The Europeans

4

Europeans on the Move

Cards like this arrived daily, from Innsbruck, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and every one started, ‘Today we visited the famous local art gallery’, or if it wasn’t a gallery, it was an arena or a church. Santa Maria something or other.

Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest

1

Turgenev travelled constantly between 1857 and 1861. He was incapable of staying still in any place for long. Much of his travel was in search of cures for various ailments but there were emotional torments too. In February 1857, complaining of bladder pains, he left Paris for Dijon to consult a doctor recommended to him by Louis Viardot. ‘I plan to spend a week here,’ he wrote to Annenkov in St Petersburg, ‘return for three weeks to my place of torture, called Paris, visit London, and then come home.’¹

Restless travel delayed his return to Russia for another eighteen months. Following a brief stay in London to see Herzen, who had settled there in 1852, Turgenev went to Berlin and Dresden; he then took the waters at Sinzig on the Rhine, rushed to Baden-Baden to rescue Tolstoy, who had lost his money in the casino, spent three weeks with him by the seaside at Boulogne, returned to Paris and Courtavenel, where he passed September, travelled for the next six months in Italy, and then took another three to travel back to Russia, passing through Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, Paris, London and Berlin on the way.

Turgenev felt unwanted, redundant, in Paris. That was the reason for his restlessness. ‘I won’t talk about myself – a completely bankrupt person,’ he wrote to Botkin before leaving for Dijon. ‘I feel as if I am a bit of rubbish they forgot to sweep away – that is my constant mood. Perhaps it will pass when I leave Paris.’ Two months later his mood had not improved. Turgenev wrote to Annenkov that he was living through a ‘moral and physical crisis’ from which he ‘would emerge either shattered or repaired! … I mean propped up, as a collapsed shed is propped up with logs.’²

The cause of his depression was a sudden break in his relations with Pauline. They had been close the previous autumn, following his return from Russia. They had spent a ‘blissful’ month or so together at Courtavenel, where Turgenev had been ‘very happy’, as he had written to Botkin, because he had felt close to her. But then there was a sudden change. She became distant, even cold. She rarely answered his letters. To find out news of her he had to write to his daughter, whose own relations with Pauline were poor.³ The break was a catastrophe for Turgenev. It made him ill. Unable to write, he destroyed all his notes and told his friends that he was finished as a writer. He was then aged thirty-nine. ‘Turgenev is pitiful to see,’ observed Tolstoy. ‘I would not have thought him capable of such a love.’⁴

Pauline’s attitude had changed when she became pregnant with her fourth child, Paul, in November 1856. There are two ways this coincidence may be explained. Pauline had a habit of breaking off relations with her male admirers after giving them encouragement. She did it to Gounod, and would do so again to Berlioz. It was as if she enjoyed the flirtation, and the admiration of these famous men, but took fright when they drew too close, threatening her commitment to her marriage, on which she depended more than these admirers realized. Perhaps Turgenev was wounded by the fact that Pauline had conceived a child with Louis at a time when he felt closer to her than at any other time before. He might have even seen it as a betrayal. Feeling rejected, Turgenev went off travelling abroad. ‘One cannot live like this,’ he wrote to Nekrasov. ‘No more sitting on the edge of someone else’s nest.’ To Tolstoy he confessed in a letter on 20 December: ‘I am too old not to have a nest, not to stay at home. In the spring I shall return to Russia – although to leave from here I shall have to say goodbye to the last dreams of so-called happiness.’⁵

An alternative explanation is that Turgenev was Paul’s father, or suspected that he might be so, and went away to protect the Viardots from rumours, which were then developing. Perhaps Pauline deliberately withdrew her affections to encourage him to leave. That would certainly explain a curious remark by Pauline in a letter to Rietz, her confidant, in January 1859: ‘Love kills, when not allowed to burst into flame. To extinguish it – that is a cruel torture – sad, deadly and terrible.’⁶

There is circumstantial evidence to suggest this explanation may be right, although the most likely source to confirm it, Turgenev’s diary, which he had kept since 1851, was destroyed by the writer shortly after Pauline became pregnant, probably because it contained compromising evidence about their relationship, which might have come to light in the event of his death.⁷ On Paul’s birth, in July 1857, Turgenev wrote an extraordinarily ecstatic letter to Pauline, far more joyous than any of his letters on the birth of her other three children. When Paul was three he fell seriously ill with pneumonia. Pauline asked Turgenev, then in Germany, to come at once to Courtavenel to care for him while she fulfilled a previous commitment to sing in a concert in London. He dropped everything to go. The fact that she had called on him, despite the cooling in their own relations, suggests that she recognized a link between Turgenev and her son. Turgenev always treated Paul with a strong paternal affection – to the extent that Louis once complained that he felt his own position as a father had been usurped by him. The boy played the violin and later became a well-known soloist. It was rumoured that his Stradivarius had been paid for by Turgenev in lieu of an inheritance from the writer’s will – it was worth far more than the modest sums Turgenev left to Pauline’s daughters. Equally suggestive is a strange aside in Louis’s testament, which calls upon his children, ‘even my son Paul’, to respect their mother following his death.⁸

Paul himself never denied rumours that he was the son of Turgenev. He often told the story of an incident from his boyhood when he had been chided by his mother for being rude to Turgenev. Told to shake hands with his mother’s friend, Paul complained that Turgenev had cuffed him on the ear for some earlier misdemeanour and that he would not take punishment from anyone but his father. His comment prompted a ‘very meaningful look’ between his mother and Turgenev which struck Paul as odd.⁹

If Turgenev was his father, it made sense for him to disappear when Pauline became pregnant. Distancing himself was the obvious way to minimize the risk of a scandal that could ruin her career. Turgenev’s novels are full of restless wanderers, rootless Russians like himself travelling aimlessly around Europe. The unnamed hero and narrator of Asya (1857), Lavretsky in Home of the Gentry (1859), Sanin in Spring Torrents (1871) – these ill-fated, lovesick travellers are his alter egos from the years of separation from Pauline. Like Turgenev, they are all without a nest.

Far from being finished as a writer, Turgenev was productive, completing three of his finest novels* and three minor works, including the novella Asya, in his period of wandering, suggesting, in the words of his biographer, ‘that this great burst of literary energy was his way of reconciling himself to the personal misery to which he now saw himself condemned’. Asya was begun (and is clearly set) in the tranquil spa town of Sinzig, where Turgenev stayed in the Badehaus, nestled on the edge of a pine forest, from which he looked out of his window, as he wrote to Tolstoy, ‘across a broad valley of wheat-fields and fruit orchards – and on the horizon a jagged line of hills on the right bank of the Rhine’. The narrator tells the story of his hopeless love for a girl called Asya, who departs the Rhineland spa, leaving him a wistful farewell note, before he finds the courage to propose to her. The tale was a reflection of Turgenev’s indecisiveness and feelings of regret about Pauline. Turgenev completed it in Rome, where he also worked on Home of the Gentry, another melancholic tale of disappointed love. Its hero, Lavretsky, who is not unlike Turgenev, returns from Paris to his home in Russia after the revelation of his wife’s infidelity. He falls in love with Liza, a girl with strong religious feelings, whom he hopes to marry after learning of his wife’s death from a report in a French newspaper. The report turns out to be false. Lavretsky’s estranged wife appears, asking for his forgiveness, and returns to Paris with a promissory note for a large sum of money from Lavretsky, while Liza enters a convent. The novel might be read as an evocation of Turgenev’s feelings of anxiety caused by his relations with Pauline: having tied his happiness to her, which would mean returning to Paris, had he not denied himself the chance of finding a more stable source of love in his homeland?

Turgenev put off his return to Russia because he was ‘seduced by the idea of spending a winter in Italy, in Rome in particular, before I turn forty and die’, as he explained in a letter to his friends in St Petersburg. He also hoped that he could write well there. ‘In Rome it is impossible not to work – and often to work well.’¹⁰ The idea of travelling to Italy had been in his mind from the spring of 1857, when he wrote to Botkin in Moscow suggesting that he join him in Paris to go by train together to London for the Season and then travel to the Rhine, Switzerland and Italy: ‘You will be in the most interesting places at the best possible time: Paris in May, England in June, the Rhine and Baden-Baden in July, Switzerland in August’ – Italy at that stage planned for the autumn. Botkin was a seasoned traveller. The son of one of Russia’s biggest tea merchants, he was a wealthy dilettante, art and music critic, travel writer, and something of an expert on Spanish and Italian art, so he was in many ways an ideal travelling companion. Plans were delayed by Turgenev’s trip to Sinzig, but at the end of September they were set. ‘So we are going!’, Botkin wrote.

I will be a quiet and patient companion, and ask you only to be patient too. It is very hard for me to travel by night, and in a carriage or wagon. Even from Paris to Marseilles I prefer to stop for a night in Lyons … From Marseilles we will have to get somehow to Nice, and then by the corniche to Genoa. Yes! I forgot to say that I do all I can to avoid sea travel … We will only go by boat from Genoa to Livorno. And from Florence overland through places where all Christian art has developed.¹¹

The journey began easily enough. The final section of the Paris–Marseilles railway had been opened in 1856, enabling passengers to travel the 862 kilometres in just seventeen hours. Crossing into Italy was much slower. The coastal road between Nice and Genoa was notoriously difficult. From 1857 it was further complicated by construction work on the Ligurian railway along the corniche. But the journey was beautiful. ‘I have entered Italy from various directions but none with a view as bewitching as this,’ Botkin wrote to Fet, who had declined the offer to join them on the trip. ‘Palm groves and enormous oleanders and orchards of trees and all nearby the light-blue sea. There are places where you are in ecstasy.’ In Genoa, where a lost trunk delayed them for three days, they visited the city’s palaces with a guidebook – John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1854) – and went to the opera in the evenings. ‘Genoa is a very pretty town,’ Turgenev wrote to Pauline on 27 October, ‘but the women are all repulsive, no matter what the guidebook says … There are some magnificent palaces and some filthy streets (by the way, I found the original of Viardot’s Ribera in the Balbi Palace);* Van Dyck’s portrait of the Marquis de Brignoles on a large grey horse is “a wonder”.’¹²

In Rome they stayed at the Hotel d’Inghilterra, a sixteenth-century aristocratic residence recently converted into a hotel popular with English visitors, partly because Byron and John Keats had both stayed there. Botkin left Turgenev on his own to write, but dined with him and spent the evenings with him at the opera, playing chess or talking about art at the Café Greco near the Spanish Steps, where a group of Russian artists met, including Alexander Ivanov, then completing his great painting, on which he had worked for over twenty years, The Appearance of Christ before the People. Turgenev was rejuvenated by his time in Rome. ‘Rome is marvellous,’ he wrote to Annenkov. ‘In no other city do you get that constant feeling that the Great, the Beautiful and Important are always close to hand, constantly surrounding you, so that you, at any time, can enter the sphere of the divine.’ To Countess Lambert, his confidante in these years of separation from Pauline, Turgenev confessed that it was ‘a city where it is easier to be alone’ – an idea he developed in a letter to the Ukrainian writer Maria Markovich when he wrote that ‘Rome is a surprising city, which can replace anything – society, happiness and even love.’¹³

Consolation also came from touring around Italy. With Botkin as an expert guide, Turgenev visited the Villa Madama and the Villa Pamphili, picturesque Lake Albano, and Frascati, reachable from Rome by a newly opened railway, one of the first in Italy, which took only half an hour to transport day-trippers from Rome to the pretty hill-town. They also made a longer trip to Naples and Pompei. Separating from Botkin, Turgenev travelled on his own to Florence, where he used his Murray’s Handbook as a guide to the city’s art treasures; and from Florence he went to Pisa, Milan and Venice on his way to Vienna to consult a doctor before returning to Russia. ‘Florence is a marvel,’ he wrote to Botkin on 28 March, continuing with advice from his Murray guide:

pay attention, by the way, to a painting by Raphael in the Pitti Palace, No. 245 in the ‘Education of Jupiter’ Room; it is a model for his Madonnas, and the ones in Dresden in particular.

Be healthy and until we meet in Russia, your I. Turgenev

Ps. Buy yourself a Murray for Florence.¹⁴

2

Railways made this sort of travel possible. Turgenev used them as often as he could on his travels through Europe. He even learned to write on them.

Less than a year after his return to Russia, in 1859, he was off again to London and Paris, with shorter trips to the spa resorts of Vichy and Ostend on his way back to St Petersburg. He returned to Europe the next spring, travelling by train from the Russian capital to Berlin, Paris, Munich, Bad Soden, along the Rhine to Cologne and Aachen on his way to London, and finally to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, a seaside resort favoured by the Russian aristocracy and recommended to him by both Botkin and Herzen, where he spent three weeks in August 1860 working on the outline of Fathers and Sons.

Dedicated to Belinsky, the short novel is a masterpiece of realist form and narrative technique. More widely read abroad than any of Turgenev’s other works, it raised the status of Russian literature to new heights, on a par with English or French fiction, and brought international fame to Turgenev. The main interest of the novel is its tragic hero Bazarov, the original ‘nihilist’, who rejects every principle or institution that does not serve the social welfare of the people. A medical student, Bazarov is taken by his friend Arkady to stay at his father’s estate following their graduation from St Petersburg University. His revolutionary opinions, weakly shared by Arkady, bring the young men into conflict with Arkady’s father and uncle, holders of more liberal views. The confrontation between these two generations placed the novel at the centre of political discussions in Russia during the 1860s, when students and young radicals were questioning the tsarist system, rejecting the political quietism of their fathers’ generation (the ‘men of the forties’), and calling for more action to improve conditions for the peasantry. Caustic, coarse, severely intellectual and self-assured, Bazarov is in many ways a typical example of the student radicals, particularly those from the raznochintsy, or non-noble backgrounds, who played a leading role in the revolutionary movement during that decade. But he is more complex than a type. Introduced by Arkady to Anna Odintsova, an elegant widow, he falls in love with her, but is disturbed by his emotions, which militate against his principles. In any case, his feelings are unreturned by Anna, who is cold and self-absorbed. Perhaps, if she had loved him, Bazarov might have softened in his character; he might have given up his angry passion to destroy. The tempering effect of love is revealed in Arkady, whose engagement to Katya, Anna’s younger sister, marks the end of his infatuation with Bazarov and his radical ideas. Departing from his friend, Bazarov returns to his humble parents in the countryside and works there as a doctor, dying later from a blood infection after cutting himself while carrying out an autopsy on a victim of typhus.

Turgenev had first conceived Bazarov during his stay at Ventnor. The idea for his hero had come to him from a young provincial doctor, referred to by Turgenev by the letter ‘D.’ but thought to be a certain Dmitriev, whom he had met on a train, travelling second class, between Moscow and St Petersburg. In his Literary Reminiscences (1869) Turgenev describes ‘taking sea-baths at Ventnor’ when he came to shape his character, who, like all his fictional heroes, had his starting point in a living person, to whom he gradually added suitable invented elements. At the basis of Bazarov ‘lay the personality of a young provincial doctor I had been greatly struck by. (He died shortly before 1860.) In that remarkable man I could watch the embodiment of that principle which had scarcely come to life but was just beginning to stir at the time, the principle which later received the name of nihilism.’¹⁵

It is one of the stranger ironies of literary history that Turgenev’s greatest creation – the fictional embodiment of the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary – should have taken shape in the genteel seaside resort of Ventnor. The Russian circles on the Isle of Wight no doubt had an influence on Turgenev’s invention of Bazarov. They were swept up in debates about the imminent Emancipation of the Serfs and the need it would create for social reforms in Russia to raise the peasants out of poverty and ignorance. Much of their discussion would have been informed by the emergence of a new breed of radicals in Russia – young writers grouped around the journal The Contemporary, which became a mouthpiece of the revolutionary intelligentsia, alienating liberals like Turgenev, who had been a regular contributor. Turgenev hit on the idea of founding a Society for the Propagation of Literacy and Primary Education, and presented a draft programme to the Russian colony for discussion. According to Annenkov, who visited Turgenev in Ventnor, the programme ‘was gone over in detail at evening meetings in Turgenev’s cottage, redrafted, and after many arguments, corrections and additions adopted by a committee made up of selected members of the group’. But no practical measures were subsequently taken to set up schools or recruit teachers, and Annenkov was left with the impression ‘that the plan was simply based on the idea of demonstrating the necessity, usefulness and patriotic character of the society’.¹⁶

Turgenev had come to Ventnor for the sea-bathing. He had been hoping for a holiday in the company of Annenkov and the 26-year-old Maria Markovich, who had promised to join him there. Markovich did not arrive, and the other pleasures of a seaside break were soon spoilt by the English weather, which became cold and rainy, ruling out the possibility of sea-bathing. Turgenev described the miserable scene in a letter to Countess Lambert on 18 August:

The wide and gently sloping strip of yellow-brown sand which forms the sea-shore, not built up in any way and devoid of vegetation, stretches far beyond the limits of the town. With the incoming tide bottle-green waves, cold, northern waves, run right up to the boundary of the uniform houses. When the tide has gone out, straight-backed figures of English people out for a stroll can be seen on the damp, firm, seaweed-striped sand.¹⁷

Confined to his cottage by the poor weather, Turgenev sat down at the writing table in his room and began his masterpiece. He had nothing else to do.

Turgenev was a seasoned traveller on the railways. With all his touring around Europe and the trips he made to Russia, he must have journeyed more on them than any other writer of his day. By the 1860s it was possible to travel by rail to nearly all of Europe’s major cities and to many of its smaller towns. The rate of railway building in the 1850s and 1860s was staggering. Everywhere the railways were seen as the key to economic growth, political stability and national unity. In Germany, where they were viewed as a driving force of unification, connecting all the German states, the length of the completed lines grew from 5,856 kilometres in 1850 to 17,612 kilometres in 1869. Spending on the railways made up a quarter of all investments (government and private) in these years. In France the growth of the railways was no less impressive – from 2,915 to 16,465 kilometres.¹⁸ The railways spread south to Madrid and Rome, north to Copenhagen and Stockholm, east to Moscow and St Petersburg, west to Cornwall and Galway.

By making foreign travel easier and affordable, the railways encouraged people to travel more and further than before. The British led the way. They practically drove the growing tourist industry in Europe. Every major city on the beaten track through France, the Rhineland and Switzerland to Italy boasted grand hotels with names like Hôtel d’Angleterre, Hôtel des Anglais, Hôtel de Londres, Hotel d’Inghilterra, and so on. The Goncourts complained that it was hard for the French to travel in their own country, because the staff in all hotels was interested only in serving tourists from Britain.¹⁹ The British middle classes were the richest in Europe. Living apart from the Continent, they felt a stronger need to travel than their European counterparts. The Grand Tour had been dominated by the British aristocracy. It had set a model of European travel as a means of intellectual betterment.

At the highpoint of the British fashion for the Grand Tour, in the 1780s, the historian Edward Gibbon had estimated that there were up to 40,000 Britons – whole families with their children, tutors and servants – travelling on the Continent in any year. Wealthy young men headed straight for Italy to complete their knowledge of the classics, find out about Continental fashions, and look for sexual adventures. In the early decades of the nineteenth century there was a steady increase in numbers. The travellers were more diverse, with many from the professional classes, who tended to make smaller tours of the Low Countries and the Rhine as far as Switzerland, which had been opened up to easier travel by steamships. But this growth was small compared with the sudden boom in railway travel in the 1850s and 1860s. After the completion of the railway links from London and Paris to the ports on the English Channel, the number of recorded Channel crossings grew from 165,000 in 1850 to 238,000 in 1860 and 345,000 in 1869. By the end of this period passengers could travel from London to Paris in just half a day.²⁰

The tourist industry was a creation of the railway age. Even the word ‘tourist’ was relatively new, entering the French and English languages from the 1810s but gaining widespread currency from the 1840s with the penetration of the Continent by railways, hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, guidebooks and so on.²¹ Whereas foreign travel had previously been the pleasure of a few, the railways made it possible for many more. The cultural élites had their doubts about this revolution in movement. ‘The enormous extension of continental travel is one of the great features of the last ten years,’ commented the Edinburgh Review in 1873:

During the autumn months the whole of Europe seems to be in a state of perpetual motion. There is a mob at every small railway station. The new hotels (as at Lucerne) are built to receive 5, 6, or 700 guests, and those most frequented turn away daily some 200 applicants, for whom there is no room. Every spot, however difficult of access, is attacked. The remote lake Koenigsee, in Bavaria, to which perhaps a dozen strangers formerly found their way in the course of a month, now supports four boats, while the carriages waiting on the shore may be counted by fifties. The top of the Rigi is worn bare of grass, and is strewn with broken bottles and fragments of The Daily Telegraph.

In contrast to the old élites, who could afford to travel for several months and even years, the new railway tourists concentrated all their travel in a few weeks’ summer holiday. ‘All the world is travelling,’ Fontane wrote in Modern Travel (1873):

Just as in the old days people found their entertainment in talking about the weather, so now they find it in travel. ‘Where did you go this summer?’ is all people say between October and Christmas. ‘Where will you be going next summer?’ is all they say between Christmas and Easter. Many people spend eleven months of the year preparing for the twelfth [when they travel], as if on the ladder to a higher existence. People live for this twelfth month.²²

What tourists wanted was a compact version of the Grand Tour. They desired many things: to see the most famous sites of Europe, the culturally important and the picturesque; to focus on those aspects of a place that were nationally ‘authentic’ and unique to it which they could not see at home; and to return with pride in thinking ‘they have seen at any rate as much as their neighbours’ – as Trollope put it in his Travelling Sketches (1866). The ‘true pleasure’ of ‘the family that goes abroad’ begins only when they return home, Trollope continued:

The spirit that instigates them to roam afield is no hankering after fashion … The days in which we heard that

Mrs. Grill is very ill,

And nothing will improve her,

Unless she sees the Tuileries,

And waddles down the Louvre,

are well nigh over, and are certainly over for such sensible people as I am describing. It is not fashion that they seek, nor is it chiefly amusement. Paterfamilias, when he starts, knows that he will not be amused, and already wishes that the journey was over, and that he could be back at his club. Mamma dreads it somewhat, and has more of misgiving than of pleasant anticipation. She has not much of happiness when papa is cross, and he is usually cross when he is uncomfortable. And then the people at the inns are so often uncivil; and she fears the beds! And the girls look for no unalloyed satisfaction. They know that they have hard work before them, and the dread of those slips in their French is not pleasant to them. But it is the thing to do. Not to have seen Florence, Rome, Munich, and Dresden, not to be at home as regards the Rhine, not to have ridden over the Gemini or to have talked to Alpine climbers at Zermatt, is to be behind the world.

‘Culture’ was the biggest draw. By seeing Europe’s greatest works of art and visiting its famous historical places and buildings, tourists sought to cultivate themselves by travelling abroad; they approached culture as acquisitions or commodities they could check off a list of things they had experienced. National galleries and museums were the major reference points for tourists planning their itineraries. International exhibitions – such as those in London (in 1851 and 1862), Paris (1855 and 1867) and Vienna (1873) – equally attracted foreign visitors, although how many is difficult to say with any accuracy.*

In 1857, Turgenev went to the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, one of the biggest of its kind, with 16,000 artworks on display, including many Old Masters. The exhibition drew over 1.3 million visitors from all over Europe to the northern industrial city, many of them travelling, as Turgenev did, with an excursion ticket from London. The Manchester industrial élite, led by George Scharf, the art critic, had organized the show to put their city on the cultural map on a par with London and Paris, whose recent international exhibitions they had contributed to. Turgenev was delighted by its ‘many wondrous things’, the Raphaels and Rembrandts and Michelangelos, which were arranged in chronological order to show the development of art – at that time a relatively new way of organizing public galleries, pioneered in Berlin’s Royal Museum by Gustav Waagen, one of the art scholars behind the Manchester exhibition, but yet to be applied in London’s National Gallery.²³

The nineteenth century was the golden age of the public gallery and museum. Royal collections were opened up in palaces that became themselves more generally accessible – a process that had begun in the final decades of the eighteenth century – or were moved to newly opened national galleries. It is no coincidence that the development of a European tourist trade took place at the same time as the foundation of national collections right across the Continent: London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (1852) and National Portrait Gallery (1856); the Hermitage in St Petersburg (1852); the Neue Pinakothek in Munich (1853); the Semper Gallery of Old Masters in Dresden (1854); the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh (1859); the National Gallery in Berlin (1876); and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (opened in 1891 but planned from the 1850s).²⁴

Writers’ homes and literary landmarks were also becoming major tourist attractions. Organized excursions to literary shrines account for much of the early tourist traffic within Britain: ‘Brontë country’ in the Pennines, Wordsworth’s Lake District, Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford – all of these were opened up to tourists by the railways in the 1840s and 1850s. The same was true on the Continent for the homes of writers such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Petrarch, Schiller and Goethe, whose house in Frankfurt was purchased for the public in 1863.²⁵

For British tourists on the Continent it was Byron’s writings that determined where they went more than any other works of literature. Travellers to the Rhine and Italy were guided by his poetry, which told them what they ought to feel in those places featured in his verse. The Murray guides selected their itineraries to take in as many of the places mentioned by Byron as they could, making sure to cite his poetry at every opportunity (John Murray was also his publisher) and even issuing a pocket edition of his poetry for travellers. If the poet had liked a certain painting or building it would be pointed out to the readers of the guides. With some sites, like the Terni Falls, where the traveller was meant to experience the sublime, Murray’s Handbook deferred to Byron altogether, merely adding ‘such historical and other facts as may be useful’ as a supplement to the ‘beautiful passage from Lord Byron, in whose judgement, either from above or below, they are worth all the cascades and torrents of Switzerland put together; the Staubach, Reichenbach, Pisse Vache, Falls of Arpenaz &c., are rills in comparative appearance’.

The roar of waters! – from the headlong height

Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice;

The fall of waters! rapid as the light

The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss;

The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,

And boil in endless torture; while the sweat

Of their great agony, wrung out from this

Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet

That guard the gulf around, in pitiless horror set …

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816)

The Italian tourist trade was quick to recognize the commercial opportunities of this Byronic trail through Italy. There were Hotel Byrons and Lord Byron restaurants everywhere. In his Pictures From Italy (1846) Dickens recounts an episode in Bologna, then ‘being very full of tourists’, when the waiter at an inn, recognizing that he was from England,* began speaking about ‘Milord Beeron’ at any opportunity:

He knew all about him, he said. In proof of it, he connected him with every possible topic, from the Monte Pulciano [sic] wine at dinner which was grown on an estate he had owned, to the big bed itself, which was the very model of his. When I left the inn, he coupled with his final bow in the yard a parting assurance that the road by which I was going, had been Milord Beeron’s favourite ride.²⁶

Murray’s guidebooks, more than any other, influenced where British tourists went, what they considered ‘worth seeing’, and how they saw those things. There were other pocket guides for tourists in Europe: Karl Baedeker’s, modelled on the Murrays, though geared more to high culture, whose handbooks first appeared in Germany in 1839 (they were translated into English from 1861); the Guides Joannes, begun in 1841 by the French travel writer and geographer Adolphe Joanne, a cousin of Louis Viardot, which would later be rebranded by Hachette as the Guides Bleus; and the Satchel Guides for Americans in Europe, published in New York by Hurd and Houghton from the 1870s.²⁷ But the Murrays were the most successful. They became the model for all modern tourist guides and were widely used by European travellers, Turgenev among them, in preference to their German and French equivalents.

The first Murray guide, A Handbook for Travellers on the Continent, appeared in 1836, sold 10,000 copies in the first five years, and went into its seventeenth edition in 1871. By this time there were separate Murray guides to every country in Europe, from Portugal and Spain to Greece, Turkey, Russia, Poland and Finland, with the most successful, such as those on the Rhine, Switzerland and Italy, selling several tens of thousands of copies each in the 1850s and 1860s. As one reviewer put it in 1855, ‘since Napoleon no man’s empire has ever been so wide’.²⁸

Murray’s most important innovation – and one copied by the Baedeker and Joanne guides – was his use of an itinerary. It made his guides more compact and easier to use than previous handbooks. Johann Gottfried Ebel’s Swiss guidebook, a mainstay of the Grand Tour, published first in German in 1793, and then translated into English, French and other languages, appeared, for example, in two heavy volumes. The sites of interest were listed in it alphabetically, necessitating the use of a separate map.²⁹ Murray’s books, by contrast, organized the sites into convenient routes, thus dispensing with the need to consult a map. The routes were chosen by the ease and speed of travel between the main sites of interest, thereby channelling the tourist traffic along the major railways, roads and steam shipping lines. In this way the cultural map of Europe was redrawn.

The new guidebooks were essential reading for a public unaccustomed to foreign travel. Most of their readers were travelling abroad for the first time, venturing into foreign countries where they did not speak the languages. They depended on the handbooks to tell them where to go and what to see; to plan their routes so that they could view as much as possible and avoid wasted days in the few weeks they had free for travelling. As Baedeker put it in a letter to Murray in 1852:

the number of tourists is increasing by the year. Not only rich people set out as soon as the weather improves, the lower classes vie with them in this respect. Students and others belonging to the latter class wish to know in advance more or less what their journey is going to cost them, what they will have to pay at hotels, tips etc. etc.³⁰

Like the Baedeker and Joanne guides, the Murrays concentrated on giving practical and descriptive information for the major tourist sites. Murray told his readers what to see. As he wrote in his Handbook for Travellers on the Continent in 1858, his guides worked on the principle of limiting themselves ‘to matter-of-fact descriptions of what ought to be seen at each place’, rather than bewildering readers ‘with an account of all that may be seen’. Intended to appeal to the ‘intelligent English traveller’, this meant, as one historian has put it, ‘outlining possible itineraries, avoiding too many chronological details, judiciously including anecdotes about monuments and other sites, adopting a condensed writing style and extracting pithy quotes from Scott, Byron or other literary figures who had written well and elegantly about particular places’.³¹

The guides helped tourists overcome their insecurities by giving them received opinions with which to respond in a correct fashion to the cultural sites and artefacts they encountered on their travels. Serious tourists followed the advice of their guidebooks religiously, sometimes going without food or sleep to make sure they saw everything. On a tour through Switzerland in 1863, Jemima Morrell, the author of a celebrated Swiss Journal, became irritated with her travelling companions when they stopped to admire some fine crockery, seriously telling them they could not spare the time ‘when within one hundred yards is that view which Murray says is worth the cost of a journey from London to see’. Heine complained that one could not move in Italy for English tourists ‘swarming everywhere; there is no lemon tree without an English lady nearby smelling its perfume, no picture gallery without at least sixty or so Englishmen, each with a guidebook in their hands checking that everything is where it should be’. The Polish philosopher and literary historian Michal Wiszniewski was amused and appalled by the English in Italy, who ‘walk everywhere with Murray’s Guide in hand, wandering open-mouthed through galleries and temples, swallowing everything they hear from the most stupid cicerone’. Watching a group of his countrymen in a church in Italy, James Bryce, an Oxford don, thought these tourists saw ‘the sights for no purpose but that of verifying their Murray, which they do with praiseworthy perseverance in front of a crowd of kneeling worshippers’.³²

By directing tourists on to the beaten track, the Murray guides did more than anything to standardize the experience of foreign travel. Tourists travelled in the expectation of finding those things mentioned in their guidebooks, and those sites became commodities – ‘culturally valuable objects’ acquired by the tourist in the act of seeing them.³³ Souvenirs enabled tourists to materialize these symbolic acquisitions. Along the tourist routes in Italy, shops sold terracotta replicas of museum sculptures, imitation Murano glass vases, photographic reproductions of Old Masters, models of the Roman temples and countless other souvenirs manufactured specially for the tourist market. In Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) the Meagles home in Twickenham is filled with them:

There were antiquities from Central Italy, made by the best modern houses in that department of industry; bits of mummy from Egypt (and perhaps from Birmingham); model gondolas from Venice; model villages from Switzerland; morsels of tessellated pavement from Herculaneum and Pompei, like petrified minced veal; ashes out of tombs, and lava out of Vesuvius; Spanish fans, Spezzian straw hats, Moorish slippers; Tuscan hairpins, Carrara sculpture, Trasteverini scarves, Genoese velvets and filigree, Neapolitan coral, Roman cameos, Geneva jewellery, Arab lanterns, rosaries blest all round by the Pope himself, and an infinite variety of lumber.³⁴

Travel agencies were equally important in standardizing tourist routes. Many companies responded to the mid-century boom in railway travel on the Continent – Thomas Bennet, who organized excursions to Norway; Henry Gaze, who arranged trips to the battlefield of Waterloo and to Switzerland; the Carl Stangen firm in Germany – but none was as successful as Thomas Cook and Son. An activist in the temperance movement, Cook had started in the early 1840s by organizing day-trips on the Midland railways as a sober entertainment for artisans, mechanics and the working class. His breakthrough came in 1851, when he sold 165,000 return tickets to the Great Exhibition in London on special excursion trains. In 1855, for the Paris Exposition Universelle, he organized and led his first excursions to Europe, two ‘grand circular tours’ from Harwich to Antwerp, Brussels, Waterloo, Cologne, up the Rhine by steamer to Heidelberg, Baden-Baden and Strasbourg, and then by rail to Paris and London, a two-week journey for £10. Losing money from these tours, it was only six years later, in 1861, that he returned to the Continent, organizing tours to Switzerland and Italy which would become the mainstay of his business for many years.

Cook believed his mission was to facilitate independent travel for as many people as he could. By purchasing in bulk, he was able to obtain discounted rates on railway fares for special tourist routes or ‘tours’ advertised in The Excursionist, his company journal, launched in 1851, which had a monthly circulation of 58,000 by the mid-1860s. A three-week tour to Switzerland in 1863 cost £9 (230 francs) in fares, with hotels and food estimated at a further £6 per person, depending on choice, for neither was provided by the company, although Cook, who went himself on a number of the tours, did make recommendations (from 1868, he introduced a voucher system for travellers at some hotels which became the basis of the modern package holiday). These prices made his tours not only affordable to the middle classes but highly attractive, given their desire to see the most important things in a short amount of time. ‘There is a class – a large class who can and do most thankfully appreciate our arrangements,’ Cook wrote of his excursionists to Switzerland and Italy in 1865. ‘They wish to see something definitely marked out for them, to be assured of its practicability and safety; and they go with all the more encouragement if they can have the personal presence of someone in whom they can confide.’ Women were encouraged to travel on their own, knowing it was ‘safe and proper’ to do so if they were with Cook; the spinster, governess and female schoolteacher became familiar figures on his tours.³⁵

In 1865, the novelist Charles Lever, who lived in Italy as the British vice-consul at La Spezia, launched an attack on the ‘Cookies’. ‘It seems that some enterprising and unscrupulous man has devised the project of conducting some forty or fifty persons, irrespective of age or sex, from London to Naples and back for a fixed sum,’ Lever wrote in Blackwood’s Magazine.

The thing has ‘taken’ – the project is a success; and as I write, the cities of Italy are deluged with droves of these creatures, for they never separate, and you see them, forty in number, pouring along a street with their director – now in front, now at the rear – circling around them like a sheep-dog – and really the process is as like herding as may be. I have already met three flocks, and anything so uncouth I never saw before – the men, mostly elderly, dreary, sad-looking, evidently bored and tired – the women, somewhat younger, travel-tossed and crumpled … I tell you deliberately it will be all but impossible to live abroad if these outpourings continue; for it is not merely that England swamps us with everything that is low-bred, vulgar, and ridiculous, but that these people, from the hour they set out, regard all foreign countries and their inhabitants as something in which they have a vested right. They have paid for the Continent as they paid for Cremorne [the pleasure gardens in Chelsea] and they will have the worth of their money.³⁶

Many commentators expressed horror at tourists ‘doing Europe’, though none with a snobbery to match Lever’s. The art critic John Ruskin was scathing in his condemnation of the English touring Europe in a few weeks by rail. ‘No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast,’ he wrote. In 1864, he castigated an audience of Manchester industrialists for building the railways, which he believed were ruining Europe through the tourist industry:

You have put a railway bridge over the fall of Schaffenhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lake Lucerne by [William] Tell’s chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva; there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not filled with the bellowing fire, nor any foreign city in which the spread of your presence is not marked by a consuming leprosy of new hotels and perfumers’ shops.³⁷

The idiocy of tourist travel struck Fontane too. In Modern Travels he wrote sarcastically about a group of tourists from ‘a small town rifle club’ visiting Reinhardsbrunn Castle, once the seat of the Ernestine Saxon dukes near Gotha. They are overawed to learn that the Elector Ernst killed 50,157 head of game over twenty-five years; they write down the imposing figure in their notebooks and gleefully anticipate those future moments when they will have the leisure to calculate how many head per day that works out as.³⁸

Turgenev was equally scornful about the tourists he observed in Italy. He ridiculed the English, who, ‘having seen a woman with red hair in one town, write in their notebooks that the female population of that town is red-headed’. Watching the Russian tourists, in particular, he maintained that nine out of ten of them were bored, because their tourism was of a superficial kind. They saw only the external features of the city and collected facts about the places they had seen, but did not interact with the people or their culture. They went ‘from place to place, never stepping outside their own sphere, or environment, circumscribed by hotels, waiters, bills, bells, servants, hired carriages, hired donkeys and their guides’. To travel ‘without entering the life and culture of foreigners’ was ‘not worth it’, he concluded, for there was no point in travelling abroad ‘just to breathe the banal air of banal rooms in various Hôtel Vittoria, des Princes, Stadt Berlin, etc’.³⁹

Underlying these critiques of tourism was the idea of travel as a higher order of experience abroad. ‘Travellers’ set themselves apart from vulgar ‘tourists’ by claiming for themselves a deeper knowledge and appreciation of the life and culture of the foreign places they visited. Whereas ‘tourists’ went in groups, never mixing with the local population nor staying long enough to try, ‘travellers’ liked to think they were exploring the ‘undiscovered’ places of a country, experiencing its ‘real’, ‘authentic’ culture in a spiritually enriching way.⁴⁰

Travel writing encouraged this idea. The first great period of railway building coincided with a golden age of travel writing in Europe. There was a boom in the publication of travel books during the 1850s, while new periodicals, like the Tour du monde, launched in France in 1860, proved immensely popular, encouraging the appearance of other travel magazines.⁴¹ A number of important and well-known writers contributed to the popularity of the genre, including Stendhal, with his account of travelling through France, Switzerland and Italy, Mémoires d’un touriste (1838); Fontane, with his travel writing from England, Ein Sommer in London (1854), and five volumes of wanderings through Prussia, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (1862–89); Dostoevsky with his critical perceptions of Europe from his travels there in 1862, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863); and Flaubert and du Camp, with their rich evocation of French peasant life and folklore, Par les champs et par les grèves, based on a journey through Brittany in 1847 and published in 1881.

Ruskin’s writings on the art of Italy inspired many travellers. Perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century literary work, they embodied the idea of travel as an aesthetic experience of place, setting it apart from tourism. Horrified by the hurried, superficial sightseeing encouraged by the railways and the Murray guides, Ruskin brought out his own books on art and architecture designed to help the serious traveller cultivate an appreciation of the art and culture of a place. In The Stones of Venice (1851–3), originally published in three volumes but abridged ‘for the use of travellers’, and later in his Mornings in Florence (1875), Ruskin sought to provide practical advice on what was really worth seeing. He gave scholarly information on the most important buildings and works of art, indicated the best times to see them, and advised how long to spend on each and how long to rest between them to keep the senses fresh. Ruskin’s books became essential guides to the cultural experience of Italy. They were cited frequently by the Baedeker and Murray guides, and were often used as supplements to them by travellers. His influence helped to change the tourist cultural map, encouraging the British to travel to the Alps and Venice, for example, in larger numbers than they had done before. The Stones of Venice, in particular, raised appreciation for the art and architecture of that city. It did more than any other work to turn Venice from a rundown stop-off on the Grand Tour into an important tourist destination in its own right (it inspired Marcel Proust, whose narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu visits Venice with his mother on the back of his enthusiasm for Ruskin).⁴²

No less widely used by travellers were the many guides to Europe’s art museums by Louis Viardot. Louis had developed his extensive knowledge of the newly opened public art collections of the Continent on his travels with Pauline. Accompanying her on her European tours, he would spend his days in the museums of the major cities cataloguing all their works and writing articles about the collections for the European press. Louis was the first to bring the contents of these new museums to wide public attention. Between 1852 and 1855 he compiled five museum guides, each one published by Hachette in its pocket travel editions under the title, Guide et memento de l’artiste et du voyageur, with detailed descriptions of the collections: Les Musées de France, Les Musées d’Italie, Les Musées d’Espagne, Les Musées d’Allemagne, Les Musées d’Angleterre, de Belgique, de Hollande et de Russie. The guides were immensely popular. They sold tens of thousands of copies in several French editions, and in many languages. Perhaps only Gautier was better known for his writings on the major art collections of Europe.⁴³

Methodical and scholarly, Louis’s works had an important influence on the reorganization of Europe’s major art collections. He had strong opinions on how paintings should be shown. This was still a time when the newly opened public galleries displayed their paintings without much rhyme or reason, covering walls with motley pictures from waist height to the ceiling. Louis’s books helped to establish modern curatorial principles. His guides were organized into national schools and periods in the history of art – a pedagogic scheme adopted by most galleries by the final decades of the nineteenth century. He could not stand to see copies mixed in with originals, or mediocrities with masterpieces, and would fume when paintings were displayed poorly – small works hung too high or detailed paintings placed near windows so that they could not be seen for reflections. He corrected errors of attribution, including some by London’s National Gallery, which had mixed up its Zubaráns and Riberas. He indicated gaps in the major collections (there were no Russian paintings at all in the Louvre, for example, and no works by English painters such as Turner, Gainsborough, Hogarth or Reynolds). He pointed out where he believed that an artist or whole school of paintings had been given too much space. He did not hesitate to voice his personal opinions. A fierce defender of artistic liberty, he hated anything that smacked of court or official art. Many of his harshest words were reserved for Charles Le Brun, who had been the favourite court painter of Louis XIV, whose high reputation he thought was undeserved. He was equally dismissive of artistic works of non-European origin (he wanted the entire ethnographic section of the Louvre closed down on the grounds that it contained mere ‘bric-à-brac’). But he was a fierce campaigner for painters he believed had been unfairly forgotten or neglected (Vermeer and Rembrandt, for example) and played an important part in the rediscovery of Spanish art in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He helped the Louvre to organize its Spanish Gallery, opened to the public in 1838, and advised the Prado on the reorganization of its royal collection in the 1840s and 1850s.⁴⁴

How did the railways affect the routes that tourists took on their journeys through Europe? Did they go to the same places visited on the Grand Tour? Or did the widening railway network encourage them to venture off the beaten track?

Before the railways, travellers from northern Europe had a clear and direct aim on the Grand Tour: to get to Italy as fast as possible. For most the Italian peninsula meant culture. The majority of British tourists travelled via Paris and Lyons, and then either crossed the Alps or risked the hazards of a rough sea-crossing from Marseilles or Toulon to Livorno or any of the other Italian ports along the Mediterranean coast. They might take a different route on the way home, perhaps going via Venice and Vienna, or taking in the Rhine. But all these places were basically stopoffs on the way to Italy and back. Few tourists deviated from the well-established routes. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there was a growing tourist traffic on its way to Italy through Germany – Hanover, Mannheim, Heidelberg and Dresden became minor destinations on the Grand Tour – but the numbers overall were very small. Hardly anybody went to Spain or Portugal or Scandinavia or Eastern Europe or Russia or the Balkans. The choice of routes was basically determined by cultural preference. Transport had little to do with it. There were few important changes in the transport system before the nineteenth century – some notable improvements in the postal roads through France which cut the journey time from Paris to Marseilles, but otherwise the trip to Italy took as long in the 1780s as it had done a hundred years before.⁴⁵

Options changed from the 1820s, when the introduction of steamboats transformed river travel against the current, opening up the Rhine and the Swiss Lakes for travellers to Italy. Steamboat travel along the Rhine became immensely popular – with a million passengers a year travelling with just the Prussian–Rhenish Steamboat Company by the mid-1830s – not only as an easy route to Basel and across the Alps to Italy but as a scenic tour in its own right. Previously the Rhine route had been shunned by travellers on the Grand Tour. Compared to their French equivalents, the German roads were very poor, the inns uncomfortable, and the cities had a reputation for being smelly and dirty. The poet William Wordsworth complained of all these inconveniences on his journeys through Germany in 1820 and 1828. Even Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an ardent admirer of Germany, could not help but comment on the dirt and stench of Cologne.⁴⁶ Steamboat travel on the Rhine cut out some of these problems. But it also catered to a growing Rhineland tourist industry fuelled by several cultural trends.

For English travellers the attractions of the Rhine were its natural beauty, the great river meandering its way between the craggy mountains and overhanging rocks, its medieval castles, Gothic churches, its ancient myths and legends, which they had got to know through the writings of the Romantics. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) was one such text. Mary Godwin (as she was then called) had travelled down the Rhine with her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, on their return from Switzerland in 1814. Running out of money, they had been obliged to travel by the cheaper Rhine route rather than return through France. Viktor Frankenstein, the hero of her novel, is transfixed by the ‘blending of all beauties’ on that stretch of the river between Mainz and Bonn which would become the centre of the Rhineland tourist industry:

The course of the Rhine below Mayence [the French name for Mainz] becomes much more picturesque. The river descends rapidly, and winds between hills, not high, but steep, and of beautiful forms. We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices, surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible. This part of the Rhine, indeed, presents a singularly variegated landscape. In one spot you view rugged hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine rushing beneath; and, on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards, with green sloping banks, and a meandering river, and populous towns occupy the scene.

But the biggest influence on English Rhineland tourism was Byron’s famous stanzas on the neo-Gothic castle at Drachenfels south of Bonn in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

The castled crag of Drachenfels

Frowns o’er the wide and winding Rhine,

Whose breast of waters broadly swells

Between the banks which bear the vine.

And hills all rich with blossomed trees,

And fields which promise corn and wine,

And scattered cities crowning these,

Whose far white walls along them shine,

Have strewed a scene, which I should see

With double joy wert thou with me.⁴⁷

For German travellers, who made up a growing share of this tourist traffic, the Rhine’s myths were a vital cultural source of their national identity. The legend of the Lorelei Maiden whose siren song lured sailors to their death beneath her ‘murmuring rock’, a steep slate hill on the right bank of the river near St Goarshausen, inspired much Romantic poetry, most of it originating from the folk songs and poems compiled by Clemens Brentano and his sister Bettina von Arnim in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–8). One by Heine, Die Lorelei (1824), was in turn set to music by many composers, among them Liszt and Friedrich Silcher, whose version entered into German popular culture. A site of tourist pilgrimage, the Lorelei rock and its legend provided the inspiration for over twenty German operas between 1840 and 1890. Many of them included the Nibelungen myth, which was intertwined with the Lorelei and the Rhineland in the Romantic nationalist imagination, most famously of course Der Ring des Nibelungen, which Wagner began working on in 1848, the highpoint of German patriotic sentiment about the Rhine. Only eight years earlier, the French government had laid claim to the left bank of the river as France’s border in the east. The left bank had been conquered by the French Revolutionary Army in 1795 but returned to the Germans, most of it to Prussia, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The new French claim gave rise to strong nationalist feelings on the German side. Patriotic marching songs were composed to ‘The German Rhine’ (1840), a popular poem by the Rhenish jurist Nikolaus Becker, which began:

They shall not have the Rhine,

The free German Rhine. Though like greedy ravens

They hoarsely cry for it. So long as calmly flowing

It wears its garment green. So long as oars resounding

Can beat upon its wave.

To which Musset responded for the French in 1841:

…

Let it flow in peace, your German Rhine –

That our Gothic cathedrals

Be modestly reflected in it;

But be fearful lest your drunken airs

Awaken the dead from their bloody repose.⁴⁸

Steamboats also increased tourist traffic to the Swiss Lakes and the Alps, which, like the Rhine, had been turned into popular destinations by the Romantics and their cult of the sublime. Previously the mountains had been seen as obstacles to be got over on the way to Italy. The decades following the publication of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), set on the shores of Lake Geneva, saw the arrival of a steady stream of tourists – Shelley and Byron most famously among them in the summer of 1816 – hoping to identify the beauty spots described in the novel. Voltaire’s château at Ferney could be visited at the same time. From Geneva, the valley of Chamonix was easily accessible, and it was soon established as a tourist route to see nature at its most divine. Other areas were opened up by the steamboats: the Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen, easily reached by steamer from Basel, where several generations of English tourists gazed in wonder at the wild beauty of the waterfalls; the Bernese Oberland, which had resorts around Lake Thun and Lake Brienz catering to English tourists; and the shores of Lake Lucerne, where many tourists came to climb the heights of Mount Rigi from which they could get a panoramic Alpine view.⁴⁹

The railways built on these developments, bringing tourists to the Rhine and Switzerland in much greater numbers than had travelled there before, and placing these destinations at the centre of the European tourist industry on a par with Italy.

The impact of the railways was complex. The Grand Tour route to Italy remained the preoccupation of Victorian travellers. But the railways gave them more ways to get there, allowing them to visit different cities on the way, and to go at different times throughout the year (trains were less affected by winter conditions than carriages had been). They enabled travellers to plan their journeys to be in the best places at the right time – Venice for the Carnival, Rome for Easter, and so on – as Turgenev and Botkin had done in 1857. The railways also offered special trains and discounts for the major tourist companies, such as Thomas Cook, the main British supplier of railway tickets on the Continent, whose core business was in organizing trips to Switzerland and Italy for the largest public possible. This meant focusing on the most popular and well-established routes – rather than opening new markets by organizing tours to less familiar places in Europe. It was not until 1867 that the company ventured into Austria, and even later when it began to offer tours to Scandinavia (from 1875), Spain (1876) and the Balkans (1889).

The railways did, however, open some new destinations on the Continent. They directed tourist traffic to spas and seaside towns, for example. Spa towns such as Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden and Bad Ems in Germany became busy tourist centres because they were connected to the railway. As summer resorts frequented by the aristocracy and occasional royalty they were able to attract a wealthy clientele from all over Europe by building luxury hotels, restaurants, casinos, concert halls and parks for promenades. The same was true of Ostend in Belgium, Bad Ischl in Austria, and Vichy, Aix-les-Bains and Plombières in France, as it was of seaside towns once made fashionable by emperors and kings but democratized by the railways: Scheveningen on Holland’s North Sea coast; Norderney on the coast of Hanover; Heringsdorf on Prussia’s Baltic Sea; Trouville, Deauville and Cabourg (immortalized as Balbec in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu) on the coast of Normandy; Cannes, Nice and Biarritz in the south of France; and San Sebastian in Spain. Other summer resorts were creations of the railways and more democratic from the start – the Jewish-dominated spa towns of Karlsbad and Marienbad in Bohemia, for example, which owed their rapid growth to their central position on the continental railway map.⁵⁰

But perhaps the biggest change the railways brought about was in the preferred route to Switzerland and Italy: whereas travellers before the railways had mostly gone through France, where the roads were better than in Germany, the development of the German railways redirected tourists through the Rhineland on their journey south.

The route from London through Holland, Belgium, the Rhine and Germany to Switzerland was opened up by the railways in the 1850s, the first decade of mass tourism on the Continent. It was soon established as the most common British route to Italy. Travelling this way, tourists could take in the Rhineland sites celebrated by the Romantics and made famous by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who toured the Rhine in 1845; they could then continue through Bavaria, where the British royals were often to be seen, or go more directly to Basel, from where they could visit the Rhine Falls and cross the Alps to Italy. The French route to Italy was less travelled by comparison, even though the Paris–Marseilles line, completed by the mid-fifties, was as efficient as the German route.

It was a turn-around from the days of the Grand Tour, when the French route had been much preferred. British cultural preferences had a lot to do with this. There was a strong anti-French feeling carried over from the wars against Napoleonic France. This was matched by a marked Germanophilia in Victorian society, reinforced by the German background of the royal family, by the pro-German orientation of the Anglican and Nonconformist movements, and by the fashion for the neo-Gothic architectural style, as seen in the building in London of the Albert Memorial (1861), St Pancras Station (1868) and the new Houses of Parliament (between 1840 and 1870). While the British were generally mistrustful of the Papist French, they looked upon the Germans as their Anglo-Saxon brethren.⁵¹ But the rise of German culture on the British tourist map must also be explained by the simple fact that railways made it easier to explore.

3

It is delightful to see, as we travel on, the breaking down of partition walls of prejudice, the subduing of evil passions and unhappy tempers, the expansion of the intellect, the grasping for information, the desire for books and the eagerness of their perusal, the benevolent sympathies excited by a more extended knowledge of the circumstances and sufferings of fellow-creatures.

Thus Thomas Cook on the beneficial impact of travelling abroad. The opening up of Europe by the railways gave new meaning to the old idea of travel broadening the mind. People talked of the railroads ending hatreds and divisions by the removal of barriers. ‘Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness,’ Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad (1869), his account of a railway journey across Europe to the Holy Land. This idea became a commonplace of nineteenth-century literature.⁵²

But there was more at stake than overcoming narrow-mindedness. The sense of being ‘European’ was itself bound up with the outwardlookingness that came with international travel. The railways enabled people across Europe to see themselves as ‘Europeans’ in ways they had not done before – some more so, some less so, depending on their history and geography. This feeling of being part of ‘Europe’ was connected to the possibility of travelling by rail to any part of it. Any small town with a branch-line station could see itself at the centre of a web of railway lines spreading out across the Continent.

‘Thirty years ago not one countryman in a hundred had seen the metropolis,’ declared The Times in 1850. ‘There is now scarcely one in the same number who has not spent his day there.’⁵³ By the end of 1851, 6 million British countrymen and women had travelled into London for the Great Exhibition, where they could see goods and artefacts from fifty different countries and forty colonies from all quarters of the globe. Around the exhibition, in any number of the restaurants that sprang up to feed the crowds, they could also try out different foods from France, Germany and Italy, even Indian curries. The famous chef Alexis Soyer opened a Symposium of All Nations, a gastronomic version of the Exhibition, where 1,500 people could be seated at a gigantic table and inspect the kitchen, where cooks from different countries, even some from China, were at work. For the majority of the exhibition’s visitors, it was their first glimpse of life in foreign lands.

At the Paris Exposition Universelle, in 1855, visitors could see not only manufactures but works of art from almost every country in Europe. It was the first time such an international collection of modern paintings had been gathered in a single space, the first time living artists from so many countries had a place to meet and compare their work. At the Palais des Beaux Arts, noted Gautier in his survey of the artworks on display, the public ‘would learn more in four hours than in fifteen years’ of travelling abroad. The result of this encounter between Europe’s artists, concluded Gautier, was a cosmopolitan eclecticism of artistic styles that had its natural centre in Paris, the artistic capital of the world.⁵⁴ The art critic Théophile Thoré (best known for his rediscovery of Vermeer’s paintings) believed that a ‘European school’ of art was being formed by this international exchange. ‘When the arts of all countries, with their native qualities, have become accustomed to reciprocal exchanges,’ he wrote in 1855, ‘the character of art will be enriched everywhere to an incalculable extent, without the genius peculiar to each nation being changed. In this way a European school will be formed in place of the national sects which still divide the great family of artists; then, a universal school, familiar with the world, to which nothing human will be foreign.’⁵⁵

This emerging European sensibility was most strongly felt among Europe’s cultural élites. For them it was part of a cosmopolitan worldview formed by international travel, the learning of languages, and openness to foreign cultures, without any necessary weakening of their national identity. Turgenev was a living example of this cosmopolitanism. He travelled constantly. His ability to make himself at home in Berlin, Paris, Baden-Baden, London or St Petersburg (and he would live in all of them) was the essence of his Europeanness. The ‘Europe’ he inhabited was an international civilization, a Republic of Letters based on the Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress and democracy. This is what he meant when he proclaimed: ‘I am a European, and I love Europe; I pin my faith to its banner, which I have carried since my youth.’ His literary personality was formed by Goethe, Shakespeare and Cervantes before he came to Gogol. His library at Spasskoe contained books in nine European languages. Although he felt himself to be a Russian, and at times such as the Crimean War could be fiercely patriotic, he was opposed to nationalism in all its forms, and refused to believe that the calls of any country should come before those of humanity. His long absence from the country of his birth earned him the reproaches of compatriots who, in the words of Annenkov, writing in his memoirs in 1880, saw it as ‘a lack of national beliefs, the cosmopolitanism of a man of means willing to exchange his civil obligations for the comfort and entertainments of foreign life’. Annenkov defended Turgenev:

It was not the lack of national sympathies in his soul and not haughty disdain for the tenor of Russian life that made Europe a necessity for his existence, but the fact that intellectual life flowed more generously there, engulfing shallow ambitions, and that in Europe he felt himself simpler, more effective, truer to himself and freer from paltry temptations than when he stood face to face with Russian reality.⁵⁶

Tensions between national feeling and cosmopolitanism shaped not only the identity of Europeans like Turgenev but European politics as well. While the nineteenth century can be seen in terms of the rise of nationalist movements in Europe, there was at the same time a strong counter-current of internationalist sentiment, rooted in the Kantian Enlightenment ideal of a world political community, which gave rise to optimistic hopes for European unification. The dream of a United States of Europe had been articulated by Napoleon, who came close to realizing it through the Confederation of the Rhine, formed in 1806 by sixteen German states under the protection of the French Empire, and later joined by other European client states. According to one of his admirers, the historian Emmanuel de Las Cases, who followed Napoleon into exile on the island of St Helena after his defeat and took down notes of his reflections, the ex-emperor had aimed to found a European legal system and a European currency. ‘Europe would be nothing more or less than a single people, and everyone, wherever they went [in Europe], would find themselves in a common fatherland.’⁵⁷

For the next three decades, Europe’s revolutionaries and national liberation movements looked for inspiration to the ideas of European unity developed by the Jacobins. An international fraternity was their best means of struggle against the conservative status quo. This internationalism was an important aspect of the 1848 revolutions. Its most influential voice belonged to Giuseppe Mazzini, leader of Young Italy (Giovine Italia), a revolutionary movement aiming to create an Italian republic, whose democratic nationalism was an inspiration for similar societies in Italy, Poland and Germany. In the Mazzinian view, the establishment of democratic nations would strengthen international brotherhood, leading to a European union of democracies to promote peace. National sentiment and cosmopolitanism were complementary, as long as the moral force of internationalism was strong enough to prevent patriotic feelings from becoming aggressive.⁵⁸

Victor Hugo developed this idea at a peace conference in Paris in August 1849. The democratic revolutions of the previous year had led him to believe that the diverse peoples of the European states would form themselves into an international republic, which he called, at various times, ‘les États-Unis d’Europe’, ‘la République d’Europe’, ‘les Peuples-Unis d’Europe’, and ‘la Communauté européene’. The foundation of the Second Empire did not change his view, even though it forced him into exile in Brussels, Jersey and then Guernsey. Appalled by the slaughter of the Crimean War – when Europe’s ‘railways and steamers, instead of carrying the bountiful gifts of nature to and fro, as friendly exchanges of men, were carrying soldiers and engines of destruction’ – he reiterated his belief in ‘European brotherhood’ as an antidote to nationalism and its tendency to lead to wars. Yet here was an irony. For Hugo’s vision of this fraternity was one in which the French would dominate. As he saw it, France was destined to become the leader of any European union by virtue of the international standing of its republican principles. In his introduction to a Paris guide for the Universal Exposition in 1867, he looked forward to a time in the twentieth century when there would be ‘one extraordinary nation’ on the continent called ‘Europe’ which had Paris as its capital.⁵⁹ Paris may not have become the twentieth-century capital of a united Europe, but it was the centre of the European world in which Hugo’s generation lived – as Walter Benjamin would put it, the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’.⁶⁰

4

During the years of Turgenev’s wandering, Pauline herself was on the move around Europe. Because of her husband’s opposition to Napoleon III, her chances of appearing at the Paris Opéra had practically disappeared (her one appearance on any Paris stage since the coup d’état of 1851 had been in Il Trovatore at the Théâtre Italien in 1855). To maintain her career as an opera singer, she was forced to go on tour. While Turgenev was in Italy, in November 1857, Pauline set off from Paris on a four-month circuit of Berlin, Warsaw and Leipzig, where she first met the conductor Julius Rietz, who would become her confidant in this period of separation from Turgenev. It was a gruelling schedule, not made any easier by the incomplete state of the railways in Poland and problems with the singers (they could only sing in Polish), which meant that Pauline had to retrain them for their parts.⁶¹

For the first time in her career, Pauline travelled without Louis for the whole duration of the tour. ‘Do you know where I am going?’ she wrote with excitement to Turgenev on 21 November, in one of the few letters she sent him in these years. ‘To Warsaw! And on my own! That is, except for a maid. Is this not courageous for one who has never relinquished her husband’s arm?’⁶² A decision had been reached that Louis should remain at home to look after the children while the prima donna went on tour: Paul was only six months old, and Marianne (aged three) and Claudie (five) were still too young to be left without both parents. Pauline wrote to Louis every day. Her letters form a sort of journal of her tour.⁶³ She missed her children terribly. A devoted mother, she wrote to her ‘petits monstres’ every day; she told them how much she loved them, and asked Louis to ‘hug them all until they are red’.⁶⁴ She told him that she missed him too. But that was not entirely true. In fact she found it liberating to travel on her own, relieved from the burden of her husband’s love, which she could not return, as she confided to Rietz in March 1859:

I will confess in a whisper, a very, very low whisper close to your ear, that these little journeys which I have made alone this winter have been very salutary holidays for me. On the one hand, they have been reposeful for my heart, somewhat fatigued by the expression of a love which it cannot share; and, on the other, absence can only fortify my friendship, my esteem and my great respect for this man who is so noble and devoted, who would give his life to gratify the least of my caprices, if I had any.⁶⁵

Without Louis by her side, Pauline became her own manager. It was an unusual position for a woman at that time, when under the Napoleonic Code women could not sign a contract without the consent of their husband or father. Setting off from Paris without any guarantees of engagements, she made all the travel arrangements, established contacts with the managers of concert halls and theatres, negotiated contracts, and took all decisions on her own, informing Louis of her progress by letter. She did not express the slightest doubt about her management abilities. Having spent her whole life touring as an independent musician, she was more than able to manage without the guidance of a man. But she missed her husband’s support and encouragement, as she wrote in this touching letter on 17 December, following a performance of Norma in Warsaw:

Yes, I was happy with myself tonight. Dear friend, I believe that you would have been happy too, you, my best judge, whose benevolent severity, whose reliable tastes are so precious to me, you, who I am so happy to please. Oh my good Louis, how I miss your good, encouraging handshake at the moment of stepping onto the stage. How nice it is to hear a friendly voice who says courage, and to see kind eyes that also say all sorts of good things – and then, when back home, to receive a good kiss of satisfaction from a friend.⁶⁶

Pauline’s guiding principle on all her tours was to make as much money as she could. She toured with sell-out operas (Norma, Trovatore and The Barber of Seville went with her to Berlin and Warsaw) and added local songs to please her audience, as she had done in Russia by inserting a Russian air into the Act II lesson scene of The Barber of Seville. In Warsaw, for example, she introduced her adaptation of Chopin’s six Mazurkas into the lesson scene, which was met with wild applause, and then sang his ‘Hulanka’, which brought the house down. Financial considerations lay behind her decision to delay her departure from Warsaw. Originally scheduled for 16 January, she postponed it for five days because ‘the whole of society is organizing a concert for me, guaranteeing me 500 roubles [2,000 francs] in advance,’ as she explained to Louis on 15 January.⁶⁷ By this time she had already exceeded her initial aim of going back to Paris with 5,000 roubles (20,000 francs) from Warsaw. She had been sure of that since 21 December, when she had written to Louis that she would be back by February: ‘I will have achieved more than my goal, and I will be able not to care about all those petty two-sous concerts or even the 300-franc concerts if it so pleases me.’⁶⁸

At this stage of her career, when her voice was showing clear signs of decline, Pauline depended on these tours to maximize her earnings before finally retiring. Six weeks after her return from Warsaw, Pauline set off for another tour of Germany, performing in Berlin, Weimar, Leipzig and Cologne, and then went to London for the 1858 season, appearing in La Sonnambula at Drury Lane, before embarking on a two-month tour of the English provinces. The highlight of her tour was the Birmingham Choral Festival, a popular venue for the performance of oratorios by amateur choirs, where she sang in Handel’s Messiah, Mendelssohn’s Elijah and The Creation by Haydn, works that drew enormous crowds.⁶⁹ From London she then went to Budapest, where Liszt, her former teacher and old friend, had organized a season for her at the National Theatre. The Hungarians were unfriendly. ‘We have not set foot in a single Hungarian home, and have not noticed one Hungarian at our receptions,’ Pauline wrote to Turgenev on 18 November 1858. But the tour was lucrative, earning some 5,000 francs.⁷⁰

The next spring, Pauline toured the United Kingdom with the Willert Beale opera company, a troupe of almost thirty performers. The schedule was punishing – seventy performances in over thirty towns, among them Brighton, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Northampton, Sheffield, Leeds and Liverpool by rail, before crossing the Irish Sea by steamboat to Dublin. The company would often travel through the night to arrive in a new town the next morning, leaving time during the day to recruit and rehearse with a choir before a performance in the evening. Beale gave an upbeat account of the tour in his memoirs. ‘The company would travel by train and would always put up in the “first hotels”. Dinner was at three o’clock, followed by a concert or an opera in the evening, and then supper’ – at which they always drank the finest wines. The only downside, according to Beale, was the grey monotony of the English food and the terrible coffee (‘not French or even Italian’), which drove the European singers mad. As the only fluent English-speaker, Pauline was often called upon to act as go-between, a role she found exhausting, as she wrote to Rietz from Dublin in April 1859:

As I generally have to assume the part of stage-manager for the operas in which I sing, being the only one who speaks English well, I serve as interpreter between all my comrades and the costumers, machinists, choristers, supers, etc. It is far more fatiguing than to sing – after four hours’ work on the stage I am worn out.

These provincial tours were a demotion for Pauline. Trading on her past fame annoyed her, particularly in England, where the arts were captive to a celebrity culture. ‘It delights me to sing when I feel that it gives the audience pleasure,’ she wrote to Rietz from London.

However, it must be admitted that this reciprocal pleasure is never as complete in England as elsewhere. The audience this evening, for instance, knew that I am a ‘celebrated singer’ – so it applauds everything that I do with equal warmth. Had I sung not quite as well, it would have been no less well satisfied, and had I sung better, it would not have been better satisfied! And that is what puts a damper on the artist’s enthusiasm. Yes, decidedly, in matters of art, the English are great speculators.

This annoyance may explain her scathing comments on English provincial audiences. Attending a concert conducted by Michael Costa in the Leeds Town Hall (which she considered ‘the handsomest and the best in all Europe’), Pauline thought he was a ‘good musician’ but one who was obliged to ‘sacrifice the golden calf to English taste’:

he knows that in order to make certain things penetrate the ears of the English public, one has to speak very loud. They require Cayenne pepper in all sorts of aliments, moral as well as physical. That is the reason why Costa has been obliged to add military band instruments to his orchestra for the oratorios in the Crystal Palace. For the rest, they, with the organ, were all that one heard in that immense hall. Costa, transported to Germany, would be a mediocre person; in England he is a man to whom all the public and the musicians ought to feel profoundly obliged.⁷¹

In fact 1859 turned out to be the pinnacle of Pauline’s career. In the early summer of that year she was approached by Léon Carvalho, the director of the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris, to see if she would sing the title part in Gluck’s Orphée, one of a series of classical revivals around this time, which Berlioz was rearranging for the stage.⁷² Carvalho had been impressed by Pauline’s voice when he heard her sing at a benefit concert for his wife, the soprano Caroline Miolan. Bold and willing to take risks, he was not the sort of manager to be deterred by the black mark against Pauline’s name because of her husband’s republican politics: the Théâtre Lyrique received no state subsidy, and relied entirely on ticket sales. Carvalho gambled on her making a successful return to the Paris opera scene – from which she had been almost totally absent since Sapho in 1851 – by taking on the role of Orphée, which he believed would be well suited to her contralto voice. Originally written for an alto castrato (in the 1762 Italian version) or high tenor (in Gluck’s French adaptation of 1774), the role called for an extraordinary vocal range and versatility, sonorous at the bottom, agile at the top, along with the presence of a tragic actor on the stage – qualities that Pauline had in spades. It must have come as a delight to her to be selected for the role, which Berlioz had previously thought to give to Stolz, her old rival at the Paris Opéra.⁷³

The cultural climate of 1859 augured well for the revival. Interest in the Greek myths was at its height in France. The story of the lyre-playing Orpheus and his attempt to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice, from the underworld was widely known and was even studied by schoolchildren as an ancient example of the contemporary bourgeois virtue of marital fidelity. This explains the huge success of Jacques Offenbach’s burlesque operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld, a parody of the Gluck opera, which opened at the Bouffes-Parisiens on 21 October 1858.

As a dedicated follower of Gluck, a composer he put on a par with Beethoven, Berlioz was keen to take revenge on Offenbach by restoring Orphée to the stage. There were also personal reasons for his involvement in the revival. By currying favour with Carvalho, he hoped to get a production of Les Troyens at the Théâtre Lyrique. He had finished

Berlioz, 1857.

his masterpiece in April 1858 but was unable to persuade the Paris Opéra to perform it. Then there was his growing passion for Pauline. The two of them had long been friends. Berlioz was a regular visitor at the Viardots’ Thursday salon in the rue de Douai, only a few streets away from his own house in the rue de Calais. He encouraged Pauline to compose. She would frequently discuss her compositions with the composer, to whom she had dedicated her lovely song ‘En Mer’ (1850). By the mid-1850s she was able to count Berlioz as one of her four ‘true friends’ (the others being Turgenev, Sand and Scheffer). Berlioz was enchanted by the Viardots. In a letter to his sister in January 1859, he described the delight of

dining at my neighbours M. and Mme Viardot, a charming family in whose company I breathe more easily. They are so intelligent and so good, the two of them, their children are so gracious and well brought up! The flower of art, moreover, fills their house with scent. They love what I love, they admire what I admire in music, literature, and in matters of the soul.⁷⁴

Later that year, at the music festival in Baden-Baden, where they both appeared in August, Pauline sang some pieces from Les Troyens with an orchestra. She excelled in the songs of Cassandra and Dido – so much so that Berlioz confessed his spirits had been ‘lifted to the skies’ and declared that Pauline would be ideal for either of these parts, perhaps even both of them. In September, he spent two days with Pauline at Courtavenel to begin their work together on Orphée. Berlioz was ill, suffering acute neuralgic pain, and emotionally tormented by the difficulties of his marital relations with the singer Marie Recio. Pauline took pity on him, encouraging him to pour out his heart to her, as she later wrote to Rietz:

The sight of this man, a prey to such mental and physical anguish, so unhappy in spirit, so touched by the kind reception we gave him, torn by horrible tortures of the heart, the violence of the efforts which he makes to hide them … – all this, I say, wrings my heart. We took a long walk together, in the course of which he became somewhat comforted and quieted. ‘All my life,’ he said to me, ‘has been only one long and ardent aspiration after an ideal which I had conceived for myself. My heart, eager for love, made its choice directly it found one solitary quality, one of the graces, belonging to this ideal – alas, disillusionment speedily brought the conviction that I had deceived myself. So my life has gone on, and, at the moment when I feel it to be near extinction, this ideal, which I had had to relinquish as if it were the fantastic dream of a heated imagination, appeared all at once to my dying heart! How can you hope that I should not adore it! Let me spend the last days that are left me in blessing you, in thanking you for coming to prove to me that I was not mad.’

Pauline tried to care for him without giving him romantic hope. ‘All in all,’ she explained to Rietz, ‘you will understand that I am labouring under a very painful impression just now, for my heart is full of kindness, and the pain (quite involuntary) which I give him causes me profound grief. Whenever he shall have conquered the violence of this exalted mood (God grant that it come quickly!) I hope to be able to restore some peace to his soul.’⁷⁵

Back in Paris that autumn, their intimacy grew as they collaborated on Orphée. Letters were exchanged on a daily basis – sometimes twice a day – between the rue de Calais and the rue de Douai. ‘I am ready to advise you to accept all my suggestions, and we will hold counsel on this subject at six o’clock,’ Berlioz wrote towards the end of September.

I did not know that I could be considered such a good counsellor; but I know even less what sort of counsellor I am. Am I a private counsellor, a royal counsellor, an intimate counsellor, a state counsellor or a town counsellor? Am I not an intimate counsellor? Yes, always ready to give intimate advice, the best possible, if not the easiest to follow. And what category of counsellor are you? You are a musical counsellor, and God knows with what joy I accept your advice.⁷⁶

Pauline had a major influence on the revisions of the score, particularly on the shaping and ornamentation of the vocal lines. She also lent a hand to the work of reducing Les Troyens for voice and piano, a job that proved beyond a pianist Berlioz had asked to do the job. Pauline volunteered to undertake the ‘impossible task’, recalled Saint-Saëns, who was then helping with Orphée. ‘I saw with my own eyes Mme Viardot, pen in hand, eyes alight, the manuscript of Les Troyens on her piano, writing the arrangement of the Chasse royale [Royal Hunt]’ in the second act.⁷⁷

*

Orphée opened on 18 November 1859. It was a personal triumph for Pauline, despite her singing with a throat condition that marred the quality and power of her voice. Chorley thought that ‘its unevenness, its occasional harshness and feebleness’, was ‘turned by her to good account with rare felicity’, and that a more ‘honeyed voice’ might have been unsuitably feminine for the male title role. ‘It may be doubted whether such a perfect representative of Orpheus ever trod the stage as Madame Viardot. Her want of regularity of feature, and of prettiness, helped instead of impaired the sadness and solemnity of the mourner’s countenance,’ the London critic concluded.⁷⁸ George Sand was ecstatic: ‘This is no doubt the purest and most perfect artistic expression that we have seen for a half a century, this Orphée of hers – understood, clothed, played, mimed, sung, spoken, and wept through in the way that she interprets it.’ Flaubert thought her Orphée was ‘one of the greatest things I know’.⁷⁹

Pauline’s triumph owed as much to her dramatic skills as to her musicianship. She made herself believable as the embodiment of Orphée, perfectly expressing his emotional development from fear, doubt and disappointed hope while searching for Eurydice to sublime joy on finding her. ‘The acting of Mme Viardot surpassed all my expectations,’ noted Marie d’Agoult in her diary. ‘I have seen nothing … that came close to this plastic beauty, to this freedom, in its feeling for antiquity. There was no sense that it was planned, contrived, nothing to remind one of the classroom. She made me think constantly of the most beautiful bas-reliefs and Greek vases.’⁸⁰

Part of her success was the costume she designed with Delacroix. She made a detailed study of classical texts in an attempt to reconstruct the ancient hero’s dress.⁸¹ Sand, Dickens, Flaubert and Ingres considered the design to be a work of genius. ‘How beautiful you are, Madame!’, Ingres wrote to her. ‘Like a beautiful figure from Antiquity, you wear your Greek costume with the noble grace and familiarity which the painters struggle to achieve in their paintings’ – a sculptural conception of the body in performance that inspired many artists (not least Gustave Moreau and Camille Corot) to take up the Orphée theme.⁸² Pauline mentioned the costume in her account of the opening night to Rietz on 21 November:

Yes, my friend, Orphée has emerged victorious, triumphant, from the profound oblivion in which it was plunged. It was veritably an enormous success. Your friend was acclaimed, recalled with frenzy. My house has not been empty since 9 o’clock Saturday morning. I shall play this evening, then Wednesday, then Friday, then three times a week till the public and I can stand it no longer. The stage-setting is very fine, without attempting, however, to outshine the music. My costume was thought to be very handsome – a white tunic falling to the knees, a white mantle caught up at both shoulders à l’Apollon. Flowing tresses, curled, with the crown of laurel. A chain of gold to support the sword, whose sheath is red. A red cord around the waist – buskins white, laced with red. Every phrase, every word was understood by an intelligent audience composed of all that Paris contains in the way of musicians, amateurs, pedants, bald heads, the world of boredom, youthful lions, etc., etc. Well, people embraced each other in the passage-ways during the intermissions, they wept, they laughed for delight, they trampled the floor – in a word, there was a turmoil, a jubilation, such as I never have seen in Paris. The role of Orphée suits me as if it had been written for me.⁸³

Pauline Viardot in Orphée, photograph by Disdéri, 1859.

Pauline’s prediction was correct. She would play Orphée until the public could ‘stand it no longer’. By the end of 1859 she had performed it twenty times; by the end of the 1861 spring season, 121 times; and in three years she would sing the part altogether 150 times. This was an extraordinary run for any opera at that time. It was no doubt in part sustained by those who came to the Théâtre Lyrique mistakenly believing they were going to see Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, then still running at the Bouffes-Parisiens, and ‘were surprised to find that Gluck’s opera was not funny’.⁸⁴ But, even so, the staying power of Orphée was bettered only by Gounod’s Faust, which had opened at the Théâtre Lyrique in March 1859 and ran alongside Orphée on alternate nights until 1862. Faust clocked up 314 performances before 1869, when it transferred to the Paris Opéra, where it was performed a thousand times by the end of the century.⁸⁵ The two long runs were the first signs of a repertoire that was becoming stabilized.

The fame of Orphée spread throughout the Continent, reviving interest in Gluck’s music across Europe. Arrangements of the opera and separate numbers of Orphée’s main arias were sold in editions bearing Pauline’s name. People travelled from all over Europe to Paris to hear her sing. On the opening night of the 1862 season at the Théâtre Lyrique, Dickens made a special trip from London to see Orphée. Henry Chorley and the young Arthur Sullivan were in his travelling party. The opera’s themes of loss and resurrection – themes that play such a big part in many of his novels – moved Dickens. So did the singing of Pauline. Dickens was seated in the stalls with several members of his family. From a nearby box, where he was sitting with Louis Viardot, Turgenev watched the English novelist, ‘his arms folded tightly across his chest and his face drenched with tears’. The curtain fell and Dickens made his way to the exit. On his way he met Turgenev and Viardot with Carvalho. Dickens’s face was still visibly wet with tears. Carvalho took him off as a living tribute to Pauline. ‘Madame, je vous présente une fontaine!’ he exclaimed. The next day Dickens sent her a letter:

Dear Madame Viardot,

I cannot help it. I must thank you for that wonderful performance of last night. When Monsieur Viardot came upon me by accident, I was holding forth about the first act, to my daughter and sister in law, with tears rolling down my face. I came to you in hardly a better condition. I went away when all was done, in a worse. Nothing can be more magnificent, more true, more tender, more beautiful, more profound!

Faithfully yours always

Charles Dickens.⁸⁶

5

Berlioz remained in love with Pauline for about a year. ‘If I had the cleverness of a writer, I would be able to articulate the many qualities of heart and spirit that make you a being apart,’ he wrote to her on 13 July 1860, ‘but I am, as you have said many times, somebody who only feels. I wish I could be with you now, I would summon all the young ones whom you love so much, beg them to take your two hands, put them into mine, and let me adore them in silence for a while … what a treasure!’⁸⁷

After that there was a break in their correspondence for eleven months. When it started up again, Berlioz was cooler in his letters to Pauline. Despite everything that she had done for Les Troyens, he refused to let her sing the part of Dido or Cassandra in the production scheduled for the autumn of 1861. Berlioz decided, no doubt rightly, that her voice was in decline after hearing her perform the role of Leonore in Fidelio at the Théâtre Lyrique, a Carvalho production attempting to capitalize on the commercial success of Orphée, in July 1860; and his impression was confirmed when she sang for him in Baden in August. But there was more to Berlioz’s cooling-off.

He was angered by developments in the early months of 1861, when Pauline sang to great acclaim some excerpts from Gluck’s opera Alceste in a concert at the Paris Conservatoire, whereupon the Paris Opéra invited her and Berlioz to stage the work. Pauline asked him to make some alterations to the score to make it easier for her to sing, but Berlioz refused, accusing her of only wanting changes that would help her ‘sell the published arrangements for voice and piano later on, as you have done for Orphée’s aria’. Outraged by Pauline’s mercenary attitude, Berlioz complained to Alphonse Royer, the director of the Opéra, on 31 March 1861:

Absolute fidelity of interpretation is as necessary for the operas of Gluck as it is for the works of great dramatic poets, and it is just as senseless and revolting to pervert his melodies and recitatives by adding notes and changing final cadences as it would be to add words and change rhymes in the verse of Corneille. The only artists to whom one can usefully give advice are those who have a truly moral attitude towards their art, and a sincere respect for great masters … As for the others, in spite of any desire they might have to take note of certain opinions, their vulgar vocalist’s instincts will always carry the day.

The Opéra set up a committee to look into his complaints, upheld some of them, but ruled that Alceste should be staged with Pauline in the title role. Berlioz was eventually persuaded to direct the rehearsals. Alceste opened on 21 October 1861; it was a great success; but Berlioz’s relations with Pauline had been spoiled.⁸⁸

One last thing had taken place to drive the two apart. At some point in the spring of 1860, Pauline gave a soirée for Wagner at her house in the rue de Douai in honour of his patron Countess Marie Kalergis, niece of the former Russian Foreign Minister Karl Nesselrode, who had recently provided Wagner with 10,000 francs to relieve him of his debts. It was on this occasion that the love duet from Act Two of Tristan and Isolde was first performed, with Wagner and Pauline in the vocal parts and the pianist Karl Klindworth accompanying them, before an exclusive audience of Countess Kalergis and Berlioz, invited by Pauline in an attempt to improve his strained relations with Wagner. Berlioz was envious of Wagner’s success, of the patronage he enjoyed from the likes of Countess Kalergis that had liberated him from the need to earn a living, as Berlioz did, from music criticism and concert tours.⁸⁹ Berlioz believed that Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser, which had been commissioned at the Paris Opéra by order of the emperor in March, had blocked the way for his masterpiece Les Troyens to be staged there. The very manner of the commission – a wager lost by Napoleon III to Princess Metternich obliging him to agree to her demand to put on Tannhäuser – underlined the pointlessness of his years of lobbying on behalf of Les Troyens. And if Tannhäuser succeeded, Tristan would come next. Pauline’s support for Wagner’s cause was thus bound to madden Berlioz, who might have been forgiven for seeing it as a betrayal. Previously she had expressed her dislike of Wagner’s music. ‘What deadly monotony!’ she had pronounced on first hearing Lohengrin (1850). Yet now she was warming to the new music, which so divided critical and musical opinion. One can only imagine what Berlioz felt that evening as he listened to her sing the love duet with his greatest enemy. According to Wagner, ‘Berlioz merely expressed himself warmly on the chaleur of my delivery, which may very well have afforded a strong contrast to that of my partner in the work, who rendered most of her part in low tones.’ As for the countess, she ‘remained dumb’.⁹⁰

Emotionally, throughout his years of restless wandering, Turgenev never left Pauline. However far apart they were, because of his travelling in Europe, his long trips back to Russia, or her own efforts to keep a distance between them, he remained in love with her. She was the only woman he would ever love, he confessed to Annenkov in March 1857, at the most painful moment of his break from her, when he resolved to run away to Italy.⁹¹

Sometimes, on his travels, he would write to her, not with the passion he had previously expressed, but giving her his news, making practical arrangements for his daughter, and asking her to write to him. She seldom did. In March 1858, he travelled from Vienna to hear her sing in the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, although he did not meet her then, travelling straight back to Vienna at the end of the concert. He knew that it would lead to dangerous rumours if he was seen in public with Pauline, who had come to Leipzig unaccompanied by her husband.

He did spend some time every year, however, in Courtavenel. Pauline was not always there. She was usually on tour. But they did pass two months there together in the summer of 1859, a period that marks the resumption of their relationship. Turgenev obviously found it hard to be with Pauline and her family – Louis and the children were all there. ‘My health is good but my spirit is sad,’ he wrote to Countess Lambert. ‘I am surrounded by regular family life. What am I here for? And why? Should I really be turning backwards? You will understand what I want to say, and my position.’⁹²

‘Turning backwards’ meant of course returning to his old position of devotion to Pauline, humble and submissive as he had always been. Gradually, he won back her affections. The summer of 1860 was the turning point. Pauline wrote more frequently, and with greater tenderness than she had for many years. It was a mark of her desire to reassert her claim on his emotions that she summoned him from Germany to look after Paul in Courtavenel. ‘Madame Viardot wishes me to go, and her will is my law,’ Turgenev wrote to Annenkov, explaining his decision to set off at once, at the beginning of July. ‘Her son almost died from pneumonia, and she suffered a great deal. She needs to recover in peaceful, friendly company.’⁹³ The next month she showed signs of jealousy when he told her that he was expecting to be joined on the Isle of Wight by Maria Markovich, the young Ukrainian writer, who did not come in the end.

Was Turgenev happy to be back in Pauline’s life? He did not know. As he wrote to Countess Lambert in 1862, he had come to learn that happiness was not something that a person should expect from life.* The idea of happiness was as alien to him as the appearance of his own youthful self. He understood that he had ‘missed out on the main prize in life’s lottery’, by which he meant the sort of love he wanted with Pauline, but recognized that what he had with her would constitute the basis of his well-being for the rest of his existence. His mood was one of resignation, acceptance of his lot (the idea at the root of the word for ‘happiness’ in Russian, schast’ye), acceptance of his destiny. It was in this spirit that he reconciled himself to his position of devotion to Pauline (his ‘need to live for someone else’, as he put it to Countess Lambert) as the closest he would get to contentment. ‘Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness,’ he advised her, ‘the only thing on earth which is beyond doubt and clear is unhappiness.’⁹⁴

Pauline and Turgenev reached a new high in their relationship in the autumn of 1862. They spent part of every day together, just the two of them in his apartment in the rue de Rivoli. On one of these occasions, she drew in his notebook the theosophic symbol of a pentagram made up of two triangles. The drawing was important for Turgenev, who marked it with the inscription: ‘This figure was done by P[auline] on 6 Nov./25 Oct. 1862 in my room, in the evening, at rue Rivoli, 210.’ The same symbol appears on the title page of several of his manuscripts.⁹⁵ The figure symbolized the triangular relationship between Pauline, Louis and Turgenev to which Pauline was now pledged.

The symbol drawn by Pauline Viardot in Turgenev’s notebook.

* Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860) and Fathers and Sons (1862).

* Turgenev was mistaken. He must have been confusing one of Ribera’s paintings of an Old Philosopher, owned by the Balbi family, with his portrait of Plato, owned at that time by Louis Viardot. ‘My Ribera has no original, because it is an original itself,’ an irritated Viardot replied (Zvig., p. 182).

* At the Great Exhibition in 1851 there were an estimated 50,000 foreign visitors, most of them from France, among 6 million visitors. At the time of the Universal Exposition in Paris, in 1867, there were over 200,000 foreigners registered in the city’s hotels but how many more there were among the exhibition’s total attendance of between 11 million and 15 million visitors is impossible to tell (Angela Schwartz, ‘“Come to the Fair”: Transgressing Boundaries in World’s Fairs Tourism’, in Eric Zuelov (ed.), Touring beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History (Farnham, 2011), pp. 79–102).

* The privilege was not reserved for Englishmen. Crossing into Italy in 1831, Berlioz met a Venetian seaman who likewise wanted to tell him about Byron, whom he claimed to have met (Cairns (trans. and ed.), Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, pp. 174–5).

* This remained his attitude throughout his life. In 1882, a year before he died, Turgenev wrote to the Russian writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, who had complained of being unhappy: ‘Let me console you (though it’s not much consolation) with the words of Goethe just before he died. Even though his life had been full of all the joys that life can give – he had lived a glorious life – women had loved him – and fools hated him – and his works had been translated in Chinese – and the whole of Europe had been to worship at his feet – and Napoleon himself had said of him: “C’est un homme!” … – and nonetheless he said, at the age of eighty-two, that in the course of his whole long life he had felt happiness only for a quarter of an hour!’ (Turg., vol. 11, pp. 89–90).