The scene was somber at the start due to the news that both M. Viardot and Turgenev were in poor health. I’d heard Louis was not well, but the truth described in the conversations around me was worse than imagined—he’d had a stroke. In the meantime, Turgenev, often afflicted with painful gout in recent years, was now said to be suffering from an angina as well. Pauline took a moment to address us all and assured us we were very welcome and that our merriment would not disturb her patients—some had expressed concern. She said Turgenev, who occupied the fourth floor by himself, had even had a long listening tube installed so he could hear us. To cancel would sadden them, she said. They had asked us to carry on, and she extended it to us as a duty to be happy for their sake and improve their spirits also.
I had not seen Pauline since my return. She seemed vital still, if also weary from nursing what were effectively her two husbands. Leonine in appearance, she wore her hair in something of a silver crown; her skin was still smooth, her large dark eyes still shining, her cheeks full. She was the youngest of the trio, but there was something else to her, some vitality that had brought her all this way and remained, undimmed by her trials.
She then went around the room to greet us, and if we at first were somber, given the news, we soon saw she was happy to see us and tried to match her. When it was my turn, she kissed me on each cheek and, touching the earrings, said, Ah! You are prepared. How I love you, thank you. Now tell me, I must know at once—are you truly marrying? And what is this nonsense about curses and retirements?
Lies, every one, I said, and she laughed.
You were away too long, she said, and set her face in a moue. You must return Sunday when you can see the men at dinner. They won’t forgive me if I don’t get you up the stairs. Come early, though. And wear something especially beautiful. And forgive me for not seeing you in Faust. I don’t dare leave them alone.
With that, she swept on, greeting the next of the room’s guests.
Paris had been cruel to Pauline as a young woman. She came of age as a singer amid a field of established singers who’d felt they’d only just emerged from the shadow of her older sister, the legendary Maria Malibran, who had died some years earlier, far too young. If Pauline had been only half the singer Maria was, she would have been a threat to them, but she was much more than that from the beginning—a mezzo-soprano with a three-octave range, she could sing freely in many roles.
After her debut, the Paris opera houses turned their backs on her on the orders of these older, more experienced, vengeful sopranos. She’d needed to go abroad just to sing. Once there, she made herself into someone who could not be ignored by any opera house anywhere in Europe. She eventually returned to Paris with much acclaim, basking a little in the fury of her enemies.
Now that she had retired, this salon in Paris was her revenge on those earlier enemies, whatever else it was—a stage in her own house that she commanded, where no one could dismiss or surpass her. Those other singers might have paused at her age as their voices faded; her technique and her command of her repertoire was such that she made more of her ailing voice than most younger singers did with theirs.
Here was Pauline, then, still accompanying herself on her organ, beginning the evening with a song from Sapho, which thrilled us all. She went on to perform songs from Alceste, La Sonnambula, and Orphée et Eurydice, and then, after applause, she gamely gave curtsies to us and then moved down to her piano, where she announced she was to play Chopin’s Nocturne in C Minor, op. 48, no. 1 and began.
If Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor, op. 55, no. 1 is like looking for a love lost in the darkness, this is the descent into love, in all its richness, mortifications, and subsequent glories. It begins mournfully and then becomes tender, then passionate, then seems to rage in a movement from despair into redemption, then passion again, and at last, a plaintive, even affectionate acceptance that this will die and leave us. In Pauline’s hands that night, it was a storm of arpeggios, a passion made more beautiful by the way it aspires to immortality despite the knowledge of its own death approaching—a love that knows it can be lost and still loves hopelessly as long as it can. Pauline played it as only she could—which is to say, as someone who was a dear friend to Chopin, who had studied with him, collaborated with him, played four-handed beside him, and then sang Mozart’s requiem over his grave. A tenderness mixed with grandeur illuminated it all. Her performance was extraordinary, and the last bars sounded as if they were thrown over that final wall that is death, a last farewell to a lost beloved passing on into whatever lay beyond.
When she was done, the room was silent, humbled. We had been startled by the force of it, I think, or, at least, I had been—and the force of what I felt. I had wept. As I reached for my handkerchief, a movement near the door to the stairs caught my eye: a silver-haired shadow that could only be Turgenev, still in his dressing gown, his eyes bright with tears.
His listening tube abandoned, it had taken him all this time to descend the stairs.