisite tension between them when they greeted each other in a room full of other people, the surreptitious brushing of hands at the table of hors d’oeuvres. The last time had been with Fauré ten years ago, and it had gone further very quickly. Claude was more cautious about doing anything overt; it was difficult to read anything in that face, those mysterious dark eyes. She had begun to wonder if it was all just a game for him. The letter that morning came as some surprise.
Symphony of Seduction Page 16