Chopin's Funeral by Benita Eisler

Author:Benita Eisler [Eisler, Benita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T02:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Forty Pounds of Jam

To those waiting at the terminus of the Paris-Châteauroux coach on May 22, 1843, the six passengers who descended (having taken up all but one of the seats) could have been any solidly bourgeois household: Chopin, Sand, and eighteen-month-old Louise Viardot, accompanied by a baby nurse, a cook, and a manservant.

At thirty-three, Chopin no longer appeared younger than his companion, nearing forty; his slight form looked shrunken, the delicate features more wizened than boyish. As Sand would warn his sister Ludwika a year later, when she was about to see Frédéric after fourteen years of separation, she should try not to be shocked by her brother’s appearance: He had aged so terribly.

In the absence of Solange and Maurice, Sand and Chopin slipped into the roles of being parents—together. George was always enchanted by young children. Preparing for Louisette’s arrival, she had refurbished an old cradle with ribbons and lace, just as she had done twenty years earlier for her firstborn. Chopin was not normally a baby lover, but when the prodigious toddler took to calling him “P’tit Chopin” he became her slave, making faces, playing patty-cake, “spending hours kissing her little hands,” Sand said. His devotion was repaid; the little princess preferred Chopin to all her other adoring courtiers. With no other visitors, their shared delight in the baby’s activities—even to her “peeing on every carpet”—emerges as need: Their borrowed child joined two solitudes.

“We’re alone here, Chopin and I” was a refrain that summer in Sand’s letters; it was not the shorthand of intimacy, but a cry of loneliness. They worked and slept like relay runners; as one rose, the other went to bed after the night’s labors. Sand missed Maurice, in no hurry to leave the good life in Gascony, where he was staying with his bon vivant father. Chopin’s letters to friends in Paris— especially to Polish intimates—sound a note of abandonment.

Her fortieth birthday looming, Sand fell prey to suicidal depression, made more desolate by the sense that she had no one in whom to confide her grief at aging; all those close to her were dependents, starting with Chopin.

Deciding that a few days in the out-of-doors would raise both their spirits, Sand and Chopin set off in June for a three-day excursion in the back country beyond the Creuse River; most of the time, George walked while Chopin, using Maurice’s plushly cushioned custom-made saddle, rode Margot the donkey. Sand had to dissuade him from paying Maurice for use of the seat; instead, she wrote to her son, he could expect a gift from “le Père Gatiau” (“Sugar Daddy”), who spoiled them all with his generosity. George may have misunderstood—or preferred to misread—the impulse behind Chopin’s preference for paying Maurice. He did not want to feel beholden to one whose growing hostility was waiting to ignite into open warfare. They roughed it, sleeping on straw in haylofts. Chopin never felt better, Sand said. It was she who took to her bed with a bad stomach as soon as they returned.

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