The Gentle Barbarian (11 page)

Que me veux-tu avec ton Vallon avec ta tristesse pénétrante, avec les accents émouvants. Laisse-moi un peu en repos, laisse-moi regarder en avant—les cordes que tu fais vibrer sont douleureusement rendues depuis quelques temps. Laisse-les se reposer, se taire.

Pauline said they were all broken by his going but knew that his family affairs had forced him to go. Louis added a postscript—as he sometimes did to Pauline's letters—saying he hoped Turgenev would eventually return and come back
indépendant
with a well-settled vocation when he had settled his affairs and told him to get out of Petersburg quickly because of the cholera.

Two years after this parting, Viardot wrote to say that there was a nice little farm going near Courtavenel if Turgenev was interested: on Viardot's side the parting seems to have quietened any private suspicions Louis may have felt or spoken.

For a time the known letters of Pauline to Turgenev were tender; in one, either in Andalusian merriment or perhaps at his request, she enclosed clippings from her fingernails and told him how she had rearranged the furniture in her little salon. He said he wished he were the carpet under her feet and sent her a lock of hair.

But the family troubles in his mother's house in Moscow were appalling. He got there to find her physically helpless, but in a state of unbelievable malignancy in the worst traditions of the Lutovinovs. She sat in her drawing-room playing patience, putting off Ivan's pleas for his brother and himself by raging about Nikolai and Ivan's “gypsy” and rambling on about her favourite blends of tea. Her mind was consumed with thinking up tricks and vengeances. She had, for example, agreed at last to recognise her eldest son's marriage, but on condition that he give up his job in the Service and settle on a small farm which had belonged to the Turgenev family. In a frightful scene, notable for its alternating scheming silences and sudden euphoria, she drew up a deed of gift giving this little property to the two sons, but they saw she had consulted no lawyer and the
deed was not worth the paper it was written on. Not only that, she had given secret orders to her bailiffs of this estate and her own, to sell all the stock and corn stored in the barns quickly and to send all the money to Moscow. There would not be a single grain of corn for the new sowing; she was giving them empty land, without horses or cattle and with no money to farm it. The brothers had to tell their mother to her face, as calmly as they could, that she was cheating them, but neither the tears of Nikolai who was nearly out of his mind or all Ivan's calm reasoning could change her mind. They had to tell her that they would never see her again. Her reply was to smash Ivan's picture on her writing table and throw it on the floor. Ivan gave Nikolai and his German wife the small farm at Turgenevo, and they all went to live there. Ivan had a broken-down room in a disused paper mill on the place.

Mme. Zhitova—the “orphan”—acted as a go-between when Varvara Petrovna moved from Moscow to Spasskoye, twelve miles from Turgenevo and although she does not mention it, it seems from Turgenev's letters that he thought their half-sister has become a grasping hypocrite. And there was a private agony for Ivan: when he was in the Moscow house he saw an eight-year-old girl living with the servants. She was Pelagea, his own child by the serf woman who had looked after the linen and had been sent away to Petersburg where she worked as a serving woman. He had had no further contact with her.

It tells us much about the atmosphere of the Moscow house and Turgenev's state of shock that he thought it necessary to get a maid to take Pelagea into the street so that he might look at her and talk to her. It tells us more about him that he was moved to confess his story at once to Pauline. He had convinced himself, in their curiously “staged,” even artificial relationship, that the Viardots were his “only real family” as if he and she were characters in a play. He wrote to tell her of the shock the discovery of his daughter had been. At the meeting in the street, he said, he saw before him a child who was exactly like himself when he was a boy of eight. She had his face: the sight of it accused him and mocked him. What shocked him was that he could divine nothing of the mother whom he had merely used and of whom he had absolutely no recollection. One wonders if this could possibly be true: he could remember well one or two touching details of his affairs with other serf women. He said:

Oh my God, how I would have loved a child who brought back to me the memory of a woman I had loved.

It was the remorse of the man who saw he too was guilty of the evils of serfdom. He feared what would happen to the child after his mother died. He wanted her to be brought up free. Should he put her in a convent? He begged Pauline for advice, he appealed to her heart and said he would follow it to the letter. He could not return the unwanted child to her mother, who had lovers in Petersburg.

Between the lines one reads the fervour, the leap-into-the-air of the wild hope that the Viardots would take the little girl in. The child might save him from what he most feared—that in absence Pauline would forget him. The other letters that went between Moscow and Courtavenel are missing and one can'only guess at what was thought and said, but the astonishing thing is that the Viardots did agree to take Pelagea and bring her up with their own daughter. It is particularly astonishing because Pauline herself was mostly an absent mother and had at this time little maternal feeling and that Louis Viardot, at the age of fifty, was often irritated by his own daughter, who was spoiled by Mme. Garcia and the aunts. But Louis Viardot was a humane and enlightened man and he would be moved by this gesture against serfdom. He considered himself the close paternal friend of the talented young writer. The child of a friend would be no burden and might be a mollifying companion to his own difficult daughter. And there is another aspect: the Viardot family had its own “orphan,” a half-nephew, Joaquin Ruiz Garcia, the son of Manuel Garcia's illegitimate daughter born of an affair he had had before his marriage, and who passed as a “cousin” in the family.

Turgenev's gratitude was eloquent. He renamed the child Paulinette and, once again, with theatrical feeling, declared that Pauline would henceforth be her “mother”; that the child should be “their” daughter. The play was like the fancy of a child and there was indeed something, as Pauline said of him afterwards, naive and child-like in the dilettante of Petersburg. The matter was quickly settled, for the Viardots understood the terrible stories he had told them of his mother's rule. Turgenev found a French woman who was returning to Paris, put Paulinette in her care and set them on the road to Stettin in Poland. He travelled with them for three days by diligence and studied the child's character. She showed
herself to be intelligent if tough and forward, for she had had her way with the old serf women who had brought her up and treated her as an amusing toy. She loved music, she said; but she had seen “many evil things.” She told him for example that she didn't feel sorry for anyone—no one had felt pity for her. But suppose, he had asked, if she saw someone suffering? To that the child said “What about it? The only person I'm sorry for is myself.” And added that although she was only little she knew what the world was like: “I've seen everything,” she said. He told Pauline that, like himself, the child had sulky moods. Still, he was confident that her life as a free person in a civilised house where she was loved would transform the little savage.

Four years passed before she saw her father again and she
had
been transformed, but not as all had foreseen. Music bored her. She did not like her new mother and she quarrelled jealously with Pauline's Louise. And she grew up to be watchful and knowing about what went on in the Viardot family.

Soon after the quarrel with their mother about the estate, Turgenev left Moscow for Petersburg and Varvara Petrovna left for Spasskoye. When she got there she heard that her sons had secretly been there to collect their things. She screamed at her butler, “How dared you let them in.”

“We could not refuse them,” the trembling butler said, “They are our masters.”

“Masters! Masters! I am the only mistress of this place,” she said, and snatching a riding whip she slashed him across the face.

She did not stay long at Spasskoye. Her illness got worse and the procession started back over the rough roads to Moscow, where her doctor said she was suffering not only from dropsy but from consumption. She was slowly dying and sat in silence. No one dared mention her sons to her. She was preparing herself for death, but her vitality kept her alive longer than anyone thought possible. She wrote a note to be given to her sons after her death which ordered them to give her butler and Porfiry, the serf doctor, their freedom and sums of money.

When at last the death agony began, Nikolai came to her side. She stroked his head and murmured Ivan's name—but the news had
not reached him. She had ordered her orchestra to play dance music in the next room as she died.

Afterwards, a note was found in her diary. It said: “My mother! My children! Forgive me. And you Lord forgive me for pride, that deadly sin, was always my sin.”

“God save us,” Turgenev wrote to Pauline, “from a death like that.” It horrified him. Even in the years when he had made excuses about coming home to see his mother, even when he persisted in his love for “that gypsy,” she had ruled him from a distance. Now he had no ruler or only an imagined ruler in Pauline.

He was suddenly rich. The huge estate was equally divided between his brother Nikolai, a man who was to show himself as practical and as careful to improve his capital as Turgenev was careless. Ivan's share was 30,000 acres of which Spasskoye alone had 3,000 and he had the large income of 25,000 roubles a year. He righted some wrongs at once: he freed all his household serfs. With the others he had his difficulties, but in putting them on an annual rent, instead of sticking to the old system of making them work half the week for him without wages, he showed that he was not a serf-owner, but a landowner who had, like Lavretsky in
A Nest of Gentlefolk
, a serious interest in the land. But Turgenev, though he might see the importance of this, was temperamentally unfitted for the role of master. Viardot wrote to advise him to install a manager and he did so: a friend and writer called Tyutchev and his family were put in charge. It was soon noticed that they spread all over the house at Spasskoye. The neighbors said that Turgenev gave the impression of being a lodger: so he was because, restless like his mother, he was often up in Moscow and above all Petersburg on his literary business. He was bored by provincial life. He still longed for Courtavenel and spoke of going there in two years and he was avid for the letters that took fifteen days to reach him. He blessed the Viardots again and again for their goodness to his daughter. Scrupulously he sent money for her pension to Louis Viardot. He had recovered from the misery of the parting. There was something, he said, that goes straight to the heart in being on one's native soil, among people who talk your own language and who, good or bad, are made of the same clay as
oneself. Things might go badly, but at least one was in one's natural element. His only trouble was that he was thirty-two. His youth had gone. Seven years had passed since he had been taken to see her—he wrote to Pauline—for the first time.

In Petersburg he took an expensive and handsome flat where he kept a valet and a cook and, once more, was the gourmet and dandy with a monocle on its ribbon, entertaining his friends and going from drawing-room to drawing-room. The chestnut-haired young man was becoming prematurely grey and the grave blue-eyed gaze of the man of the world brought the women buzzing round him to hear his witticisms and his laughter. He had always charmed society, but now
The Sportsman's Sketches
—though not yet published in book form—had made him a celebrity. The unsuccessful poet had vanished. He had become the dangerous writer, the hope of the young enemies of serfdom. He had moved to minor successes in the theatre. He had written three plays:
The Bachelor,
which had short runs in Petersburg and Moscow, despite a poor second Act; the long
A Month in the Country;
and a witty one-act piece,
A Provincial Lady.
The last was a great success in Petersburg. He had caught influenza but went to the packed theatre and murmured Pauline's name for luck as the curtain went up. He found the acting of the young première detestable, but at the end the applause was so loud and sustained that he lost his head and ran out of the theatre.

But the censor refused to pass
A Month in the Country
because of its “immorality”; it would have been permitted if Rakitin had been shown to be in love with a widow, but not with a married woman. The play is usually taken to be based on Turgenev's relationship with Pauline and does seem to be a partial transfiguration of it, but the differences are obvious. The story has been transferred to Russian provincial life in which the characters are trapped by the boredom Turgenev hated. Pauline was not a bored provincial woman on the verge of middle age; Turgenev was not an idler; there was no young girl in rivalry with Pauline. The only possible portraits are the young man with whom Natalya has fallen in love: he is a sort of Gounod but without the temperament. The farming husband might be Viardot. It was always Turgenev's habit to start with models from real life and, as many writers do, to transfer them to other scenes or to add bits of other people and aspects of himself to them. No doubt, for Turgenev's ear and memory were quick, some of the lines
of the play may have been spoken at Courtavenel but one notices how the burden of the play is borne by Rakitin-Turgenev rather than by Pauline-Natalya. It does contain Natalya's mockery of Rakitin's poetic talk of Nature, which Pauline may have spoken, but it is the bitter, analytical Turgenev who warns the new young lover in words that his own father might have used.