The Gentle Barbarian (6 page)

Musset, who had known Pauline Garcia and had been in love with her when she was seventeen, said the voice had “the velvetness of the peach and youth,” and had written a poem in which the first verse runs:

Oui femme, tel est votre empire;
Vous avez ce fatal pouvoir
De nous jeter par un sourire
Dans l'ivresse ou le désespoir.

But the last verse contains the lines:

Mais toute puissance sur terre
Meurt quand l'abus en est trop grand,
Et qui sait souffrir et se taire
S'éloigne de vous en pleurant.

The extravagant words of Heine about her voice are well-known.

Her ugliness is of a kind that is noble and, if I might almost say beautiful, such as sometimes enchanted and inspired the great lion-painter Delacroix… The Garcia recalls to your mind not so much the civilised beauty and tame grace of our European homeland, as the terrible splendour of an exotic wilderness and during some moments of her impassionated performance, especially when she opens wide her large mouth with its dazzling white teeth and smiles with such savage sweetness and delightful ferocity, you feel as though the monstrous plants and animals of India and Africa were about to appear before your eyes as though giant palms festooned with thousands of blossoming lianas were shooting up—and you would not be surprised to see a leopard or a giraffe or even a herd of young elephants stampede across the stage.

Musset was more precise. Recalling the resemblance of her voice to the voice of her famous sister, La Malibran, he said there was “the
same timbre, clear, resonant, audacious; that Spanish
coup de gosier”
which has something, at the same time, so harsh and so sweet in it that it reminded him of the taste of wild fruit.

Heine's grotesque images magnify the reality. Pauline Viardot was an exotic: her inheritance came from the Triana. The strictly dedicated young artist, who had been brought up in cultivated circles in Paris, had race in her. She had the fine carriage of Spanish women; she sparkled in repose. Many other writers speak of something noble in her plain masculine face; in her portraits which are, of course, idealised, there is something else: authority. Such a strange figure must instantly have brought back to Turgenev the half-barbarous spell of his plain mother. Love at first sight, Jane Austen said, was a sign of giddiness: Turgenev certainly had the reputation of giddiness in Petersburg. But with him, love at first sight seems to have been a recognition of an earlier image printed in the heart.

If the voice of Pauline Viardot was part primitive and a gift of nature, it was exquisitely schooled beyond the rough spontaneity of popular Andalusian singing. An exacting musical culture had produced it: Pauline was born into a family who had been musicians for three generations. Her father, Manuel del Popolo Garcia, had been born in Seville in 1775; her grandfather had been a gypsy and as a child had been one of the harsh, shrill choristers of Seville cathedral and had become very quickly a professional singer and composer. Manuel Garcia's wife is said to have been an actress with all the hard-headedness of the theatre in her. There had been nothing for a poor ambitious man like Manuel in Spain and, being enormously energetic, subject to strong impulses, and having the gifts of a showman, he had moved the family in a business-like way to Paris. There he soon made a reputation as a tenor and pushed on to Italy, where he sought out Rossini who wrote for him the part of Almaviva in
Il Barbiere di Seviglia:
the opera in which Turgenev first heard Pauline was almost the Garcia family's property. Her father and her famous sister, La Malibran, had made their names in it.

In considering the character of Pauline one has to look more closely at the influence of this elder sister's life and fame. She was much older than Pauline, who was a child when her sister was already celebrated in Europe and America. In her scholarly life of Pauline Viardot and her indispensable account of her relationship with Turgenev,
The Price of Genius,
published in 1964, to which
all writers on Turgenev owe a debt, April Fitzlyon tells us that La Malibran became the incarnation, the goddess of the Romantic movement. Every poet worshipped her. Beautiful and of great independence of spirit she had caused an upheaval in the Garcia family by quarrelling with her father and marrying Malibran, an American banker, when they were in New York. Manuel had been unrelenting and even cruel in the training he had given his daughter and she had married Malibran to get away from him. She was not cast down by the failure of her marriage—her husband went bankrupt at once and became unimportant in her life—she eventually divorced him and after many love affairs married a gifted Belgian violinist. The extraordinary girl was not only a singer but a talented painter and a daring horsewoman.

One early adventure of the Garcia family—of which Pauline and all of them were proud—occurred when Manuel, having done well in New York, dragged his family to Mexico, where again they made a small fortune and decided to go back to France. On the rough and dangerous journey from Mexico City to Vera Cruz they were attacked by brigands who soon disposed of the frightened escort of soldiers and robbed the party of everything. Although Pauline was frightened—she was only seven—she used to say in old age “all this was terribly beautiful, I liked it.” And apparently, the excited and cheerful Garcias laughed all the way to Vera Cruz afterwards.

Pauline had scarcely known her marvellous and tragic sister. La Malibran was killed at the age of twenty-eight in a riding accident when she went to sing in Manchester. The father was more tender with Pauline. She would have preferred to have been a pianist and was very accomplished, but singing was the family tradition and she was persuaded by her sister's fame to emulate her. To La Malibran singing had come by nature, she had an unmatched ease and range of voice and could move from tragedy to comedy without effort. She was indeed lazy. Not so Pauline: she worked at whatever she was doing (the family said), “like an ant.” By temperament she was an intellectual; she applied her will and very good mind to her task of acquiring range by will and this quality was to have a special appeal to Turgenev's deep regard for critical intellect. Throughout her life, music critics were amazed by a singer who studied the literary texts
of the operas she sang in. There are two more aspects of her character as an artist: the story of her sister's life warned her against a reckless marriage and the Bohemian love affairs that had followed. Pauline was no rebel. And there was the influence of her shrewd mother who embodied the cautious business sense of a family of geniuses who put their art first.

When Turgenev was carried away by Pauline's voice in Petersburg he was listening to an achieved artist who had worked hard as he had not and, who although three years younger than himself, was already an idol. She was well-educated. She was a quick linguist. She was married and a mother. Her French husband, Louis Viardot, was in his forties. He was the capable and honourable son of a respectable judge and, in addition to being her impresario, had a modest reputation as a translator, a writer of travel books and studies of European painting.

There was nothing reckless in this marriage, even though Pauline's husband was in his forties, twenty-one years older than herself; she respected him, she relied on him absolutely but was not in love. The curious and sensible marriage had been arranged by George Sand, who had known the Garcias and Louis Viardot for years: and it can be said, at any rate, to have satisfied George Sand's ruling maternal passion. More than once, after her own unhappy marriage, she had been attracted to young women and in the young Pauline she saw a girl whose independence as an artist of growing powers would need protection from the dangerous temptations and illusions from which she herself had suffered in her own early scandalous days. In middle age, however, George Sand's motives were never quite simple: her jealousy was aroused when she heard Musset, one of her own disastrous and discarded lovers, was courting the girl, who, luckily, was disgusted by his drinking and his libertine life; but that would still leave her open to folly. George Sand worshipped the artist in Pauline and indeed was using her as a model for the ideal artist-heroine of her longest and most famous novel,
Consuelo:
Pauline always said that the portrait perfectly described what she herself was like and wished morally to be, although the wild adventures of the book were romantic invention.

Louis Viardot might be thought a comic middle-aged figure: he was short, he had a large nose which was a gift to caricaturists, he looked as if he were going to tip over; people found him dull, inclined
to fuss and a pedant. (In one of his
Prose Poems,
“The Egoist,” Turgenev is thought to have portrayed him as the imperturbable right-thinking man.) He was a decent man of principle. If public opinion in France or, indeed abroad, was to be considered—he shared the Republican and anti-clerical opinions of George Sand and particularly of Lerroux the Radical politician who had been her lover; but Pauline's mind was in her art. She knew he lacked the engaging, child-like qualities; if she did not love him she respected him and, with the utmost dignity and consideration, he loved her deeply. She had never loved anyone except her father and, perhaps, in Louis she saw a father reborn. It was noticed that she often called him “Papa.”

Turgenev went night after night to hear the singer. He pushed into his friends' boxes—he couldn't afford one of his own—and he shouted his admiration. His gentleness and shyness vanished as his shrill voice screamed applause, his mad behaviour was the joke of the season. There is nothing like the sight of a giant who is out of his mind. There was no performance without it. People told Pauline that the noisy ass with the long chestnut hair was a young landowner, a good shot and a feeble poet. The young singer had the pretty tactics of fame at her finger tips: an admirer who was far richer than Turgenev had given her a huge bearskin which was spread on the floor of her dressing-room and there she sat like an idol and four of her admirers were allowed the privilege of sitting at a proper distance on the paws. It was a long time before Turgenev was allowed to join her privileged admirers in her dressing-room and win his right to a paw. Once there, the quick, serious charm, the wit and his power of telling and acting amusing untrue stories came back to him. His French and German were perfect. But surrounded as she was by more important admirers, Pauline took little notice of him.

Turgenev had to be content to concentrate on Louis Viardot, who, like himself, was often pushed into the background and, in the classic fashion of such triangular beginnings, it was the men who became friends first. Writing his books of travel and art, managing the opera company and Pauline's career, seeing to it that she would indeed be another Malibran, developing her distinct personality and style—these were the lasting preoccupations of Louis Viardot's busy life. But once business was over, Louis Viardot saw a flattering and aspiring young writer with whom he had a quite unexpected taste
in common. It was decisive. Louis was fanatical to the point of comedy as a sportsman: he loved slaughter, as Pauline once said. He loved shooting birds in season and out. The sportsmen of Spasskoye and of Courtavenel in France, where Louis had bought a converted medieval chateau and estate, had a subject less strenuous than a love of music.

And there was more than that. The man of forty and the young man of twenty-five had other things in common. Pauline's Spanish spell had also caught Louis. He had written a book on Spain and had translated
Don Quixote
—not very well, they say. There was also the bond of politics: the two men were rationalists and democrats. Viardot was even thought to be politically dubious by the Russian secret police. The pair were at one in their hatred of serfdom. Louis was much taken by the clever young man and saw he could be congenial and useful. He saw that Pauline could clinch her popular success by singing a few Russian songs and that Turgenev was the man to teach her something of the language. Certainly they all met for this useful purpose, in the Viardots' apartment in Petersburg.

Pauline herself was captivated by the mixture of Oriental barbarity and polish in Court Society in Petersburg where everyone spoke French. She was persuaded to sing some Spanish gypsy songs to Russian gypsies: both parties were convinced that Russia and Spain had far more in common than they had with Western Europeans and in this their instinct was right. It is an irony that Turgenev, the Westerner who believed the future of Russia lay in learning from Europe, should have been brought to his one great and lasting passion by what looks like an atavism: her Spanishness had its Islamic roots; his own, remote though they might be, had something of this too. The Andalusian wit and feeling that underlay her French upbringing responded to his lazy, open Russianness. There was more than the buried image of his mother in Pauline, more than the attraction of a common love of music and the belief in the supremacy of art, more even than the conventional attractions of a handsome man for a plain woman, or of a young Quixote for a young woman who was set on the practical matters of her career.

The Viardots left Russia. The following year they came back to Petersburg and then went on to Moscow, where Turgenev took his mother to hear Pauline sing. His mother had heard the gossip about his absurd behaviour. She was annoyed. She did not mind him going
to bed with serf girls or having an older mistress of his own class—he had been having an affair with a miller's wife when he was out shooting near Petersburg just before meeting Pauline—but to dangle so seriously after a foreign actress killed any chance of the marriage his mother had hoped he would make. After hearing the singer she sulked, but came away saying “It must be admitted the damn gypsy sings well.”

The embittered, ill and ageing sovereign of Spasskoye was at this period of her life, showing her own ever-increasing powers as an actress. She had, as we know, broken with her son Nikolai because of his disgraceful marriage; cutting Ivan's allowance to next to nothing had not prevented him from stooping to literature and accepting an invitation from the Viardots to visit them in France. (He went, on the pretext that he had to see a doctor about his eyes.) She could not stand the company of her brother-in-law who had come to live in the house and got rid of him. Worse: the old gentleman had married and very happily. In spite of everything, she longed for the sons who would not obey her and she put on fantastic and malevolent scenes. One year she announced that there would be no Easter Festival—an appalling sacrilege in the eyes of her peasants and her neighbours. She ordered the priest to stop the ringing of the church bells and though the servants laid the great table in the hall with the Sèvres porcelain and had set out the bright red eggs, the lamb made of butter and the Easter cake, she made them clear it all away untouched.