The embittered, ill and ageing sovereign of Spasskoye was at this period of her life, showing her own ever-increasing powers as an actress. She had, as we know, broken with her son Nikolai because of his disgraceful marriage; cutting Ivan’s allowance to next to nothing had not prevented him from stooping to literature and accepting an invitation from the Viardots to visit them in France. (He went, on the pretext that he had to see a doctor about his eyes.) She could not stand the company of her brother-in-law who had come to live in the house and got rid of him. Worse: the old gentleman had married and very happily. In spite of everything, she longed for the sons who would not obey her and she put on fantastic and malevolent scenes. One year she announced that there would be no Easter Festival—an appalling sacrilege in the eyes of her peasants and her neighbours. She ordered the priest to stop the ringing of the church bells and though the servants laid the great table in the hall with the Sèvres porcelain and had set out the bright red eggs, the lamb made of butter and the Easter cake, she made them clear it all away untouched.
In another scene she sent for the priest to hear her confession, but when he got there she called for her house serfs to be assembled and told the priest she wanted to be confessed publicly. The priest protested that this was against the laws of the church but she shouted and threatened till the terrified man gave in.
The most powerful scene occurred on the date of Ivan’s birthday, a sacred day for her. She ordered him to come home. Budding orange trees were placed in tubs on the verandahs, the cherry trees were brought out of the forcing sheds. A great feast with the foods Ivan loved was laid out on the tables in the stone gallery, the flags of the Lutovinovs and Turgenevs were hoisted over the house and she had a signpost erected on the road on which the words Ils reviendront were painted. Neither son came, and retiring to her room she announced that she was dying. She called for Ivan’s portrait and called out, “Adieu, Jean. Adieu, Nikolai. Adieu, mes enfants.” As the household wept she ordered them to bring in the icon of the Holy Virgin of Vladimir. She lay on her bed imitating the death rattle with her favourites kneeling at her bedside—they knew it was all a farce—and obliged the forty servants from the highest to the lowest to come in and kiss her hand in farewell. When this was done she suddenly called out in a stentorian voice to Polyakov, her chief servant: “Bring some paper.” Her box of loose sheets for making strange notes was at her bedside and when it was given to her, she wrote down:
Tomorrow the following culprits must appear in front of my window and sweep the yard. You were overjoyed that I was dying. You were drinking and celebrating a name day and your mistress dying!
The next day the drinkers, from the principal servants downwards, were made to put on smocks with circles and crosses on their backs and clean out the yards and gardens with brooms and shovels in sight of her terrifying window.
In the following year—in 1846, according to Mme. Zhitova—Ivan did come home to ask her to recognise his brother’s marriage and to give him money. She stormed and refused. They got on to the subject of serfdom. Mme. Zhitova says she heard a conversation. It could have been matched, in this period, in landowners’ houses in Ireland or in the American South.
“So my people are badly treated! What more do they need? They are very well fed, shod and clothed, they are even paid wages. Just tell me how many serfs do receive wages?”
“I did not say that they starve and are not well-clothed,” began Ivan Sergevitch cautiously, stammering a little, “but they tremble before you.”
“What of it?”
“Listen mama, couldn’t you now, this minute, if you wanted, exile any one of them?”
“Of course I could.”
“Even from a mere whim?”
“Of course.”
“Then that proves what I have always told you. They are not people—they are things.”
“Then according to you they ought to be freed?”
“No, why? I don’t say that, the time hasn’t come yet.”
“And won’t come.”
“Yes it will come, it will come soon,” cried Ivan Sergevich passionately in the rather shrill voice he used when excited and he walked quickly round the room.
“Sit down, your walking about worries me,” his mother said.
“I see you are quite mad.”
The Viardots’ third season in Petersburg lasted until the spring of 1845 and they returned to France. Turgenev resigned from his post in the Civil Service on the excuse that he was having serious trouble with his eyes and accepted an invitation to stay with the Viardots at Courtavenel. There are signs that Pauline had lost her indifference and was falling in love against her will, and Turgenev spoke of this time as “the happiest time of my life.” From any other man these words would indicate that he had conquered, that the love was returned and fulfilled; but one notices that when he became the master of the love story, he is far more sensitive to the beginnings of love than to its fulfilment, to the sensation of being—to use one of his titles—“on the eve” of love, of standing elated as he waits for the wave to curl and fall. The spring—and also the autumn—mean more to him than high summer.
He went back to Petersburg and had some small successes writing for The Contemporary, a new review which was making an impression, and was distraught at being unable to see her. At last, in 1847, he borrowed money and went to Paris again and the Viardots let the penniless writer stay on at Courtavenel whether they were away or not. They were often away for months on end, as Pauline travelled from success to success all over Europe. If, as some believe, they ever became lovers, it was in the next three years and if they did not, it was the time when what has been called “a loving friendship” sparkled and crystallised.
Courtavenel was a strange and spacious house. It was close to Rozay-en-Brie and lay in dull but good shooting country, convenient for Paris. Louis Viardot had bought it from a Baron. It had two faces. The older face dated from the sixteenth century and had towers, a moat and a drawbridge; the modern one suggested bourgeois wealth and respectability, just the place for a prosperous family who entertained largely and would soon acquire a town house in the rue de Douai in Montmartre where they would go in the winter. When the Viardots went off they left behind them Pauline’s mother and her in-laws, her little girl and her governess, and a crowd of servants and gardeners, guests and visitors continued to come and go. When Dickens stayed there with the Viardots he complained that there was a general air of transience about the place; it was like a railway junction where people were changing trains, but to Turgenev such a life had all the easy-going openness of life in a Russian country house, without the provincial stagnation. The lonely young man who had not been able to stand life with his mother at Spasskoye had found a home and a cheerful family. He became a great friend of Mme. Garcia, Pauline’s mother, who was affectionate and full of salty Spanish proverbs. Pauline wrote letters to her mother and occasionally to him and they were read and re-read aloud; and he wrote amusing letters on his own and the family’s behalf and showed them to her mother before he sent them so that she could add postscripts of her own.
It is on the letters that Turgenev wrote to Pauline at this period—and indeed all his life—that we have chiefly to rely for our conjectures about their mysterious relationship and especially for our sight of his character. He wrote to her constantly about what he was doing, the people he met and especially about his reading and about her music and her performances, for he followed every report of them. Our trouble is that although she made time to write to him in her distracted life, only a handful of her letters have survived. He longed for them; occasionally some—to judge by his replies—were delightful for a lover to receive; but there is not a sensual or even an extravagant word of feeling in the few we have. She chattered away but is reticent and no more than affectionate.
The question of Turgenev’s relationship with Pauline and the changes in it are important. It was the opinion of a large number of his Russian contemporaries
that his love for her was fatal to his talent, for it was an obsession that took him away from Russia and damaged his understanding of his own country. It was also their opinion that she enslaved him and reduced him to the state of her cavalier servant and that he became the humiliated figure in a ménage à trois, and that his love was not a strength but a sign of his chronic weakness of will, at the root of his pessimism and his melancholy.
Turgenev called Courtavenel “the cradle of his fame.” There at the age of twenty-eight he felt that épanouissement de l’être which gave him his first important subjects. His letters of this time are the happy letters of a mind finding itself and growing. It is a cultivated mind. It is endlessly curious. It is spirited and critical: the letters are brilliant, changeable, discursive talk, all personality. One can see that Pauline Viardot was drawn to him by not only his gaiety and his serious interest in her art, but his ease as a natural teacher. He was flattering, but the flattery was instructed. For example, he told her she had not quite mastered tragic parts where her talent would eventually lie—Iphigenia would suit her, but Goethe was “a shade calm” because “Thank God you come from the Midi—still there is something composed in your character.”
Turgenev read everything rapidly and with excitement. He tells her that he has picked up a book by a fool called Daumer who holds the theory that Primitive Judaic Christianity was simply the cult of Moloch revived. A silly theory, but there is a terrible side to Christianity: the bloody, disheartening, anti-human side of a religion which set out to be a religion of love and charity. It is painful to read of the flagellation, the processions, worship of relics, the autos-da-fé, the hatred of life, the horror of women, all those wounds and all that talk of blood.
Under her husband’s influence Turgenev’s conversation was peppered with bits of Spanish. Pauline, of course, knew the language well. Turgenev took Spanish lessons at Courtavenel and was soon reading Calderón. Of Calderón’s Devoción de la Cruz he says he is the greatest Catholic dramatic poet since Shakespeare—like him, the most humane and the most anti-Christian: He has
cette foi immuable, triomphante, sans l’ombre d’un doute ou même d’une réflexion. Il vous écrase à force de grandeur et de majesté, malgré tout ce que cette doctrine a de répulsif et d’atroce. Ce néant de tout ce qui constitue la dignité de l’homme devant la volonté divine, l’indifférence profonde pour tout ce que nous appelons vertu ou vice avec laquelle la Grâce se répand sur son élu—est encore un triomphe pour l’esprit humain, car l’être qui proclame ainsi avec tant d’audace son propre néant, s’élève par cela même à l’égal de cette Divinité fantasque, dont il se reconnaît être le jouet.
He has moved on to Calderón’s La Vida Es Sueño with its wild energy, its profound and sombre disdain for life, its astonishing boldness of thought, set side by side with Catholic fanaticism at its most inflexible. Calderón’s Segismund is the Spanish Hamlet. That life is a dream will be both context and impulse when Turgenev found his genius in poetic realism and already we see him forming his theory of the contrasting characters of Hamlet and Don Quixote. But a Hamlet who marks the difference between the South and the North. Hamlet is the more reflective, subtle and philosophic; the character of Segismund is simple, naked and as penetrating as a dagger: one fails to act through irresolution, doubt and brooding: the other acts—for his southern blood drives him to do so—but even as he acts he knows that life is only a dream. (The lover is subtly trying to stir her southern blood and draw out her Spanishness.)
Contemporary literature, he reflects, is in a state of transition. It is eclectic and reflects no more than the scattered sentiments of their author. There is no great dominant movement—perhaps industrialism will take the place of literature; perhaps that will liberate and regenerate mankind. So perhaps the real poets are the Americans who will cut a path through Panama and invent a transatlantic electric telegraph. (Once the social revolution has been achieved a new literature will be born!) He doesn’t suppose that a spirit as discriminating, simple, straight-forward and serious as hers is has much patience with the stories of Diderot: he is too full of paradox and fireworks, though sometimes he has new and bold ideas. It is by his Encyclopaedia he will live and by his devotion to freedom. (There will be more than a touch of Diderot in the construction of Turgenev’s stories.)
Louis Viardot has asked him to arrange his library. There is a list of books read: M. Ott’s History is the work of a Catholic Democrat—something against nature: that idea merely produces monsters. There are other nauseating books on history in the library: Rolteck, for example, with his flat, emphatic style but there are the spirited letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; an absurd Spanish novel; Bausset’s Napoleon, the book of a born lackey; a dull translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, not exactly a marvel in the original. He has started on the Koran but despite its good sense he knows it will all lead sooner or later to the usual Oriental flatulence.
But he knows that what she will most want is news of the theatre, what he is doing and the small events of life in Paris where he goes to buy the papers for critiques of her performances and to stroll in the Tuileries and to watch the pretty children and their staid nurses and enjoy the crisp autumn air. Autumn on a fine day is rather like Louis XIV in old age. He expects she’ll laugh at that idea. “Well, go on laughing to show your teeth.”
Another day he goes to the woods at Ville d’Avray:
L’impression que la nature fait sur l’homme est étrange. Il y a dans cette impression un fonds d’amertume fraîche comme tous les odeurs des champs, un peu de mélancholie sereine comme dans les chants d’oiseaux
and adds that he adores the reality, the changes, the dangers, the habits, the passing beauty of life. While he is rearranging Louis Viardot’s library the servant is polishing, washing, tidying, sweeping, waxing from morning to night. One night as he goes up to bed he hears two deep sighs that passed in a puff of air close to him. It froze him. Suppose the next moment a hand had touched him: he would have screamed like an eagle. (Question: Are the blind afraid of ghosts?) He lists the sounds he heard one night as he stood by the drawbridge: the throb of the blood in his ears, the rustle of leaves, the four crickets in the courtyard, fish rising in the moat, a dull sound from the road, the ping of a mosquito. He goes out to look at the stars and writes what will become one of the certainties of his life:
Cette chose indifférente, impérieuse, vorace, egoiste, 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 “À la voix de la mère” 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.”
The Pritchett Century Page 60
