by J. D. Landis
“Very expensive,” he answered. “From Cuba.”
“It smells like shit, if you don’t mind my saying so.” To make her point, she pinched closed her nose.
“Oh, that’s not my cigar you’re smelling,” he teased. “It’s this.”
He withdrew his finger from the jar and held it up to her.
She gasped. “How dare you!”
“It’s only a little bit of oxen—”
“The last man who did that to me, I broke his finger.”
“Oh, no, no, no!” She didn’t understand what he was showing her. The poor girl thought he was baiting her with the digitus impudicus, when all he’d meant to do was make her laugh at the absurdity of his attempt to cure himself of pain and discontent.
“I’m sorry,” he said into the anger from her eyes. “I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s only ox manure.”
“On your finger?”
“Yes. Nowhere else, I assure you.”
“On your finger?”
“Yes.” He waved it at her before he realized that it did seem a rather obscene gesture.
“And you thought I would find that enticing?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“Doctor’s orders.”
“A good doctor tells you to wash it off your fingers, not to put it on them.”
“It’s a cure,” Robert explained.
“Well, thank God you didn’t break your jaw then.” Christel smiled. “Or your nose!” Now she laughed.
“Yes, thank God it’s only my hand,” said Robert ruefully.
“Does it still hurt?” Christel asked in a sympathetic way that Robert realized was the beginning of seduction.
“Yes.”
“So much for ox manure, then.”
“Yes, so much for ox manure.”
“Go wash it off. And I mean off. Heat the water.”
“That will take time.”
“Heat the water. I can wait.”
As she waited, she came gradually out into the air from beneath the sheet—narrow shoulders, tiny breasts whose very diminutiveness was for him a comfort and delight, solid ribs, surprisingly large buttocks that had been the first thing about her he had noticed, swelling genially beneath the fabric of her skirt as one day he had come upon her at the Wieck house bent over to retrieve a piece of fallen piano music.*
By the time Christel was fully uncovered, her long feet now complemented by her long legs, he had washed his hands under her scrutiny.
She threw to him, from the bed, the small towel she always placed between her legs just before she drifted off to sleep. It was still wet with the two of them so that when he came to her he was still drying his fingers.
“Enough,” she said and took the towel from him.
“Charitas,” he said as he lowered himself upon her, because she loved for him to call her by a name that was his alone for her.
“Now,” she said, pulling him within her.
“Careful of the hand,” he whispered.
*It would be interesting, if impossible, to learn whether Clara is referring to Ulrike von Levetzow or to Marianne von Willemer. The former was fifty-six years Goethe’s junior, a difference in age that was of no concern to Goethe himself, who believed that the older a man became, the more women there were to love, not the fewer; it was for Ulrike that he wrote the Marienbad Elegy, convinced he had lost her because his passion was so vast, the accumulation of love in a man that toward the end of his life is simply, and tragically, too intense for any woman, no matter how youthful and acquiescent.
*Mr. Sweetfoot—the late Frau Goethe’s affectionate term for her husband’s penis.
**Clara was apparently, in using the word Fussnote (footnote), both showing off her newfound love of words to the person who might most appreciate it and, with this play on words, forcing his attention back to the utterly prurient Schönfuss.
*This he discovered was the very delightful and simple Opus 20 Sonatina by Jan Dussek, who had been so handsome that he could not bear the fact his audiences were unable to see his face and thus he turned his piano to the side and became the first pianist to display his profile, to say nothing of allowing the raised lid of the piano to become a sounding board. However, after the death of his revered patron, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Dussek became so fat that his profile completely disappeared and the man whom the French had called le beau Dussek became known as le gros Dussek and was buried in the bed in which he died in St. Germain-en-Laye, having grown so large that, once rigor mortis set in, he could not have been removed from the bed without the amputation either of his limbs or no small portion of the bed itself. Because he made Christel laugh in telling her this story, it was not long until the two of them were in Robert’s bed.
Paris
APRIL 9, 1832
I really don’t know whether there is any place with more pianists
than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere.
Frédéric Chopin
Her father hated Paris. He complained constantly. Though they both spoke French, it was not a French that was understood by the French. What good were all their letters of recommendation when he couldn’t make people understand what they were in the first place? The French looked at these laudations like menus in a restaurant in which they had no desire to eat. Even when he explained, “Un pauvre Allemand ne comprend pas un mot à Paris,” people didn’t understand that he was telling them he was an unfortunate German who didn’t understand them, and so they would go right on bringing him a fly swatter when he’d asked for a chair or dog food when he’d requested watermelon.
Before beginning what turned out to be four uninterruptedly miserable days and nights in the diligence in order simply to get to Paris, he first had to pay the driver a bribe so he and Clara might sit inside. Only then did he discover that the French, as if it were a national obsession to force bodies upon one another, squeezed in six people to occupy the four seats. Worst of all, he wasn’t allowed to smoke even one of the fifty cigars he had so carefully selected and protectively packed. It was nearly enough to cause him to draw the pistol he kept in his belt whenever he ventured out of Leipzig—if you won’t let me smoke a cigar, I’ll shoot you! Once in Paris, he found he must not smoke in restaurants or in the salons of the wealthy to which he brought Clara in case she might be invited to perform, because the ladies said cigar smoke made their dresses stink. Thus he smoked only in the little hotel room they shared, where he griped endlessly about the cold because he was unable to get the fireplace to work and because the stone floor sent the chill right up his legs and into his lungs. And he felt dirty all the time, as who would not, he said, when they were given one towel a week to share and one glass of water a day between them for bathing. “The French. Ce n’est pas dire!”
Yet for all the filth, he was forced to dress like a popinjay, out nearly every night to publicize her in a blue double-breasted, brass-buttoned, velvet-collared frock coat and black trousers with the silk stripes along their seams in the new style dictated by Nestor Roqueplan and gloves the gaudy yellow of Goethe’s house and a neckband as white as the new dress he had to buy for each of her appearances in public, because heaven forbid someone see her wear the same dress twice, though no dress of hers ever became nearly so dirty as his neckband after a single night out among the princes, ambassadors, and ministers in their tapestry-suffocated salons filled with porcelain, ornate vases large enough to contain the body of a faithless lover, which gossip indicated would include everyone they met, and stuffed birds held aloft upon spikes up their derrières. In such places as this, where a mass for the dead was as likely to be sung as a fugue to be fiddled with, of primary concern was whether the ice cream would be served before or after the De Profundis.
Then there were the heavy-actioned pianos, from whose tough bones he continually lamented she could get no expression suitable to her clear and singing style—every note sounded jerked and quivering.
Clara, on the other hand, adored Paris.
Until now, the most sophisticated city in which she had been was Dresden (the further spread of cholera having kept them out of Berlin on their way to Paris). But what was Dresden compared to Paris? Paris was life; Dresden was merely breath.
And what was life? Life was revolution. So said Herr Schumann, who was referring more to art than to the affairs of man, though he had told her—more than once; perhaps a hundred times if not a thousand—that art has a greater effect upon man than does politics, even if its influence always hovers in the blood as distinguished from spilling it.
Little more than a year before they had arrived, there had been blood flowing in these very streets, as the Bourbon Charles X was pushed aside after the “three glorious days” and with him all his censorship and restraint, not to mention the inquisitorial burden of Catholicism as the state religion.
As a result, Paris seemed to her the first place she had ever been where the air outside her matched the heat within her. It was not a matter of temperature, or fever, but of ardor. The city burned with a passion for passion itself.
There had been riots over performances of Hugo’s Hernani, though whether for its insurrectionary politics or its botched alexandrines no one seemed to know. Even now, with the Orléanist Louis Philippe in command, the streets (though lighted at night with the gas lamps installed by Napoleon after his 1813 defeat at Leipzig in a futile attempt to be able to see the invading allied armies) were full of a kind of raucous unrest as defeated revolutionaries from other countries streamed into France and gravitated toward the restaurants and brothels and liberal newspapers of Paris, in particular the Poles, whose revolt had been crushed by the czar with the defeat at Ostroleka and the retaking of Warsaw. These Poles were far and away the most popular of the democratic zealots among the Parisians, who admired their unselfconscious swagger, and their ability to hold their liquor, and their beatifying of their General Sowinski’s wooden leg by which his corpse was planted upright like a scarecrow over the acres of his dead soldiers, and most of all their utter Polish lunacy in having challenged the very Russians who twenty years before had chopped up Napoleon’s French soldiers into an average of six pieces each.
Fearlessly, excitedly, Clara walked everywhere—with her father, of course. He would have preferred to have been left behind as much as she preferred to be allowed to go out alone, which he would not permit her, though she hardly thought she might be mistaken for what she learned was called a lady of the night, for reasons she could not entirely fathom because such women were absolutely multitudinous in broad daylight around the Palais-Royal and on the boulevard Montmartre and between the Hôtel de Ville and the Châtelet and even on small winding streets like the rue de la Vieille Lanterne where they stood in the doorways of doss houses, the images of whose rooms made Clara shudder with fear and excitement. Surrounded always by the ubiquitous posters warning of the terrors of venereal disease, which Clara found peculiarly tantalizing, these audacious women were wrapped in colors so bright that she felt positively drab when she put on her puffy-sleeved white dresses in the evenings. Her father turned up his nose when they came upon these ladies, but then he looked down its long, curving planes right at them, head aswivel, mouth agape. He never mentioned them, and he and she never discussed them, but Clara knew what they were and what they did and stared at them a lot more directly than did he.
There were virtually no sidewalks in Paris, and so they often made their way in the streets themselves, she with her hand in his arm because the large hunks of stone that made up the streets were of unequal height and because she was proud to be out with her Papa even if she would have preferred to be out alone. All around them careened the small calashes, cabriolets, britskas, tilburys, and victorias, which far outnumbered the huge berlins and landaus and barouches, cumbersome traveling beasts next to Lord Brougham’s sporty new coupés, in which she longed to ride with her hair loose and unribboned and her face to the wind.
But they walked, not rode, all the way to the western boundary of Paris at the Place de la Concorde, where Louis Philippe had ordered trees be planted to shroud those places where the guillotines had stood and where Clara now imagined the hordes screaming as the heads plopped down into their baskets and the dying of an age that Herr Schumann said had brought its death upon itself because of its injustices to people and its rigid adherence to outmoded forms of artistic expression.
She insisted her father take her where few dared go, beyond the place de la Concorde toward the Champs-Elysées and then down to the edge of the forest where workmen climbed like tiny bugs all over a huge arcing framework of canvas and wood that had been begun twenty-five years earlier, and thus even before the birth of Herr Schumann a mere twenty-two years ago come June 8, by Napoleon in honor of his triumphs. Nearly everywhere they went, in fact, there was evidence of Napoleon’s influence on the building of this city, from the Bourse to the smaller Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile to the Chamber of Deputies to the Vendôme column to the Rivoli wing of the Louvre to four of the bridges over the Seine—Beaux-Arts, Austerlitz, Saint-Louis, and Jena—though it didn’t matter what bridge she was on, she loved to stop and stare down into the water as if it were her own blood flowing through Paris. Even the finest street in Paris, the rue de la Paix, was still referred to by most as rue Napoleon.
To the south she and her father walked to where the city ended and saw the Tuileries, to which the royal family had moved from the Louvre. In the Latin Quarter they strolled about the monastery of the Feuillantines, where Victor Hugo himself had lived before moving to the rue de Vaugirard, not far from Charles Sainte-Beuve, who was part of a group of young romantics surrounding Hugo in one café or another in the faubourg St.-Germain and whose name she had heard whispered in more than one salon as the lover who had stolen Hugo’s wife, Adèle. But the story that most excited her about Sainte-Beuve was one more brayed than whispered and concerned his love for girls her own age, he being in his late twenties already and taking these girls to the Café Brébant, where he was said to have said to one of them, “Listen, my child. I want to satisfy all your desires. Ask of me the finest, the most expensive, the most exquisite thing of which you have ever dreamed,” to which the girl was reported to have licked her lips, smiled with delight, and lisped, “I would like to eat some tripe, Monsieur!”
When she dreamed of coming upon these men in one of their cafés, and thought of what she might say to them that didn’t involve anything as silly as tripe, or sweetbreads for that matter, she realized she had something more in common with at least one of them than merely her devotion to art and to the revolutionary in art. This was with Gérard de Nerval, who was younger than the rest and at the age of nineteen had become famous for his translation of Goethe’s Faust. It was said that Nerval had fallen in love with a beautiful young woman he had seen but once, riding past him through the woods near Chantilly, and, not knowing her name, called her Adrienne and wrote about her and discovered only much later that she was a poor English girl who had been won at a game of whist from the duke of Kent by the duc de Bourbon, who upon the recent ascension of Louis Philippe had been found hanging from an espagnolette in his château at Saint-Leu. Nerval had been one of those lucky ones to attend the première of Hernani, to which he had gone with his best friend, Théophile Gautier, and Théophile Dondey, who turned his name into Thimothée O’Neddy so as not to be just another Théophile and wore glasses when he slept so he might better see his dreams, and Petrus Borel, who was famous for the orgies at his home in the rue d’Enfer, at which Nerval dressed like—exactly as she would have pictured him—young Werther, drinking rum mixed with ice cream from a skull he said was his mother’s and dancing endlessly the fashionable galop internal, in which people moshed their bodies together so violently that all eventually ended up unconscious, which she assumed th
erefore must happen following the orgy part of the evening unless she was misinformed as to exactly what an orgy was.
She actually found herself rehearsing her lines in case she might meet up with Nerval and his pack of rowdies, known as les bousingos: “I am Clara Wieck, whose fanny was fondled by Herr Goethe before he gave me this medallion of himself accompanied by a note that says, ‘To the greatly gifted artist Clara Wieck.’” The problem was, her father carried the medallion sealed up in its box, and she knew she could never ask him to display it in her favor to these beautiful young men of whom she wanted nothing more than to sit in their presence and be desired by them.
So instead of a glass of wine or a cup of tea at Café Brébant, she had to be satisfied with her father buying her an ice cream from Violet in the faubourg Montmartre or a pastry from Frascati, whose bakery was in the same building in which Balzac had lived and was right across the street from Camille Pleyel’s famous piano shop, where Monsieur Pleyel sold the pianos his firm manufactured.
Soon after they arrived in Paris on February 15, her father took her to the Salle Pleyel, which was on the ground floor of that magnificent building, and introduced her by saying, “This is my daughter, Clara. She plays the piano. She plays the piano better, in fact, than does your wife.”
Monsieur Pleyel shook his head and laughed and said, “Nobody plays the piano better than my wife. Except perhaps for Chopin.”
“Chopin,” repeated her father. “Yes, I’ve seen your advertisements in La France Musicale. I tried to call on Chopin, upon the recommendation of another of my pupils, Robert Schumann, but Chopin was too impolite to receive us, though Schumann himself has written a most positive review of Chopin’s Variations on “Là ci darem” from Don Giovanni. Would you care to hear my daughter play them?”
“Thank you, no,” said Monsieur Pleyel, much to Clara’s relief.
Though she had been, she believed, the first to play Chopin’s piece in Germany—at the Town Hall in Weimar two days after she had received Goethe’s approbation—she could remember when she and every other pianist had considered it incomprehensible and virtually unplayable. She had been forced to spend eight whole days learning it to the degree that it might satisfy the Weimar audience, if not herself. And the last thing she wanted was to sit down here to play and be interrupted by the arrival of Monsieur Pleyel’s wife, the former Marie Moke. It was not that Marie had studied piano with Herz, with Moscheles, with Kalkbrenner himself, and had become the wunderkind against whom all other wunderkinder were measured. It was Marie’s renowned beauty that intimidated Clara, filling her with a fear of what would happen should she be playing the piano and get a first glimpse of this famous young woman rising toward her—hair, face, neck, breasts—over the keyboard. As if it weren’t enough for her poor assaulted imagination to picture this, she now began to worry that Anna de Belleville might marry Pierre Erard, whose pianos were the first equipped with foot pedals and were said to be Anna’s favorites among the French—though their reputation had suffered ever since Hector Berlioz had written a story about how an Erard piano had begun to play Mendelssohn’s GMinor Concerto all by itself and could be made to stop not by the application of holy water, not even by dismemberment, but only by its pieces being set on fire! And they said Berlioz and Mendelssohn had been friends ever since they’d met in Rome just the prior year and met every morning to sing Gluck’s Armide together!
