The Dream Lover (41 page)

Our rooms were not clean or comfortable (our mattresses were slabs of slate), nor was the food delectable—one had a choice of fish and garlic or garlic and fish—and it was cooked in rancid oil. I hastened to find us a house to rent with more forgiving beds, where we might prepare dishes more satisfying and nutritious. I located one soon enough, but then the weather abruptly changed to cold and rain, and Frédéric began coughing in such a violent way that the owner of the house, fearing contagion, not only evicted us but charged us for a new mattress, as he said he would have to burn the old one.

I found us another place, one far out in the country. It was three rooms in an abandoned Carthusian monastery, on a mountain in Valldemosa. The Charterhouse was a collection of well-constructed buildings with a large enclosed area. It overlooked the sea on two sides, and the children and I loved exploring its mysterious passages: it brought me back to my convent days. A sacristan visited daily, and an apothecary-monk rented a cell a long way from ours, but he rarely came out. He sold us marsh mallow herb or couch grass (the only medicines he had) for exorbitant prices.

Otherwise we were alone but for the woman next to us, named Maria-Antonia, who rented a room in the monastery and offered to let us use it for cooking, as she had a stove. She also volunteered to be our housekeeper. She refused compensation, saying that she preferred to help us for the love of God, but she mostly helped herself to our meager supplies. Most of the work she was meant to do
fell to me; it was a case of it being easier to do it myself than to explain to Maria-Antonia what I needed done. I would clearly state my objectives, and she would stare at me as if I were a talking portrait.

My days were spent tutoring the children and exploring the monastery and the island with them, cooking, talking with and nursing Frédéric, and fitting in writing when I could—there were, after all, bills to be paid and the publisher's hand reaching across the miles.

As for Frédéric, despite his ill health, he was remarkably prolific in his work, composing, on the piano we had brought in, mazurkas, scherzos, and, most notably, his preludes: he, too, had taken an advance against promised works. In some of those preludes, I thought he evoked the place we were in. The darker ones suggested his terror of phantoms in the cloisters: they conjured long-dead monks and death and funerals and the heavy scent of incense caught in the folds of clothes. The sweeter ones I thought must have been inspired by the high cries of the children playing outside, or by the farmworkers' cantilenas rising up from the foothills, or by the nestling sounds of the birds who sought shelter in the dripping boughs next to our window while thunder rumbled out its long complaints. Once, I remarked on the way that Frédéric had incorporated the patter of rain into a composition and made the mistake of referring to it as imitative harmony.

“Imitative!” he said. “No, it was not
rain
that inspired me; it is the tears of heaven that fall upon my heart!”

“Imitative!”
echoed Solange, in her haughtiest tone.

I let it alone. I did not remind Frédéric of the times I had seen his creativity directly influenced by something other than himself. At Nohant one afternoon, we were out walking and I spoke rather poetically about the verdant countryside around us. Frédéric stopped walking. “Do you know how beautiful that is, what you just said?”

“Do you really think so?”

He nodded.

“Well, then. Put it into music.”

We went inside, eager as children who have been called to open gifts, and he sat at the piano and immediately began improvising a pastoral symphony. I stood behind him as he played, my hand on his shoulder.

Another time he was sitting at the piano late at night, idly improvising, and he suddenly fell silent. Delacroix, who was visiting us and had been listening to him, said, “Go on! You are not at the end yet.”

“Nor even at the beginning!” Frédéric said. “Nothing comes to me. Nothing but shadows. To put it in your terms, I'm trying to find the right color, but I can't get the form.”

“Yes, you must have both,” Delacroix said, “and usually you find them together.”

Frédéric stared out the window, shaking his head. “Suppose I find only…moonlight.”

Delacroix leaned forward, his eyes shining. “If you find moonlight, you ask it to speak and you play what it says.”

I was sitting in a chair doing some needlework, and I smiled, pondering this interesting statement, wondering how such a concept would show itself in my work.

Suddenly Frédéric began to play, nearly formlessly at first, then in a way that had us nearly swooning. Describing it later, I wrote:

He begins again, without seeming to, so uncertain is the shape. Gradually quiet colors begin to show. Suddenly the blue note sings out, and the night is all around us, azure and transparent. Light clouds take on fantastic shapes and fill the sky. They gather about the moon which casts upon them great opalescent discs, and wakes the sleeping colors. We dream of a summer night, and sit there waiting for the song of the nightingale.

T
he unrelenting rain and cold in Majorca made Frédéric more and more ill and, finally, confined him to his bed. A Frenchwoman on the island gave me goosefeathers so that I could have pillows made for him. I called in three different doctors, none of whom helped him and one of whom, with his wide eyes and nervous manner, had Frédéric convinced he would not make it through the night. He ate very little, and I could not blame him: we were once delivered a skinny cooked chicken that came complete with a flea hopping upon its scorched back. “See how he dances the tarantella!” Solange said, and the children laughed, and I thanked God for their good natures at such a moment. I paid exorbitant prices—well over four times what they were worth—for the fish and vegetables and eggs I was able to procure; the locals laughed behind their hands at me when they departed. I learned early not to haggle; when I did, the offended merchant would pack the merchandise back up and refuse to sell it to me, and the next time the price would be even higher.

From the moment we arrived, we were not well regarded: I with my man's name and men's clothes, and even my daughter in trousers. Worse than that, we did not go to church! No, no favors were forthcoming from the people on whom we so desperately depended. When it rained very hard—which was often—no one would risk coming up the road to deliver anything. At those times, we made do with bread so hard it could have served as a minor weapon of war.

We were stuck there; Frédéric's steadily deteriorating health made it imprudent for us to attempt to return to Paris. But there is something about untoward circumstances that can bind people closely together, and that is what happened to our little group in Majorca. Sometimes things were so bad that we could only laugh helplessly, then wipe our eyes of tears.

We made up stories, we recited poems, we exulted on rare sunny days when the lingering raindrops bejeweled the least blade of grass. But when Frédéric stopped eating altogether, I became fearful that he would die. On the day in February that I arranged for passage on the very next boat out—a boat carrying pigs!—he filled a basin with blood he had coughed up.

After an arduous and anxious journey, we checked into a hotel in Marseilles—Frédéric did not have the strength to make it to Paris.

I directed my attentions to restoring Frédéric's health, and soon he stopped spitting blood and began eating again. I was able to return to producing fifteen or twenty pages of prose a day. I was rewriting
Lélia
, creating the more sanitized version of the novel that my publisher had requested for a reissue, and was working, as well, on a new book, called
Spiridion
, which incorporated elements both mystical and revolutionary. It was not what my publisher had hoped for, but it was what I wanted to write. He sighed and put it into print; my readers waited impatiently for me to return to a form more like my earlier works, ones more romantic and richly detailed, like those written by Balzac. (He, incidentally, had come back into my life after he had suffered his own frustrations in trying to help my fickle former lover Jules.) But I could serve only one master; and it was not my publisher I chose, but myself.

May 1839

NOHANT

F
inally, Chopinet, as we often affectionately called him, was plump and healthy again, and we and the children were back at Nohant. Life was lovely there, at first. I created an
appartement
for Frédéric next to my bedroom, with his own bedroom and a library.
I wallpapered the space with a gay Chinese print in red and blue, and although at first I could see he was holding his tongue, he came to like it very much—it was, after all, au courant.

Downstairs was a new Pleyel piano I had gotten for him, and while he sat composing, I took the children out for expeditions in a much more forgiving countryside than the one we had just left. Chopin's output was prodigious in those months. Relieved that everyone's health was good—Frédéric's lungs, Maurice's joints, Solange's pulse, which had a tendency to race—I, too, worked well.

It was at that time that I wrote my novel
Gabriel
, and I did it using only dialogue. It concerned a princess who is given a boy's education. As an adult, she dresses as a man except for three months a year, when she dresses as a woman to please her lover. He is named Astolphe, that name borrowed from a man who was openly homosexual and in love with Chopin.

It was ever mysterious to me the ways writing could excavate things from the secret corners of the soul. Oddly, sometimes I could not see what my writing placed directly before me—in this case, a moving back and forth between the sexes. Balzac praised that novel's psychological acuity; most others left it alone as an iconoclastic oddity.

One night I sat writing at my little desk, a candle lit with a high and steady flame. I put down my pen and moved to the window, suffused with a kind of contentment. Outside, clouds floated peacefully past the moon, and I stared up into the firmament with a prayer that this life would continue, that for once I would be able to count on something lasting. The love Frédéric and I enjoyed had moved entirely to the spiritual, and I found I preferred it to the wild fluctuations of the earlier passions I had known. Delacroix had recently done a painting of the two of us, where I was listening to Frédéric play and in my face was a rich contentment. I was looking off to the side, and there was a smile playing about my lips of which I was unaware. I seemed (and was) totally entranced by the music. Long after that painting had been seen by others, it amused me to
learn that people said I was sewing. They saw one of my hands holding fabric, another raised in midair to hold something they assumed was a needle. Had they looked more closely, they would have seen the truth: in one hand I held a handkerchief, which I used for tears when the music overcame my emotions. In the other hand was the butt end of the cigar I was smoking.

That night at Nohant, however, I beseeched whatever power might be listening to keep safe these three beings I loved most in the world: Maurice, Solange, Frédéric Chopin. My family. I vowed to devote my life to them, to care solely for them and my art. I commemorated this promise by scratching on my windowsill a line in English from one of my favorite poets, Lord Byron
—All who joy would win must share it
—followed by the date: June 19, 1839.

Those words were a variation of what I was always saying, one way or another. When one takes the long view, one sees that I did not say much else.

September 1839

16 RUE PIGALLE

PARIS

T
hat fall, Chopin had to get back to his students, and it was too expensive for me to stay at Nohant, where uninvited guests came nearly every day to my table—sometimes a dozen at a time!—and I was too softhearted to turn anyone away. We decided to move back to the city.

Frédéric dispatched his friends to find us places to live, and we were lucky enough that they turned up paired pavilions at the back of a garden, offering us the privacy we both longed for. For propriety's sake, now that we were in the crowded city and fodder for the gossipmongers, we did not live together.

Solange stayed with me when she visited from school. My
daughter had once again been sent away to school because shortly after we got back to Nohant from Majorca, she had returned to her exasperating moody and often hostile behavior. Once Chopin's darling, she began making fun of him, insinuating things about his character and sexuality; she called him “Sans Testicules.” Such outbursts made no sense to me; my daughter was once again walking through a garden and decapitating flowers. When I tried to give her more attention, thinking that her rude behavior reflected a need for that, she only grew more hostile toward me. I no longer knew what to offer her. The stricter environment at school did not seem to help her, either; but I was hopeful that, in time, it would.

As for Maurice, he was sixteen now and would soon be finished with school and in need of finding a vocation. We were both thrilled when Delacroix took him on as a studio assistant.

Frédéric and I lived a happy lifestyle, with our combined friends. On my side were Delacroix, Balzac, the poet Heine, the actors Bocage and Marie Dorval, and the usual rowdy and unkempt journalists. I had also new friends who visited regularly: a locksmith, a baker, a weaver, a stone carver whose poetry I helped get published, and a cabinet maker. Frédéric's friends were musicians, singers, princesses, countesses, and Polish expatriates.

We often had community dinners together and lingered long at the table discussing again and again how best to approach the “social question.” I would be lost in the ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, in discussions about how, if one assumed the world was rational, certain principles could be applied to the management of people, no matter what their social standing. I would postulate that the future of the world was in the hands of the working class, that in time the masses would rise up from where the so-called enlightened had chained them down. Frédéric would sit silently with a frozen smile on his face, asleep with his eyes open, and eventually disappear. He tolerated my dissident friends, but at heart he was an unapologetic aristocrat. Still, he relied on me, a woman whose sympathies lay with the people, to help him with his work.