The Gentle Barbarian (8 page)

Cette chose indifférente, impérieuse, vorace, égoiste, envahissante, c'est la vie, la nature …

Still, tell Louis there are a lot of quail about and shooting begins on the 25th. There is a plague of orange tawneys (
rougets
). In an hour her aunt has caught
“cinquante, cincuenta, fünfzig,
fifty,” on her face and neck. He's scratching himself with both hands. They're all waiting for Mlle. Berthe's arrival,
para dar a comer a los bichos
(“to give the bugs a meal”), as Don Pablo says, as a useful diversion. M.
Fougeux arrives, the king of bores. Turgenev goes rowing and puffing around the moat with him. The moat needs dredging. Fougeux is a man who speaks only in clichés and quotations. Over and over again he says “Nature is only a vast garden.” God!

One night he has a long fantastic flying dream. He is walking along a road lined with poplars and is obliged to sing the line
“A la voix de la mére”
a hundred times before he will be allowed to get home. He meets a white figure who calls himself his brother and who turns him into a bird. He finds he has a long beak like a pelican and off they fly:

I can remember it still, not simply in the head,
but
if I can so express myself, with my whole body.

They fly over the sea and below he sees enormous fish with black heads and he knows he has to dive for them because they are his food. A secret horror stops him. The sun suddenly rises and burns like a furnace. And so on. (Perhaps he was dreaming about his mother, his brother and the carp lying deep in the fish pond at Spasskoye. Many times in his later writings he evokes gross sinister fishes rising out of the deep water to threaten him. A great many years later, in a gloomy period of his life, he put this dream into a rhapsodic fantasy called
Phantoms:
it has little merit but suggests an erotic excitement or the frustration and fear of it.)

From her exhausting tours and the applause of audiences in London, Germany and Austria, the singer and her husband returned at intervals to Courtavenel to rest. They had taken in the young Gounod and Turgenev was for a time a little jealous of Pauline's interest in his work: there was some local gossip—George Sand indeed wrote to Pauline asking if he were “a good man”—but the friendship seems to have been strictly musical in its interests, though when Gounod suddenly married, his wife made trouble when Louis and Pauline sent her a bracelet.

On Sundays Turgenev would go off shooting with Louis or would go for charming walks with Pauline. They lay under the trees talking or reading books aloud or in the house he would go through the works she was studying. If there were parties Turgenev danced with
her; he was an excellent dancer. On ordinary evenings, the family of aunts sat about reading, knitting and sewing, and an uncle taught Pauline's rather spoiled little daughter Spanish, Gounod worked on a musical score, and Turgenev told stories.

Then Louis and Pauline were off again and every few days he was writing to her. The letters begin, Bonjour or Dear Madame Viardot, and there were friendly messages to Viardot. To hers, Viardot often added a postscript. Nothing could have been more correct; but by 1848, his letters often end in ardent phrases in German. She is his “dearest Angel.” Again “Thank you a thousand, thousand times for … you know why … you the best and dearest of women … what happiness you gave me then …” And “Give me your kind and delicate hands so that I can press and kiss them a long time … Whatever a man can think, feel and say, I say it and feel it now.”

Her hands were beautiful and he worshipped them all his life. In a letter sent to her in 1849 he said in German:

All day I have been lost in a magical dream. Everything, everything, all the past, all that has been poured irresistibly and spontaneously into my soul … I am whole … I belong body and soul to my dear Queen. God bless you a thousand times.

In July ‘49 at Courtavenel he went off to a village féte, studied the faces and watched the sweating dancers. He passed the next day alone and wrote to her in German:

I cannot tell you how much I have thought of you every day, when I got back to the house I cried out your name in ecstasy and opened my arms with longing for you. You must have heard and seen me!

There is a line in one letter in which, once only, he addresses her as “
du
.” From this and from the paragraphs in German some biographers have thought that Pauline and he had become physically lovers and that German was used to hide the fact from her husband who is said not to have known the language. This is most unlikely: Louis had been many times to Germany; as a capable translator in a bilingual family, he must at least have picked up some German in the course of his business and indeed from Pauline's singing. German is more likely to be “a tender little language” between intimate
friends and Turgenev, the polyglot, liked to spice his letters with foreign words for he could not use more than a word or two of Russian to her. Perhaps in using German he was simply using the romantic language of the sublime he had learned in Berlin when he was nineteen. Expressions of love are at once more extravagant and frequent in a foreign tongue and, for that reason, have the harmless sense of theatrical fantasy or flattery: platonic love affairs live by words and not deeds. George Sand wrote with the same exaltation in her novels; and young women of the period would expect no less from a correspondent, especially from the Russian “openness.” There is no sign that Pauline ever replied to Turgenev in such terms.

It is impossible to say more about the nature of this love for the moment; but there is strong reason to suspect that Pauline, duty or no duty, “hot southern blood” (as she once or twice said) or not, was one of those gifted young women who do not feel physical passion until later in life and have something mannish in their nature. And what about the guilt Turgenev may have felt in being in love with the wife of a generous friend? This is also a mystery: there is only a slight sign of this embarrassment in his stories.

In their biographies, Yarmolinsky, Magarshack and April Fitzlyon differ considerably in their interpretation. Yarmolinsky is vivid, engaging and ironical in the disabused manner of the nineteen-twenties and regards the love affair as purely platonic on both sides, a deep
amitié amoureuse,
which would go a long way to explaining why Turgenev never gave it up and why Louis Viardot tolerated it. (Louis was to become the father of four children.) Magarshack asserts that Pauline did become Turgenev's mistress and that the affair came quickly to an end because she gave him up for Ary Scheffer, the painter, who often came to Courtavenel and that when she and Turgenev were reconciled she was unfaithful to him and her husband again. He also accepts the common gossip that her second daughter, Didie, and her son Paul were probably Turgenev's children. Neither of these writers has closely considered the character of Pauline and all the evidence as searchingly as April Fitzlyon has done. She believes that Pauline did fall seriously in love with Turgenev and indeed felt passion for the first time; that it is just possible they were briefly lovers, though to neither of them was physical love important—indeed Pauline may have been put off by a dislike of “conjugal duty”—and that, in any case, she put her art before
personal relationships always and is well-known to have disapproved of the Bohemian morals of her profession. Far from having been her lover, Ary Scheffer—a man as old as her husband and a stern moralist—would be the counsellor who prevented her from leaving her husband for Turgenev and made her control her heart by her will which was certainly very strong. She says it is indeed just possible in the case of the son that Turgenev was the father, but it is unlikely and there is no evidence. And that although Turgenev made bitter remarks in the vicissitudes of his attachment to her and in his masochistic way said that he lived under her heel as many of his incredulous friends thought, he endured what he did endure because he was in love with his own chivalrous love.

In this situation Louis Viardot behaved with dignity and concealed the pain he must have felt. He was passionately in love with his wife and was no cynic: he remained friends with Turgenev all his life, although some thought their attitude to each other formal.

The situation indeed changed, as we shall see.

Whatever went on at Courtavenel in those early years there is no doubt that Louis and his wife must have regarded Turgenev affectionately as an extraordinary and exotic case. Viardot himself, as a traveller and one who had felt the Spanish spell of his wife, must have felt the Russian spell of Turgenev. They must have been astounded by the story of his barbarous experience at Spasskoye, and have been amazed that the giant had grown to be grave and gentle, as well as gifted. And Louis must have recognised a wit and a mind far richer than his own. The Viardots felt concern for his talent and both pointed to the dangers of idleness to a man who was rich enough to do nothing. Pauline was no amateur: she was an artist and a professional and it can never have entered her head that Turgenev, who was incapable of managing money or any practical matter, could replace her husband. One can see by their kindness, and especially Louis Viardot's, that although they saw his distinction and originality, their feeling must have been protective. Viardot had no small vanity in his own taste and exercised an almost fatherly right to give sound advice to the feckless aristocrat and was aware of having two artists on his hands whom he could keep in order. He was a rational man but quietly firm in requiring moral behaviour and decorum.

There is a line in
A Month in the Country,
the play that Turgenev began to write before he left Courtavenel and which in many respects is drawn on his situation as a lover. Rakitin, the lover, is made to say at the crisis of the play:

“It is time to put an end to these morbid, consumptive relations.”

Consumptive? Or self-consuming? It strikes one that those words must have been actually spoken at Courtavenel not by Turgenev but by Viardot. They have his manner.

There comes a moment, in one of the last letters Turgenev was to write from Courtavenel, when he adds a sentence in German:

What is the matter with Viardot? Is he upset because I am living here?

Turgenev was all personality but he did not pour everything away in talk at Courtavenel. He began to write and indeed earned a little money. He had before him the example of a young woman who sacrificed her personal feeling for her art. And there was the industry, even the literary influence, of Louis Viardot himself, who saw that Turgenev's talents would have to struggle against his expectations of great wealth and ease. The methodical slaughterer had written a book about his holidays with the gun. When he and Turgenev went out shooting near Rozay-en-Brie the dull country brought his memories of the ravines, the marshes, the oak woods of Spasskoye to life. He discovered that, Westerner though he was, he carried an ineffaceable Russia inside him; the Russia of his boyhood and young manhood became all the clearer in detail and stronger in meaning for being distant. Distance also freed him of the direct rancours of politics. He sat down to write prose, the first of
The Sportsman's Sketches.
He was proud to write to Pauline that he had sent off packets of manuscript to
The Contemporary
in Russia and the editor and the readers asked for more.

When he became a writer of stories Turgenev was obliged to find some way of disguising himself and of distributing his character among the people he created. In
The Sportsman's Sketches
he had to be, with his natural modesty, what he had been—an anonymous amateur of his sport, coming casually upon the country people of the private nation he had been brought up in. The people and woods of Orel and Kaluga were his educators as a writer.

He goes out apparently with nothing in his head except the simple happiness of the outdoor life and the love of nature. He walks or rides for miles, sleeps in the hay of any old hut. The day alone is the containing shape and the formlessness of the day is exactly suited to the eye that picks out the portrait of a human being as he picks out a snipe or a woodcock. One notices at once how he is neither an essayist nor a documentary reporter: a simple, reflective, poetic feeling sustains him. In the well-known opening sketch the enquirer's canvas may show through, but as in Maria Edgeworth's Irish writings (which, surprisingly, he had read), he sees a peasantry as they are.

The peasantry of Orlov is not tall, is bent in figure, sullen and suspicious in his looks; he lives in wretched little hovels of aspen wood, labours as a serf in the fields and engages in no kind of trading, is miserably fed and wears slippers of bast: the rent-paying peasant of Kaluga lives in a roomy cottage of pinewood, he is tall, bold and cheerful in his looks, neat and clean of countenance; he carries on a trade in grease and tar and on holidays he wears boots. The village of Orlov province (we are speaking now of the eastern part of the province), is usually situated in the midst of ploughed fields, near a water course which has been converted into a filthy pool. Except for a few ever-accommodating willows and two or three gaunt birch-trees, you do not see a tree for a mile around: hut is huddled against hut, their roofs covered with rotting thatch.

We see the landowner Polutykin drawn from life as everyone else is: “An enthusiastic sportsman and it follows, an excellent fellow,” who was always trying to marry rich heiresses and when turned down, would “shower offerings of sour peaches and other raw produce from his garden upon the young lady's relatives.” We see two of Polutykin's peasants: one is Khor—the polecat—a practical, sly, long-headed fellow who could easily buy his freedom but pretends he can't afford it. Kalinych, his closest friend, is an enthusiastic dreamer “who could charm away haemorrhages, fits, madness and worms; his bees always did well; he had a light hand.” Kalinych does
poorly on his plot because Polutykin insists on dragging him out shooting every day. This opening sketch also recalls the plain manner of Cobbett and contains one very Cobbettish statement about “the pedlars or eagles”—men who sell scythes to the peasants at mowing times and often exploit them. When the landowners took over the trade from these pedlars the peasants were angry: they missed the pleasure of bargaining and trickery; for “the eagles” also went round the villages to buy up rags for the paper-mills and their visits excited the women who sold every bit of rag they could lay hands on, even their husbands' clothes and their own petticoats. “The eagles” tried to get “hemp” off the women, but the men stopped that: getting “hemp” on the side was their own little racket.