The Dream Lover (44 page)

I wrote him back:

Do as your heart tells you, and take its instinctive promptings for the language of your conscience. I quite understand
.

As to my daughter…she has the bad taste to say that she needs the love of a mother whom, in fact, she hates and slanders, whose most sacred actions she sullies. You have undertaken to lend a willing ear to her, and perhaps you really do believe what she tells you. I would rather see you go over to the enemy than myself take arms against that same enemy who was born of my body and fed of my milk
.

Take good care of her, since you seem to have decided that it is your duty to devote yourself to her. I will not hold it against you, but you will, I hope, understand me if I say that I shall stick to my role of outraged mother. To have been a dupe and a victim is quite enough. I forgive you, and will not, from this day forward, address so much as a single word of reproach to you, since you have confessed frankly what is in your mind
.

Goodbye, my friend. May you soon be cured of all your ills, as I hope that now you may be (I have my reasons for thinking so). If you are, I will offer thanks to God for this fantastic ending of a friendship which has, for nine years, absorbed both of us. Send me news of yourself from time to time. It is useless to think that things can ever again be the same between us
.

And then, as I have the fragile and contrary heart of a woman, I waited for him to come to me, or to at least respond. He did neither. We marched forward into our separate lives.

March 4, 1848

PARIS

I
was on my way to see Charlotte Marliani when I ran into Chopin in her anteroom, coming out from having just visited her himself.

“George!” he said.

“Frédéric.” I kept my tone neutral, and I tried not to let my eyes devour him in the way he used to make fun of me for. He was pale, thin. I took his hand briefly; it was cold as ice.

“How do you fare?” he asked.

“Well, and you?”

“The same. Have you any news from Solange?” he asked.

“Last week I heard from her.”

“Not yesterday or the day before?”

“No.”

He smiled: half joy, half sorrow. “Then let me tell you that you are a grandmother. Solange has had a little girl, and I am delighted to think that I am the first to inform you of that fact. Her name is Jeanne-Gabrielle.”

“But then she came early!”

“Yes.”

I stood still; he bowed and made his way downstairs with his companion, an Abyssinian man named Combes.

I was turning to go into the apartment when I heard Combes calling my name as he bounded up the stairs again. I waited for him to reach me. “Frédéric wanted me to tell you that Solange and the baby are in good health,” he said breathlessly and smiled.

“And this he would not tell me himself?”

Combes spoke softly, “He could not climb the stairs again, madame.”

I rushed downstairs and asked Frédéric all about Solange,
though I wanted desperately to inquire about him as well. He dutifully answered every question about my daughter, ending by saying that Solange had had a difficult labor but that the sight of her child had made her forget her pain.

I looked into his eyes. “As it ever goes. If given a chance, true love will always vanquish pain.”

“So it is said. Well. Good evening.” He bowed and started to turn away, and I quickly said, “And you, Frédéric? How is your health?”

“I am well,” he said, but he would not meet my eyes and instead bade the porter to open the door to his carriage. He did not turn around. He climbed in, and Combes followed him, the carriage creaking with his greater weight; and then it drove away. I stood at the edge of the street on a clear evening, the stars a rebuke, the memories falling like rain.

I thought,
Love begins as a rhapsody and ends as a dirge
.

I never saw him again. And most unfortunately, Solange's baby died within days.

May 1848

PARIS

M
ichel de bourges and I may have come to a bad end, but his political proselytizing was not entirely in vain. After the July Monarchy was overthrown early in '48, it seemed that at last a socialist republic would rise up. Undone by love (though what I declared was that I was through with it), I went to Paris and immersed myself in politics, giving it the same hectic energy and trusting heart I had offered my paramours.

I was called “the mind and the pen of the new regime.” I wrote government circulars, and I had access to all members of the provisional government at any time. I was privileged to award friends of
mine temporary positions as commissaries of the republic at Châteauroux and La Châtre, and I even appointed my son as mayor of Nohant. What hope I had for the elevation of the masses! What faith I put in the courage of the people! But how far we fell in our efforts to grant freedom, and in such a short length of time. By May, the general elections showed us that the cause of the socialist republic was lost. All our efforts for the creation of a grand republic had failed.

Back at Nohant, I was greeted by men with tipped hats and straight lines for smiles; these same men wanted to burn my house down for my liberal politics. They were not like the protesters in Paris, who had barricaded the streets with everything from chairs and paving stones to broken cups and saucers. The people of Berry were more conservative than I had imagined them to be. The new mayor of Nohant, who was a political adversary but a personal friend, even suggested I leave town for a while. I shared this advice with some friends and received a letter back from Delacroix, in which he wrote:

Liberty purchased at the cost of pitched battles is not liberty at all, seeing that true liberty consists in the freedom to come and go in peace, to think as one will and eat as one likes, and enjoy a great many other advantages to which political upsets pay no attention
.

He was right, I thought.

Not long afterward, I was out for a walk in the country one day with my old friend François Rollinat. He reminded me of how, a year ago, we had walked there and I had told him a story called “The Waif.” I had told it in the same easy, conversational style as an old village woman had told it to me, so long ago.

“I remember,” I said. “And it seems that in one year, we have aged ten. So much has changed from that day when we spoke here.”

François nodded sadly and looked out over the land. He drew in
a breath, as though pulling the vision of all he was seeing deep into his lungs. Then he said, “Yet the stars shine on and the smell of the air is still sweet. Perhaps that is the only offering we can make. Let us use art again as we once understood it, and treat the anguish of the soul with the balm of the natural world.”

“Yes,” I said. “Let the cobbler return to his last, and the novelist to her pen.”

My next book was
La Petite Fadette
, which was praised for its evocation of the beauty of the rustic life, and it put me back in the good graces of the public, where I stayed.

October 1849

PARIS

O
ctober 17, 1849, FrÉdÉric FranÇois Chopin died. Solange was among those at his bedside; in fact, I heard that he died in her arms.

People said I did not care enough to go to him or to attend his funeral, but I was not told he was dying. I knew he was ill; I had heard that his sister Ludwika had come to care for him. After she arrived in Paris, I wrote to her, inquiring after Frédéric, but heard nothing back. Therefore I assumed it was nothing serious, and that he would recover the way he always had.

He had often said that he wanted to die in my arms; I had responded that if the fates decreed he went first, I would be the one to hold him then. My name may not have crossed his lips as he lay on his deathbed, but I know beyond knowing that I was in his thoughts and deep in his heart, and that if he did not call for me, he wanted to.

In the years that followed, I would be reviled for having caused his death, when in fact I'd extended his life. Without me, the world would have far fewer of his mazurkas, polonaises, preludes, and waltzes. It would be without his ravishing B-flat Minor Sonata,
which he completed on a stormy afternoon at Nohant, after which he called me from the kitchen, where I had been putting up plum jam, to hear it. I stood at the piano with my fingers stained blue, with minute blossoms that had fallen in the wind on my walk that morning still dotting my hair. After he lifted his hands from the keys and the room fell abruptly silent, I opened my eyes and smiled at him through tears. And the breath he had been holding came rushing from him.

The world will ever love Chopin's music. I loved not only his music but, to the bones, I loved that shy and private man, he with his constant cough and listless appetite, his nervous complaints and the raised veins in his feet, the tenderest of tributaries. And he loved me. We were not the thing each of us privately longed for; but our understanding of that made it possible for us to be to each other what we were. Our souls met and mingled in our love for music, in the grace and transcendence it provided us both. For all those years we were together, I listened daily as he played out his rapture, his questioning, his suffering; I knew him as well as he knew himself and perhaps better. However unconventional the manifestation of love between us, it was a true love. And even after it was over, it lasted.

It was Chopin who began our ritual of theater: it became incorporated into the house's routine as much as were the lavish breakfasts followed by walks, followed by work, followed by dinner, followed by fun. We might read aloud or play dominoes or cards, but mostly we loved play-acting.

Later, Maurice built a marionette theater and carved from willow wood twenty different characters, including a theater manager, policemen, Bamboula the Negress, and the Comtesse de Bombrecoulant, who made a show of displaying her ample bosom. The puppets' faces were painted by Maurice and his artist friends, and I sewed elaborate costumes for them: silk gowns and little frock coats and waistcoats enhanced with starched ruffs, embroideries, and feathered hats

Two years after Frédéric's death, I combined the billiard room and Solange's former bedroom into a large space that I made into a real theater, complete with a raised stage, proscenium, and benches for the audiences. To the left of that was Maurice's marionette theater, which I made high enough to hide the bodies of the people who animated the puppets.

There was beautiful, hand-painted scenery. I had equipment for sound effects: piano and trumpets and the horns used for hunting; and I had machines for making the sound of rain, wind, thunder, cowbells, ocean waves, carriage wheels, and birdsong. Long after Frédéric had left Nohant and even long after he'd died, I often saw him sitting in the audience watching the shows, erect in posture, the crease lines in his pants legs undisturbed, every soft hair on his head in place, his hands folded lightly in his lap, his lips pursed to let escape a whisper of the music he was putting to the scenes being played out before him, his delight muted but obvious; his love contained, yet given.

F
ACED WITH GROWING OLDER,
one is consoled by things both predictable and surprising. Grandchildren are expected to bring joy, and I lost my heart to all of mine: first to Jeanne, Solange's second daughter, who, to my great sorrow, died young of scarlet fever. But then came Marc-Antoine, Maurice's son, who was born after my son had the good sense to marry Lina Calamatta, who became a true daughter to me. The couple had two more children, Aurore and Gabrielle, and they offered me boundless joy. Those little ones and I made a nest of the wild thyme that came up year after year. They sat in my lap and I rested my chin on their heads, and I taught them to read, and the birds sang, and the wind parted the grasses, and the flowering gorse rose up next to water colored pink by a setting sun. What else better was there? What else better had there ever been?

February 1866

PARIS

“
A
h! So tonight we are graced with George Sand in her peach silk dress, here to rape Flaubert.”

This is the comment I overheard as I sat down with a group of men in a private dining room at Magny's restaurant. This group, made up of various artists and writers, had been founded by Sainte-Beuve, and they gathered bimonthly to dine and to enjoy vigorous conversation. After having received many invitations to join them, this was the first time I had come. It was for the express purpose of being with Gustave Flaubert, though not for the reason suggested.

In 1862, I had given Flaubert a good review of his historical novel,
Salammbô
. He had written me to thank me, and I had invited him to visit me at Nohant. At the time of this dinner, he had yet to come, but in the letters we sent back and forth a great friendship developed, in spite of our differences in worldview and character.

Over and over again I invited him to Nohant; over and over again he made his excuses—he was very much a recluse. In one letter, I told him: “You fancy that the work of the spirit is only in the brain, but you are very much mistaken, it is also in the legs. You live in your dressing gown—the great enemy of freedom and the active life.”

And he wrote back to me: “I wonder why I am so fond of you. Is it because you are a great man or a charming creature?” (This because I often assumed a male persona in my letters to him, just as I did in my private journals.)

On the night of the dinner, after a few minutes of my sitting silent and stiff-backed at the table, my glass of wine untouched before me, Flaubert finally blew in with the winter wind and came to sit beside me, close enough that I could feel the cold coming off his coat. I was becalmed by his open, handsome face. He was in his
mid-forties then, tall, blond, green-eyed, and one of those men who have about them a sense of coiled strength. I was in my early sixties, beginning to show age in my graying hair and in a certain drooping at the jowls, though my energy had not diminished.