Metro Stop Paris Page 18
Proust had a horror of theatres and public concerts. According to the novelist André Maurois, he had the Quatuor Capet round to his apartment on Rue Hamelin to play to him alone at night as an inspiration for his work. They came and performed Debussy's Quatuor. Debussy's correspondence does indeed indicate that in 1901 the Quatuor Capet was giving private performances of his Quartet. In Maurois' account Proust insisted that no one else attend: "If there are others present I would be obliged to be polite and I would not Usten . . . I need absolutely pure impressions for my book." While the musicians played, Proust lay down on a couch, his eyes closed, searching in the music for some mysterious communion. In 1911, more and more a recluse, he employed the Théâtrephone—a telephone that broadcasted live musical and theatrical performances—to Usten, night after night, to Pelléas et Mélisande.
"LOVE," WROTE PROUST, "is space and time made sensitive to the heart." This was not so very different from Debussy's notion of the "Cult of Desire," the joy of the moment which he had described to Prince Poniatowski. Debussy's problem is that he not only fed this into his music; he lived like that. Debussy's private life was a drama, a story fit for the composer of Pelléas.
One of the friends Debussy and Proust had in common was Robert Godet, a man of immense learning who made his name in the press as a Wagnerian zealot, but could speak on any subject one chose. He had travelled with Debussy to Bayreuth in 1889 and remained one of Debussy's correspondents for the rest of his life—a most unusual case. Just before their trip to Bayreuth, Godet had given Debussy a copy of his youthful first novel, Mal à aimer: é'tats d'âme. Love, as Proust would have put it, was the most intense of all sensations but also the most dangerous. Godet presented his hero, a sensitive Swiss musician, like Godet himself, as being faced with two life plots: that of Wagner's Tristan, which concludes with the death of the two lovers, or Tolstoy's Katia, in which the hero puts all passions aside and marries for reason. "Does one prefer the end of Tristan or the end of Katia?" asks Godet in his novel. "One must choose." Godet, like his hero, chose Katia by marrying a dull and sensible Dutch woman. Debussy wrote ecstatically to Godet on Saturday morning, 13 July 1889: "Dear Friend, I read you all this night!... Don't feel wounded if I declare immediately my sympathy for your 'unhappy prose.' At places I had the rare sensation of'Real Beings' whose sufferings were clear to me." Debussy chose Tristan.
His friendships and his love affairs were always of the most passionate kind. And they always ended with sorrow and, usually, complete rupture. He told both Ernest Chausson, the composer, and Pierre Louÿs that he had never enjoyed such friendship; he broke with them both. His mistress, Gaby Dupont, with whom he shared a fifth-floor flat on Rue Gustave-Dore, attempted to kill herself. Debussy himself showed certain suicidal traits. 1898 was a bleak, impecunious year. "I never arrive at doing anything without some event happening in my life," he wrote to Louÿs at the end of March; "this is what gives superiority to memory, from that at least one can redeem a few valuable emotions'—a most Proustian thought. "I need something to love, something to which I can hook on to, without which I should go mad, and might as well commit suicide, which is a bit stupid." A month later he was writing again to Louys, "I feel alone and distraught, nothing has changed in the black sky that forms the backdrop of my life, and I do not know where I am going if it is not towards suicide ."Gaby moved out of the flat in December. Debussy moved to another tiny fifth-floor flat at 58, Rue Cardinet, today classified by the City of Paris as a historic monument, with its plaque inaccurately stating: "Claude Debussy installed himself here in 1901 and composed Pelléas et Mélisande: it was a disaster, followed by a triumph."
In the 1890s Debussy, like all his friends, had been bathed in the poetry and prose of the American inventor of terror, Edgar Allan Poe, thanks largely to its able translator, as great a giant as Poe, the symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire. Prior to attending Maeterlinck's Pelléas at the Bouffes Parisiens, Debussy had been working on an operatic version of Poe's Fall of the House of Usher—he was still working on it during the First World War. It was undoubtedly because Poe was exercising such an influence on both Maeterlinck (who admitted that his play was derived from The House of Usher) and Debussy that the latter decided immediately to begin work on Pelléas. The old castle was modelled after Usher's crumbling ruin. The gloomy colours, the cold cellar, the working of events the characters are powerless to control are all borrowed from Usher. So too are the fateful words Pelléas utters to Mélisande:
"You are strangely beautiful when I kiss you like that. You are so beautiful that one would say you are going to die."
Debussy's choice of Tristan, and his subsequent adoption of Poe, took him to Poe's women—innocent, sickly creatures like Ligeia or Morella. Gaby, after leaving Debussy, fell into a state of poverty. In her eighties she was seen in Rouen, under the German occupation, collecting cigarette butts in the streets to satisfy a nicotine habit she had picked up from Debussy. More poignant still were the events that happened on the fifth floor of Rue Cardinet as Debussy prepared for the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande.
On 3 April 1899 Debussy wrote from Rue Cardinet to his editor Georges Hartmann, 'After so many bad and sad days, I believe I have rediscovered a little moral tranquillity." On the nth he was asking him for 200 francs, "which I will reimburse as soon as possible"; Debussy would always remain in Hartmann's debt, as he would with all subsequent editors.
Sometime that month he had met the beautiful Liliy* Texier, who worked as a model at Paris's elite fashion shop right behind the Opera, Mesdames Sarah Mayer et A. Morhange, on the corner of Rue Auber and Rue Boudreau. Their correspondence suggests the encounter had taken place on a tram. "My dear little Lili," he wrote on Friday, 21 April, "If you are really kind you will put on your pink skirt and your black hat and come and say bonjour Sunday around 2.30." He noted there was no lift to the fifth floor. On Monday, 24 April, he wrote, "My dear little Lili, Claude is not yet cured of the bites from your dear little mouth . . . Impatient of your mouth and your body, I love you. Your Claude."
For six months it was "Ma Lili jolie," "Ma Lili amé'e," "Lili ché'rie et très adore'e" and even "Si adorablement Lilly si délicieusement Mimi"—after the heroine of Puccini's La Bohéme (who died): "I send you my longest and best kiss," "I alone in this huge bed look vainly for a little corner that has not been embalmed in your memory," "I drink at your mouth" and "never has anyone loved you with such absolute abandon." All the objects in his two-room flat, exquisitely decorated in art nouveau, bore her presence; the great old Japanese toad on the mantelpiece "looks obstinately at the door through which he is accustomed to see you enter." She suspended time: "You who have abolished all the Past... you know my insufferable need to see into the Future." But she did not suspend his debts: two weeks before Louÿs married Louise, the daughter of the poet Jose-Maria de Heredia, Debussy was asking him desperately for fifty francs—"I am in the blackest mess, without even mentioning my 300,000 francs of debt." He told Lilly of an anonymous letter, "bête et mé'chante, "menacing him for payment. She did seem to invite on the household malady Debussy could not attend Louÿs ' marriage because he was so ill and, in September, he asked Proust's doctor, Abel Desjardins, to come round to the flat "to see my little Lilly... only don't damage her." There was a Mimi and a Mélisande living in little Lilly: "You have made me love you more than is perhaps permitted to a man; there is in me a need to destroy myself that almost overrides my need for joy—a tension so violent that it almost resembles a desire for Death" (3 July).
Claude and Lilly Debussy were married in a civil ceremony at the mairie of the Dix- Septième Arrondissement, on Rue des Batignolles; five witnesses were present, including Pierre Louys. "Debussy is married," remarked Arthur Fontaine, a civil servant and friend, facetiously.
"A pretty woman is always a pretty woman, and a great musician is a great musician."
She never opened her mouth when the couple were seen together in the cafés of musical Paris. The poet Pau
l-Jean Toulet, who would become one of Debussy's close friends after the premiere of Pelléas, called them "Saint-Roch [pronounced with a hard "ch" so that it is almost 'Rock'] and his dog."
In November, Debussy told Hartmann that "Mermaids," the third movement of his Nocturnes, was not ready because "Madame Debussy has been sick this night and she is still not well this morning." He added a week later, "I have furiously little money!" And a few days later: "Do you want to help me? I have piles of medicines to buy for Lilly." He tried to earn a little by taking on a student—teaching was not Debussy's greatest talent. Once more he got behind in his composition of Pelléas ; the Opéra Comique must have "the score under its eyes" before it can commit itself, Hartmann warned him. "Can you advance me two hundred and fifty francs?" Debussy asked Hartmann in January 1900. On 12 April Hartmann wrote to Debussy: "I have been in bed for twelve days suffering like a martyr from gout in my arms, my knees and both feet! I scream and am broken with pain . . . My friend, you come banging at my cash box at a moment when it is very empty" Eleven days later, Hartmann was dead. His family declared that all advances made to Debussy must be treated as loans and repaid: Debussy had to carry the heavy debt for the remainder of his short life.
In August Lilly suffered a miscarriage and during her two weeks of hospitalization it was discovered she had contracted tuberculosis—a killer in those days. "You see this means moral pain," he wrote to Louys, "and added to that is a material side that is absolutely miserable." "We don't count for much," he told his friend in October. "You surely think like me that the most passionate will is feeble and how virtually useless is this intense desire to live. How ironic it is that all we give—all the blood we spill—is for this."
Carré announced to Debussy, on 3 May 1901, that the Opéra Comique had finally committed itself to a production of Pelléas in April 1902. But the health problems of "Madame Mimi" did not abate. Worse, boredom was setting in. In the summer of 1901 the couple spent three months in Burgundy with Lilly's parents. Debussy had as much love of green chloroform as would Jean-Paul Sartre. "This stay in the countryside is perfectly unbearable!" he wrote to his new editor. "The minutes pass by without one ever knowing exactly why," he explained to his old pupil Raoul Bardac on 31 August. Raoul took note, and when Debussy was back in Paris he invited him over to his home on Rue Bassano to meet his mother, Emma, who, as an accomplished soprano and the former mistress of Gabriel Fauré, had a high regard for musical talent. "Remember me to your mother," wrote Debussy in a note to Raoul three weeks before the opera's premiere.
Henri Biisser, who took over the conducting of Pelléas from Mes-sager after the third performance, recorded in his diary a visit to Debussy's flat that early spring of 1902 when the maestro was slaving away at the orchestral interludes: "This little room we're in, with oil paintings, watercolours and drawings on the walls, radiates happiness. The delightful Lilly [his wife] is its source. She's happy that Pelléas is being produced. 'It's my work too,' she says, 'because I gave Claude encouragement when he was despairing of ever seeing his work reach the stage.'" In fact, illness continued to haunt that little home.
In July Debussy was writing to Messager that a "cruel and ironic God, who controls our destinies, really makes us pay hard for our purest joys!" That August Debussy turned forty He spent another long summer with his in-laws in lifeless Burgundy, from which he escaped by plunging himself in a new operatic project, Shakespeare's As Tou Like It—"art is the most beautiful of lies," he wrote in the journal Musica that autumn.
The winter was relieved by the resumption of Pelléas and the bestowal of the Legion d'honneur; but "I am sadly troubled by the health of my wife," he wrote to a friend. Debussy was now calling her his "petit être mystérieux" his Mélisande: "we are united by ties a thousand times stronger than the traditional ties of marriage."
That June, 1903, Raoul Bardac invited Debussy over to Rue Bassano again to have tea with his mother. Debussy dedicated one of his piano scores, Ariettes oubliées, to her: "To Madame S. Bardac whose musical sympathy is precious to me—infinitely so." She was born Emma Moyse, from a respectable Jewish family in Bordeaux, and had married at the age of eighteen Sigismond Bardac, a rich banker who believed wealth would keep his wife by his side. In the case of Gabriel Fauré he proved right; the composer of Pelléas, however, was another matter.
Another summer in Burgundy, another winter. Debussy could share with Emma his musical humour as a picture postcard, dated 19 June 1904, of the Château de Dampierre with a declining scale in D and the Debussy monogram scribbled on the back shows. Lilly left for Burgundy alone that July His letters to Lilly began to reveal the truth. "I was wondering in what state the pretty places of your poor little body could be in," he began one letter, and went on: "Don't believe it was a pleasure for me to put you so dryly on the wagon . . . But I have to find new things, under the pressure of deadlines . . ." He was now addressing her as "Lily-Lilo" as he launched into a series of lies: "If La Mer is prepared to let me go, I will be able to join you around 15 August." It was not the sea of his dreams that was holding him, but the real thing. Debussy had just begun the composition of Lisle joyeuse, an ecstatic little piano piece, and at the end of July he took the ferry to Jersey, with his Emma, "petite Mienne adoré'e." "I am working in complete liberty," he wrote from Saint Helier to his new editor, Jacques Durand. "The Sea is very good for me, and she is showing me all her apparel." He asked Durand to keep his address secret "from everybody, including my charming family."
A week later Emma and Debussy moved to the seaside resort of Pourville, near Dieppe. He wrote to Lilly on n August that he was leaving for England with his painter friend Jacques- Émile Blanche—Blanche was not in sight. "If I have an invincible need to be alone it is because.
I can no longer work as I wish." It was a farewell letter and Lilly understood it too well. She returned to Paris, where, in their empty flat, she uncovered the correspondence with Emma. On 22 August Debussy wrote to her, "It seems to me that it would be quite useless for us to see each other at this moment, that would be too sad."
Debussy remained in Pourville with Emma right through to mid-October. He then rented a small flat on Avenue Alphand, complaining of being "horribly short of money." Lilly hardly emerged from the flat on Rue Cardinet; Debussy showed little sympathy—she was now a "petit etre" with the mystery knocked out. He imagined she was starving herself to death. But that was not true. On 13 October, a week before their fourth wedding anniversary, Lilly laid her blonde head on the famous white pillow and shot herself in the chest.
"IT WOULD NOT be from such a little wound as this that she might die," chants the doctor to the orchestral strings and a harp as he gazes down at Mélisande stretched out on a bed. "It's not grave enough to kill a bird."
Miraculously the bullet from Lilly's revolver passed by every vital organ and lodged in her spine; it remained there for the rest of her life. She was taken to the Clinique Blomet in the Septième, where Proust's doctor took care of her. Mary Garden found her lying alone, helpless. "This young girl never knew anything else in her life but her love of Debussy,"
recalled Garden in her memoirs. Lilly recounted her version of the story and then the surgeon came in to dress her wound, opening her nightdress: "In my Ufe I have never seen anything so beautiful as Lilly Debussy from the waist up. It was just like a glorious marble statue, too divine for words! Debussy had always said to me, "Mary, there is nothing in the world like Lilly's body" Now I knew what he meant. And lying underneath Lilly's left breast was a round dark hole."
Lilly lived until 1932, alone on Avenue de Villiers, accepting the odd interviews and writing notes in red ink on the back of the huge correspondence she had collected on her husband—some of it most compromising. She was not poor. According to the divorce terms pronounced on 17 July 1905, Debussy paid alimony to Lilly of 400 francs a month and every year had to turn over a sum of 3,600 francs for a pension fund in her favour. It was another great debt on his shoulders.
All his friends turned against him: André Messager, René Peter, Maurice Curnonsky Paul Dukas and Robert Godet. "I have seen such desertions around me!" he wrote to the music scholar Louis Laloy who at last broke his silence in April 1905 to become a real friend. Debussy's estrangement from Pierre Louÿs was the cruellest of them all: "I went to see poor Madame Debussy yesterday," Louÿs wrote with venom to his brother shortly after the suicide attempt. "The husband has gone off with a Jewess of forty years and more, Mme S. Bardac. You know Bardac, very much accustomed to the elopements of his wife . . . Jolie race!" Robert Godet and Paul Dukas would eventually rally to Debussy, but their friendship was never the same. "Madame Lily Debussy is very interesting and Claude Debussy a miserable wretch," Debussy wrote to the painter Paul Robert. "I have the terrible defect of loving music for its own sake, and not for its success . . . I shall go into exile."
And for a year that is precisely what he did. He eventually found peace of mind in the summer of 1905 with Emma and her daughter, Dolly, on the English coast at Eastbourne, in Sussex. "This place is peaceful and charming," he told Durand. "The sea unfurls itself with a most British sense of correctness." There he put the finishing touches to his Burgundy production of La Mer, completed his Jersey production of Lislejoyeuse and began an exotic series of piano pieces known collectively as Images. Debussy was at last a happy man. He finally married Emma in January 1908 just after, on a rare occasion, he had himself conducted a performance ofLa Mer. "You really feel yourself to be the heart of your own music," he told Durand.