The Europeans

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Europe in 1843

Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone … Now you can travel to Orléans in four and a half hours, and it takes no longer to get to Rouen. Just imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with these railways. I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries are advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea breakers are rolling against my door.

Heinrich Heine, 1843

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At eight o’clock in the evening of 3 November 1843, a full house at the Bolshoi Theatre in St Petersburg waited in excitement for the curtain to go up. The house was packed to see the great soprano Pauline Viardot make her Russian debut as Rosina in The Barber of Seville. In the front rows of the stalls, seated in armchairs, were the highest-ranking dignitaries of the Russian Empire, all dressed in tailcoats, alongside their wives and daughters, mostly dressed in white, the colour of the season; behind them were ministers in evening dress and officers in uniforms. There was not a spare seat to be had, neither in the bel-étage nor in any of the private boxes in the four lower tiers, where the nobility was all turned out, diamonds twinkling in the light from the oil-lamps of the immense chandelier. In the cheapest seats on the fifth and highest tier, above the level of the chandelier, students, clerks and serious music lovers squeezed up tight on the benches and strained their necks to see the stage. The auditorium was buzzing with excitement as the late arrivals took their places and the overture began. The imminent appearance of the famous singer with Giovanni Rubini and his Italian company of singers had been the only compelling subject of salon conversation in St Petersburg for many weeks. The press build-up was so intense that one newspaper tried to jump the gun by publishing a piece about Viardot’s first performance – complete with descriptions of the wild applause – two days before it took place.¹

Viardot-Garcia, as she was then known, struck everybody by her appearance. With her long neck, large protruding eyes and heavy lids, she looked exotically unusual, some would even say horsey; but her gracious smile and hazel eyes, sparkling with intelligence, and the liveliness of her expressions, which reflected her vivacious character, gave an alluring interest to her face. ‘Richly ugly’ was how she was described by the Russian Foreign Minister, Count Karl Nesselrode, on her debut in St Petersburg. The poet Heinrich Heine, a famous wit, thought she was so unattractive that she was ‘almost beautiful’.²

Her voice was the key to her spellbinding presence on stage. It had a tremendous force, extraordinary range and versatility.* It was not a soft or crystal voice – some thought it was guttural – but had a dramatic power, an emotional intensity, that suited it equally to tragedy or to the Spanish gypsy songs she often sang (Camille Saint-Saëns compared it to the taste of ‘bitter oranges’).³ Clara Schumann, who heard her sing in Paris in August 1843, thought she had ‘never yet heard a woman’s voice like that’.⁴ The Russians agreed. ‘We have heard many first-rate singers but none has overwhelmed us in this way,’ wrote one critic of that first performance in St Petersburg. ‘The astonishing range of her voice, its unrivalled virtuosity, its magical, silvery tonality, those passages which even the trained ear could barely follow – we have not heard anything like it before.’⁵ After the final curtain had gone down, she was called out nine times by the audience, which remained standing in the theatre, not one person heading to the exits, for a full hour.

The Russian public was passionate about opera. It displayed a spontaneous enthusiasm which delighted Viardot.⁶ She brought the house down on the second night when she sang a well-known Russian air in the Act II lesson scene. She had taken Russian lessons to get the diction right. It was a piece of showmanship she often used to win the hearts of an audience abroad. Tsar Nicholas was so delighted that he led the exuberant applause, received the singer in the Imperial box, and the next morning sent her a pair of diamond earrings, which Pauline at once had valued.⁷

Levels of excitement reached new heights with each fresh performance. Viardot herself felt her voice improving every night as she worked through the season’s repertoire, following her debut in The Barber of Seville with equally sensational performances in Rossini’s Otello, Bellini’s La Sonnambula and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Every aria was applauded with cries of ‘Brava!’ Every act ended with a dozen curtain calls, most of them for Viardot. At the final curtain of La Sonnambula there were fifteen calls for her alone. The Tsarina, seated in the side box by the curtain, threw a camellia that landed by the prima donna’s feet. The gesture broke an Imperial interdiction against throwing flowers on the stage. From the next night, after every aria by Viardot, flowers were thrown on the stage. Florists did a roaring trade. Every available bouquet was bought up by ‘fanatics’ of the opera – the new ritual itself became the subject of a contemporary vaudeville, Bouquets, by Vladimir Sologub.⁸

This was the height of the Russian craze for Italian opera. Few other operas could get a hearing in St Petersburg. In the 1843–4 season there were almost twice as many performances of Italian operas than there were of Russian ones. Even Mikhail Glinka, the ‘inventor of the Russian opera’, whose Ruslan and Liudmilla and A Life for the Tsar had filled the Bolshoi Theatre almost every night in the early months of 1843, found his works demoted to Sundays and then despatched to the provinces once Rubini’s company had arrived. Glinka was in fact long accustomed to the domination of Italians. He had lived in Italy in the early 1830s and could not help but adapt his music to the fashionable Italian style with its cheerful melodies and virtuoso thrills. His most ‘Russian’ work, A Life for the Tsar (1836), positively ‘reeked of Italianism’, as he later acknowledged.⁹

This Italomania was relatively new. Although the tsarist court had kept a resident Italian opera in the eighteenth century, there was none in Russia after 1801, except in the Black Sea port of Odessa, where many non-Russians lived. The exiled poet Alexander Pushkin heard a mediocre touring company perform Rossini operas in Odessa in the 1823–4 season. The experience inspired these lines in Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin (1825), in which the bored narrator lets his lorgnette rove around the opera house:

And what of other fascinations?

And what of keen lorgnettes, I say?

And in the wings … the assignations?

The prima donna? The ballet?

The loge, where, beautiful and gleaming,

A merchant’s youthful wife sits dreaming,

All vain and languorous with pride,

A crowd of slaves on every side?

She heeds, and doesn’t heed the roses,

The cavatina, heated sighs,

The jesting praise, the pleading eyes …

While in the back her husband dozes,

Cries out from sleep Encore! – and then

Emits a yawn and snores again.¹⁰

Italian opera came back into fashion in St Petersburg only after 1836, when a Russified Venetian, Catterino Cavos, the director of the Bolshoi Theatre, made a splash with a production of Rossini’s Semiramide.

Russia was the last European country to be swept up in this international craze. It attracted ageing stars eager to cash in on their past fame. In 1841, the great Giuditta Pasta, then at the end of her career, her voice almost completely gone, appeared with the Russian opera in the title role of Bellini’s Norma, a part she had sung in the opera’s first performance ten years earlier. Soon afterwards the Russians welcomed the ‘greatest tenor of the age’, Rubini, now aged forty-nine, who had been advised by Liszt, the virtuoso pianist and composer, to follow his example and make a tour of Russia for the piles of cash the naive Russians were prepared to pay for ‘civilization’. Keen to put St Petersburg on a cultural par with Paris, Vienna and London, the Tsar paid Rubini a fortune (80,000 paper roubles, or 90,000 francs) as his fee for bringing an Italian opera troupe to St Petersburg in the 1843–4 season. Viardot, alone, received 60,000 roubles as well as half the earnings from other concerts she was free to give.¹¹ It was a level of remuneration few opera singers had received before. Such expenditure was fully justified by the prestige the troupe brought to the Russian capital, according to the Tsar’s own spokesman, the editor Faddei Bulgarin, who wrote in his newspaper, The Northern Bee, during that first season:

Let’s admit it: without an Italian opera troupe it would always seem as if something were missing in the capital of the foremost empire in the world! There would seem to be no focal point for opulence, splendour, and cultivated diversion. In all the capitals of Europe the richest accoutrements, the highest tone, all the refinements of society are concentrated at the Italian Opera. This cannot be changed, nor should it be.¹²

In Western Europe opera had flourished since the seventeenth century. From its origins as a private court event, opera was soon transformed into a public spectacle, first in Venice and then throughout Italy. Unlike in France, where opera was under royal control, every major town in Italy had its own theatre and a group of nobles or rich merchants and professionals to manage it (the first Italian national census in 1868 recorded 775 opera houses in active existence).¹³ The business model was fairly uniform throughout the peninsula. Forming a consortium of boxholders, the owners of the theatre would contract with an impresario, usually a former singer or musician, who employed a company for a season (few provincial theatres could afford to keep a troupe). The impresario would receive an advance from the owners and would take the profits from the sale of tickets in the stalls, while the theatre earned its income from leasing private boxes for an annual fee.¹⁴ The small size of the audience, drawn from the élite of a single town, obliged companies to tour constantly to reach a larger audience. Opera thus became a unifying element of the various states in Italy, its language understood even where the people spoke a dialect rather than Italian.

Touring companies exported opera from Italy to the European courts. New theatres were built for its needs in every European capital. Where opera took root in the eighteenth century – in Handel’s London or Gluck’s Vienna – it did so in a style that was essentially Italian. Such was the domination of Italian opera that composers of every nationality were drawn into writing it: the German Simon Mayr composed over fifty operas for Italian opera houses between 1795 and 1820; Mozart, as a teenager, wrote three operas for La Scala in Milan, as well as going on to write many others in Italian for Austrian theatres. But it was Rossini who first cornered an international market for Italian opera. Conquering theatres across Europe and the wider world, he was a musical Napoleon, in the estimation of Stendhal, his earliest biographer: ‘Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world; and from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta, his name is constantly on every tongue. The fame of this hero knows no bounds save those of civilization itself.’¹⁵

The employment of Rossini was a virtual guarantee of making money for an opera house. His tuneful and lighthearted operas would prove ideally suited to the mood of the Restoration period, when frothy entertainment was the order of the day. Following the dazzling successes of his early operas, especially Tancredi (1813), Rossini was employed as musical director of the San Carlo in Naples, at that time the leading theatre in the world. Its manager was Domenico Barbaja, an astute businessman turned impresario, who had stumbled on a novel method to make opera pay.

Barbaja had started his career as a waiter in a café near La Scala in Milan. He had made a killing by delivering refreshments to people in their boxes at the opera and by inventing a new type of coffee mixed with cream and chocolate (a type of mocha) that became all the rage. During the French occupation of Milan (from 1796 to 1815), the previous Austrian ban on gambling in the theatres was lifted. Barbaja won the lucrative concession to run the roulette tables (a game brought to Italy by Napoleon’s officers) in La Scala’s entrance hall. His gambling empire quickly spread to other cities conquered by the French. The organizing skills Barbaja had developed to run his gaming syndicate were easily transferred to opera management, where large amounts of cash were also regularly moved around. In Naples, where he was in charge of not only the San Carlo but the smaller Teatro dei Fiorentini, Barbaja used the profits from his roulette wheels to hire the best singers for the opera. As musical director of the San Carlo from 1815 to 1822, Rossini was contracted to write two operas every year, for which he was paid a salary of 12,000 French francs and received a share of all Barbaja’s takings from the roulette wheels – considerably more than Rossini earned from his music.¹⁶

With the international triumph of The Barber of Seville (1816) and La Cenerentola (1817) Rossini became a global phenomenon. When Barbaja took over the Vienna Opera in 1822, he employed Rossini there. The Viennese nobility soon succumbed to the Italian craze, in spite of the nationalist critics who opposed this ‘foreign invasion’ and rallied their supporters behind Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), a work they championed as a ‘German national opera’, mainly on account of its folk motifs and language (in fact its style was largely French and its setting in Bohemia). Likewise, in London, where Rossini spent five months in 1823, he was greeted as an international celebrity. Rossini’s every movement was reported in the press, if only to remark on his fat and jolly figure walking to his rooms in the Quadrant, Regent Street, then just completed by John Nash. Popular demand for his music was insatiable. All three London opera houses (the King’s Theatre, the Drury Lane Theatre and the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden) catered to the craze for Rossini’s operas.¹⁷

But it was in Paris that Rossini had his biggest impact on the opera world. In 1824, he became director of the Théâtre Italien, one of the city’s three main opera theatres under royal control, the others being the Paris Opéra and the Opéra-Comique. Rossini’s contract was lucrative. Following his triumph in London, the French court was willing to accept the composer’s extravagant demands: 40,000 francs for the first year, when he was meant to write two operas, and the recognition of his copyright on an equal basis with all citizens under French law, the most advanced protection in Europe at that time.¹⁸ Over the six years of his directorship, the Théâtre Italien became one of the leading opera houses in Europe. The Paris Opéra was in the doldrums by comparison. People had grown tired of the old French operas – now long lost or forgotten works by the likes of Christoph Gluck, André Grétry or Nicolas Dalayrac – which made up so much of its repertoire. They flocked instead to the ‘Italiens’, as it was fondly called, where Rossini reigned, in the words of Stendhal, as a ‘citizen monarch’.

The Théâtre Italien, engraving, c. 1840.

The Salle Favart, its auditorium, was not just a theatre but a way of life (‘as much a salon as an opera house’, according to Gautier). Exclusively devoted to the Italian repertoire, it was a place for elegant society, for opera fanatics (the ‘tribe of dilettanti’ who posed as cognoscenti), serious music lovers and intellectuals, as opposed to the more stately public of the Opéra’s Salle Le Peletier. The novelist George Sand, the poet Alfred de Musset and the painter Eugène Delacroix were regulars at the Italiens. Because the stalls were barred to women, Sand appeared dressed as a man, wearing a long military coat with trousers and a waistcoat, the fashion of the day, cravat and hat and hobnailed boots, an outfit which she also wore elsewhere. Among the French Romantics only Berlioz, a devotee of the Gluck school, despised the cult of Italian opera and ‘more than once debated with myself the possibility of mining the Théâtre Italien and blowing it up one evening, along with all its congregation of Rossinians’.¹⁹ In contrast to the city’s other music theatres, where the public talked throughout the performance, the audience at the Italiens listened more attentively: they were stilled and silenced by maestro Rossini when he knocked three times to signal the beginning of the overture.

In the early nineteenth century, the opera industry was an international business of itinerant tradesmen. The young Rossini earned his living until 1810 as a vocal coach (répétiteur) and harpsichord accompanist, both important music trades. He was then hired as a composer at the Teatro del Corso in Bologna. His contracts stipulated that he was a ‘trader in music’ (mercante di musica). Musicians still had a lowly status in the palaces and salons of the aristocracy, despite the efforts of composers such as Mozart to elevate their position. They appeared ‘on the footing of inferiors’, wrote Countess Marie d’Agoult, who lived with Liszt:

If someone wanted to give a fine concert, he sent to Rossini, who, for a recognized fee – it was small enough, only 1500 francs if I recollect correctly – undertook to arrange the programme and to see to its carrying out, thus relieving the master of the house of all embarrassments in the way of choice of artists, of rehearsals and so on … At the appointed hour [the musicians] arrived in a body, entering by a side door; in a body they sat near the piano; and in a body they departed, after having received the compliments of the master of the house and of a few professed dilettantes.²⁰

Typically, in the opera business, a composer would be engaged by an impresario to compose the music for a libretto, oversee the rehearsals, and conduct the first three performances as the player of the harpsichord. For his services he would receive a one-off fee that put him at the level of a master artisan. Once he had fulfilled his contract, the composer was free to leave and ply his trade in the next town. The production of an opera tended to be very quick, so it was possible to mount several operas in a year. The Barber of Seville received its first performance within a month of Rossini starting on the score. The singers were still learning their parts on the day of the premiere, which may in part explain why it ended in fiasco, with whistling and hissing from the audience, following a series of accidents on stage at the Teatro Argentine in Rome.

Rossini churned out operas at a furious rate – sixteen in his first five years of composing – many of them made up of recycled bits from his earlier works. This recycling was still a common practice by opera composers in the early nineteenth century, when people did not travel far: it was easy to pass off a rehashed work as something new in a distant town. Donizetti did so famously (he was caught and criticized for it). The pressure to compose quickly was the main reason why he reused music from his own previous scores. In 1832, when he had just a few weeks to compose L’elisir d’amore, Donizetti borrowed whole chunks of his Alahor in Granata (1826) and Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle (1829).²¹ Underlying this practice was the economy of opera production before the railway age, when theatres drew their public from a narrow geographic area and needed several new works every year to keep it entertained. Working in this industry did not always give composers time to write original material. In 1827, for example, Donizetti signed a contract with Barbaja in Naples to write twelve operas in the next three years, during which he would be paid a monthly salary of 400 ducats (approximately 2,100 francs). Nothing in the contract stipulated that the music of each opera should be new; as long as he produced enough in quantity, Donizetti would be paid.²²

The leading singers earned more than the composers. People came to the opera to hear the star performers, and the music played a supporting role to showcase their talents. All the main composers would write for particular singers or adapt their scores to suit their vocal qualities. The fees paid to the prima donnas were astronomical. With the disappearance of the treasured castrati in the early decades of the nineteenth century, female singers were the highest paid in opera. It was not unusual for half an opera’s production costs to go into the fees of the leading soloists, especially if these included famous divas like Giuditta Pasta or Maria Malibran, Viardot-Garcia’s elder sister. They bargained hard for better pay and conditions, sometimes using agents, sometimes negotiating by themselves, but always with an eye to what their rivals were earning.²³

Increasingly, the leading soloists were spending time on international tours, travelling wherever they could earn the highest pay. Improvements in road transport, steamships from the 1820s and railways later, pushed up fees, as more theatres were able to compete for their services. For the London season in 1827, for example, Pasta earned £2,365 (60,000 francs) – thirty times as much as any of the other soloists – for forty-five performances. In the early 1830s Malibran was paid even higher fees – £1,000 for just twelve performances at Covent Garden and £3,200 for forty nights at Drury Lane, not including earnings from a series of benefit concerts guaranteed to net £2,000. For a two-year contract in New York, from 1834, she was offered a fortune, 500,000 francs (£20,000), but turned it down.²⁴

The concert tours by Liszt or Paganini were the only real comparison to the financial success of the leading divas. In 1831, according to one reckoning, Paganini earned 133,107 francs from just eleven concerts during March and April in Paris, and then in London, from May to July, was paid £10,000 (250,000 francs), enough to buy a mansion in Mayfair. People paid enormous sums to hear the virtuoso violinist play – a whole guinea for a stalls seat in the King’s Theatre, almost three times the usual price. Ticket prices were inflated by extravagant accounts of his strange appearance and demonic personality, of his sexual conquests, and the hypnotic powers he was said to exercise through his playing – rumours Paganini encouraged by playing ever more wildly. Everything in his performance was calculated for sensational effect and spectacle. But he approached his tours as a businessman, keeping detailed accounts of his income and expenses in a ‘secret book’. He employed concert managers to act as agents and handle the expenses for a share of the receipts – an innovation in the music industry, where composers had previously managed themselves. With his manager, Paganini controlled every aspect of his concerts, from finding venues to placing adverts in the press, hiring orchestras, employing ticket agents, and sometimes selling tickets at the door himself. He developed his own merchandising: print engravings, ‘Paganini cakes’ and other souvenirs of his concerts.²⁵

Liszt took a leaf out of Paganini’s book. Much of his early career was spent touring, from which he learned how to cultivate his own celebrity to attract an audience. Touring Europe with his father in 1823–4, Liszt had drawn enormous interest as a teenage prodigy. Reproduction prints of the precocious pianist were sold in Paris shops. His father charged 100 francs for his son to play in private homes. After his father’s death in 1828, Liszt gave up on concert tours (he compared them to being a ‘performing dog’) and tried to make a living as a piano teacher. But then, in 1831, he heard Paganini play at the Paris Opéra. Liszt set out to create a new kind of piano repertoire by emulating the effects of Paganini’s violin, its tremolos and leaps and glissandi. It was a type of virtuoso playing that set him on a highly profitable course of concert tours across Europe – from Spain and Portugal to Poland, Turkey and Russia – between 1839 and 1847. Whereas previous composers had mostly toured to enhance their reputation and win patrons, Liszt thought of his tours as a business venture whose purpose was to make him ‘capital’ – a word he used himself.²⁶ He employed an agent, Gaetano Belloni, who managed his accounts and worked with him on his public image for these tours. Liszt’s flamboyant stage behaviour gave him an emotional appeal, encouraging his listeners to respond to his performance with strong emotions in the concert hall. ‘Lisztomania’ (a term coined by Heine) swept through Europe from 1843. Fans would swarm around the virtuoso pianist. Women in the front rows of his audience would fight to get the handkerchiefs or gloves which he dropped deliberately before seating himself at the piano. His cigar ashes were jealously guarded as ‘relics’.²⁷ Thousands of his fans would buy the music of his most demanding pieces, even if they had no chance of ever being able to play them, solely for the reason that they wanted to possess a memento of the Liszt phenomenon.

The opera industry had many families and even dynasties of singers, dancers, instrumentalists, who toured around the theatres of Europe together. But the Garcias were the most talented, prolific and successful of them all. Liszt, who was a close friend of the Garcias, once wrote that Pauline had been ‘born into a family where genius seemed to be hereditary’.²⁸

Manuel Garcia, Pauline’s father, was born in Seville in 1775, only five years after the last victim of the Spanish Inquisition was burned at the stake there as a heretic. For a long time it was thought that he had gypsy origins (Pauline believed it) but he probably invented this himself to add a Romantic aura to his stage personality. Garcia belonged to the first generation of professional singers independent of any patronage (by State, Church or aristocracy) and dependent on the market to make a living.²⁹ His voice had an extraordinary range, allowing him to sing both baritone and tenor roles. He had started as a singer and composer in Cadiz, where he married Manuela Morales, a bolero dancer, and then moved to Malaga, a centre of Italian opera in Spain, before becoming the musical director of the royal theatres in Madrid, where he took up with the singer Joaquina Briones, whom he married too.

Garcia composed in a Spanish style, incorporating folk songs and dances into his operettas, or zarzuelas. Later Spanish composers saw him as the founder of Spanish opera.³⁰ In Madrid there was little cultural space for the national tradition. The theatre there was given over to performing mainly French and Italian works. Abandoning Morales and their two small daughters, whom he continued to support financially, Garcia left for Paris with Joaquina, who had already given birth to Manuel’s son, named after him. In 1807, he made his debut in the Théâtre Italien, where he soon became the leading tenor, celebrated for his brilliant virtuoso improvisations then deemed part of the Romantic singing style (the comparison between Paganini and Garcia would frequently be made).

A good-looking man with dark curly hair and ‘gypsy’ features, Garcia had a fiery and rebellious temperament. Much of his violence was taken out on Joaquina, who bore not only his beatings but the shame of passing for his mistress in public to conceal his crime of bigamy.³¹ His tempestuous character often led to conflicts with the authorities (in Madrid he was even once imprisoned on the orders of the theatre management for refusing to perform). Garcia’s solution to these conflicts was always to move on to a new place. Three years after the birth of their second child, Maria, in 1808, the Garcias left for Naples, where Manuel met Rossini, and then moved to Rome, where he sang the part of Count Almaviva – a role created especially for him – in the first performance of The Barber of Seville. From Rome they went to London, where the eight-year-old Maria was put into a convent school in Hammersmith. The Garcias then returned to Paris, where Pauline, their third child, was born in 1821.

From an early age the Garcia children were taught to sing by their father. He was a hard taskmaster and was said to hit them when they did not get their repetition right. Maria, who was as fiery as her father, suffered most on this account. Pauline, the youngest and his favourite, claimed years later that he had only hit her once, rightly she believed, and denied that he was cruel. He was in any case a first-class teacher and had his tried-and-tested pedagogic methods – based on hard work, discipline and exercises for the training of the voice – which he passed down to his children, enabling them to become famous singing teachers in their turn.

At the age of just fourteen Maria made her debut as Rosina in The Barber of Seville at the King’s Theatre in London. Manuel sang the Almaviva role. He had fled Paris, where Morales had turned up, demanding money and threatening to expose him as a bigamist. Maria caused a sensation. Her voice was extraordinary, rich in tone, with a range of over three octaves that enabled her to sing both soprano and contralto roles. Manuel assumed the office of his daughter’s manager, demanding higher fees for her than those earned by even well-established prima donnas. The English critics became hostile, so Manuel moved on again.

In 1825, he accepted a profitable offer to take his family and a company of singers to New York, where a group of wealthy men, who had fallen in love with Italian opera, were ready to support the trip. The 1820s saw a marked increase in the number of Italian opera troupes touring the Americas: the new wealth of cities such as Buenos Aires and New York acted as a magnet to adventurous touring groups.³² Pauline, who was then aged four, learned to sing on the long sea voyage across the Atlantic. ‘It was on a sailing boat that I was taught, without a piano, at first singing on my own, then with two voices and with three,’ she recalled many years later. ‘My father wrote some small canons, we sang them daily, in the evenings on the bridge, to the delight of the crew.’³³

There was great excitement in America about the arrival of Italian music – much of it drummed up by no less a figure than Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s great librettist, who was then living in New York and teaching at Columbia College. The New York season opened with The Barber of Seville on 29 November 1825 (the first time an opera had been sung in Italian in the New World) before an audience that included Joseph Bonaparte, the exiled former King of Spain, and James Fenimore Cooper, who was just about to publish The Last of the Mohicans. The opera was a great success. Maria was hailed as a star. The season continued with Mozart’s Don Giovanni – performed for the first time in the United States by four of the Garcias (the two Manuels, Maria and Joaquina) in the presence of da Ponte. But the opera-going public was too small – and there were no kings or noble patrons – to make opera a profitable venture in New York. The Garcias faced a more immediate problem when the seventeen-year-old Maria decided to escape her domineering father by marrying a New York banker of French origin by the name of Eugène Malibran. The banker paid a fortune, said to be as much as $50,000 (250,000 francs), to compensate Garcia for the loss of his lead singer.³⁴

Without Maria, the Garcias left for Mexico, where at least people spoke Spanish. But it was virgin territory for opera. There were no real theatres in the European sense, and audiences were too small to make any money out of opera. In 1828, the family gave up and returned to Paris. On their way to Vera Cruz, the first part of their long trek back to Europe, their convoy was attacked by brigands operating in collusion with the convoy’s escort of soldiers. The masked bandits forced the travellers to lie face downwards on the ground and robbed them of everything – ‘down to our clothes’, as Pauline would recall – a story she retold in the same vivid detail right until the end of her long life.³⁵

‘God created me for travelling. It was in my blood from before I was born,’ Pauline wrote many years later.³⁶ The constant movement of her early years, combined with the rigour of her father’s teaching, imbued in her a steely stoicism and determination to succeed. It also made her talented at languages. Adding to the Spanish which she spoke at home, she was completely fluent in French, Italian and English from childhood, and in German from a little later on. There were, it seems, no mental barriers between her many languages: in her diaries and letters she expressed herself with natural ease in all of them, often shifting in mid-sentence from one language to another if it contained a better word.

In 1827, Pauline’s elder sister had returned to Paris, where she made her debut in Rossini’s Semiramide at the Théâtre Italien, launching her spectacular career in Europe. The extraordinary power of her voice, so simple in expression, her exotic Spanish looks, her passionate performance style and general air of melancholy perfectly embodied the Romantic spirit of the times, quickly winning for her a cult status among young Parisians. Malibran had left her banker husband in New York and taken up with Charles de Bériot, a Belgian violinist, living with him near Brussels and bearing him two children, only one of whom survived. Manuel refused to see Maria any more, declaring that her conduct ‘offends and dishonours her entire family’ (as if his own bigamy had not done so already).³⁷ Maria continued to send the family money, several thousand francs a year. She wrote to her mother asking her for news, but ‘dared not’ write to her father, because she was afraid that he would not reply. ‘Let him know that he can be content with his daughter’ was all that she would say.³⁸

Manuel Garcia died of a sudden heart attack at the age of fifty-seven on 10 June 1832. Pauline and her mother joined Maria in Brussels (her brother Manuel had enrolled in the French expedition to Algeria two years earlier). Following her husband’s death, Joaquina carried on the role of Pauline’s coach and general manager. Pauline had shown a precocious talent for singing. At the age of four she had sung for the Duke of Wellington, and at eight for Rossini.³⁹ In Paris she was sent to study composition with Anton Reicha, the Czech-born composer and friend of Beethoven, whose pupils had included Berlioz and Liszt. At this stage Pauline seemed set on a career as a concert pianist – the piano, harp or voice being at that time the only instruments deemed fit for women performers. She had taken lessons from the cathedral organist in Mexico City and now, at the age of twelve, was taught by Liszt, who was then in his twenties. Naturally she fell in love with him. Getting dressed to go to her Saturday lessons, Pauline’s hands would tremble so much from emotion that she could not tie the laces on her boots, she recalled many years later. ‘When I knocked on his door, my blood would freeze; when he opened it, I would burst into tears … But what joy it was when we played together Herz’s variations for four hands.’⁴⁰

It was her mother who insisted that Pauline become a singer – a decision reinforced by Maria’s death, at the age of twenty-eight, in 1836. She had fallen from her horse in Regent’s Park in London two months earlier but had struggled on with her concert engagements until she finally collapsed and died in Manchester. In the last years of her short life she had been at the height of her international fame. Huge crowds would gather wherever she performed. At La Scala, where her performance of Norma had given Malibran an almost divine status, fans would stand for several hours just to see her enter the theatre. Her death sent shock waves around the opera world. Gautier and Musset both wrote poems to express their grief. The impact on the Garcias was obviously even more immense, coming as it did so shortly after Manuel’s death. For Pauline it was decisive, determining that she would follow in the footsteps of Maria. To Joaquina it was inconceivable that there should be no Garcia singing on the stage.

Charles de Bériot took Pauline under his wing, organizing concerts for them both. In August 1836, three weeks after turning fifteen, Pauline made her concert debut with him in Liège. By coincidence, the composer Meyerbeer – who would go on to play a crucial role in her career – was in the audience.⁴¹ From the start, she included Spanish songs as part of her repertoire. She had sung these songs since her childhood – many had been written by her father – and these ‘party pieces’ must have come across as charmingly original to audiences in northern Europe, where Spanish music was still then unknown. Pauline’s first public performance was a triumph. During the next eighteen months, she appeared with Charles in several concerts in Brussels (once in the presence of the Belgian royal couple), as well as in Berlin, where the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm III, was so enchanted by her singing that he presented her with an emerald necklace and several times invited her to meet his family at Charlottenburg palace. It was during these visits that Pauline began her long friendship with Princess Augusta, the future Prussian queen.⁴²

Inevitably, Pauline was compared to Malibran. It was a comparison she exploited. At her Paris concert debut, in December of that year, Pauline wore the same costume, a simple white dress with a black diamond, that Malibran had always worn. ‘It is her sister come alive again,’ wrote one critic. ‘The same voice, the same singing method, the same style, a resemblance of talent that confounds, and yet not the slightest hint of imitation!’ The poet Musset, the archpriest of the cult of Malibran, thought the resemblance ‘so striking that it appears supernatural’.⁴³

What Musset had idealized in Malibran he now saw in her sister: her exotic Spanish origins; her fiery, melancholic temperament; her freedom of expression; her natural appearance; and, above all, the purity of her singing, without any excess of virtuosity or Romantic effect. ‘She abandons herself to inspiration with that easy simplicity which gives everything an air of grandeur,’ Musset wrote. ‘She sings as she breathes.’⁴⁴ Musset fell in love with her, and courted her relentlessly. He had met Pauline at a musical soirée organized by Madame Caroline Jaubert, one of Musset’s former mistresses, and pursued the young singer. In the Revue des deux mondes, where he was a regular writer, Musset praised her singing to the skies. Using his connections, he opened doors for her to the most important salons of Paris.

The relatively small size of the music world, even in a city like Paris, meant that artists were heavily dependent on influential critics and patrons to promote their talent. Madame Jaubert’s lively salon was one of a growing number in the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain to favour musical performances and conversations about art and music over political gossip. The weekly salon was attended by well-connected intellectuals, among them Prince Belgiojoso, the sculptor Jean-Auguste Barre and the Mussets, Alfred and his brother Paul, who shared a love of music, and adored Pauline. They organized her Paris concert debut in the Salle Ventadour on 15 December 1838, and spread in conversation and writing the conviction that she was a rising star.⁴⁵

On the back of her success, Pauline spent the next spring in London, where she performed in two private concerts for Queen Victoria and made her opera debut as Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello at Her Majesty’s Theatre on 9 May 1839. Her mother had negotiated a very handsome fee, 6,000 francs (around £240) for her six performances, more than any other singer had ever been paid for a first appearance in London.⁴⁶ ‘The public received me as if I were a returning favourite rather than a foreigner performing for them for the first time,’ Pauline wrote to a friend on 13 May.

I was so emotional that my voice choked during the first act. But in the second, as their interest grew, I gained in strength and confidence, and by the end I was no longer terrified of the public … I was called back many times and repeated several airs. At the end of the [second] act, the whole of the stalls were on their feet, waving their cravats and handkerchiefs with frenetic cheers.⁴⁷

The press reviews were ecstatic. ‘There could be no doubt in anyone who saw that Desdemona on that night,’ wrote the Athenaeum critic Henry Chorley of ‘this new Garcia’, that ‘another great career was begun’.⁴⁸

In London she received a visit from a certain Louis Viardot, a well-known journalist and man of letters, art collector and critic, Spanish expert and historian, who had recently become the director of the Théâtre Italien. A handsome and distinguished-looking man, then just turning forty, with finely barbered sideburns and moustache, Viardot had come to see if she would sing for his theatre. He seemed prepared to satisfy her monetary demands, declaring his belief in her talent as the equal of her sister’s, whom he had known. On his appointment to the Théâtre Italien he had received a letter from Charles de Bériot recommending Pauline in such high terms that he thought at once of signing her as his new star.⁴⁹

Louis Viardot was born in 1800 in Dijon, where his father was the Procurator General in the Court of Appeal. As a law student at the Sorbonne, he became an opera fan, spending every sou he could afford at the Théâtre Italien. It was there, in 1819, that he first heard Manuel Garcia sing in Don Giovanni. He skimped on meals to save for a ticket in the second balcony. For the next three years he did not miss a performance by Garcia or his family. He became a trusted friend and adviser to Malibran, who turned to him in her despair when she became pregnant with the child of Charles de Bériot in 1830 and needed legal help in seeking a divorce from Eugène Malibran.⁵⁰ Viardot was level-headed, kind and principled, with a fierce commitment to individual liberty, including the promotion of women’s equal rights. He was the best man possible for Malibran to turn to in her desperate plight.

Viardot’s attraction to the Garcias was strengthened by his interest in Spain. In 1823, a French expeditionary force of 60,000 troops was mandated by the five great powers at the Congress of Verona to invade Spain and restore the absolutist power of King Ferdinand VII, who had been imprisoned for the past three years by the leaders of a parliamentary government. Having graduated from law school, Viardot joined the expedition, considering it an ‘opportunity to see the world’. Later he would come to view the restoration as a ‘crime against the nascent constitutionalism of Spain’. But at the time he reconciled the trip with his democratic conscience by serving not as a soldier but as a provisioner to the French troops in Seville. He was proud of his military title (‘garde-magasin de liquides’), because at the time of the Spanish Armada, in 1588, Cervantes had also worked as a supplier to the fleet based in Seville.⁵¹

The two years he spent in Seville began a life-long engagement with Spanish art and literature – one that would be shared by several generations of Frenchmen – and turned him from a lawyer into a writer. In the first of many books on Spain, Lettres d’un Espagnol, an epistolary novel published in two volumes in 1826, Viardot’s impressions of the country animated his account of a French officer journeying through Andalusia – one of the ‘most backward parts of Europe’, ruined by the power of feudal institutions and the Church (and the French occupation), which ‘needed to be opened to the influence of other European cultures for its civilization to develop’.⁵² It was a founding statement of his cultural philosophy of internationalism.

Back in Paris, Viardot turned more and more to writing political commentary. Under the pseudonym of ‘Y …’ he appeared regularly in Le Globe, a literary journal that became increasingly vocal in its opposition to the reactionary French king, Charles X.⁵³ From 1830, Le Globe became the organ of the Saint-Simonians, an early socialist movement to which Viardot was loosely connected.

Viardot would not only write but take action too. He participated in the 1830 July Revolution, which replaced Charles with his more liberal cousin, Louis Philippe, the Duc d’Orléans, at the head of the July Monarchy. On the morning of 30 July, the last of the three days of the uprising, Viardot was in the offices of Le Globe preparing the first bulletin on the victory of the Revolution, when a young journalist charged by the Commission of the Hôtel de Ville to take control of the préfecture de police came in search of help. The two men went armed with rifles to the prefecture, which they occupied for the next twenty-four hours, getting the administration back to work and restoring the free movement of goods into Paris, which had been blocked by the militias during the fighting.⁵⁴

In August 1830, the liberal Spanish exiles in Paris nominated Viardot as the leader of a ‘revolutionary committee’ to promote democracy in Spain. Louis Philippe had supported the initiative but his appointed government, led by Casimir-Pierre Périer (1831–2), turned out to be more conservative: it renounced foreign intervention, in the name of revolution in particular, and closed down Viardot’s committee. Viardot joined the opposition to the July Monarchy. He became a journalist for radical republican journals, writing mainly about opera, theatre, art and politics, and worked as an editor of La Revue républicaine.⁵⁵ By the end of the 1830s, he was considered one of the major figures in the intellectual circles of Paris.

A fire started by an overheated stovepipe swept through the Théâtre Italien on 14 January 1838. The Salle Favart was destroyed. One of the directors of the theatre, Carlo Severini, burned to death.⁵⁶ Viardot stepped in to get the theatre back onto its feet, moving it to temporary quarters in the Théâtre de l’Odéon, and in June he was appointed its director on a salary of 12,000 francs a year. Viardot was respected for his business acumen – in addition to his journalism he also ran a city transport company which he called a ‘social enterprise’.⁵⁷ But the key to his appointment was his friendship with the Spanish banker Alejandro Aguado, the Marquis de Las Marismas, a major power in the European opera world.⁵⁸

Born in 1784 into one of Seville’s leading noble families, Aguado had enrolled in the Spanish army, but went over to the French in 1810, when Napoleon’s forces conquered Andalusia. He became an aide-decamp to Marshal Soult, helping him in the wholesale pillaging of Spanish art and exporting it to France. When the French troops were expelled from Spain, he left with them and set up as a merchant in Paris, later becoming a financial broker for Spanish investors in France. His breakthrough came in 1823, when the heavily indebted Spanish government was forced to take a loan from France, its main protector following the intervention of that year. As one of the key players in setting up the loan, Aguado made a profit of around 5 million francs. From this point he acted as the Spanish government’s banker, securing loans for it from the financial markets in Paris, and by the end of the 1820s he had amassed a fortune of over 20 million francs. He owned several mansions in Paris, the Château de Petit-Bourg in Évry-sur-Seine, a hunting estate at Grossouvre in the Cher, and in 1835, when he was even richer from securing loans for Algeria and Greece, he bought Château Margaux, the famous wine estate.⁵⁹

Eager to convert his immense wealth into ‘symbolic capital’, Aguado bought up newspapers and amassed a collection of 400 paintings by the old masters (including 17 by Velázquez, 55 Murillos, 13 Zurbaráns, and 4 Rembrandts), which he opened to the public in 1837. Spanish art was little known in France until that time, but the opening of Aguado’s gallery coincided with a growing interest, reflected in the founding of the Musée Espagnol by Louis Philippe in 1838. To publicize his gallery, Aguado commissioned Viardot, recognized as a connoisseur of Spanish painting, to write a study of the masters it contained for a book of engravings.⁶⁰

Opera was Aguado’s biggest interest and the focus of his lavish spending in Paris. A close friend of Rossini, he commissioned works from him, gave him large amounts of money, showered him with gifts, and opened up his palaces to him (Rossini wrote his operas Le Comte Ory and William Tell during his extended stays at Petit-Bourg in 1828–9).⁶¹ It was through Rossini that Aguado became more involved in managing the Théâtre Italien and the Paris Opéra.

The Théâtre Italien was the first to fall to his control. In July 1829, the royal court signed a contract with Édouard Robert to run the theatre as a private enterprise for a period of fifteen years. Recommended by Rossini, Robert was Aguado’s man, his ‘pawn’ (prête-nom), as he was described by the Paris prefect of police, who oversaw the royal theatres. The contract set a number of conditions for the director-entrepreneur to maintain the theatre in its ‘present state of glory’, for which the court would pay him an annual subsidy of 70,000 francs. His side of the contract was guaranteed by a surety (cautionnement) of 100,000 francs deposited by Aguado.⁶²

The model set by this contract was then extended to the Opéra in a reform of February 1831. The July Revolution had added force to the idea that the theatre should be run as a business without burdening the public purse. The Opéra had amassed colossal debts, despite its growing subsidies during the 1820s. Its privileged position became a target for the liberal opposition, which also called for a renovation of its conservative repertoire. In February 1831, the government appointed a ‘director-entrepreneur’ to run it as a business for the next six years with an obligation to maintain it ‘in the state of magnificence and splendour’ appropriate for a national theatre. It was a form of public–private partnership. The director would receive a subsidy, which would be reduced as he brought the Opéra back into profit. The man chosen for this role was Louis-Désiré Véron, a doctor, journalist and businessman, who had made a small fortune by marketing a chest ointment for common colds. Like Robert, he was placed in the office by Aguado, who paid 200,000 of the 250,000 francs required as a surety.⁶³

For the next ten years, Aguado effectively controlled the two main opera houses in Paris. He paid the surety for every director and spent a fortune on financing them.⁶⁴ The theatres’ running costs were far higher than their subsidies and receipts from ticket sales: they depended on the Spanish banker to survive. Aguado’s losses were considerable (at least 50,000 francs a year), but they were more than compensated for by the prestige which he gained. At the Salle Le Peletier he sat in the royal box, which had a sumptuously furnished antechamber and a private toilet (lieu à l’anglaise) for the king and queen. On the marriage of Ferdinand-Philippe, the Duc d’Orléans and heir to the throne, to the Duchess Hélène of Mecklenburg–Schwerin in 1837, Aguado gave his box as a wedding gift to the royal couple (and then had a similar but bigger suite converted from two other boxes for himself). After each performance, that night’s takings were counted on a table placed outside Aguado’s box, where he waited for the sum to be announced. Such was the banker’s influence that at the Opéra, where a ballet was mandatory in any production, the costumes worn by the dancers were fashioned in a Spanish style and their fabrics put on sale in the theatre’s shop, the Garde-robe d’Aguado, which opened in 1838. Fashionable members of the audience started coming dressed à l’espagnol.⁶⁵

On his appointment by Aguado to the Théâtre Italien, Viardot looked for ways to bring it back into profit. One way of making opera pay was to combine the management of several theatres and share the singers between them. Barbaja had successfully combined the running of La Scala with the Italian season at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna during the 1820s. Rossini had encouraged Aguado to think of Paris, London and Naples as the basis of an opera empire which he might build up by running them together as a single enterprise. Covent Garden and the San Carlo theatres were both in financial crisis in the 1830s, so their leases might be cheaply acquired. Viardot wrote a memorandum for the Spanish banker in which he proposed a merger of the two Paris opera houses with Covent Garden. It would save on costs, because the same singers could be used in both cities (the Paris season ended in the spring before the beginning of the season in London); and it could make handsome profits if a larger theatre was constructed on the site of the Salle Le Peletier to increase the audience capacity. A good case could be made to the government that France’s glory would be served by a bigger opera house.⁶⁶

In May 1839, Viardot left for London with instructions from Aguado to buy the Covent Garden lease. On 1 June, Viardot reported that the trustees would not sell; they had already rejected three offers in excess of £80,000, and were holding out, he had been told, for £90,000 (2.26 million francs). He thought that at that price a purchase still made business sense. The failing London theatre could be turned around, bringing in a profit of perhaps £6,000 (150,000 francs) a year, if it was combined with the Opéra and the Théâtre Italien. ‘But for that,’ he concluded, ‘we must first put our affairs in Paris in order.’⁶⁷

The fire at the Salle Favart had been a major setback for the Théâtre Italien. Its new home at the Odéon was less well located on the left bank of the Seine for its mainly right-bank clientele. To boost ticket sales for the coming autumn season, Viardot purchased three new Donizetti operas, and it was then, after hearing Pauline sing in London, that he called on her to see if she would sign for the Théâtre Italien.

His negotiations with her mother, then still acting as her manager, proved difficult. Joaquina was no fool. She knew what price she could earn for her daughter and did not hesitate to turn down any offer if it fell short.⁶⁸ The deal she struck with Viardot was expensive for the Théâtre Italien. Pauline would be paid 4,500 francs a month, 27,000 for the whole season, and take half the profits from a benefit, a sum guaranteed by the management to be at least 5,000 francs. ‘I do not know if the financial conditions will appear to you a little hard,’ Viardot wrote to Aguado on 1 June,

but I have always thought, and you have shared my opinion, that we need to engage Pauline Garcia, at any price, whatever success she may have or not in the future. In effect, more than staying at the Odéon, what matters most is to push up sales of season tickets so as to ensure the theatre’s income independently of the artists’ or productions’ chances of success. The best way for certain is to pique in advance the curiosity of your parroquianos [parishioners] by promising them a new and already celebrated talent.⁶⁹

Pauline returned to Paris on her own to begin rehearsals at the Théâtre Italien in September. She wrote to Joaquina in Brussels saying how she wished she was in Paris for her debut there and that she had kept a room for her in case she came. She felt let down that Charles de Bériot had left Paris on a concert tour days before her premiere.⁷⁰ In the absence of her mother and Charles she must have become more dependent on Viardot. She needed the protection of a manager against rival prima donnas, jealous of the highly paid and heavily promoted newcomer. Despite the malicious rumours which they circulated against her, Pauline made a brilliant debut in the part of Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello on 8 October.

Musset praised her to the skies in the Revue des deux mondes. ‘The whole of Paris was drawn to the Odéon’ for the first night, he wrote. ‘There was a moment of silence when Mlle Garcia entered on the stage. The young artist was visibly moved, she hesitated, but before she was able to open her mouth, she was greeted by unanimous applause from all parts of the theatre. Was it the memory of her sister that had moved us to do that?’ Whereas Malibran had played Desdemona as a ‘Venetian heroine – love, anger, terror, everything about her was exuberant,’ Musset wrote, her younger sister played her in a manner that was truer to Rossini, ‘as a girl who loves naively, who wishes to be pardoned for her love, who weeps in the arms of her father at the very moment when he is about to curse her, and has courage only at the moment of her death’. The public was delighted by her innocent appearance (she wore a plain white dress to conjure memories of her sister), by the naturalness of her acting, without grand dramatic gestures, and by the purity of her singing. Some were bemused by the freshness of her performance, the likes of which had not been seen before. Marie d’Agoult was ill-disposed towards Pauline. She wrote to Liszt that the young singer was ‘ugly, badly dressed, and ungainly’. Yet even she acknowledged that she had a ‘magnificent voice’, which elevated her role to tragic heights in spite of these ‘blemishes’. Pauline had the air of ‘a proud and noble woman with an immense future before her’, d’Agoult reluctantly concluded. Two decades later, in his history of the nineteenth-century French theatre, Gautier wrote about her debut that ‘no one could forget her adorable gaucherie and naiveté worthy of the frescoes of Giotto’.⁷¹

Pauline’s debut was the talk of Paris, and everybody wanted to meet her. Viardot introduced her to George Sand, who had recently returned from her country house at Nohant in central France with the composer Chopin, her lover. A great fan of Malibran, Sand went to hear her sister sing, and at once pronounced her to be ‘the first, the only great and true singer’, a ‘priestess of the ideal in music’. Sand befriended the young star. Old enough to be her mother (she was thirty-five), Sand became her champion and counsellor, her ‘maternal and dearest friend’, as Pauline addressed her in their many letters during the 1840s. ‘It seems to me,’ Sand wrote in her diary, ‘that I love Pauline with the same sacred love I have for my son and daughter, and to all those tender feelings I add enthusiasm inspired by her genius.’⁷²

The writer saw Pauline as the embodiment of her feminist ideal of artistic freedom and autonomy. She would use her as the model for her heroine in Consuelo, a romantic saga serialized in 1842–3 in La Revue indépendante, a left-wing journal she had founded with Louis Viardot and Pierre Leroux in 1841.⁷³ Consuelo is a simple Spanish girl with a divine operatic gift. She arrives in Venice in the 1750s, becomes a leading singer in the courts of Europe, and, because she is devoted to her art, refuses to be tied down by any man or marriage, although in a sequel, The Countess of Rudolstadt (1843), she is reunited with Albert, a loyal spiritual companion, and eventually marries him. Sand based her heroine on what she wanted Pauline to become. She tried to shape the real life of her young friend and protégée, as she had shaped the story of her heroine.

Sand was determined to protect Pauline from the amorous attentions of Musset, who ended up proposing to the young singer.⁷⁴ Sand’s own stormy love affair with the romantic poet had left her deeply wounded, not least by his treatment of her infidelities in his autobiographical novel, The Confession of a Child of the Century (1835). Knowing him to be a womanizer and libertine, Sand thought that Musset was unsuitable as a suitor for Pauline, who needed a more stable and undemanding husband to pursue her career (a view shared by Pauline’s other female patron, Caroline Jaubert).⁷⁵ Sand had in mind her old friend Louis Viardot, who was in any event already showing a keen interest in Pauline, inviting her and Joaquina to his house for dinner with Aguado, Donizetti and the painter Ary Scheffer.⁷⁶

Viardot had all the qualities required to fulfil the role of Pauline’s husband, manager, protector, friend and spiritual companion. Old enough to be her father, he was not driven by the egotism of a younger and artistic man such as Musset, and would not have any problem putting her career first, supporting it indeed with his business skills in theatre management. He had excellent connections in society, in the artistic, literary and theatre worlds. By taking on the role of Pauline’s manager, he could promote her career more effectively than her mother Joaquina, who as a woman was at a disadvantage in the opera business, despite her undoubted strengths. Viardot, in addition, would give Pauline the respectability that her sister never had because of her scandalous affair with Charles de Bériot. Since the death of Malibran there had been malicious rumours that Bériot, who had led Pauline’s concert tours to London, Brussels, Leipzig and Berlin, had in turn been having an affair with her and was about to marry her.⁷⁷ Worried that such gossip might ruin her career in its infancy, Sand urged Pauline to accept Viardot’s offer of marriage, and recommended him to Joaquina as not just her daughter’s husband but her manager.

This was not to be a marriage of passion. Louis was a decent, kind and intelligent man. He stirred deep feelings of friendship and affection in Pauline but not strong romantic emotions. She depended on his advice and support (without them she would have been lost) and felt blessed to have him as her husband. But she was ‘unable to return his deep and ardent love, despite the best will in the world’, as she herself once confessed.⁷⁸

In a revealing letter to her confidante and friend, the German composer and conductor, Julius Rietz, in 1858, Pauline introduced her husband thus:

You will get to know him as an admirable man with a sensitive soul. He looks very cold, but is not so. His heart is warm and good, and his mind is far superior to mine. He worships art, and thoroughly appreciates the beautiful and the sublime. His only fault is that he lacks the childlike element, the impressionable mood. But is that not splendid to have just one fault! Perhaps in his youth he did not even have that fault. I did not know him yet when he was a young man – too bad – I was not born then.⁷⁹

To write about her husband to another man like that suggests that Pauline felt a high degree of emotional freedom. She had no internal brake to prevent her from developing – as she would in the years to come – a series of intimate relationships with men more suited than Louis to her passionate and playful temperament. Louis was too calm and sensible, too reasonable and staid, to satisfy what she herself described as her ‘demonstrative and southern character’. She was capable of loving Viardot, according to Sand, ‘only in a certain way, tenderly, chastely, generously, greatly without storms, without intoxication, without suffering, without passion in a word’.⁸⁰

They were married on 18 April 1840 in a civil ceremony at the Mairie of the 2nd arrondissement. Pauline was eighteen and Louis thirty-nine. Musset was sour about losing out, and claimed to friends he had been treated badly both by Pauline and by Sand. He drew a cruel satirical cartoon strip of Viardot’s courtship of Pauline and their wedding: the theatre manager is handicapped by his gigantic nose, which turns to dust when Sand makes a speech on his behalf to win him the consent of Pauline’s mother for her hand. The image of Viardot was henceforth to be linked to this mythically proportioned nose, which frequently appeared in drawings of him in the press.

They spent an extended honeymoon in Italy, a popular destination for well-off newlyweds, where Louis was commissioned by the government to write a report ‘on the state of the theatres and the arts’. They travelled to Milan, Bologna, Venice, Florence and then Rome, where they visited the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, then under the direction of Ingres, where they met a young Charles Gounod, who had just received the Prix de Rome.

Later that summer they returned to Paris, where they set up home in rue Favart, a few steps from the old Théâtre Italien. The next year they moved to square d’Orléans, a secluded residence of Nash-style mansions built in 1829 by the English architect Edward Cresy, where Sand and Chopin lived in separate apartments.⁸¹

Part of Musset’s cartoon satirizing Louis Viardot’s courtship of Pauline. The captions read (in English): left panel: ‘Superb lecture by Indiana [the heroine of George Sand’s first novel] that proves as two and two equal four that the more a man has nothing, the more one must give one’s daughter to him. Mr V. rests his nose on the backgammon table’; right panel: ‘The nose of Mr V crumbles into dust at the end of Indiana’s speech’.

On their marriage Louis had announced his resignation as director of the Théâtre Italien, a post he felt he could not hold without a conflict of interest. He now took on the role of Pauline’s business manager, negotiating all her fees and contracts, and handling all her earnings and her property, for which, as her husband, he was legally responsible in most countries in Europe.⁸² Until 1852, all her contracts were ‘duly authorized by her husband’ and signed by him. Later contracts were signed by herself but even then it was noted that she had been ‘duly assisted by her husband’.⁸³ Because of the theatre’s reputation for immorality, the laws for married women on the stage tended to be stricter in subordinating them to the control of their husbands than they would be otherwise. Under the Napoleonic Code, which ruled in France and strongly influenced the laws of other countries in the nineteenth century, women could not sign a contract without the consent of their husband, but they were allowed to act in business on their own. Jurists argued, however, that in the case of women in the theatre business a husband should retain the right to break a contract he had previously approved on grounds of morality and the protection of his family.⁸⁴

Being the wife of Louis Viardot, an influential man in the theatre world with close links to Aguado, was not the ticket to success Pauline’s supporters had imagined it would be. Aguado might have helped her on the Paris stage, but in 1840 his influence was cut by the government, which opposed his merger plans and forced him to accept its own choice of director at the Opéra, Léon Pillet, a man Aguado could not stand (he immediately reduced his investment there from 300,000 francs to 150,000 francs a year). Then, in 1842, Aguado died in a carriage accident in Spain, whereupon his widow sold his opera interests.⁸⁵

Once the power of Aguado was removed, the opera world of Paris descended into a welter of petty rivalries. Pauline found her career blocked by rival prima donnas and their supporters. At the Opéra, she was obstructed by Rosine Stolz, a singer known for her passionate excess, who was the mistress of Pillet.⁸⁶ Too weak to resist her influence, Pillet would not let an opera be staged without his mistress in the leading role. Stolz employed a claque to organize applause and cheering for herself. She intrigued against Pauline, paying journalists to spread the rumour that she was too mercenary to reach an agreement with the Opéra’s management. Louis became so frustrated that he launched an attack on the Opéra, accusing it of bias and incompetence, in La Revue indépendante, in December 1841. It was not the most effective way of promoting Pauline’s cause.⁸⁷

Meanwhile at the Théâtre Italien the new management was reluctant to employ Pauline for fear of alienating their own prima donna, Giulia Grisi, the Italian soprano, then at the height of her powers. Grisi was ten years older than Pauline, and feared her as a rival. When at last Pauline was engaged for one season, beginning in October 1842, Grisi employed a claque to greet her own arias with loud applause and bravas while hissing at Pauline’s. Grisi also bribed the leading critics to heap lavish praise on her own performances and scorn on those of her competitor. The critics of the Revue des deux mondes, the Revue de Paris, Le Ménestrel and Le Moniteur were all in her pay. The most vicious attack came from Henri Blaze de Bury in the Revue des deux mondes on 1 December. The real target of the article was not only Pauline but her husband, one of the founders and main financier of La Revue indépendante, the rival publication to the Revue des deux mondes.⁸⁸ Feeling honour-bound to defend his wife, Louis wrote a pompous letter to the newspaper Le Siècle, explaining the real motive of Blaze de Bury, who only three years previously, on her debut at the Théâtre Italien, had praised Pauline to the skies. ‘There are good-hearted people who strike a woman in order to wound a man,’ concluded Viardot.⁸⁹

Blocked in Paris, Pauline was obliged to tour abroad. In 1841, she spent a second season in London, a city she disliked, complaining to George Sand that its citizens were dull and over-formal, and ‘one had to flatter their bad taste’.⁹⁰ The next summer, following the birth of their first child, Louise, Pauline went on a concert tour of Spain accompanied by Louis as her manager. The reception she received was ecstatic. In Granada, in the stifling heat, huge crowds thronged outside the theatre, pushing at the door in desperate efforts to get in. Blackmarket ticket prices soared.⁹¹ It was the first time she had visited the country of her parents. As she recalled many decades later, it all seemed strangely familiar to her: ‘Everything I saw, it seemed, I had seen before, everything I heard I thought I had heard before … the people I encountered seemed to reappear from my own dreams … I felt as if this was my true homeland. But that did not mean that I wanted to live there.’⁹²

Sand wrote that she was following her tour in the newspapers with Chopin and Delacroix at Nohant, where she was also taking care of the baby Louise. ‘You have your foot in one stirrup, that is Spain. You need to put your foot in a second stirrup, which will be Italy, and then you will ride through France and England at a great gallop.’ The three friends agreed, she reported, that Pauline was the greatest singer in the world, that one day it would be obvious, ‘to the vulgar as well as the connoisseurs’, that she had made rapid progress before suffering a setback (her exclusion from the Paris Opéra), and that to advance she needed to adopt a different route. She was sure that ‘our Loulou [Louis], once he had reflected and discussed it with you, would give you the same advice’:

The fact is that France and England are too blasé and their taste is too corrupted not to stifle – so far as they are able – the development of a young artist, above all when that artist is a woman, faithful and modest, devoid of intrigue or impropriety. You must return to these cold countries with a renown so well-made abroad that the cabals against you only serve to strengthen you. It must be that the newspapers with their ignorant and petty, pedantic criticism in bad faith, do not come every morning to push you right and left. You must by enthusiasm reign in the less sceptical and less dogmatic countries, and for a few years the newspaper countries [Sand’s emphasis] must only record and draw attention to your successes, without being able to analyse them and pick them to pieces. It must come about, in sum, that the imbecile public, which thinks itself such a great connoisseur but is so far from it, because of its lack of heart, desires you, calls for you, demands that you return.

The conclusion was that Pauline should continue on her tours, and not return to Paris until her fame forced her enemies to give way. ‘Paris without an engagement at the theatre would be like a grave for you.’⁹³

The Viardots agreed, and, as Pauline’s manager, Louis soon began negotiations with La Scala and Berlin. The next spring, from April to July, they were in Vienna, where Pauline triumphed as Rosina in The Barber of Seville and as La Cenerentola. On the opening night there were no fewer than a dozen curtain calls; each time flowers were thrown onto the stage, which was completely covered by them, as she herself reported to George Sand. The Viennese had ‘not heard anybody sing like that before’, recalled Princess Metternich in her memoirs. From Vienna they travelled on to Prague, where Pauline found the public to be ‘very intelligent and very enthusiastic’, and from there continued to Berlin. On her previous concert tours she had struggled to make an impression on the Prussians, who were known for their relative decorum as theatre-goers. But this time she was able to report to Sand: ‘the cold Berliners have suddenly become as hot as the Viennese’.⁹⁴

Meyerbeer, 1847.

It was in Berlin that Pauline first met the composer Meyerbeer, a powerful figure in the European music world whose spectacular Robert le diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836) had been huge hits throughout the Continent. Meyerbeer was the Kapellmeister (musical director) at the Prussian court and (from 1843) the Generalmusikdirektor of the Berlin Opera. A keen admirer of Pauline’s voice and acting qualities, he arranged for her to sing at Potsdam for the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm. Meyerbeer believed that Pauline should become the prima donna at the Paris Opéra. He promised her that he would not allow his operas to be put on there unless she appeared in them. ‘Meyerbeer has plans for me,’ Pauline wrote excitedly to Sand in August 1843. ‘He tells anybody he can get to listen that for him I am the greatest artist in the universe, that it is me he wants at the Opéra.’⁹⁵

Meyerbeer was a powerful ally, but even his support was not enough to overcome the opposition in Paris. As a result, shortly after their return to the French capital, in September 1843, the Viardots accepted the contract for the coming autumn season in St Petersburg. ‘I can announce with heated excitement that the engagement for St Petersburg was signed an hour ago and we are all very happy,’ Pauline wrote to Sand on 20 September, ‘all the more because this grand parti is advantageous in a thousand different ways.’⁹⁶ Their motives for the trip were commercial: the money she was offered by the Russians was just too good to refuse. Russia was a lucrative new market for Italian opera, and Pauline needed it, not just for the huge fees she would earn, but because, as George Sand had advised, she needed more successes to draw attention to herself in the ‘newspaper countries’ such as France.

In the first week of October, the Viardots departed on the long and arduous journey from Paris via Berlin to St Petersburg. The French railways were only just beginning to be built, so from Paris to the Belgian border they had to travel by stagecoach. But from there they could connect to the newly finished railway between Antwerp and Cologne. Crossing western Prussia by mail coach, they reached Hanover on their sixth day on the road. From there they could go by train to Magdeburg, continuing their journey by horse and carriage to Potsdam, where there was a rail link to Berlin. There was no railway for the last part of their journey from the Prussian capital, so they travelled the remaining 1,600 kilometres to St Petersburg by Schnellpost, the fastest German carriage, as far as the Russian frontier, and then by kibitka, a closed wagon drawn by horses over muddy, bumpy roads.

2

The first international railway, between Antwerp and Cologne, had only just opened, and the Viardots must have been among the first to travel on the line. The new railway was a vital boost to international trade. Goods from lands with access to the Rhine could now be transported via Aachen and Liège to Antwerp’s harbour on the River Scheldt, and from there by ship to the rest of the world.

There were festivals to mark its opening in Cologne, Aachen and Antwerp, where the main theme was the unity of Belgium with Prussia’s Rhine province. ‘Our customs, habits, desires, our interests are the same. We feel the same impulse to business, and we are inspired by the same love for art and science,’ declared the Mayor of Antwerp at a banquet for 500 people in his city’s Stock Exchange.⁹⁷

The King of Prussia was not there. As a member of the Holy Alliance, established by the three great conservative powers (Russia, Austria and Prussia) at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Friedrich Wilhelm would not recognize the Belgian state, founded by a revolution in July 1830, and saw it as a growing threat to Prussia’s Rhineland interests, not least through its ‘ultramontane’ movement linking Belgian Catholics with Rhenish Catholics. He feared that the railway between Antwerp and Cologne might unify the Rhineland with Belgium and prise it away from Prussia. The Rhenish bourgeoisie admired Belgium’s freedoms. It invested heavily in the international line, wanting closer trade links with Belgium. From its very start, the railway weakened national frontiers.

With a second railway from Antwerp via Brussels to Mons in the south, Belgium was soon crossed by two main routes – one from east to west, the other north to south – connecting its main cities, ports and industrial regions. The network also opened Belgium to its four neighbours: Britain, France, the Netherlands and the patchwork of independent states that made up Germany.

Within a few years of the opening of the Cologne–Antwerp line, national boundaries were being crossed by railways everywhere. In 1846, the line from Paris to Brussels was completed when the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer du Nord opened the French section as far as Lille. The Chemin de Fer du Nord soon connected Paris to the Channel ports of Boulogne, Dunkirk and Calais, from which a steamer took only three hours to reach England. By 1848, there were railways linking France to Switzerland, Switzerland to Baden and Hesse, Bavaria to Saxony and Prussia, Brunswick to Hanover and Holland. The Austrians had a railway from Vienna to Prague and were building another through the Semmering mountains to Trieste, their only seaport. The Russian Empire had a railway line from Warsaw to the Austrian border, where trains went through to Vienna.

The railway was the symbol of industrial progress and modernity. It defined the ‘modern age’, consigning horse-drawn transport to the ‘old world’. ‘We who lived before the railways and survive the ancient world are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark,’ declared William Makepeace Thackeray.⁹⁸ The railways brought about a revolution in the European sense of space and time. Broad new vistas opened up and countries seemed to shrink in size as remote hinterlands were brought closer to cities. ‘I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries are advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea breakers are rolling against my door,’ Heine wrote on the opening of two lines from Paris (one to Orléans, the other to Rouen) in 1843.⁹⁹

The power of the railways to unite people was seized upon immediately. They were seen as a democratic force. Reflecting on a train ride from Versailles to Paris, Jules Michelet, the historian, wrote that, where the palace was the caprice of a king, the railways were ‘for everybody’s use, bringing France together, uniting Lyon with Paris’.¹⁰⁰ Reactionaries feared the railways’ democratic influence. Pope Gregory XVI banned them in the Papal States for this reason, while the Crown Prince of Hanover was equally opposed to them because he did ‘not want every shoemaker and tailor travelling as fast’ as him.¹⁰¹

Goethe saw the railways as a unifying force for Germany, a vision shared by the German economist Friedrich List in his influential work, The National System of Political Economy (1841). List envisaged a railway system for the whole of Germany, with six lines radiating out of Berlin to Munich, Basel, Cologne, and connecting Germany to neighbouring countries. The railways, he maintained, were the driving force of national development, allowing trade and industries to grow, promoting a common culture, and weakening provincial isolation and narrow-mindedness. He even thought the railways would facilitate the development of a Europe-wide economy.

List was not alone in seeing the potential of the railways to unite Europe. Camillo Cavour, the Minister of Finance, who oversaw the building of the railways in Piedmont, believed more broadly in their cultural mission to ‘raise the civic spirit of the backward nations of Europe’, by which he largely meant the rest of the Italians.¹⁰² In France, Victor Hugo spoke about them as the locomotive of progress, leading to a global culture with a single language, French: ‘On va en wagon et l’on parle français.’ In Britain there were predictions that the railroad would transform the world of nations into ‘one large family speaking one language and worshiping a single God’.¹⁰³

But no one believed in the unifying force of the railways more than the Saint-Simonians, who saw in them the realization of the French Revolution’s ideals of fraternity between nations. ‘To foreshorten for everyone the distances that separate localities from each other is to equally diminish the distances that separate men from one another,’ wrote the Saint-Simonian thinker Constantin Pecqueur in a book of 1839 whose central argument – that changes in material conditions produce changes in the cultural sphere – was a major influence on Marx’s materialist philosophy.¹⁰⁴

Marx himself was keenly conscious of the railways’ impact on the circulation of commodities. In the Grundrisse (1857–8) he analysed the ‘annihilation of space by time’ through the railways, steamships and the telegraph, enabling commerce to be globalized. By cutting transport costs, the railways opened new markets to a whole range of products: fresh fish could now reach inland towns; wines from France or Italy became known throughout Europe. During the previous 300 years, the volume of world trade had risen slowly at less than 1 per cent per year; but between 1820 and 1870 it shot up by 4.18 per cent every year.¹⁰⁵

It was not just commodities that circulated wider and faster, but people, letters, news and information, leading to a widening public sense in all the railway nations of belonging to ‘Europe’. The connection between the growth of international commerce and the development of a pan-European or ‘cosmopolitan’ culture was indeed emphasized by many leading thinkers, including Kant, Goethe and Marx. Before the railways it was not uncommon for citizens to spend their whole lives in the town where they were born. ‘A journey of a hundred miles,’ recalled an English writer in the 1890s, ‘was then looked upon with greater apprehension than a journey round the globe is at present.’¹⁰⁶ The fastest mode of long-distance travel was by stagecoach or diligence, which even on macadam roads could not go faster than 10–12 kilometres an hour, allowing time for horses to be changed.

The arrival of the railways did not transform times of travel overnight. It took years for lines to be completed, so passengers were forced to switch from train to carriage for those sections of their journey where the railway was not yet built, as the Viardots had done on their first voyage to St Petersburg. Similarly, in July 1849, an Italian diplomat took more than a week to reach Genoa from Ferrara, a distance of 300 kilometres as the crow flies, despite using the newly opened railway between Florence and Livorno. To reach Florence he had to cross the Apennines in a carriage, and then take another one from Pisa to Genoa.¹⁰⁷

Nonetheless, the speed of railway travel was experienced as a revolution. The first trains travelled at between thirty and fifty kilometres per hour, with some reaching speeds of up to eighty kilometres per hour, causing many passengers to both marvel and take fright.¹⁰⁸ Before 1843, George Sand needed two days, sometimes more, to travel by mail-coach from Paris to her home at Nohant, a journey of 280 kilometres; but the opening of the railway to Orléans cut the journey time by half.¹⁰⁹ Five years later, in 1848, Chopin took just twelve hours to go by train from London to Edinburgh, a journey of 650 kilometres which only ten years earlier had lasted two days and a night by the fastest coach on turnpike roads.¹¹⁰ Letters which had taken weeks to travel across Europe by mail-coach now arrived in a few days, and with the telegraph, which ran along the railways, news could reach the major cities in minutes. National daily newspapers were a product of the railways, which could get an evening edition from the capital to most provincial towns by the following morning. Regional newspapers were a product of the telegraph, which transmitted the main national and international headlines in a matter of seconds, so that they could report them in the paper locally.

Spreading right across the Continent, the railways also powered the international circulation of European music, literature and art. They brought about a revolution in the cultural marketplace.

A market for creative works had existed in the eighteenth century, when a public sphere developed in the form of concerts, newspapers and periodicals, private galleries and museums, enabling writers, artists and musicians to free themselves from their previous dependence on powerful patrons and sell their works to a wider society.¹¹¹ But this market was still quite small and localized. In the visual arts and music it was dominated by the networks organized around a group of noble connoisseurs, an academy of arts or opera house, and artists still depended on these personal connections to pursue their trade. The situation did not change substantially in the early decades of the nineteenth century. It was only with the arrival of railways, telegraphs, a national press and cheap methods of mass printing that the arts began to function in a more impersonal marketplace – one in which producers sold their works in forms that could be reproduced and distributed internationally.

The impact of the railways was transformational, especially in the book trade, where transport costs were cut dramatically. The international export of books from France, for example, more than doubled in volume between 1841 and 1860. For the first time the market for French books became truly global, one third of the exports going beyond Europe by 1860, when steamships made it economical to transport books to francophone Canada.¹¹² In the German-speaking world, the publishers of Leipzig and Berlin enjoyed a similar export boom thanks to their excellent rail connections, which cut transport costs by three quarters between 1845 and 1855.¹¹³

The speed with which a new creative work was now able to cross national boundaries was phenomenal. Nothing like it had been seen before. For example, on 1 September 1843, the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris premiered a vaudeville about the newly opened railways, entitled Paris, Orléans, Rouen. Published in the Magasin théâtral, it was adapted by the Austrian actor Johann Nestroy as Railway Marriages, or Vienna, Neustadt, Brünn, whose first performance took place at the Theater an der Wien only four months later, on 3 January 1844.¹¹⁴

The cultural map of Europe was redrawn by the railways. Provincial towns were drawn into the orbit of big cities, whose growth went hand in hand with the development of the railways. For Lille, for instance, the opening of the line from Paris meant more visits by touring artists from the capital (the Théâtre Italien did a season there in 1856, and again in 1865).¹¹⁵ Cities with an international link became important cultural hubs in their own right. Brussels was transformed from a Flemish-speaking Brabant town into a cosmopolitan European city by its rail connections to France and Germany. The opening of the Paris–Brussels line brought in 20,000 foreign immigrants, mostly French, between 1843 and 1853.¹¹⁶ The French emerged as the city’s cultural élite, running theatres and museums, writing for the press, or working there as writers and artists. Because of its position between the francophone and German-speaking worlds, Brussels became an important channel for the German arts in France (many of the operas of Wagner, for example, were performed in Belgium before they were in France).

The railways also brought a new provincial public into the cities. Hotels, restaurants, shops and cafés sprang up near the railway terminals. The impact on the entertainment business was extraordinary. Previously, in the age of carriage travel, when a theatre would depend on the population of a single town and its environs, managers relied on selling season tickets to the box-holders. To keep this local public entertained, they needed constant novelty. An opera would last for a season – or less – before being dropped and forgotten. Few productions maintained their powers of attraction to survive much longer than a year or warrant a revival later on, so they simply disappeared. At La Scala, for example, 298 different operas were produced in the first four decades of the theatre’s existence (from 1778 to 1826), but only thirty were repeated in a second season, and just eight in a third. Paisiello’s Barber of Seville (1782) was the only opera to be staged in five seasons.¹¹⁷ With the coming of the railways a new type of market for the theatre developed. Theatre-goers came into the cities from a wider catchment area, from distant provinces and foreign lands, pushing up demand for single-performance tickets. Released from their dependence on selling season tickets, managers could put on longer runs of the most successful works, or bring back old productions for a second run, so that something like a stable repertory or canon began to emerge.

The railway also made it possible for touring companies and musicians to reach a wider audience. For Pauline Viardot, who had toured by coach and boat for years, the railways opened up exciting possibilities. She could now return to France between seasons or performances in Germany or England, both of which had fast rail links. At the same time, the railways made it possible for her to make money from provincial tours. Travelling on the newly opened Great Western Railway on their way to the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester in September 1841, the Viardots marvelled at the ‘huge horses of civilisation devouring coal and spewing flame’, as Louis called the locomotive trains.

Peacefully seated in a vast armchair, without jolting or jarring, without pitching or rolling, one looks out through the window at a moving panorama, whose points of view change every second, and renew themselves incessantly. Villages and towns, manor houses, cottages and farms dotted over every hill and valley – they all flew past. We had for our journey one of those days interspersed with sun and rain, which allowed us to observe things in all their aspects of light and shade.¹¹⁸

Johann Strauss was delighted by the possibilities of railway travel in Britain. In 1838, his orchestra performed in over thirty British towns between April and July – a rate of travel that would have been impossible in Austria or France, where railway-building lagged behind. ‘I found myself in a different town almost daily,’ Strauss wrote to the conductor Adolf Müller at the end of his British trip, ‘as one may travel here exceedingly quickly by virtue of the good horses and excellent roads. In particular, of great advantage to the traveller are the railways, which mode of transport I have used extensively, e.g. in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, etc …’¹¹⁹

Musicians had been forced to travel constantly to make a living long before the arrival of the railways. But the time spent on travelling by coach, not to speak about the dangers and discomforts, ate into their profits heavily. Berlioz would frequently complain about the ‘ruinous costs’ of transporting heavy boxes of sheet music by boat and horse-drawn carriage over pot-holed roads, claiming that they wiped out any profit from his concert tours. But he was encouraged by the coming of the railways to set off on a series of ambitious tours of Germany, beginning in the winter of 1842–3, taking advantage of the newly opened lines between Berlin, Magdeburg, Brunswick and Hanover. In his memoirs, Berlioz recalls an ‘unusual success’ at Magdeburg, where a mail office clerk, on registering his luggage, would not believe that he was the famous composer:

No doubt the good man had imagined that this fabulous musician would be bound to travel, if not mounted in a hippogriff in a whirlwind of flame, at least with a sumptuous baggage-train and a small army of flunkeys in attendance; instead of which, here was a man who looked like any other man who has been at once smoked and chilled in a railway carriage, and who saw to the weighing of his trunk, walked by himself, did his own talking, in French, spoke no word of German but ‘Ja’, and was clearly an impostor.¹²⁰

Rossini, famously, was scared of trains. It had not always been that way. On his first rail journey, between Antwerp and Brussels in 1836, he had marvelled at the speed of the train and had told his mistress, Olympe Pélissier, that he felt no fear. But something must have happened after that, an accident perhaps, because from the 1840s he refused to board a train again and travelled everywhere by horse-drawn carriages. His inability to move with modern times was symbolic. Rossini’s music was firmly rooted in the world before railways: it was small-scale, it went along with the light clip-clop of a horse and carriage, and was designed for the economies of a provincial or court theatre whose public did not travel far. The composer was unable to adapt to the new conditions of the railway age, when theatres also catered to a broader middle-class public, demanding large-scale entertainments with bigger orchestras and choruses, sumptuous stage designs and spectacular effects – namely the Grand Operas, the five-act music dramas favoured by the Paris Opéra. Rossini tried but could not work with this new form. After William Tell (1829), his first and last attempt at it, he gave up writing operas altogether and went into retirement, settling down in Bologna. Seeking to explain his decision to retire, Rossini later wrote that opera, like any type of art, was ‘inseparable from the times in which we live’, that the ‘idealism and sentiment’ which underpinned his art had become outdated in the modern age of ‘steam’ and ‘barricades’.¹²¹ It is no accident that Meyerbeer, the first great composer of Grand Opera, embraced the industrial age. He travelled on the railways all the time; he composed on trains. You can hear their pulse in his music. Meyerbeer had been a protégé of Rossini. The two men were friends, colleagues and contemporaries, but their music was the voice of two entirely different worlds.

The railways underpinned the optimism of the nineteenth century, the belief in moral progress through science and technology. Along with photography and mechanical technologies, they helped to generate a modern understanding of reality, a new sense of the ‘here and now’, of a world made up of movement, constant change, where everything was momentary. ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’, as Baudelaire put it.¹²² Fresh art forms were needed to reflect this contemporary reality: an art that made sense of the modern world as it was experienced by the city dweller; an art that showed things as they actually were, not Romantic fantasies. As Theodor Fontane wrote in 1843, ‘Romanticism is finished on this earth, the age of the railway has dawned.’¹²³

3

Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris was published in Le Journal des débats over seventeen months from June 1842 to October 1843. Set in the criminal underworld of Paris, where its hero, Prince Rodolphe, ventures on a mission to help the urban poor, the melodrama proved so popular that its serialization boosted the newspaper’s sales by several thousand in only a few weeks. The number of its readers was far higher than those who could afford to pay the 80-franc subscription to Le Journal des débats. By some estimates, anything between 400,000 and 800,000 people read the story between 1842 and 1844. In that time there were ten translations of the novel, including six in English, at least doubling its readership. Tens of thousands of its poorest French readers bought the novel in fifty-centime instalments. Others kept up with its weekly episodes in public reading rooms, the cabinets de lecture, where books and journals could be read for a small fee, although demand for Le Journal des débats was so high that in many cabinets access to it needed to be timed. ‘In the cafés,’ noted Charles Sainte-Beuve, the literary critic, ‘they fight over the débats in the morning; they charge as much as ten sous for the time it takes to read the episode of Sue’s story.’ Groups of workers assembled in their workshops to hear the next instalment read. They wrote to Sue with comments on his passages describing the conditions of the poor, and made suggestions for plot development. The novel’s characters were household names. ‘Everyone is talking about your mysteries,’ wrote one reader to the novelist.

Your work is everywhere – on the worker’s bench, on the merchant’s counter, on the little lady’s divan, on the shop-girl’s table, on the office worker’s and magistrate’s desk. I am sure that of the entire population of Paris, only those people who cannot read do not know of your work.¹²⁴

For middle-class subscribers of Le Journal des débats the novel’s dark descriptions of the backstreets of Paris tapped into their fears of the city’s poor. Les Mystères de Paris transposed the horrors of a Gothic novel to the urban underworld. It also offered hope of reconciliation between rich and poor (a point on which Marx took serious issue with Sue’s politics). The novel had a popular appeal to a new class of readers created by the Guizot law of 1833, which obliged every commune or municipality to maintain a public school. What the novel meant to the newly literate shopgirl or worker is hard to tell; though, judging from the letters that many of them wrote to its author, they liked its exciting episodes, the story’s twists and turns, and its characters from humble backgrounds like themselves.

The serialized novel was a cheap alternative to the standard hard-bound novel format, which was too expensive for these new readers. For the newspapers it represented a marketing technique in their quest for a mass readership. The first novel to be serialized in a French newspaper was Balzac’s La Vieille Fille, which came out in twelve daily episodes in La Presse, starting on 23 October 1836 – the same year as Dickens’s Pickwick Papers began to appear in monthly shilling instalments. La Presse was the brainchild of Émile de Girardin, one of a new breed of commercial publishers to take advantage of the mass demand for reading matter. He worked out that subscription prices could be lowered if a bigger readership succeeded in attracting increased advertising revenue. Launched in July 1836 with an annual subscription price of only forty francs, La Presse tripled its daily circulation by 1845, doubling its advertising income during the same period. Adverts appeared on every page. The serialized novel, or roman feuilleton, was the paper’s major draw. Girardin was ready to pay writers handsomely. He had been lucky to discover Sue at the lowest point of his literary career, when he had fallen into debt after his first stories had been given bad reviews. Girardin paid him by the page for his first success, Mathilde: The Memoirs of a Young Woman, published in La Presse from December 1840. It was followed by three more serials in 1842.¹²⁵

By this time, every major newspaper was in the market for serial stories to increase circulation. Technical improvements in lithography enabled them to publish them cheaply in mass print-runs with illustrations, which added to their popularity. Editors competed for the best authors. Le Journal des débats had paid 26,500 francs for Sue’s Mystères, a huge sum for a novel, but the boost it gave to the newspaper’s sales meant that bids were even higher for his next novel, Le Juif errant. The editor of Le Constitutionnel, Louis Véron (the former director of the Opéra), won with a payment of 100,000 francs for Sue’s family saga, reckoning that he would earn it back just by increasing subscriptions. By Véron’s calculations, Le Constitutionnel would need to double its 40-franc subscriptions, but in fact the number rose from 3,600 to 25,000 while the story ran on its pages, and went on rising to 40,000 in the next few years as the continued popularity of Le Juif errant in cheap book formats and theatrical adaptions brought prestige to Le Constitutionnel as a source of popular fiction.¹²⁶

Many of the most successful writers made their fortunes from the roman feuilleton. From Pickwick Papers (in 1836–7) to Bleak House (in 1852–3), Dickens published his bestsellers in monthly shilling instalments, switching to a weekly format for Hard Times in 1854. Balzac wrote on an industrial scale for the feuilletons. He was preoccupied with making money, because he was constantly in debt. Over twenty Balzac novels (including Cousin Pons and Cousin Bette) appeared first in newspapers between 1836 and 1850, all of them reprinted in book form. In 1847 alone, he had novels being serialized in three different newspapers. George Sand published Consuelo in instalments in La Revue indépendante between 1842 and 1843. Its appearance helped to keep the struggling journal going at a time when Louis Viardot, as the journal’s financial guarantor, might have been bankrupted otherwise (this was an extra incentive for the Viardots to accept the lucrative contract for St Petersburg in 1843). In the next four years Sand wrote seven novels in serialized form – the first, Jeanne (1844), for Le Constitutionnel, which paid her handsomely, although she disliked the monthly deadlines and the need to write to the same format, complaining to Véron that she felt like his bouche-trou (column-filler).¹²⁷

No one filled more column inches than Alexandre Dumas, whose long novels, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, were both published in serial form, the first in Le Siècle from March to July 1844, the second in Le Journal des débats from 1844 to 1846. Dumas needed to finance an extravagant lifestyle. He had several mistresses and at least four children to support. Because they were paid for fiction by the line, writers were encouraged to string out stories by adding characters and episodes, and editors were happy to keep on printing them, as long as they sold their newspapers. The Count of Monte Cristo proved so popular that Dumas was able to spin it out for 139 episodes, earning him 200,000 francs at 1.5 francs per line. By the mid-1840s, he was writing several novels simultaneously for different newspapers. Nobody could work out how he found the time to churn out so much prose. The cartoonist Émile Marcelin drew Dumas at a table holding four pens between the fingers of his hands while a waiter fed him soup.¹²⁸

Able to make do with very little sleep, Dumas would write from the morning until late at night. He composed extremely quickly, producing up to twenty large sheets every day, and leaving it to secretaries to add the punctuation to his flowing prose. He relied heavily on assistants – the most important of them being a young aspiring writer and historian, Auguste Macquet, who met Dumas in 1838. Macquet helped him with his major novels, usually writing the first draft on an idea from Dumas, and often adding his historical research, before Dumas rewrote it in finished form. Although Macquet was well paid, his name did not appear on the title page, on the insistence of the publishers, who were interested only in the Dumas brand. But rumours spread, and soon Dumas was accused of not writing everything in his own name. ‘Everyone has read Dumas, but nobody has read everything of Dumas’s, not even Dumas himself,’ commented one wit. There were unfair claims that Dumas bought up manuscripts from literary hacks and put his name to them to profit from his popularity. One critic, a jealous rival called Eugène de Mirecourt, wrote a pamphlet (Fabrique de romans [The Novel Factory]: Maison Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie) accusing him of running a literary sweatshop in which his hired scribblers were reduced to the condition of ‘black slaves working under the whip of a half-caste overseer’ – a malicious reference to Dumas’s own ancestry, for his grandmother was of African descent and had been enslaved on a French plantation in Haiti. Dumas won a libel case against the pamphleteer.¹²⁹ Yet the critics did not go away. What they objected to was not so much the provenance of Dumas’s stories as the monetary profits which they made. Commercially successful literature was seen almost automatically as bad literature. The idea that a writer would debase himself as a ‘literary merchant’ – as Thackeray accused Sue of doing in a critical review of Les Mystères – was anathema to those who held that literature should aspire to the ideals of pure art. Among them was Sainte-Beuve, who wrote a blistering attack, ‘On Industrial Literature’, claiming that it transformed writing into a form of business where success was measured not by artistic merit, but by profit and celebrity. ‘Money, money, money,’ the critic lamented, ‘we cannot overemphasize how it has become the nervous system and the god of literature today.’¹³⁰

It was not just in the newspapers that fiction boomed. There was also a revolution in the publication of books.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the making of a book was still a craft. The main production processes – paper-making, typecasting, composition, inking and binding – were all done by hand. Hard-bound books were expensive. In England novels were often published in three volumes – a format designed to enable libraries to lend the parts out separately – with each volume costing between five and six shillings. Since the average weekly earnings of a skilled worker were not much more than twenty shillings, or a pound, the purchase of a novel was a luxury. The restricted size of the market meant that publishers were risk-averse. They were small-scale businesses. Without capital, they were unable to make long-term investments in a book; nor could they afford to do so without effective laws of copyright, for pirate reprinters of anything successful soon ate into their profits. Instead they published small print-runs in the hope of making profits on a quick turnover, and reprinted only if the book caught on. Even when it did, they were more likely to increase its price than to sell it cheaply in a bigger print-run. The publisher of Walter Scott, Archibald Constable, cashed in on his popularity by charging the enormous sum of 10s 6d (roughly fourteen francs or $11) for each volume of his works.¹³¹

There had always been cheap books. Bibles, prayer books, catechisms, ballads, almanacs and popular abridgements of classic tales were sold by pedlars in large numbers. What was new in the 1830s and 1840s was the development of a commercial strategy by publishers in Britain, France and Germany to make literary works affordable to a mass readership by exploiting new technologies and increasing the print-run to achieve a lower unit cost. Between 1828 and 1853 the price of books in England came down by 40 per cent, on average, but the biggest reduction was in the price of fiction for the new mass market of readers. The novel published in three leather-bound volumes gave way to cloth or paperback editions in one volume which were cheaper to produce and easier to sell. The eighteen-shilling ‘three-decker’ novel in Britain was replaced by the two-shilling or 1s 6d book. In France the twenty-two-franc novel in three octave volumes gave way to the pocket-sized editions of the Bibliothèque Charpentier and other series published by the likes of Lévy or Hachette where the whole text was contained in a single volume costing only 3.5 francs. In Germany the new (16mo) format was introduced by the publishing house of J. G. A. Cotta in its cheap twelve-volume pocket edition of Schiller’s works (1837–8), which sold 100,000 copies, an unheard-of figure for German publishing at that time.¹³²

The revolution in trade publishing was driven by a series of developments. The popular demand for cheaper books was a result of the growth of literacy in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In France the number of adult readers rose by 21 per cent in the 1830s, by a further 18 per cent in the next decade, and by 21 per cent again during the 1850s.¹³³ More people had a bit of extra cash to spend on books. A middling British family with an annual income of around £200 (5,000 francs) could afford to spend a pound or two on books and music every year. Leisure time increased. The introduction of gas lighting had a transformative effect, making it much easier to read or play the piano in the evenings, turning these home entertainments into the main leisure activities of ‘respectable’ families.

New technologies made book production cheaper: paper-making was increasingly mechanized, reducing its cost by around half in the early decades of the nineteenth century; hand-sewn leather bindings were replaced by machine-bound cloth covers; and steam-powered presses made large-scale printing possible. The real breakthrough in mechanized printing was the revolving cylinder machine, the basis of the rotary press, invented in 1843, which used a curved stereotype to move back and forth across the inked printing plate. Cast from a papier-mâché mould, the stereotype was more durable than moveable print and could last for thousands of impressions before it needed recasting. The mould could be stored and used for reprinting, allowing publishers to respond to demand if sales were good from the first print-run, rather than having to reassemble the type. Stereotypes also made it easy to reprint the instalments of serialized novels and bind them as a book, a form of publishing which flourished during the 1840s.

The boom in book production was astonishing. So many books were being published that some people feared the market would be swamped. One writer estimated that the books produced in France in a single year would go round the world if they were placed end to end. The number of new titles registered in the Bibliographie de la France rose by 81 per cent between the 1840s and 1860s.¹³⁴ In Britain the number of new titles increased by two and a half times, while in the German lands it quadrupled. In all three countries there was a steep rise in print-runs. The most popular titles sold in larger numbers than before, with some ‘classics’, such as the collected works of Walter Scott, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and La Fontaine’s Fables, reaching annual sales in the hundreds of thousands.¹³⁵

With the expansion of the industry the production process became more specialized and the publisher emerged as a new figure alongside the printer and the bookseller, who, between them, had run the trade before. The publisher now became the major intermediary between the author and the public. He took on the tasks of buying manuscripts, editing them, distributing them to booksellers, and publicizing them with marketing techniques which aimed to give his books an edge over their competitors. Whereas the printer was an artisan, and the bookseller a merchant, the publisher was identified as a professional entrepreneur.

The pioneers of this revolution were mostly new to the book trade. They were self-made men with little or no family background in the industry, and in some cases no actual interest in books except for the money they could make from them. Pierre-François Ladvocat was the son of an architect who entered the book trade by marrying the owner of a cabinet de lecture. The most successful of the Paris booksellers and publishers, Ladvocat was the prototype for Dauriat, the despotic publisher in Balzac’s Lost Illusions, who describes himself as a ‘speculator in literature’. Pierre-Jules Hetzel, the publisher of Balzac, Hugo, Zola and Jules Verne, had been born into the family of a master saddler in the First Lancers’ Regiment and studied law in Strasbourg before dropping out of university to set up his business in 1837. Gervais Charpentier, the pioneering publisher of the cheap mass editions of the Bibliothèque Charpentier, was the son of a soldier who had started out as a bookseller’s clerk, working for a while with Ladvocat, before opening his own bookshop and cabinet de lecture in Paris. Louis Hachette’s father was a pharmacist, while his mother came from a textile-manufacturing family. Of the men who would transform the European book trade in the 1830s and 1840s, only Bernhard Tauchnitz and Michel Lévy came from backgrounds in the industry; Tauchnitz hailed from a family of publishers in Leipzig, while Lévy’s father was a colporteur, or pedlar of books.

Behind the success of all these publishers was their use of innovative marketing techniques. The most important was the ‘Library’ – a series of cheap books in small formats with uniformly coloured cloth or paper covers, standard prices and the same familiar brandmark on the cover, which made them easily recognizable and collectable as commodities to furnish the cultured home. The idea was developed by publishers across Europe during the 1840s. First off the mark was the Leipzig publisher Anton Philipp Reclam with his Wohlfeile Unterhaltungsbibliothek für die gebildete Lesewelt (Inexpensive Entertainment Library for the Educated Reading World), launched in 1844, which quickly grew to sixty cheaply priced volumes before folding after just three years.¹³⁶ In 1847, the Belfast firm of Simms and McIntyre introduced its Parlour Library of fiction reprints in distinctive green covers which sold for a shilling each. It was soon followed by Thomas Hodgson with his Parlour Library, and, from 1849, by George Routledge with his Railway Library, whose shilling novels and adventure stories had bright green or yellow covers (‘yellow-backs’) to attract attention at bookstalls. In France the same approach was taken by the Bibliothèque Charpentier, whose novels all appeared in yellow cloth covers from 1838. The Collection Michel Lévy, launched in 1856, had different colours for each category and price of book (green-covered paperbacks at one franc; blue-covered hardbacks at 1 franc 50 centimes, and so on), though all had the ‘M.L.’ logo on the back.¹³⁷

These libraries were an early indication of how market forces and technologies would create a canon of standard literary works in the nineteenth century. The rationale of their publishers was to make the classics accessible to all. Launching his Panthéon Littéraire in 1839, Girardin, for instance, declared his aim to be the publication of a ‘universal collection of masterpieces of the human spirit’ at prices any household could afford.¹³⁸ The economics of the mass market obliged these collections to concentrate on books with an established popularity. The main ‘interest of the public is the price’, explained Lévy: ‘this is why we have decided to publish only successful works so that we can sell more and reduce the price.’ At the same time, this commercially driven canon comprised not just classic works, the oeuvres complètes of dead writers, but also contemporary works, the ‘modern classics’, or oeuvres durables, as Charpentier called them, which publishers selected for their collections because they thought, as he put it, that they would stand the test of time and ‘enter literary history’.¹³⁹

Other shrewd techniques of marketing included catalogues, advertising posters, and bills and notices in periodicals; some publishers even paid for favourable reviews and articles in newspapers. One or two started giving away a lottery ticket with each book. Charpentier was the most advanced, pioneering many of the basic strategies of publishers today. He employed agents to pre-sell books to booksellers; used wholesalers as intermediaries; and sold in bulk at extra discounts to the shops on condition that they placed his books in their window or displayed them prominently on tables. He was the first publisher to perfect the modern system of selling books by mail or telegraph order (a sort of nineteenth-century Amazon) by holding large amounts of stock in warehouses near the railway stations in Paris.¹⁴⁰

The railways once again were key to these developments. They enabled publishers to reach small towns and rural areas where readers had before been served only by the colporteur’s cartload of religious books, cheap pamphlets and almanacs. Colportage was a thriving rural business throughout Europe in the early nineteenth century. In France alone there were 3,000 licensed colporteurs, each one travelling an average of thirty kilometres a day by horse and cart, and all of them together selling every year an estimated 9 million francs’ worth of books and almanacs. The arrival of the railway gradually drove them out of business by enabling bookshops in provincial towns to supply readers quickly with editions from Paris, although some colporteurs managed to survive by using the branch lines to distribute their books to smaller communities on the periphery of the market. The growth of bookshops in provincial towns took off in line with the spread of the railways. Between 1850 and the 1870s the number of bookshops in France more than doubled, to over 5,000, mostly on the railway network around Paris, in the north-east around Lille and the south near Lyons, areas where the railways were most advanced.¹⁴¹

Through the railways publishers were able to connect directly to their customers in the provinces. They sent sales reps with samples of their books to drum up interest in them among provincial booksellers. Lévy was the first to use the railway in this way. In 1847, he toured provincial France to promote his books to booksellers. Two years later, he made a second lightning tour, travelling by rail and coach to Chartres, Tours, Blois, Poitiers, Angoulême, Bordeaux, the Midi and the Rhone valley before crossing into Switzerland. From these tours, which would have been unthinkable before the railway, he gained a better sense of the literary tastes of provincial readers that would stand him in good stead.¹⁴²

Railways also fuelled the boom in cheap fiction. Travellers on trains were a large market, especially for entertaining literature. The train was smoother than a horse-drawn carriage on a bumpy road, enabling passengers to read a book more easily. Reading was a good way to relieve the boredom of a long journey as well as to avoid the embarrassment of constant eye contact with the person sitting opposite (in most European trains the seats were arranged, as they had been on the stagecoach, facing each other).

The short-story form was made for these journeys. It is no coincidence that it came into its own with the growth of railway travel in the nineteenth century. New types of publishing for railway readers began to appear: adventure and detective tales, known as penny dreadfuls, as well as miscellanies of fiction, humorous incidents and anecdotes mixed with travel guides and information for the traveller. Carlo Collodi, the creator of Pinocchio, had his first success with Un romanzo in vapore (A Novel in Steam, 1856), a book of comic tales with a guide to Florence, Pisa and Livorno, which sold in railway stations on the Florence–Livorno line.¹⁴³ Many of the biggest publishers in Europe – Longman and Routledge in Britain, Albert Hofmann in Berlin, Hachette in France – brought out cheap mass editions of novels, stories, travel books and guides in standard pocket formats well suited to a travel bag.

Every station had a lending library or bookstall. A licence to sell books in the stations was practically a guarantee of big profits. In Germany, station bookshops were as old as the railroads themselves. The three main lines – between Berlin, Hamburg and Munich; Frankfurt am Main and Basel; and Mannheim and Cologne – all had bookstores before 1848.¹⁴⁴ Britain followed close behind. In 1848, William Henry Smith secured a concession from the London and North Western Railway to open a bookstall at Euston Station. Born into a family of London booksellers, Smith had used the railways to deliver newspapers to provincial towns. A pious businessman, he had won the Euston franchise by promising to offer travellers a more wholesome diet of improving literature than the previous tenant of the stall, who had sold smutty books along with blankets, cushions, candles and other useful items for their journey. Smith had the support of the major publishers of cheap books and pamphlets for the railway traveller: Simms and McIntyre and Chapman and Hall with their Parlour Libraries, Longman and Routledge with their Railway Libraries, and G. W. M. Reynolds with his Miscellany – all of which were found in the seventy bookstalls established by W. H. Smith in station halls by the end of 1851.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 brought millions of railway travellers to London. One of them was the publisher Hachette, who was more impressed by Smith’s bookstalls in the stations than by any of the exhibits in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Born in 1800, Hachette had attended Guizot’s classes at the École Normale Supérieure and trained as a lawyer before starting up as a publisher of school textbooks and dictionaries – a market then, in the mid-1820s, in a backward state. After Guizot’s law mandated primary schooling, Hachette was ideally placed to expand his business: his schoolbooks were commissioned by Guizot’s ministry. One million copies of his ABC were published in 1833 alone, while his reading books practically had a monopoly in French schools in the 1830s and 1840s. By 1851, Hachette had moved into general publishing. He was looking to increase his market share, and W. H. Smith with its bookstalls in stations offered him that opportunity.

In 1852, Hachette won his first concession from the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer du Nord. He promised to fill his railway bookstalls with a library of 100 books, increasing to 500 in the next few years. They would appear in seven different series, each with their own colour-coded jackets (travel guides in red, histories in green, French literature in a sort of cream, children’s books in pink, etc.), all in the same pocket-size format and easily affordable to railway travellers at just two francs each. The five-year contract was soon followed by deals with other railway companies. By 1854, there were sixty bookstalls filled with the titles of Hachette in France, and by the 1870s the number had increased to 500, a national distribution network for the publisher, which had a monopoly on all the country’s major lines.¹⁴⁵ The railways had transformed the company from a niche publisher to one of the biggest in the world.

4

A long-term sufferer from gonorrhoea, Rossini came to Paris in May 1843 to consult France’s most acclaimed urologist, Jean Civiale, who kept him under observation for three months. During his stay, Rossini sat for a portrait by Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) in the artist’s studio in rue Chaptal. It was to become one of the most celebrated pictures of the composer (of which there were many). It shows Rossini at the age of fifty-one, at the height of his international fame, a man at ease and enjoying life in his long retirement from composing operas. Throughout that summer in Paris he was still living with Olympe Pélissier, an artist’s model, in the place de la Madeleine.

Rossini was a frequent visitor to Scheffer’s studio. He had been going there since the 1830s, when it was a meeting place for artists and intellectuals: George Sand, Chopin, Liszt, Ernest Renan and the Viardots were there on a regular basis. Born in Dordrecht, Holland, in 1795, Scheffer came to Paris to study in the workshop of the painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. He quickly came to the attention of the French Academy with his portraits in the Ingres style. The Duc d’Orléans became his patron, appointing him as the art tutor to his ten children and granting him commissions at Versailles.¹⁴⁶

Scheffer was a good friend of the Viardots. He had known Louis since the 1820s, when he taught his younger brother Léon Viardot, one of the many now forgotten painters who made a modest living in Paris. Scheffer had a gruff exterior, but he was loyal and generous to friends. He was devoted to Pauline. When Louis introduced the painter to his bride in 1840, he asked him his opinion: ‘Dreadfully ugly,’ replied Scheffer, ‘but if I were to see her again, I would fall madly in love with her.’ Scheffer’s portrait of Pauline (ill. 1), painted around 1841, is, according to Saint-Saëns, ‘the only one to show this unequalled woman truthfully and give some idea of her strange and powerful fascination’.¹⁴⁷

Rue Chaptal was at the heart of the ‘New Athens’ area leading up to Montmartre – at that time a quiet part of Paris where many artists had their studios. Eugène Delacroix, Horace Vernet, Paul Delaroche, Paul Gavarni and the sculptor Jean-Pierre Dantan were all neighbours of Scheffer. Soon they would be joined by Adolphe Goupil and his family, art dealers and print sellers, whose gallery in rue Chaptal became a meeting place for artists, some of whom had rented studio spaces on the upper floors. Scheffer, Vernet and Delaroche were the founding artists of the Goupil business, one of Europe’s first commercial dealers in contemporary art.

Old Masters had been sold by private dealers since the seventeenth century.¹⁴⁸ But a commercial market for contemporary art was something new in the 1840s, when private galleries like Goupil’s first emerged as a space for living artists and their buyers outside the Academy system, which had previously controlled the art market.¹⁴⁹ In France this meant the École des Beaux-Arts, whose annual Salon was the main way for an artist’s works to be known and sold. The Salon’s jury selected entries exclusively from graduates of the École. The system was based on an academic hierarchy of genres, in which history paintings, and mythological and religious subjects, occupied the highest positions, while still-lifes and landscapes found themselves at the bottom. Innovative pieces were nearly always rejected.

Scheffer was one of many painters to become frustrated with the Salon’s academic rules. Public taste in art was changing, the demand for genre and landscape painting was on the rise, but the jury did not change its selection criteria. Scheffer did not submit any of his works to the Salon after 1846. Instead he turned his studio into a private gallery for Delacroix, Rousseau, Corot, Dupré and other landscape painters, all of them rejected at some point by the Salon. He formed them into an association of ‘free artists’. The next year, he joined a larger group of independent-minded artists, including Théodore Rousseau, Honoré Daumier and the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, who established a salon indépendant to exhibit and sell their works.¹⁵⁰

There were many such initiatives. In 1843, a gallery was opened on the top floor of the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle, one of the first department stores in Paris, where artworks rejected by the Salon could be hung and sold in exchange for a small rent or commission. Delacroix had three paintings at the Bonne-Nouvelle, including Tasso in the Madhouse (1839), which was sold, and his superb Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero (1825–6), which was not. Inspired by Byron’s play, the Execution was the picture Delacroix himself was most proud of, but it was attacked for flouting all the academic laws of history painting.¹⁵¹

Meanwhile, private dealers were setting themselves up as intermediaries between artists and their customers. In the early years of the picture trade there was little clear distinction between art dealers and print sellers, merchants of artists’ supplies and stationery, sellers of antiques and luxury goods. In the 1840s, Goupil & Vibert, as the company was known, combined selling prints with representing artists in its gallery. Ernest Gambart, the London dealer, started as an agent of Goupil selling reproductions of French art and engravings of celebrities, before setting up his own gallery in Berners Street in 1845. Jean-Marie Durand-Ruel (father of the Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel) began as a trader in artists’ paper and materials in the Latin Quarter, home to poor art students, before establishing his fine-art gallery near the Palais-Royal in Paris in 1833. In 1846, to be even closer to his wealthy clientele, he opened a new gallery on the fashionable boulevard des Italiens, where stockbrokers and opera-goers mixed with foreign visitors.

A range of new art buyers were appearing on the scene, from connoisseurs, like Louis Viardot, to wealthy bankers and industrialists, like Aguado, who depended on the expertise of dealers and advisers to guide them in their purchases.

As Aguado’s main adviser in the Paris art market, Viardot had acquired a deep knowledge of not only Europe’s major public galleries but also of the smaller private collections when he started buying art in 1845. Old Masters were readily available on the market, but buying them involved a relatively high level of risk because their provenance was not always established. There were many forgeries. The market was unsettled at this time by a series of scandals, one of which involved a whole London ‘Canaletto manufactory’. Viardot had a limited budget. He started out with only a few hundred francs. But his expert knowledge of European painting, Spanish, French and Dutch art, in particular, enabled him to build up and improve his collection by buying and reselling constantly. Over the years he would amass almost 200 paintings, mostly Dutch and Spanish Old Masters, portraits, landscapes and genre paintings from the seventeenth century, though he also bought some modern art – paintings by Scheffer, the Swedish artist August Hagborg and Antoine Chintreuil, including his Pommiers et genêts en fleurs (c. 1870: now in the Musée d’Orsay). It was in many ways a typical collection of the nineteenth-century connoisseur – not too large, with a small number of acknowledged masterpieces that would later go to museums, but made up mainly of first-rate works by artists such as Jacques Stella, Govaert Flinck, Salomon Ruysdael or Philips Wouwerman, whose names might have been forgotten had collectors such as Viardot not recognized their worth. He bought from private sales and galleries, from other collectors and increasingly from public auctions, while his contemporary paintings came mainly from the Salon, where he was a member of the jury in the 1860s and 1870s. Viardot’s most successful buys were a handful of neglected masterpieces that he picked up for a song because no one else had recognized their value: Ferdinand Bol’s Portrait of a Woman (1642: now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York) and Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655: now in the Louvre). His expertise enabled him to stay clear of forgeries, although he did make some mistakes. Having bought a painting of an old bearded rabbi signed by Rembrandt, he later came to the conclusion that it was the work of one of Rembrandt’s pupils and consigned the picture to the darkest corner of his collection.¹⁵²

Among other art buyers, especially the new industrialists who did not have much knowledge of the Old Masters, the fear of losing money on a forgery was a powerful incentive to invest in modern art instead. The growth in the market for contemporary art was strongest in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution had created a wealthy manufacturing and commercial class of art collectors – men like Joseph Sheepshanks, a Leeds textile manufacturer who made his fortune from supplying fabrics for army uniforms during the Napoleonic Wars; Elhanan Bicknell, a sperm-whale oil manufacturer who sold his art collection for £80,000 in 1863; John Allnutt and John Ruskin, both wine merchants and collectors of Turner; Henry McConnell, a cotton manufacturer from Manchester, who commissioned Turner’s Keelman Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835), one of his few industrial scenes; Joseph Gillot, a pen manufacturer from Birmingham, who built a large collection of English landscapes; and Robert Vernon, a London hackneyman, who left his stock of modern British art, on which he had spent £150,000, to the National Gallery.¹⁵³

There were many reasons for this growing interest in contemporary art, aside from worry about forgeries. In France an example had been set by the Duc de Berry and the Duc d’Orléans, who after 1815 had both switched their attention from the Flemish Old Masters to modern French works as a patriotic act. The opening of the Musée du Luxembourg, the first public gallery of contemporary art, in 1818, reinforced this trend. The big French bankers who collected art from the 1820s (Benjamin Delessert, Casimir-Pierre Périer, Jacques Lafitte, Isaac Péreire) all bought a growing share of their collections from living French artists. It enabled them to act as patrons, a prestigious role traditionally performed by the aristocracy. Perhaps most importantly, contemporary art was not only cheaper but offered better prospects of speculative profit than old paintings. ‘I always buy a few moderns, because it is more reliable,’ Péreire told the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, the famous diarists of Parisian cultural life. ‘And its price will always rise.’¹⁵⁴

This was the moment when the work of art began to play the role it has today: a financial investment. Not all artists liked the change. Many thought that the workings of the market were destroying the ideals of art. ‘Here in France there are no longer art collectors,’ complained the French sculptor and painter Antoine Étex in 1855. ‘One cannot give such a title to that group of stock-market speculators who only encourage and buy minor paintings, little pictures worthy of decorating the boudoirs of their mistresses, and who, even in buying them, hope to turn a profit by later reselling them to foreigners.’¹⁵⁵

Certain painters were gilt-edged. Enormous prices were paid for the highly detailed genre paintings and ‘Oriental’ scenes of Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (1803–60), a self-taught artist, rejected all his life by the Academy. The jewel-like appearance of these miniatures made them luxury objects for the bourgeois living room. The genre paintings of Ernest Meissonier (1815–91), inspired by the interiors of the old Dutch masters, were collected by the richest bankers and businessmen of Europe, who prized them for their polished craftsmanship and investment potential. Meissonier’s prices soared. The Chess Game, for example, which Périer had bought for 2,000 francs from the Salon of 1841, was resold six years later for 5,000 francs to Delessert, and in 1869 to the financier François Hottinguer for 27,000 francs – the sort of money paid for a Rembrandt. Meissonier’s paintings became financial assets, often changing hands in business deals. For those who deplored the commodification of artworks they became a symbol of ‘bourgeois vulgarity’. Baudelaire was disgusted by the stupidity of those bankers who paid ten or twenty times as much for a Meissonier as they would for a painting by his hero, Delacroix.¹⁵⁶

The merchants, bankers and industrialists who dominated this new art market did not have a detailed knowledge of the classics and mythology, nor an acquaintance with the cultural sites of the Grand Tour – all things acquired by the aristocracy and usually required to interpret academic art. They wanted paintings which they could enjoy and understand: scenes they recognized from everyday modern life; narrative and landscape paintings; family portraits; pictures small enough to ornament their homes as symbols of their culture and standing. As Wilkie Collins wrote in 1845:

Traders and makers of all kinds of commodities … started with the new notion of buying a picture which they themselves could admire and appreciate, and for the genuineness of which the artist was still living to vouch. These rough and ready customers … wanted interesting subjects; variety, resemblance to nature; genuineness of the article, and fresh paint; they had no ancestors, whose feelings, as founders of galleries, it was necessary to consult; no critical gentlemen and writers of valuable works to snub them when they were in spirits; nothing to lead them by the nose except their own shrewdness, their own interests, and their own tastes – so they turned their backs on the Old Masters, and marched off in a body to the living men.¹⁵⁷

Whether they liked it or not, artists were obliged to adapt their work to this growing market for small (‘cabinet’) paintings. Larger works were difficult to sell: they had no place in the new commercial galleries, as Goupil underlined to his artists. Scheffer followed his advice. With no personal fortune, only what he earned from his painting, he was always short of money in the early stages of his career. After he had signed up with Goupil, around 1835, Scheffer turned away from large religious paintings, most of which remained unsold, and concentrated rather on small portraits, which sold well as originals and reproductions (engravings of his portrait of Rossini sold in thousands of copies). He also made reductions of his large paintings which could be sold more easily because they were more affordable. Scheffer’s prices rose. By the end of the 1840s, he could earn as much as 50,000 francs from a single painting by selling the engraving rights. The biggest share of his income came from portraits and small copies of his larger works.¹⁵⁸

Delacroix would also make reductions of his larger works, or get assistants to do them and finish them himself for sale to dealers and private buyers in various formats (copies in the classic ‘sofa size’, around 50 × 80 centimetres, fetched the highest prices).¹⁵⁹ Like Scheffer, Delacroix had been trained in the neo-classical school in the Guérin studio and had started his career as an artist working for the court. He had won important commissions from Louis Philippe in the 1820s and 1830s, benefiting from the powerful support of Adolphe Thiers, one of the first critics to write about his work, who was twice Prime Minister under the July Monarchy. His livelihood depended on these commissions, for his work was little understood or valued by the critics and public. From the 1840s, however, Delacroix depended more on sales to connoisseurs and dealers, such as Goupil and Durand-Ruel, who bought his works at the Salon, at auctions or directly from his studio. He adapted his work to this new market, producing smaller pictures with subjects that would sell – animal paintings, ‘Oriental’ scenes and landscapes. He accepted requests from dealers and clients who wanted pictures on particular subjects, and even followed their instructions on the way his paintings should appear. For example, in Bathers (also known as Turkish Women Bathing: 1854), it was the patron who had decided on the subject, on the position of the figures, and even on the style, which was meant to resemble that of other painters named by him in his letters to Delacroix.¹⁶⁰

During this late period of his career, Delacroix became more and more involved in the reproduction of his works, recognizing that the print engraving was a major source of income and an effective way to promote his paintings to a broader audience. He delighted in the modest popularity which he obtained through these initiatives, and took it as a belated vindication of his work. ‘Happiness always comes too late,’ he wrote in his journal in 1853. ‘It is like the little vogue for my pictures; after despising me for so long, the patrons are going to make my fortune.’¹⁶¹

Some critics were uncomfortable with the way that art was shaped by the imperatives of furnishing a living room. ‘Genre painting, which fits small frames and hangs easily in the small rooms in which we live, is pushing history painting out of existence,’ complained Maxime du Camp, the writer and photographer, in a review of the 1857 Salon.¹⁶² But artists were subjects of the market by this time: there was no escaping its imperatives. John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite, bemoaned the fact that there was no demand for the large ambitious canvases he wanted to produce. In 1857, he wrote about a visit from Thomas Combe, the publisher and printer, whose portrait he had painted seven years before: ‘He wants me to paint him a picture about the size of the Heretic (anything larger than that size is objected to). There is no encouragement for anything but cabinet pictures. I should never have a small picture on my hands for ten minutes, which is a great temptation to do nothing else.’¹⁶³

Once the rules of art had been reset by the market there was no longer any clear distinction between the painting as a ‘work of art’ and as part of a room’s furnishing. Later artists, such as the Impressionists, who sold exclusively to this domestic market, embraced this aspect of their art, painting decorative panels and pictures for specific places in a room on the request of patrons. Because of the critical attention their paintings have received in the history of the avant-garde, the function of their work in simply furnishing interior spaces has been largely lost from sight.¹⁶⁴

5

In 1843, the Marquis de Custine published an account of his travels in Russia. La Russie en 1839 probably did more than any other publication to shape European attitudes towards Russia in the nineteenth century. Within a few years of its publication, the entertaining travelogue went through at least six French editions, came out in several pirated editions in Belgium, was translated into German, Dutch and English, and appeared in pamphlet form in various European languages.

Custine had travelled to Russia in 1839 with the express aim of writing a popular travel book to make his name as a writer. He had previously tried his hand at novels, plays and melodramas without success, so travel literature, an increasingly popular genre, was, he thought, his final chance to make a reputation for himself.

La Russie was not his first attempt in this genre. After the July Revolution, Custine had travelled to Spain in search of validation of his legitimist Catholic principles. He had been struck by the ‘Oriental’ feel of southern Spain, rooted in the culture of its Moorish past. The experience made him think more generally about ‘European civilization’, its core countries and peripheries. At the end of his book, L’Espagne sous Ferdinand VII (1838), Custine had reflected on what defined ‘Europe’ and arrived at the idea of travelling to Russia, Europe’s other ‘Orient’, to see better what it was:

I have travelled almost everywhere in Europe, and of all the ways of living that I have observed in this part of the world, those of the people of Seville seem to me the most natural, the most simple, the closest to the ideas I have always had of the social good … In vain have I searched for traces of this right-mindedness in other peoples of Europe. Austria is prosperous, it is calm, but it is the skill of its rulers, more than the spirit of its people, to which I attribute the good fortune of this monarchy. I cannot talk of Russia, which I do not know, and which I would like to know well; they are also Asiatics, at least as much as the peoples with whose blood the Spanish have been mixed. Also I would be interested to compare Russia to Spain; both hold more immediately to the Orient than any other nations of Europe, of which they form the two extremities.¹⁶⁵

The comparison between Spain and Russia, the two ‘Oriental’ peripheries of Europe, was not entirely new. The French in 1812, struggling with their military campaigns in both countries, had compared the barbares du Nord (the Russians) with the barbares du Sud (the Spanish). But by the 1840s it had become something of a commonplace. It was to be found, for example, in Vasily Botkin’s Letters From Spain (1847–9), in which the Russian writer compared the Moorish impact on Spanish culture to that of the Mongols on Russia. Louis Viardot similarly noted in 1846 that ‘the Orient has penetrated Europe from its two extremes. Is it not the case that the Arabs brought it into Spain and the Mongols into Russia?’¹⁶⁶

What the Marquis found in Russia reinforced his belief in European freedoms and values. Everything about the country filled the Frenchman with contempt and dread: the despotism of the Tsar; the lack of individual liberty and human dignity; the contempt for truth that corrupted society; the servility of the aristocracy, who were no more than slaves; their pretentious European manners, which were just a thin veneer of civilization to hide their Asiatic barbarism from the West. ‘It must never be forgotten that we are on the confines of Asia,’ he maintained. As for the comparison to Spain, Custine ended with this famous warning:

In sum, the two countries are the very opposite of each other; they differ as do day and night, fire and ice, north and south.

To have a feeling for the liberty enjoyed in the other European countries, whatever form of government they may have adopted, one must have sojourned in that solitude without repose, in that prison without leisure, that is called Russia … If ever your sons should be discontented with France, try my recipe: tell them to go to Russia. It is a journey useful to every foreigner; whoever has well examined that country will be content to live anywhere else.¹⁶⁷

The key to the success of Custine’s book was its articulation of fears and prejudices about Russia widely held in Europe at that time. In the early decades of the nineteenth century a large number of books and articles had built up the perception of Russia as an Asiatic power, aggressive and expansionist by nature, a ‘menace’ to European liberties and civilization. It was an impression reinforced by the Tsar’s brutal repression of the Polish uprising in 1830–31, forcing many Polish noblemen and intellectuals into exile in Paris, where they had a major influence on Western thinking about Russia, not least through their contacts like Custine. Viardot was a rare exception in choosing not to join this Russophobic chorus in his Souvenirs de chasse (1846), which contained a positive account of his Russian hunting trips. It was a choice dictated by his need to keep the door to Russia open to Pauline, as he explained to George Sand when she reproached him for criticizing Custine’s book (and, by implication, compromising his republican convictions by doing business with the ‘gendarme of Europe’, as Nicholas I was known).¹⁶⁸

But La Russie was doing something more than stoking Western Russophobia. By focusing on Russia’s Asiatic ‘otherness’, it was inviting its readers to recognize their ‘Europeanness’.

The idea of ‘Europe’ had always been defined by this cultural contrast with the ‘Oriental’ world. In the European imagination the ‘Orient’ was primitive, irrational, indolent, corrupt, despotic – an intellectual construction underpinning Europe’s domination of the colonial world.¹⁶⁹ The ‘Orient’ was not a geographic category. It was not just located in the Middle East, Asia or North Africa, but was inside Europe too, in the continent’s periphery in the south and east, where the influence of Arab and Islamic cultures remained strong.¹⁷⁰

In The Spirit of the Laws (1748) Montesquieu divided Europe into a progressive North and a backward South, Spain and Sicily, which as former Muslim colonies had never been entirely Europeanized. Arguing that cultures are shaped by climate and geography, Montesquieu defined the edge of Europe at that point in southern Italy where the sirocco wind holds sway.

There is, in Italy, a southern wind, called Sirocco, which passes through the sands of Africa before reaching Italy. It rules that country; it exerts its power over all spirits; it produces a universal weightiness and slowness; Sirocco is the intelligence that presides over all Italian heads, and I am tempted to believe that the difference one notices between the inhabitants of northern Lombardy, and those of the rest of Italy, derives from the fact that Lombardy is protected by the Apennines, which defend her from the havoc of the Sirocco.¹⁷¹

Voltaire built on Montesquieu’s idea, adding a secondary distinction between the progressive heart of European civilization in the Western capitals (the Republic of Letters) and the semi-Asiatic East. Drawing on these divisions, Hegel constructed a schema of historical progression from the infancy of European civilization in the South, Ancient Greece and Rome, to the German-centred Europe of the North (Hegel’s ‘end of History’). By the mid-nineteenth century, a distinct cultural map had thus emerged, with the core of ‘Europe’ in the north-west of the continent, in France, the Low Countries and the German lands, while on its periphery, from Spain to the Black Sea, there was an internal ‘Orient’. The vice-president of the French Oriental Society wrote in 1843:

Our Orient comprises all the countries of the Mediterranean basin which are related to the African and Asian countries on the shores of that sea: Greece and its islands; Turkey and its annexed territories, Wallachia, Moldavia; the Austrian possessions on the Adriatic; the English possessions, Malta and the Ionian islands; Southern European Russia, which dominates the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Everything that depends on what we still call today the trade with the Orient …¹⁷²

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, interest in the exploration of South and Eastern Europe encouraged travel writers to reflect again on the idea of ‘Europeanness’. During their travels in Albania, a virtually unknown part of Europe, in 1809–10, Lord Byron and his friend John Hobhouse wondered whether the Albanians and Turks, or indeed the Russians and the Greeks, could be counted as Europeans at all. Hobhouse thought that the Turks were closer to the English than the Greeks, whom he categorized as ‘Orientals’ rather than descendants of the ancient Hellenic culture idealized by philhellenics like Byron. For Byron the Albanians were a hybrid tribe, half Asiatic, but capable of being Europeanized, a position with which he identified himself when he posed for his famous portrait in Albanian dress.¹⁷³

Travellers in Spain were equally aware of exploring Europe’s edge. The Iberian peninsula was a relatively unknown part of Europe until the Napoleonic Wars. Travelling was slow and difficult, without any railways until 1848 and few well-made roads. From the 1820s Andalusia was ‘discovered’ by the French Romantics. Impressed by its Jewish and Moorish heritage, they projected onto it their own exotic myths of ‘oriental’ colour and passion. In his Voyage en Espagne (1843), which remained popular throughout the nineteenth century, Gautier assembled an image of ‘Arabian Andalusia’ out of scenes of gypsy life, flamenco dancing and picturesque descriptions of the Alhambra. ‘Spain, which borders Africa as Greece borders Asia, is not designed for European ways. The spirit of the Orient penetrates it in all its forms,’ Gautier wrote. ‘South of the Sierra Morena, the nature of the country changes completely: it is as if one were passing suddenly from Europe to Africa.’¹⁷⁴

The ‘otherness’ of Spain was one of its attractions to Louis Viardot. He was fascinated by the cultural traces of the Jews and Moors in Spain. In Andalusia he saw a country linked by history to the ancient civilizations of North Africa and the Near East. It reminded him that Europe was neither closed nor self-contained: it was a culture in progress, constantly evolving through its interaction with the world beyond, its periphery permeated by the Orient. In his Lettres d’un Espagnol Viardot maintained that the Comte de Volney, the eighteenth-century Orientalist, had scarcely ‘needed to leave Europe, to cross the seas and follow Arab nomads across the desert, to go in search of the great lessons of the ancient ruins in the Syrian sands, when he could have found such traces in the Iberian peninsula’.¹⁷⁵

Viardot explored the impact of the Moors on European culture in L’Essai sur l’histoire des Arabes et des Mores d’Europe (1833). He wrote many articles on Spanish art and literature that emphasized this legacy. His translation into French of Don Quixote (1837), in which he gave full expression to the novel’s ethnographic details and colour to create a vivid sense of Spain, was vitally important for the Romantic discovery of Spanish literature (it was read by Prosper Mérimée, the author of Carmen, whose love of the translation was the starting point of his interest in Spain). Viardot’s version of Cervantes’s masterpiece became a bestseller. Reissued many times, it served as the basis for subsequent translations into other languages.¹⁷⁶

No doubt part of Viardot’s attraction to Pauline was her Spanish ancestry. Just as he was drawn to the ‘otherness’ of Spain, so he fell in love with a woman who, in Heine’s words, ‘recalls not the civilized beauty and domesticated grace of our European homeland, but the wild splendour of an exotic landscape in the desert’.¹⁷⁷

As the Viardots travelled to St Petersburg, in October 1843, they might have been forgiven for thinking they were leaving Europe for Asia. Russia was an unknown territory to all but a tiny number of European travellers. St Petersburg and Moscow were the only parts of it that people ever visited. Travelling conditions were extremely difficult. The trek from Paris to St Petersburg took a minimum of sixteen days. There was no railway for the last part of the journey from Berlin – the only finished railroad in the Russian Empire at that time was the short line from the capital to the Tsar’s residence at Tsarskoe Selo and the nearby resort of Pavlovsk.

In St Petersburg only the main avenues had ‘wooden pavements’ for the carriages. Beyond these the streets were all unpaved. Muddy in the spring, hot and airless with the stench of sewers in the summer, always bustling with labourers and traders, these back streets and alleys remained unchanged when Dostoevsky described them in Crime and Punishment (1866). A stone’s throw from the elegant neo-classical façades of the Nevsky Prospekt, where the Viardots were staying in the Demidov Palace, a different world of poverty and squalor could be found.

The reading public of this world was limited to the cultural élite. Shopfronts were decorated with pictures to show the unlettered what they could obtain inside. There were few bookshops. In Kharkov, the biggest city in Ukraine, there were only four in 1843, ‘three Russian [shops] where they sell books by the pound’, according to a travel guide, ‘and one French, whose owner boasts of valuing his intellectual wares by their intrinsic worth’.¹⁷⁸ There was a vibrant literary life in St Petersburg and Moscow, however. The small and bookish circle of the intelligentsia was almost totally confined to these two capital cities. The 1840s were an extraordinary decade of intellectual ferment, when Slavophiles and Westernists debated whether Russia should be part of Europe or follow its own native traditions, and a stellar range of writers (Gogol, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky) emerged on the European scene.

In these circles there was an enormous appetite for any new ideas or books from Europe, from which the intelligentsia was cut off by geography and censorship. Among the progressive Westernists – for whom Europe was the solution to all of Russia’s problems – there was a particular interest in the writings of George Sand. Somehow her works had managed to escape the attentions of the censors and appear in Russian periodicals. The Russian socialist Alexander Herzen maintained that through these journals she was even read as far afield as Omsk and Tobolsk, Siberian towns with large contingents of political exiles.¹⁷⁹ Idolized as the embodiment of the Westernist ideals of human liberation and democracy, Sand was the most translated foreign author in Russia at that time, although she would soon be overtaken by Dickens. There were as many translations of her work in Russian as there were of Balzac, Paul de Kock, Sue and Dumas together. ‘Here you are the first writer, the first poet of our country,’ Louis wrote to her on 18 November 1843. ‘Your books are in everybody’s hands, your portrait is everywhere; they talk constantly to us of you, congratulating us on our good fortune to be your friends.’¹⁸⁰

After their arrival in St Petersburg the Viardots were soon immersed in these circles. They were frequent guests of Count Michał Wielhorski, an amateur composer and noble scion of a Polish family with a position at the court. Wielhorski’s palace in St Petersburg was an unofficial ministry of European culture with musical soirées attended by the leading members of the Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia, including the composer Mikhail Glinka, the poet Prince Vyazemsky, the philosopher and music critic Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, the painter Karl Bruillov, the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko and the writer Nikolai Gogol. But the longest-lasting Russian friendship the Viardots would make did not originate in these illustrious circles.

On 9 November 1843, Louis met a nobleman, tall and handsome with long hair and a beard, gentle manners and, surprisingly for his gigantic size, a relatively high-pitched voice, who on that day was celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday. There was a party for him in the house of Major A. S. Komarov, a figure on the margins of the literary circles of St Petersburg, who had taken it upon himself to introduce the Frenchman to some of his hunting friends. The young nobleman was obviously keen to meet Pauline, whose every performance he had seen. He invited Louis to join him the next day on a hunting trip, and a few days later, on 13 November, called on him at the Demidov Palace in the hope that Pauline was at home. He was in luck. The admirer was introduced to her, as she recalled, as a ‘young Russian landowner, a good hunter and a bad poet’.¹⁸¹ His name was Ivan Turgenev.

6

Turgenev had published his first work, a long poem called Parasha, in April 1843, and by the time he met Pauline four more poems had appeared with his signature ‘T.L.’ (Turgenev Lutovinov) in Annals of the Fatherland (otechestvennye zapiski), a liberal monthly journal in St Petersburg. The journal’s editor, the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky, had published a review of Parasha in the April issue of Annals of the Fatherland and had praised it as the work of a new poetic star in Russia following the deaths of Alexander Pushkin in 1837 and Mikhail Lermontov in 1841. Turgenev, then, was clearly seen as a young upcoming writer when he met Pauline, not as the ‘bad poet’ who was introduced to her, though in later years he would look back on his early verse with ‘physical repulsion’ and embarrassment.¹⁸²

The idea of becoming a writer had developed in Turgenev’s thinking only during the last year. In 1843, he was employed as a civil servant in the Agronomic-Economic Department of the Ministry of the Interior, mainly tasked with reviewing various proposals for the reform of serfdom. Before that he had wanted to become a professor of philosophy. Turgenev turned his hand to writing only after the Tsar had frozen new appointments in philosophy, a potentially seditious subject. But at this stage writing was no more than his hobby. He had no need to make it pay. He lived on an allowance from his mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, who disapproved of literature as a career for a nobleman.

Turgenev’s mother was a wealthy landowner with 5,000 serfs on several estates in Kursk, Tula, Orel and Tambov provinces inherited from her uncle. In 1816, she married Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, a handsome cavalry officer, seven years her junior, who owned 140 serfs on his small estate, Turgenevo. The main family house was at Spasskoe, not far from Mtsensk in Orel province, 350 kilometres south of Moscow. The residential buildings were laid out in a horseshoe shape, with two curved wings stretching out from either side of the large central palace, a two-storeyed wooden house at the end of each wing, formal gardens and a park. The estate had its own hospital, police station, serf theatre and orchestra. Varvara Petrovna was an oldstyle Russian landowner, strict and orderly, careful in the running of her estates, not without a sense of charity, but generally tyrannical and cruel to her serfs. Once she sent two household serfs into penal exile in Siberia for the sole reason that they had failed to remove their caps and bow to her in the appropriate manner. Widowed by the death of her philandering husband in 1834, Varvara Petrovna became even more controlling and demanding of her sons. ‘I have no happy memories of my childhood,’ Turgenev recalled. ‘I feared my mother like fire. She punished me for nothing, treating me like a recruit in the army. Few days passed without the stick; if I should dare to ask a question, she would punish me for it, declaring categorically: “You should know the answer better than I, work it out for yourself.”’ His mother’s cruelty shaped Turgenev’s liberal attitudes, his feelings of revulsion from serfdom, as well as the softness of his character. Throughout his adult life he craved affection from women. For him there was nothing higher than a woman’s love. According to his closest friend, the literary critic Pavel Annenkov, the young Turgenev

Turgenev’s mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, daguerreotype, c. 1845.

was an unhappy man in his own eyes: he lacked the love and attachment of a woman which he sought from his early youth. It was not for nothing that he repeatedly remarked that the company of men without the presence of a kind and intelligent woman was like a great cart with ungreased wheels, which shatters the eardrums with its unbearable, monotonous screech.¹⁸³

In 1838, at the age of nineteen, Turgenev went to Berlin University, promising his mother that he would return within two years to take up a position as professor of philosophy at Moscow University. He was already fluent in German from his studies at school and university in Moscow and St Petersburg. In Berlin, where he studied at the same time as Karl Marx, he embraced the whole of European culture, reading broadly in the classics, philosophy and German literature, and meeting a wide range of German intellectuals, including Alexander Humboldt and Bettina von Arnim. These years in Berlin were crucially important for Turgenev’s intellectual development. The poetry of Goethe, much of which he knew by heart, set him on his literary path. In his way of thinking, sensibility and character, Turgenev was a European cosmopolitan. He was permanently shaped by the Westernism of the friends he made in his student years, above all Belinsky, whom he revered.¹⁸⁴ Turgenev believed in Europe as the source of moral progress, freedom and democracy. It was the only place where he felt able to fulfil himself as a writer and a human being. His path to it was via Germany, which remained his ‘second homeland’, as he himself would later acknowledge.¹⁸⁵

In the Prussian capital, Turgenev lived a bohemian lifestyle with his fellow Russians Timofei Granovsky, the future medievalist, Nikolai Stankevich, the future poet, and Mikhail Bakunin, at that time not yet showing any signs of becoming a revolutionary anarchist. Careless with their money, they spent it all on tailored clothes, tickets to the opera, restaurants, wines, gambling and prostitutes, and then lived without a pfennig until they received their next allowance from their families. Turgenev’s spending was particularly high: 20,000 assignat roubles were sent to him during his first year in Germany – twice his normal annual allowance from his mother. Varvara Petrovna became increasingly exasperated by her son’s extravagant lifestyle, as reported to her by his manservant, whom she employed as a spy. She was horrified by the Russian company Turgenev was keeping (Bakunin was a ‘monster’, she told him).¹⁸⁶ She tried to tighten the purse strings, and threatened to stop payments altogether when she learned about his losses at the roulette wheels and the nightly visits to the theatre (which she supposed could only be to meet the actresses). Turgenev’s spendthrift habits were a real drain on the family estate, where there was a series of bad harvests during his years in Berlin. The main residence at Spasskoe was destroyed in a fire, leaving only a two-storeyed wooden house. His mother exploited the situation to put moral pressure on Turgenev to return to Russia and take up a position in the military or civil service, which she believed were the only occupations fitting for a nobleman.

Turgenev did return, in the spring of 1841, having run out of money. Denied an allowance, he lived at home in Spasskoe or stayed with friends, surviving on loans from his brother Nikolai, who had joined an artillery regiment and was also still supported by Varvara Petrovna. For the next two years, Turgenev pursued his ambition of a university career, first in Moscow, where he briefly fell in love with Bakunin’s sister, and then in St Petersburg, where he passed his exams but failed to write his dissertation for a master’s degree. Throughout this time it was a struggle to get by. According to Annenkov, Turgenev was penniless, as everybody knew, but too proud to admit it; he kept up appearances by dressing like a dandy, which made him come across as insincere. ‘A Khlestakov [Gogol’s foppish anti-hero in The Government Inspector], educated, clever, superficial, with a desire to express himself and fatuité sans bornes [boundless fatuity]’ was Herzen’s first impression of him when they met around this time. At six foot three in height, Turgenev cut a striking figure at the Bolshoi Theatre with his fine tailsuit, white waistcoat, top hat, lorgnette and cane. But he did not have the money to buy his own ticket and had to cadge a seat in the box of friends.¹⁸⁷

Eventually, in 1843, Turgenev gave up his pursuit of a professorship and dutifully took up his position as a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior. His principal concern was to please his mother and assure his inheritance. He worked ‘very badly’ in the ministry, as he himself acknowledged, arriving late for work and spending most of the day with his nose in a novel, if not writing poetry. One of his duties was to process the paperwork for corporal punishments meted out to the peasants: in copying them out for execution he would change the harshest sentences (with the deadly knout) to make them softer (with the lash).¹⁸⁸

Varvara Petrovna was disturbed by his lack of diligence. ‘My son,’ she wrote to him,

you are entering an age when a man should make himself useful to others and aspire to join society. The time of selfish fantasies, of early youth’s unlimited freedom, of rootless wandering for the body and the soul has passed for you, I would even say you have spent too long in this state of laziness and irresponsibility, which only sickness or extreme youth can justify.

She was opposed to the idea of his becoming a writer, an occupation she equated with a ‘penpusher’, and asked ‘who reads Russian books in any case?’ Yet she softened on the publication of Parasha. In a letter to Turgenev on 28 May, she began with an opening position of hostility, but then could not conceal her pride:

What is a poem? You can be like Pushkin, a good poet, but that brings nothing to a mother. My happiness consists in your love for me, in your obedience and respect. I do not know anything about poetry but I fear that you will suffer from the envious … Pushkin was attacked, they found fault in him, coldness, etc. May the Lord protect you from the grief of reading your critics …

Do send me some copies of Parasha and tell me who is the publisher, and how many copies are printed. And how much it sells for, and if it can be purchased in Moscow.¹⁸⁹

From his first encounter with Pauline, Turgenev was in love. He begged and borrowed all he could to hear her every performance. He applauded her so ostentatiously that he annoyed all the nearby members of the audience.¹⁹⁰ Every day he called upon the Viardots, engaging Louis in conversations about literature, offering to help him write books on the Hermitage, or on hunting in Russia, though his real aim was to catch sight of Pauline, to whom he offered himself as a teacher of Russian. Pauline did not take Turgenev’s admiration very seriously. There is certainly no sign that she returned his affections at this time. The young writer was not even invited to receptions at the Viardots’.

She had many other young admirers. Among them was Stepan Gedeonov, an expert on music and the son of the director of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg, who arranged a private room beneath the stage where Pauline would retire after every performance and be entertained by four young men, her ardent fans, Gedeonov, Turgenev, P. V. Zinoviev (on whose estate Louis had been taken hunting by Turgenev) and Wielhorski’s son. On one occasion the four men brought her the skin of a bear they had shot. Pauline had it made into a rug with golden claws. Relaxing after a performance, she would lie on it, while her four admirers were each assigned a paw on which to sit. Gossips called them ‘the four paws’.¹⁹¹

The operatic season in St Petersburg ended with a week of carnival performances during the Shrovetide celebrations – with the start of Lent all theatres closed. Rubini and his company of singers left with promises to return for the next season. Just as they were about to leave, in March 1844, Clara and Robert Schumann arrived for a three-week concert tour, the latest European musicians to brave the long and uncomfortable journey to St Petersburg for the large amounts of money to be made. They were at once received ‘in the most friendly way’ by the Viardots, Clara noted in her diary. ‘Pauline showed me her beautiful presents – sable, Turkish shawl, and lots of cut diamonds, everything from the court, chiefly from the Imperial couple.’ Not long after, at their first concert, the Schumanns made a clear profit of 1,000 roubles (around 4,000 francs). ‘In those days,’ recalled the nationalist critic Vladimir Stasov, ‘the Russian rouble had a good clink to German ears.’¹⁹²

The Viardots returned for a second season in St Petersburg and Moscow, beginning in the autumn of 1844. Pauline’s contract was improved: her fee was raised to 65,000 assignat roubles (75,000 francs), and she was guaranteed to take home a further 15,000 roubles (17,000 francs) from a benefit performance.¹⁹³ The centrepiece of the season was Bellini’s Norma with Pauline in the title role. The demand for tickets was so great that the number of performances was increased from forty to sixty in two different subscription series, although including benefit nights the actual number was seventy-six. A larger troupe of singers had to be employed to cope with the strain. This was the height of the Russian mania for Italian opera. The public divided into warring factions over Viardot and her rival prima donna, Jeanne Castellan. Flower frenzy was at fever pitch. Fanatics paid the claques, including poor Turgenev, who spent all he had to rent a group of claqueurs in the top ring of the theatre for Pauline (‘One cannot do without them, one must warm up the audience!’ he explained to a friend).¹⁹⁴

Satirists had a field day. ‘Never mind the Bolshoi auditorium,’ Nekrasov wrote in March 1845,

wherever you may be you will hear the names of Rubini and Viardot; in every corner of the town you will hear roulades and trills; in a word, Petersburg has been turned into one gigantic organ performing only Italian motifs.

Everyone has begun to sing!

You take a walk down the Nevsky – ‘U-na for-ti-ma lag-rima uu-na’ [sic] booms out behind you; you look into a coffee shop – roulades à la Tamburini meet you already on the stairs; you drop in on a friend’s family, even one that lives on the Vyborg side, and they immediately sit their daughter down at the piano and force her to squeak her way through an aria from Norma or some other opera. You turn into the smallest alley, and barely ten steps in you come across an organ-grinder, who, having seen you from afar, has lost no time in striking up the finale to Pirata [an opera by Bellini] in full expectation of a generous reward.¹⁹⁵

How far Nekrasov was exaggerating is difficult to tell. Certainly, through sheet music sales and constant repetition by orchestras and bands and street musicians, it did not take a long time for the latest opera hits to become widely known.

At the end of her second season, in March 1845, Pauline received a delegation of merchants with a German interpreter who, as she recounted in a letter to George Sand, ‘begged me to accept the respects of the simple Russian peasants, in the same manner as I had accepted them from the Russian aristocracy’. Pauline had received a magnificent portebouquet from the St Petersburg nobility. Because the humble merchants had not been invited to join the subscription for this gift, they presented her with a diamond bracelet, financed entirely by their own modest contributions, ‘to prove to me that they too possessed ears to hear and hearts to feel’.¹⁹⁶

The Viardots returned to Paris in the spring of 1845. Turgenev went to them. He was hopelessly in love and would do anything to be close to Pauline. Resigning from his post in the ministry on grounds of poor eyesight, he received permission from the Tsar to travel to Europe for medical treatment. Turgenev spent the summer with the Viardots at Courtavenel, their château on the plains of Brie, south-east of Paris, which they had bought from Pauline’s earnings in Russia. During the summer Turgenev and Pauline became more intimate in their relationship. He felt that she was starting to return his affections.* Although no kisses had yet been exchanged, there was the exciting possibility of deeper emotional connection. Turgenev would recall this summer as the ‘happiest time of my life’.¹⁹⁷

In the autumn the Viardots returned to St Petersburg for a third Russian season. Turgenev followed them. Louis’s account of their hunting parties in Russia had been published in L’Illustration in 1844 and had been read in Russia, making him a person of real interest there. He was invited to hunt everywhere. By this time he was also acting as an intermediary between the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg and those artists in Europe the Russians were attempting to recruit, among them Meyerbeer and the librettist Eugène Scribe.¹⁹⁸

Pauline, by contrast, was not as popular as she had been before. The craze for Italian opera was on the wane. Houses were half-empty. So few tickets were sold for some of the Moscow performances that these had to be cancelled. One literary journal explained this cooling-off as the public waking from a dream: ‘someone sang and played while we slept, an unknown feeling of sweetness swept all over us, we felt happiness, and then we woke to silence and emptiness.’¹⁹⁹

The season was cut short because Louis became ill with gastric fever, while the young Louise, who accompanied her parents for the first time on a tour, developed whooping cough. As soon as they were fit to embark on the arduous voyage overland, the Viardots departed by carriage for Berlin, where Pauline had her next engagements in March 1846. It was a terrible three-week journey in freezing temperatures and snow blizzards. By the end, the ‘coach was literally breaking into bits’, Louis wrote to Turgenev. ‘I don’t think it could have done another leg.’²⁰⁰

Perhaps three seasons were enough. The market was not big enough to sustain another year of interest in Italian opera. But these seasons would be long remembered in Russia: for years the press would follow the career of ‘our Viardot’ and publish memoirs about her. Pauline herself recalled her visits to Russia with gratitude.²⁰¹ They had been the making of her career. But now she had to find a bigger stage.

* Technically, by today’s standards, Viardot was a mezzo-soprano, but that term was not commonly used until the late nineteenth century, so she would have been billed as a soprano. The Rosina role in The Barber of Seville was originally written for a contralto but is now known as one of the staple roles for a mezzo-soprano.

* He was not the first young man to win Pauline’s heart since her marriage. In the summer of 1844 Pauline fell in love with Maurice Sand, George Sand’s son, a talented painter two years her junior, who spent a week with Pauline at Courtavenel. Realizing that the situation was impossible, Pauline wrote to George Sand after his departure: ‘We promised each other to be brave … I cannot say more about it at the moment … I love him very seriously … Write to me soon – a double-entente if possible [to avoid arousing the suspicions of Louis Viardot]’ (Correspondance de George Sand, vol. 6, p. 632). In an earlier letter, on 11 August, George Sand had advised Pauline in double ententes to break off the love affair, even if she could have got away with it as far as Louis was concerned:

‘While your husband would let you do whatever you wanted, your mother [i.e. Sand herself] would advise you not to follow the inspiration of your friendship’ (George Sand, Lettres retrouvées, ed. Thierry Bodin (Paris, 2004), p. 55).