The Gentle Barbarian (17 page)

Old French-language-and-grammar teacher in a school. Stodgy, parochial, inveterate snuff-taker, tedious, kindly enough at bottom, fond of joking in a donnish way. He is tall, stooped, sunken-chested; he is a bachelor, likes to go strolling along the quais: he's inquisitive, he'll stand and stare. He never goes out without an umbrella and wears big green gloves.

The novelist's impartiality is at work, but Pauline is sharper on the same man:

Head clerk in a banking house, disingenuous, spiteful, commonplace, greedy, his fingernails have never been clean—he breathes very heavily, and you hear all kinds of noises issue from his nose and throat—his eyes are dirty too, as for his teeth!

The comments were read aloud and were given either the
grande médaille d'honneur
or
la bêtise la plus complète
—awards which had to be accepted with grateful thanks.

One of the guest-players in this witty game was the local doctor, a Radical, who though he shared Louis Viardot's detestation of Napoleon III, privately regarded the company at Courtavenel as a collection of typical bourgeois liberal intellectuals who would do nothing for the working class. His name was Dr. Frisson and his comments on the portraits were solemn. Seven years on, when the Viardots left for Baden-Baden, Courtavenel was pulled down and sold piecemeal and it is not quite surprising that Dr. Frisson supervised the operation.

One comic disturbance did occur at Courtavenel. The soldier poet Fet arrived, having characteristically made a mistake in the day of his invitation. He was a neighbor of Turgenev's at Spasskoye, a great friend of Tolstoy's who, like him at this time, was opposed to the emancipation of the serfs and was a roaring reactionary. Turgenev loved him and quarrelled with him and said “Fet lies so sweetly that one wants to kiss him.” He was a poet and for Turgenev that was enough. Fet was a rough lonely fellow who hated Paris and spoke French badly and was turned out like “an officer endimanché with rings on his fingers and the ribbon of St. Anna in his buttonhole:” he told stupid stories in broken French so that the humour disappeared—“His eyes,” Turgenev wrote to Tolstoy, “were wide open, his mouth rounded with astonishment, yet open-hearted astonishment
was on his face.” He was blundering, bored everyone and he did not conceal that he wanted to get away up to Turgenev's room and have a real Russian shouting match. He did so and everyone was alarmed by the row going on upstairs. He was simply attacking Turgenev's democratic ideas as usual; also his folly in leaving Russia and for hanging on to the skirts of Pauline Viardot. Turgenev lost his temper too and said that for him
her
decisions on everything were absolute. Fet had come to get Turgenev out of the mess he was in.

“I am really only happy,” Turgenev said, “when a woman puts her heel on my neck and grinds me into the dust. What luck it is for a woman to be hideous.”

That is how Fet reported their row afterwards when he wrote his memoirs in old age. No one ever really believed what “the sweetest of liars” said. Still, Turgenev himself had spoken to the Countess Lambert about “ugly Dulcineas.” He had his malice. When someone in the party went up to see who was killing whom, the quarrel stopped and they came down quietly like children. The row had started because Turgenev had said how delighted he was to see his daughter had forgotten her Russian and had become entirely French.

In October, with the shooting done, the Viardots returned to their house in Paris and Turgenev took a flat there. His daughter was at school in Paris. She had been thrilled to see her father, for the lonely child needed an ally and was glad to get him away from his fascination with the Viardot girls. It is said that she was put out when Pauline Viardot came to see him at the flat, for the watchful adolescent thought, jealously, that Pauline treated Turgenev as if he were a husband and was indignant. It may be that in her managing way Pauline started complaining about the disorder in which Turgenev lived and his daughter did not understand the actress's business-like gush. Once in Paris, Pauline had become the singer again and now the warmth of the country holiday had gone: indeed she became firm and cold. And not from caprice. She told Turgenev she was pregnant again.

It has been suggested by Magarshack and others that the child was Turgenev's or that Pauline did not know whether it was his or her
husband's. The child was a boy called Paul who was said by some to resemble Turgenev. Against this is the fact that Turgenev took little interest in the boy; his deep affections in after years were for Pauline's daughters. Those who have gone thoroughly into the gossip concerning Turgenev's relations with Pauline and the parentage of her children—especially the possibility of Didie and Paul being his children—have found no evidence that he was the father of either of them. It is true he established a dowry for Didie, but she was conceived and born in a period when there were no known meetings between Turgenev and her mother. His special affection sprang from the fact that he saw the mother reborn in her, especially when she grew up. Turgenev confided in his brother Nikolai, and his brother absolutely denied that there was anything in the gossip which became general, especially among Russians who hated Pauline for getting him away from his country. There is nothing in the fact that Turgenev sent Pauline an enthusiastic telegram when Paul was born. He congratulated Pauline on everything and even invented a biographical entry for Grove's biographical dictionary for “the son of Louis and Pauline Viardot.” He foresaw the boy would grow up to be a musician and the flattery of the prophecy is entirely in keeping with Turgenev's gifts of fantasy. He made one request of the Viardots: that the children should regard him as their godfather. His imaginary, unreal, poetic family was complete.

One thing seems certain: the news of the pregnancy was a violent shock to him. He became ill at once, as he always did in these crises. And for many years after, indeed until Pauline retired from the stage, they were once more on very distant terms, even if they occasionally met. It is possible that Turgenev made advances to her that summer which angered her. It may be that this and not the earlier occasion in his youth was what she referred to when she wrote in a letter to the conductor Jules Rietz, quoted in April Fitzlyon's
Life:

without Ary Scheffer I would have committed a great sin—for I had lost my will-power—I recovered in time to
break my heart
and do my duty—I had my reward later—ah! I too had my gypsy instincts to combat—to kill passion … Scheffer watched over me like a father.

The sporting and literary friendship between Louis Viardot and Turgenev continued in a dignified way. Turgenev talked of translating Viardot's French version of
Don Quixote
into Russian. He did not do so, but he arranged for it to be published.

So Turgenev had, after all, “broken his head against the brick wall.” His illness was “the bladder complaint” he said, which had killed his father. The illness brought on neuralgia and long periods of depression; and as always with him a dramatic rush of fantastic images into his head. He said he had become an ant heap poked about by children, a shed falling to pieces, as brittle as glass; that he was rotting like frozen fish when the thaw comes on, that he was as foul as a squashed mushroom, a heap of rubbish not worth sweeping up and that a snake was gnawing at his vitals. If Turgenev was still malicious about others, he was savage with self-ridicule. He would never write another line and, remembering not to follow the mad Gogol's example, he had not
burned
his manuscripts, but had torn them up and thrown them in the water closet. Tolstoy saw him in Paris and felt a mixture of contempt and pity for this victim of love. The illness wore off but Turgenev's depression lasted. He was seen about in Russian society in Paris but he loathed the city and called Lamartine a whiner, George Sand garrulous and hated Hugo's tremolo. He had met Mérimée many times but his cold obscenities disgusted him, though he was glad to use an introduction to Monck-ton Milnes and Palmerston when soon after he went off to London.

He went there to visit Herzen and to attend a public dinner for the Royal Literary Fund where he saw Disraeli and talked with Carlyle, and in an account of English solemnities he gave his famous analysis of the diction of Lord Palmerston. He noted that at seventy-five Palmerston had an old man's voice, but clear and strong and that he spoke slowly punctuating his phrases with “er-er,” but always finished his sentences beautifully. These stutterings were a studied habit with English public speakers and, in fact, the manner was pleasant because it added a touch of naturalness to speech, a touch of good humour and surprise. And it amused him that Mérimée, who had tried all his life to achieve the English coldness and reserve, could only stumble in English and was lost without the formal aids of French rhetoric. Afterwards Carlyle tried to convince him that
the best government was autocratic, like the Russian!

After London he went to Sinzig, the spa on the Rhine, where he was tortured by a pain like toothache which went on all day until midnight. Nevertheless the little town brought back memories of his youth. From the deck of a Rhine steamer he had seen an old woman and a young girl placidly looking out of different windows of an old house and, for some reason of memory working upon his present life, he wrote an excellent long story called
Acia
which Tolstoy disliked. Delicately, in a few lines, Turgenev catches the charm of the town as he had seen it himself as a young man drinking the delicious wine, breathing the smell of the lime trees that embalmed the place, listening to the voices of the pretty German girls who “even when the moon appeared and made each cobble of the streets distinct” did not go home. For all his affectations of premature old age and his misery, the sensations of youth were an inexhaustible spring to which the poet in him could always return. The story is an odd one: it portrays a wilful, naive young Russian girl—a Russian “orphan,” and her first awkward awakening to love. The original upon whom he worked is said to be a child of his uncle's, but perhaps it was his own “orphan” Paulinette who came to his mind as he looked into her future.

Tolstoy wrote to him from Baden-Baden to say he had ruined himself at roulette, and to borrow money. Turgenev sent it and wrote: “If you knew how difficult I find things and how sad I am. Take a lesson from me: do not let life slip through your fingers.” Soon after Tolstoy came to Sinzig to borrow more—he had lost at the tables again. Turgenev himself had to borrow in order to rescue him and Tolstoy wrote in his diary “Vanicha … was very severe with me.” Turgenev told him he was living in a cesspool. He told him to roll up his sleeves and get to the workers' bench. Their comedy was still held at a harmless stage by Turgenev's tolerance.

But he was not cured of love by the short reunion at Courtavenel. He was a man of recollections, never to be cured of the past which shadowed him. Whether it was because he was indulging the strange pleasure of tormenting himself and could not resist the brick wall, he made one more brief visit to Courtavenel. Pauline was away in Budapest and he passed the time with Louis Viardot shooting. At last Turgenev's friends took action. Botkin, the tea merchant and epicurean, a man of large appetites—“a man,” Turgenev said, “with
a number of extra mouths, aesthetic, philosophical and fleshly, who munched noisily with all of them”—persuaded him to go to Italy and above all Rome, and Turgenev did begin writing a draft of his next novel,
A Nest of Gentlefolk,
there. He was stirred to exasperation by the Russian colony in Rome; the nobility were alarmed by the news that the problem of emancipating the serfs was at last being seriously approached in Petersburg. He stood his ground, albeit nervously: his opponents in Rome were alarmed because emancipation would affect their incomes—it would affect his own. He wrote to Countess Lambert: “I shall be a landowner and a gentleman, not a serf-owner.” The novelist was creating, in his mind, a hero—a practical projection of his own unpractical self: Lavretsky.

Botkin and Turgenev spent some time among the painters in Rome. One short essay, a portrait of the Russian painter Ivanov, shows Turgenev, the critic-artist-traveller, in good form. Ivanov had been working for years on his huge picture,
Christ Appearing to the People,
a work which the strange mystic and ascetic had started and re-started over and over again, something Balzacian, a
chef d'oeuvre inconnu,
an obsession. Ivanov lived in a state of involuntary semi-starvation and had reached a point of mania. He refused to eat in restaurants, because he said the waiters were plotting to poison him.

It is said [Turgenev writes] that Ivanov copied the head of Apollo Belvedere and the head of the Byzantine Christ he had discovered in Palermo over 30 times and gradually bringing them together at last succeeded in painting his John the Baptist … But true artists do not create in that way.

Ivanov was not a good painter but he belonged to “the transitory period”—as Turgenev more and more thought he himself did. Ivanov, he said, was imperfect and obscure, attempting something beyond his powers; but his great merit, as an idealist and thinker, consists chiefly in the fact that he pointed out the models to use, “leads us to them, awakens us, stirs us. He himself may not satisfy but he does not offer cheap satisfactions to others.” Once Turgenev showed Ivanov an album of good caricatures. Ivanov examined them and then raising his head said “Christ never laughed.” The naïveté of Ivanov delighted Turgenev, who was drawn to the beautiful observation of his small simple sketches. Where he succeeded was
in commonplace things, not in the huge clumsy grandiose “masterpiece” which he had laboured at for twenty years. These small things contained the tranquillity of the artist—the quality which Turgenev himself carried in his own nature.

The travellers went on to Florence and Venice and returned to Paris. His friends were relieved to see Turgenev returned to health. But like the hero of Italo Svevo's
Confessions of Zeno,
Turgenev replied with one of his ready fantasies that cherish illness as a religion: