CHAPTER XVII

Swan Song

For twenty years Chopin had been playing hide-and-seek with revolutions. He had left Warsaw a few weeks before that of 1830. His projected trip to Italy in the spring of 1831 had been put off because of the insurrections at Bologna, Milan, Ancona, Rome. He had arrived in Paris a year after the “Three Glorious Days,” but still he had witnessed from his balcony on the Boulevard Poissonnière the last squalls of the storm. Louis-Philippe was then King of France. Now he was abdicating after a reign of little more than seventeen years, just the length of Chopin’s stay at Paris. ’48 promised to be a bad year for artists. Very bad for Chopin, with that gaping wound in his heart, and the phthisis against which he no longer even struggled. He decided to leave France for a time, and to undertake a tour in Great Britain that Miss Stirling, a Scotch lady whom he greatly liked, proposed to organize. She had been his pupil for four years. But his friends advised him to give a last concert in Paris before leaving. He allowed himself to be persuaded. This was at the beginning of February.

In eight days all the tickets were sold, three hundred seats at 20 francs in the Salons Pleyel. “I shall have all Parisian society,” he wrote to his family. “The King, the Queen, the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Montpensier have each taken ten places, even though they are in mourning and none of them can come. Subscriptions are coming in for a second concert, which I shall probably not give because the first one already bores me.” And he adds the next day: “My friends tell me that I shall not have to bother about anything, only to sit down and play... They are writing to my publisher from Brest and Nantes to reserve places. Such enthusiasm astonishes me, and I must begin playing to-day, if only for the sake of my conscience, because I play less than I used to do. (Before his concerts Chopin always practised on Bach.) I am going to play, as a curiosity, the Mozart trio with Franchomme and Allard. There will be neither free programmes nor free tickets. The room will be comfortably arranged, and can hold three hundred people. Pleyel always jokes about my foolishness, and to encourage me for this concert, he is going to have the stairs banked with flowers. I shall be just as though I were at home, and my eyes will meet, so to speak, none but familiar faces... I am giving a great many lessons. I am overwhelmed with all sorts of work, yet, with all that, I do nothing... If you leave I shall move, too, because I doubt if I could stomach another summer such as the last in Paris. If God gives us health, we shall see each other again, and we shall talk, and embrace each other.”

It is not only lassitude that this letter breathes; does one not read beneath the weary smiles the certainty of an approaching end? This gathering of friends, this atmosphere of flowers and wreaths, has about it something funereal. We detect in the eagerness of this élite of worldlings and of artists an anxiety, something like a presentiment of the twilight of a whole peaceful and elegant epoch. Poet and King are passing away. Society is hastening to catch the last perfume of the ancient lilies of France, and of the young Polish rose. Sweeping closer was the triumph of George Sand, of the philosophers with dandruff, and of Barbès.

Frederick Chopin’s supreme concert took place on Wednesday, the 16th of February, 1848, one week before the abdication of Louis-Philippe. Everything about it was extraordinary. The room was decorated with flowers and carpets. The list of the selected audience had been revised by Chopin himself. The text of the programme had been steel-engraved in English script, and printed on beautiful paper. It read: