The Edge of the Nest by Christopher Cruise

Author:Christopher Cruise
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784629656
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

‘The last flowers of the season

Mean more to us than

The firstborn of the fields…’,

but he didn’t refer to the poem’s bittersweet conclusion:

‘As the parting hour’s more precious

Than the moment when we met.’

which he would have found it hard to endorse during what he would refer to as his ‘black winter’ of 1856/57. The first symptom of the misery to come was a violent outbreak, four days after moving into the rue di Rivoli apartment, of an old physical problem, a neuralgic disease of the bladder. He had had a mild attack before leaving Paris six years ago, but of nothing like the virulence with which it now returned, causing frequent bouts of stabbing pain, blood and pus in his urine and even occasional incontinence. Although he had drawn up a rigorous programme for his Paris winter – work in the morning on what was to become A Nest of Gentry, reading and correspondence in the afternoon, dinners with friends and visits to the theatre in the evenings – he soon found he was almost incapable of writing, and much of the time the pain and embarrassment of his disease made all kinds of social life, even with his closest friends, out of the question. Fortunately Paulinette had returned to Mme Harang’s, as he would have found it difficult to explain to her what was wrong with him, but impossible to conceal his suffering for any length of time. It was perhaps a mixed blessing that when Pauline Viardot paid her first – and as it turned out only – visit to the apartment on a Sunday, when Paulinette was there, it happened to be one of those rare days when he was almost free from pain.

It is a cold, sharp January afternoon and Pauline is already forty-five minutes late. Turgenev paces nervously up and down the long rectangular sitting-room, frequently consulting his watch. Eventually he goes over to the window and stands gazing moodily out at the stern bare trunks of the lime trees in Le Nôtre’s Tuileries gardens, before craning his neck to try and peer down into the street. Paulinette is sitting in a chair, engrossed in a book, pointedly uninvolved in her father’s agitation. When the bell rings, she barely looks up as he hurries into the hall to open the door. He greets Pauline, who is wrapped in a Siberian sable given to her in Moscow, and reaches out to help her off with it. But she only draws it tighter across her chest, shivers a little and asks if it is always this cold. “The hall, yes, I’m afraid,” he admits. “I’ll have to find some way of heating it. But come in here,” he gestures towards the sitting-room, “there’s a good hot fire.”

As he ushers her in, Paulinette gets up, carefully puts a marker in her book, and bobs a minimal curtsey. Pauline kisses her on the forehead and asks how she is.

“Very well, thank you, madame. And you?”

“Oh, well enough. A little out of breath after all those stairs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.