Read Online The Gentle Barbarian by V. S. Pritchett - Free Book Online Page B

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