The Dream Lover (39 page)

I thought, then, that what Solange wanted, what she needed, was to be credited with her own strength and ambition. In this respect, I thought, she was like me. I let go of a kind of wariness and believed that Solange and I would finally be able to love each other openly, freely, lastingly.

—

W
hen I returned to Paris, I gave up my apartment and moved into the hotel where Franz and Arabella lived, to the room below them. We shared a common sitting room, and it was filled with writers and artists and musicians and the wailing of Franz and Arabella's baby. Our regulars included the radical priest Abbé de Lamennais, the poet Heinrich Heine, the novelist Eugène Sue, and the socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux. So many interesting individuals, all of whom offered a kind of nourishment, both individually and collectively.

On November 5, I was invited to a musical soirée at the home of Frédéric Chopin. It was on the fashionable Right Bank, on Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin. I saw how true the rumors were that he adored the color gray: the wallpaper was a light version of that color, beautiful against the white trim, and the brocade furniture was a shade of oyster. He liked his luxuries: he had a silver tea service displayed against a white silk hanging, and his dinner service was Sèvres, in turquoise and gold. I knew that the fresh flowers he had in abundance were replaced daily. The whole apartment, though small, gave the illusion of airy space and was a study in understated elegance.

That evening was the first time I had heard him play—he almost never gave concerts, preferring instead to earn money by charging outrageous amounts to teach and by selling sheet music of his pieces. That night, I lost my heart to his music before I lost it to the man. He played first a duet with Liszt, a sonata for four hands, then performed an improvisation, something for which he was famous. In its minor chords, I heard what I believed was a mourning for a love that he could not have. I knew about such things, and I understood the lasting melancholy that came with it. My eyes filled with tears. I put down my wineglass, walked over to the piano, and kissed him full on the mouth.
The you that I hear in this music, I understand and love—instantly and wholly
.

His feelings toward me were not precisely the same. They were, in fact, quite the opposite. After we had become lovers, he told me of the letter he had written to his family after he had first made my acquaintance. “I said you were a coarse and ungainly and crude woman who wore men's clothes and smoked cigars in public, then expressed my doubt that you were a woman at all. I said I found distasteful your devouring eyes and deep silences, and your frankness about sex I found absolutely unnerving.”

The journey from that point of view to one quite different took two years. In the meantime, my busy life as a free woman went on.

January 1837

NOHANT

A
rabella, Liszt's lover, came to stay with me at N
OHANT
that winter when Franz was touring. We were not the best of friends. She was under the mistaken assumption, as were so many, that I was ever a fearsomely independent figure who had a well-deserved reputation for bold behavior, the consequences be damned.

I saw Arabella as a person with a cold heart and a suspicious mind who was overly concerned with appearances. She rarely wore the same thing twice, and she spent an inordinate amount of time styling her hair each day. She would mouth the words of others as though they were her own in order to make herself appear intelligent. We tried hard to get along for the sake of Liszt, whom we both loved. But when we embraced, it was with the light of day between us.

One evening, after we had had what I think both of us would have described as a surprisingly pleasant day together, we sat before the fireplace after dinner. The children, exhausted, were in bed. “You know, George, Maurice is a very sensitive young man,” Arabella said.

I smiled. “Yes.”

“And talented; only thirteen, but he could easily make his living as an artist.”

“So I have told him. As has Delacroix.”

“A wonder that Casimir so blithely handed him over to you; he is such a devoted son, such a pleasure to be around.”

“Casimir is one of those lucky individuals who is rarely bedridden. He has no patience for those who suffer from various illnesses, as Maurice does. He thought Maurice hypochondriacal and all but punished him for his weakness. When he found out his son had an enlarged heart and rheumatism, he took it as an affront to his own masculinity. He was only too happy to give custody of Maurice to me. And I was glad to have it.”

“Of course you were.”

A silence fell. I waited for Arabella to comment on eight-year-old Solange. It had been a tiring day with my daughter, complete with displays of explosive behavior one might see in a toddler. At one point, Solange had flung her hairbrush across her room, nearly breaking a window. I wasn't sure how much my guest had overheard of all that.

Finally, I said, “I must apologize if you were bothered by any unpleasantness today.”

One finely shaped eyebrow raised. She murmured something I could not hear, then turned to face me and said, “May I speak frankly?”

“Please do.”

“One hesitates to criticize a friend's child. But I must say that I find Solange to be very difficult. She is a natural and unrepentant rebel, one who seems to delight in extremes of emotions. I doubt that she will ever be able to go along with commonsense rules.”

I flushed, then defended my daughter in a mother's automatic way, saying, “I should be happy for her if that is so. A woman in a man's world needs to be rebellious.”

Arabella turned her sherry glass slowly in her hand, and I
watched the flames from the fireplace cast colors on the liquid. When she looked back at me, her expression was empty of malice; I saw that she felt genuinely sympathetic. She said, “Perhaps what you say is so. Perhaps what I see as Solange's faults may turn out to be heroic. Please understand that I know she is not without her virtues. She is also unusually beautiful. But…” She leaned forward. “There is a kind of manipulation she has already mastered. She has a preternatural ability to spot one's weaknesses. You will have to exercise your own strength against hers.

“Also, if you will permit me to say this, I believe she is jealous. I suppose no one could be the daughter of one so famous and not be resentful of time taken away from her, of attentions shared by others when she wants them for herself alone. Far be it from me to advise you to deny yourself for her sake. But you must be prepared for the revenge she will take on you.”

I said nothing. Already I had seen evidence of this. The carefree relationship Solange and I had enjoyed in Switzerland was now only a memory. A few days ago, when I had awakened and begun looking over my work from the night before, I saw that three consecutive pages from the middle of my pile were missing. I looked around my room, under the bed, even on the ground outside the window I had left cracked open. The pages were nowhere to be found. But when I came into the dining room, I saw that they had been thrown into the fireplace and burned: a quarter of one page lay with its charred edges off to one side, in the ashes. I knew who had done it, and I called Solange into my bedroom to account for herself. “Was it you who burned my manuscript pages?” I asked.

She stared at me, her face cold and unyielding.

“Why?”

Again, I was met with silence, and I dismissed her. I knew why she had burned the pages. She craved her mother's love the same way I had craved my own mother's—and still did. And as I was never satisfied, so Solange was destined to be always wanting. My mother was a slave to her need for love and attention. As an artist,
I belonged primarily to my work. But whereas I, for the most part, had suffered in silence from the wrongdoings of my mother, Solange would not. Perhaps could not.

I rewrote the pages and found them better than before.

Living with me that winter, Arabella discovered other things about me. My capriciousness was revealed in all its glory; every day gave her another example of how indecisive I could be; she remarked upon it humorously, but with her brows knit. She came to understand that what many people misinterpreted as coldness or disdain was actually my shyness. She, who outfitted herself in wildly expensive dresses and jewels every morning, whose hair needed to be styled just so, saw that what I preferred most was a peasant's smock.

Most tellingly, though, she saw my weakness and hypocrisy in love. Despite having renounced romantic love in general and Michel de Bourges in particular, I still wrote passionate letters to him, begging to simply cast my eyes upon him. One night, I showed her one in which I had written,

The delights of love are to be found not only in those fleeting hours of furious passion which send the soul careening madly to the stars, but also in the innocent and persevering tenderness of intimacy
.

She looked up from reading, and I expected her to express sympathy, or agreement that the best part of love was indeed that gentle intimacy, or at least admiration for the way I had with words. But she only said, “I should have thought you would have preferred Chopin.”

She leaned over and touched my hand, and her eyes softened. “Poor George. Such a fire in your soul, and nothing for it to lay hold upon.”

It is one thing to keep the shadow of love's humiliation hidden
in a corner of one's soul; it is another to have someone bring it out into the open. Being revealed in this way is devastating, but it is a relief, too; one has no choice then but to acknowledge the truth, and begin the process of moving forward.

L
ISZT CAME BACK IN
M
AY,
and the house was full of sublime pleasures. He and Arabella were in the bedroom below me. Near their window, I had stationed a piano for him, and I often wrote to the sounds of his composing. I thought the birds must be in thrall to his music, for they fell silent whenever he played. Sometimes I paused in my storytelling to listen to the broken phrases he began, then left suspended in the air; and it seemed as though the breezes outside carried the music onward, where it brushed against the nodding blossoms in the garden before lifting itself heavenward.

After dinner, we would gather on the patio to talk and smoke, and one evening Arabella, who loved to dress dramatically, came outside in a diaphanous white gown and a long white veil that fell to her heels. She talked with us for a while, then rose to walk around the grounds. She was like a ghost; she would vanish behind the trees and then silently appear again. Franz and I watched her as if in a dream, beneath a rising moon that finally settled, seemingly caught in the branches of the pines. In the stillness, one could almost hear the heartbeat of the earth. I sought out Franz's eyes and understood that he heard music in what we were seeing. As for me, phrases floated into my brain. I believed that the next day each of us would translate some part of the experience into our respective art.

M
Y GUESTS AND
I had had a very pleasant day. The weather was fine for hiking, and Franz and Arabella had accompanied Maurice, Solange, and me for a long walk. The countryside offered gifts at
every step: a slight give to the warm earth, wildflowers grouped like freestanding bouquets, clear running streams, birdsong of every variety, the inviting darkness and spicy pine scent of the woods.

Afterward, we had a dinner of roast chicken stuffed with lemon and garlic, fingerling potatoes, and a mix of lovely vegetables from the garden, followed by an apple tart. Then we adjourned to the drawing room, where we enjoyed piano music from Franz, card games, and charades. Maurice and Solange, who were exhausted, went to bed after that, but Arabella lingered with Franz and me. Then she, too, began to yawn and excused herself.

“I suppose I should try to work a bit,” I told Franz, “but I am enjoying your company.”

“I have work to do as well,” he said. “Why don't we do so together? I shall sit at one end of the dining room table, you at the other.”

I was not sure we could work in each other's company, but I agreed to it. Anyway, my work had been going so poorly I doubted I'd get much done no matter where I sat.

We gathered our materials, took our places, and tended to our individual endeavors. Franz worked on a score; I worked on an as yet unnamed novel. There were the sounds of quiet, for quiet is rarely absolute: the clock ticking, the house creaking, the wind rising up now and again, the owls hooting. I tightened my shawl about myself as the night deepened and the air grew cool. Once, I silently brought tea to both of us.

There was in Liszt's company a rare peace. I knew that he would not interrupt me, and I knew, too, that he would not be jealous of work that took me away from paying attention to him. It is to be expected that people who are not artists might not understand the need for one to immerse oneself totally in one's work; but it also sometimes happens that other artists feel no compunctions about interrupting, or in feeling slighted that one's attention is not focused on them first and foremost. What jealousy can be inspired by
a person's singular devotion to something the other cannot share! It was a concern for Liszt, I knew, who had once confided to me that it was difficult to play the piano with a woman's arms around his neck.

Just as the sky was beginning to lighten, I wrote a few lines to finish a scene. Then, as quietly as I could, I began to gather my papers so that I might retire.

“Don't go,” Franz said.

I looked up at him. “I don't want to disturb your work.”

He smiled. “I have been finished with my work for some time. I have been watching you.”

I was embarrassed. “I'm afraid there is not much to see.”