The Europeans

6

The Land without Music

The English are the only cultured race without a music of their own (music-hall ditties excepted). I say music of their own, for perhaps more foreign music is performed in England than in any other country.

Oscar Schmitz, 1904

1

Louis and Turgenev arrived in London on 13 November 1870. Pauline and the children were still in lodgings in Seymour Street but after Louis’s arrival they moved together to a handsome Georgian house in Devonshire Place in Marylebone. Turgenev rented rooms just around the corner from the Viardots in Devonshire Street, but could not bear the cold and damp, nor the smoke from the coal fires, and soon moved to what he hoped were better rooms in Bentinck Street, a short walk away. He was no more comfortable there. He complained bitterly about the English cooking of his landlady. ‘It’s a country where they can’t make anything from a potato or an egg,’ he wrote to Henry James, who had moved to London in 1869.¹

Turgenev spent little time at Bentinck Street. From morning until night he was at the Viardots. Theirs was a five-storey house with spacious rooms on the lower floors. They had a governess, a cook and two live-in housemaids, according to the census of 1871. Yet compared to their living arrangements in Paris and Baden, they thought of this as roughing it – a view shared by Clara Schumann, who wrote to Brahms after visiting them at Devonshire Place in February:

30 Devonshire Place, where the Viardots lived.

Madame Viardot made a very sad impression upon me here. I saw her the other day in a most uncomfortable and dirty residence and she told me about the appalling pupils she has here. What an indignity for such an artist, and how sad that she should be forced to do it … I had tears in my eyes when I was at her house but fortunately she did not realise it for she would have laughed at me.

Paul Viardot – at that time aged thirteen – recalls the ‘gloomy house’ in his memoirs: ‘the yellow fog and gas street-lamps lit up in the middle of the day when it was dark as night; the cold and damp, the silent meals punctuated by the hurried steps and cries of the newspaper sellers announcing German victories.’²

The Viardots were living in straitened circumstances in London. Most of their money had been invested in their Baden villa. They had not tried to sell the house in case they returned to Germany after the war was over – a possibility that became ever less desirable during their time in London. Meanwhile they were forced to make ends meet. Louis sold some more of his Old Masters, including his second Rembrandt, An Old Man in Military Costume (1631), for which Turgenev found a buyer in Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, sister of Tsar Alexander II, in January 1871.³

London was expensive. Paul’s school fees and the cost of keeping servants were higher than they had been in Baden, and Pauline would not give up entertaining in the lavish way to which she was accustomed. The Viardot tradition of musical soirées continued at Devonshire Place. There were informal recitals of chamber music, evenings of Spanish songs and Pauline’s famous operatic scenes, and a number of performances of Le Dernier Sorcier for a new circle of artistic friends and politicians, the cream of London society, including Charles Hallé, Arthur Sullivan, Frederic Leighton, Anthony Trollope, Robert Browning, George Eliot and her ‘husband’, George Lewes,* Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) and, on at least one occasion, the then Prime Minister, William Gladstone.⁴ They were soon joined by their friend Saint-Saëns, who had fled Paris in April 1871. Charles Gounod, who had come to London the previous September, was another frequent visitor. He and the Viardots had been reconciled after they had fallen out over his rejection of Pauline’s wedding gift in 1852. Pauline had contacted him in 1864, and since then they had kept up a friendly correspondence.⁵ Now, in London, they were brought together by their common misfortune.

The Viardots depended on Pauline’s income from teaching. She attracted students not only by her fame as a singer and teacher but also by the presence of her brother, himself one of Europe’s most sought-after teachers of bel canto. In 1854, Manuel Garcia had invented the laryngoscope – a device using mirrors to view the larynx and glottis – which brought him worldwide recognition in the scientific and the music worlds. The instrument enabled him to add science to his training of the voice. Among the stars who studied under him were Jenny Lind, Giulia Grisi, Antoinette Sterling and the tenor Julius Stockhausen. When Pauline arrived in London, he referred many of his younger students on to her. Pauline complained that they were not as good as her pupils in Baden, but they were many in number, and they helped to pay the bills.⁶

Pauline supplemented her income by performing in concerts, and, despite her earlier decision to retire from the stage, in provincial theatres, her voice now deemed not strong enough for the operatic stage in London. She resumed her touring career with the Willert Beale opera company, spending whole weeks on the road to places such as Derby, Northampton, Manchester and Newcastle. When she was away, Turgenev felt her absence as a ‘physical malaise’, as he explained on 5 December 1870, when she was in Edinburgh:

It is as if I had too little air, I have a secret, nagging anxiety that I can’t escape from and which nothing will distract. When you are here, I have a quiet joy – I feel ‘at home’ [written in English] – and I want nothing else. Ah, theuere Freundin [beloved friend], I have the whole of my beautiful and dear past of 27 years to treasure and respect. And things will be the same for us as for Burns’ ‘Joe Anderson, My Jo’ – we will go down hill together.*⁷

The idea that they were over the hill was hardly justified numerically (Turgenev was only fifty-two, and Pauline forty-nine, while Louis had turned seventy), but, having lost their happy life in Baden, it must have felt that way to them.

Pauline’s earnings were not enough to meet their living costs, even with the money from the sale of Louis’s Old Masters. The Viardots depended on Turgenev for financial help, as he had relied on them in previous years. Their faithful friend was forever going down to Coutts’ Bank in the Strand to arrange money transfers to Louis. On his trip to Russia, in the early months of 1871, he even sold a plot of land to raise the 80,000 francs in cash for Claudie’s dowry in railway shares. The investment was ‘enough to provide an annual income of 5½ or even 6,000 francs’, as he explained to Pauline.⁸

On his return from Russia, Turgenev moved into new lodgings in Beaumont Street, just behind the mews of the Viardots in Devonshire Place. He was re-creating the arrangement of their ménage à trois in Baden – next door to each other but detached. Living in a separate house was mainly for appearances. He suffered in the cold and damp and soon fell ill with flu and gout. From Beaumont Street he wrote to Flaubert on 6 May:

I am in England – not for the pleasure of being here – but because my friends, almost ruined by the war, have come here to try to earn a little money. The English have some good qualities – but they all – even the most intelligent – lead a very hard life. It takes some getting used to – like their climate. But then where else can one go?⁹

London had a large community of French exiles. They had come in several waves, beginning with the mass arrival of royalists fleeing from the revolutionary terror after 1793; then again in 1848, when Napoleon, as president, had clamped down on the socialists and radical republicans. An even larger number, around 4,000 of Napoleon’s political enemies, had fled to England following his coup to overthrow the Second Republic in December 1851. Victor Hugo was among them, arriving first in Jersey, from which he was expelled for supporting a newspaper that had been critical of Queen Victoria, and then settling with his family in Guernsey, where he lived from 1855 to 1870. Most of his fellow countrymen did not stay long in Britain, but by the middle of the 1850s there were around a thousand exiles in London, mostly concentrated in Soho and Fitzrovia. Leicester Square was the cosmopolitan centre of French London, with the Sablonière Hotel acting as headquarters and reception centre for the latest arrivals. A ‘dingy modern France’, Thackeray called the area. ‘There are French cafés, billiards, estaminets, waiters, markets, poor Frenchmen, and rich Frenchmen …’ The third and biggest wave of émigrés arrived after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. By the mid-1870s, there were an estimated 8,000 Frenchmen living in London. Cash-strapped exiles, including many artists, settled in Soho, but the better-off, deterred by Soho’s prostitutes, moved into the fashionable districts of Fitzrovia and Marylebone.¹⁰

Britain altogether was a haven for political exiles from Europe. There were no laws to prevent immigrants from coming into the country, regardless of their nationality or beliefs, nor any legal means to stop them from continuing with their political activities once they were living in Britain. The Alien Act of 1848 did allow the government to deport individuals if a court accepted that they were a threat to state security, but the Act lapsed in 1850, never having once been used. The British sense of liberty extended to the protection of revolutionaries against foreign governments. Mazzini, Marx and Engels, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin and Herzen all used London as their propaganda base. In 1858, after an attempt by the Italian revolutionary Felice Orsini to assassinate Napoleon III, the French government demanded measures against Orsini’s collaborators in Britain, where the bombs he had thrown at the emperor’s carriage had been made. Palmerston’s government duly introduced a bill to make conspiracies to murder outside Britain a felony in British law. But the bill was defeated in the House of Commons, which passed a vote of censure against the government for caving in to Napoleon’s demands, forcing Palmerston to resign.¹¹

Britain’s strong economy also made it a magnet for economic migrants from the Continent. Most settled in London, where their trades were in demand: French dressmakers, jewellers, engineers, found for the most part in Soho; German bakers, watchmakers and musicians, mostly in Fitzrovia; Italian food importers, ice-cream makers and barrel-organ players in the Little Italy of Clerkenwell.¹²

No one came to Britain for the weather or the food. Foreigners complained about them both. They saw the country through the prism of anglophobic clichés widely distributed on the Continent: London’s melancholic fog, the coldness of the English temperament, its materialism, hypocrisy, ‘perfidious Albion’, and so on.¹³ Flora Tristan’s Promenades dans Londres (1840) probably did more than any other book to popularize these stereotypes, certainly among the French:

In London you breathe melancholy in the air, it enters you through all your pores. There is nothing more lugubrious … than the appearance of this city on a foggy day or in the rain and dark … It makes you feel profound despair … disgust for everything, and an irresistible desire to end your life by suicide … On such noxious days, the Englishman is under the spell of his climate and behaves like a brute.¹⁴

It was a European commonplace to connect the English climate to the English temperament. Victor Schoelcher, the French anti-slavery campaigner, thought that England was ‘the coldest country on the earth in every sense’. Fontane, who spent four years in London in the 1850s, concluded that hospitality had ‘become extinct’ in English hearts: ‘their country is open, but the houses are closed.’¹⁵

The stuffiness of the English upper class was observed by visitors of every nationality, especially the Russians, whose aristocracy was noted for its liveliness and private informality. On his first day in London, Turgenev was taken to one of the Pall Mall clubs for lunch by his Russian friend Nikolai Zhemchuzhnikov. Irritated by the over-stiff waiters, who served each cutlet in turn on a separate silver plate, Turgenev could not stop himself from banging on the table and growling Russian words – ‘Radishes! Pumpkin! Turnips! Kasha!’ – to express his mirth. ‘He poked fun at me, at the English and at England’, once the waiters had retreated, Zhemchuzhnikov recalled.¹⁶

Turgenev’s friend Herzen, who had lived in London since 1852, became acquainted with an Englishman who had been employed as a servant in the Paris household of the Viardots. Shocked by their informal ways, he had soon left them. Asked what had offended him, the Englishman replied: ‘They are not the sort of people who are comme il faut: it was not just the wife who spoke to me at dinner but the husband too.’¹⁷

English eccentricities were another commonplace. Europeans explained them by Britain’s separation from the Continent. The Guide Joanne to London warned its readers:

Long deprived of contact with the peoples of the Continent, or accustomed by their pride to consider them barbarians, the English have created their own peculiar code of etiquette, stiff and stilted like themselves, whose absolutely rigid laws are observed with servility … A foreigner is expected to know and observe them on pain of not being recognized as a gentleman.¹⁸

The Viardots were accustomed to the English and their eccentricities. They had been coming to their country for thirty years. Louis thought the English were bizarre. In his Souvenirs de chasse he compared their country to a ‘vast convent’, such was their conformity to absurd rules of etiquette. A ‘foreigner who failed to doff his hat when greeting someone in the street, or dared to use a knife to eat his fish, was considered badly born’. Invited for a weekend’s hunting on a great estate in Gloucestershire, he found that even in the wet and cold of an English May the women dressed for dinner ‘as if they were going to a ball’, in white muslin dresses that left their shivering arms and necks exposed. Thinking they had dressed up so absurdly on account of her presence, Pauline said they really needn’t have, but one of them replied that it was not for her – they dressed like that every night: if their father was at home alone he would still appear for dinner in white tie.¹⁹

Even after thirty years, the Viardots found it hard to sympathize with the English. Like many Europeans of their social class and cosmopolitan outlook, they found the English stuffy, cold and conceited. Pauline was exasperated by their lack of musicality, their following of fashion and celebrity, and by the constant need to flatter them for their ‘bad taste’. At an after-concert dinner with Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, in 1850, Pauline had complained to Turgenev that the English royals knew neither how to dress nor hold a conversation about music properly:

The queen was dressed like a sugar-barley stick (bâton de sucre de pomme de Rouen) wrapped in blue and silver, tight around the body and quite stiff. With all that on, it could not have been comfortable for her to eat. When she came to the artists, she had no idea about what to say, but said the same kind of thing to them all – so to me she said, for example, ‘I much admired you recently in The Prophet – it must have been tiring – but it was lovely, especially the church scene.’ Then she moved on.²⁰

The French, of course, were predisposed to be critical of the English, having as they did an inborn sense of cultural superiority over them, as Herzen noted, tongue in cheek, in My Past and Thoughts (1870):

The Frenchman cannot forgive the English, in the first place, for not speaking French; in the second, for not understanding him when he calls Charing Cross Sharan-Kro, or Leicester Square Lesesstair-Skooar. Then his stomach cannot digest the English dinners consisting of two huge pieces of meat and fish, instead of five little helpings of various ragouts, fritures, salmis and so on. Then he can never resign himself to the ‘slavery’ of restaurants being closed on Sundays, and people being bored to the glory of God, though the whole of France is bored to the glory of Bonaparte for seven days in the week.²¹

Herzen sided with the French on this last point in fact. ‘Life here is about as boring as that of worms in a cheese,’ he wrote from London to a Russian friend. Most Europeans shared his view. ‘The evenings in London for a foreigner are very depressing,’ wrote Edmondo de Amicis on his first visit to the city in the early 1870s:

A ferocious melancholy would descend on me. I’d grown used to the splendour of Parisian boulevards and the festive crowds which throng them; the streets of London seemed dark and gloomy by comparison. I missed the packed cafés, the sumptuous shops, and even the strange magic-lantern shows on the boulevard Montmartre, conveniently forgetting the indignation I also felt at the sight of the brazen and ostentatious prostitution which is rife all over Paris.

For the French socialist leader, Jules Vallès, who had fled to London in 1871, the domination of the Protestant religion killed all joy in London life. ‘Adultery is impossible here. Religion is virtually compulsory and highly disagreeable. The English god is ugly, unsympathetic, and yellow with age … Catholic ecstasies pose a danger to the chastity of women. The reformed religion is therefore not something blondes are likely to go wild over.’²² The tyranny of inactivity that ruled English Sundays maddened Louis Viardot:

Sunday is the day of rest and festivity throughout the Continent, from Cadiz to Arkhangelsk; but in England Sunday is the day of nothingness. It is erased from the calendar, removed from life. Sunday, it does not exist. Do you want to eat as usual? You had better buy your provisions the day before because nothing is on sale. Do you want to call on friends? The houses are all closed, only churches open at prayer times. Do you want to write or receive letters? The postal service does not work. What stupidity! What hypocrisy! The English rail against the papists who eat fish or prefer frogs on Fridays rather than roast beef, yet they permit this fetishism of Sundays to the point that every week Parliament receives a petition signed by thousands demanding imperiously the prohibition of all railway and steamship services as an abominable profanation of the holy day.²³

For Louis, as for many European visitors, the Protestantism of the English was connected to their practical, prosaic, passionless and business-minded character. ‘The inside of an Englishman’s head can be fairly compared to a Murray’s Guide,’ Hippolyte Taine, the French critic and historian, wrote in Notes on England (1872): ‘a great many facts but few ideas; a great deal of exact and useful information, statistics, figures, reliable and detailed maps, short and dry historical notes, useful and moral tips by way of a preface, but no all-inclusive vision, and no relish of good writing.’²⁴

It was a commonplace of European thought, especially among the Romantics, that the English were a commercial people but not an artistic one. Heine hated England, the ‘seriousness of everything, the colossal uniformity, the machine-like movement’ – you could send a philosopher to London, he wrote, ‘but on pain of your life not a poet’. Clara Schumann wrote to Brahms from a concert tour in London in 1865 that ‘all artistic interest, in fact all idealism of every kind is sacrificed here to “business”’.²⁵ Still, she would come to England nineteen times.

Chopin similarly thought the English had a better sense for money than music. During his visit to London in 1848 he gave his friends in Paris an account of a typical conversation with an English society lady:

THE LADY: Mr. Chopin, how much do you cost?

CHOPIN: My fee is 20 guineas, madam.

THE LADY: Oh! I only want you to play a little piece.

CHOPIN: My fee is the same, madam.

THE LADY: Then you will play a lot of pieces?

CHOPIN: For two hours, if you wish, madam.

THE LADY: Then that is settled. Are the 20 guineas to be paid in advance?

CHOPIN: No, madam. Afterwards.

THE LADY: Very reasonable, I’m sure.²⁶

2

The British were sympathetic to the French exiles of 1870. They had mostly sided with the French in the Franco-Prussian War. They saw them as the underdog, as Clara Schumann explained to Brahms in a letter from London in February 1871:

It is when I live here that I realize how deeply I am attached to Germany. What makes it stronger this time is the anti-German feeling of the English, who express their sympathy for the weaker side, that is to say, for the French. At first I thought that this was the English being jealous of the Germans, who have just proved their greatness, but certain Germans who live here assure me that the English are motivated by pity.²⁷

To help the French exiles, the British formed a National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded, which became the British Red Cross. For the émigrés in London a Mansion House Relief Fund was set up by musicians, among them the composers William Sterndale Bennet and Arthur Sullivan, which organized a number of benefit concerts, including one with Pauline for a packed audience in the Exeter Hall.

British attitudes to Germany were permanently altered by the war. Previously, the Victorians had seen the Germans as the European nation closest to themselves: they shared their Saxon origins, their Protestant religion, in the north of Germany at least, and their moralizing seriousness. They also had a monarchy with German ties. All these connections made for a strong Victorian Germanophilia. Views changed after 1870. The German victory against France – until then the greatest power on the Continent – gave rise to British fears of military aggression by Germany. It was expressed in the bestselling novel by George Chesney, The Battle of Dorking (1871), the first in a genre of ‘invasion literature’, which told the story of Britain’s conquest by a German-speaking country, referred to only as ‘The Enemy’.²⁸

The British were reluctant to become involved in European politics. Confident that their free-trade values would spread through Europe, and concerned with keeping taxes down, Queen Victoria’s governments pursued a consistent policy of non-intervention on the Continent, unless of course the interests of the British Empire were at stake, as in the Crimean War, the only European war fought by Britain in this period. The idea that, as Europe’s greatest power, Britain had a moral or religious duty to champion righteous causes on the Continent seldom mustered much support from the public or the press.²⁹

When they took an interest in a foreign cause – the nationalliberation movements of the Poles, Italians and Hungarians all received a sympathetic hearing in Britain – it was because they saw the nationality involved as the underdog, fighting against bullies and tyrants, and projected their own liberal values onto them. On a visit to Britain in 1864, Garibaldi was welcomed as a hero of the anti-Papist movement, credited with all the virtues of an English gentleman, and compared to Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake. The unification of Italy – completed with the capture of Rome in 1870 – was seen by the British as a victory for their own constitutional principles against the authoritarianism of the Austrians and the Papacy.³⁰

British insularity was not just political. Culturally the British held aloof from Europeans on the Continent. They toured in groups, their Murray guides in hand, rarely interacting with the local population, and criticizing anything that struck them as too ‘foreign’ (i.e. different from how things were organized at home). Ignorant of European languages, they expected to be understood by tradesmen, waiters, porters and everybody else they had to deal with, provided they spoke to them loudly and slowly enough in English.

Guidebooks encouraged British travellers to adopt a colonial attitude towards the natives of the European countries they were visiting. ‘In general a firm, courteous and somewhat reserved manner is the most effective,’ advised Richard Ford in his popular Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1855). ‘Whenever duties are to be performed, let them see that you are not to be trifled with. The coolness of an Englishman’s manner, when in earnest, is what few foreigners can withstand.’³¹ No European country was exempt from criticism, and no area of European life more subject to such reprimands than the sewage system and plumbing, which, in fairness, did lag behind the standards achieved in Britain by the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Murray’s guide to Switzerland, in 1846, mentioned recent improvements to the Swiss roads, accommodation and general conditions of travel, but noted that

even in the first-class inns the houses are deficient in proper drainage and want of ventilation, and the passages and staircases are unwholesome and offensive from bad smells. Care should be taken to impress on the landlords how disgusting and intolerable to English ideas such a nuisance is. There is no excuse for it.³²

The British had a firm belief in their superiority to the Europeans, indeed to all foreigners. They believed that Britain was the envy of the world because of its ancient liberties and traditions of parliamentary government and the rule of law. These ideas were central to their national identity. Their confidence was rooted in their country’s military victories against the continental powers, especially the French, in the conquests of the British Empire, and in Britain’s status as the first industrial society. Isolated from the Continent by their geography, the British had a strong sense of their special character, based upon their history as a long-unconquered island and, above all, on their Protestant religion, setting them apart from ‘Catholic Europe’, which in this myth was backward morally.³³ It was a narrative encouraged by the great Whig historians of the Victorian age, such as Lord Macaulay in his History of England (1848–61), who presented the country’s history as a march of progress from the Magna Carta to the modern constitutional monarchy – the highest possible form of social and political evolution.

European travel confirmed Britons in their view of Europe’s moral backwardness. ‘It has long appeared to the author,’ Henry Mayhew wrote in German Life and Manners (1864),

that travelling southward from England is like going backward in time – every ten degrees of latitude corresponding to about a hundred years in our own history; for, as in France we see society in the same corrupt and comfortless state as prevailed in our nation at the beginning of the present century, so in Germany we find the people, at the very least, a century behind us in all the refinements of civilization and the social and domestic improvements of progress; whilst in Spain the denizen lives a positive medieval life, among the same dirt and intellectual darkness, the same beggary and bigotry as preceded the Reformation in our land. In Russia, too, we observe the state of villeinage and serfdom existing almost at this day, as it did with us in the feudal time of the Conquest; whilst, in Central Africa, we reach the primitive condition of nature – the very zero of the civilized scale – absolute barbarism itself.³⁴

3

At the end of June 1871, Turgenev went with William Ralston, the British Russian scholar and Turgenev’s English translator, to visit Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate. They spent two days at his house, a mock-Tudor mansion at Blackdown, on the Sussex and Surrey border. After a long walk, a game of chess and dinner, the two great men got down to talking literature. Turgenev did not much like the poetry of Tennyson – it smacked too much of the British Empire and Progress – but at least he had read it. He was also able to converse at length about Byron, Shelley, Scott, Swinburne, Dickens and Eliot, all of whom he had read in English. Tennyson, by contrast, showed little familiarity with European literature, and, to his guests’ surprise, had not the slightest contact with his Continental colleagues, despite his extensive travels in Europe. Tennyson admitted that he had not read a single work by Hugo, Sand or Musset, although on Turgenev’s recommendation he later read Consuelo and La Petite Fadette, books written by George Sand almost thirty years before. As for the Russians, Tennyson had not read a single one of them, not even Turgenev himself.³⁵

Tennyson was not unusual. Turgenev found that British writers were generally unfamiliar with contemporary European literature. The two main exceptions, with whom he was acquainted from his time in London, were Thomas Carlyle, who had a good knowledge of French and German literature, and George Eliot, who had lived in Germany, was a distinguished translator, and had read extensively the major modern European writers, including Goethe, Balzac, Keller and Sand.

In literary terms the British were the most insular nation in Europe. The English language was so dominant, its literature so rich and global reach so wide, that its readers barely took an interest in foreign works. Compared to other European countries, Britain was a tiny importer of foreign literature. It had a thriving book trade of its own; more titles were published in English than in any other language on the Continent, so there was not much demand for literature in foreign languages. As the book trade grew, though, the number of translations into English steadily increased. From the mid-century mark of 2,600 foreign titles translated into English every year, the number published annually rose to almost 4,000 by the 1870s, when popular editions of classic foreign fiction became a stock in trade of the Standard and Railway libraries. But overall this was a tiny share of the book trade in English compared to the number of translations in other European markets. Translated works made up only 2.88 per cent of the books published in English in 1870 – even less than the 3.78 per cent in 1800 – whereas in the biggest book-importing countries (Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy) foreign literature made up almost half the total book production in the 1870s. Even France – the only other country with a literary language as dominant as English – had a larger appetite for foreign literature: translations represented around 12 per cent of French book production in 1870.³⁶

If the British did not read much foreign literature, they imported European art, opera and music on a larger scale than any other country on the Continent. Culturally, they were more dependent on the Europeans than they liked to admit to themselves. Britain’s wealth enabled it to buy in the best of the arts from Europe rather than produce its own.

In 1870, Britain was the largest trading nation in the world. The London docks, where over 40,000 ships would annually unload their cargo from around the globe, were bigger than a city in themselves. Foreign trade was the basis of the country’s wealth. Britain had a bigger and richer middle class than any other country in Europe. Salaries in the liberal professions were far higher than on the Continent. According to Taine, writing in the early 1870s, a visit from a doctor cost from five to ten francs in Paris but a guinea (around twenty-seven francs) in London; a professor at the Sorbonne earned 12,000 francs a year, but an Oxford professor had an annual salary of up to £3,000 (75,000 francs); a journalist received 200 francs for a page of copy in the Revue des deux mondes but 500 in equivalent English publications, while The Times paid as much as £100 (2,500 francs) for a single article. Taine did not mention the industrialists and noblemen, whose annual revenues were in the order of £200,000 (5 million francs), nor the wealthy families with substantial houses in and around London who earned several thousand pounds a year. ‘To earn a lot, consume a lot – such is the rule,’ he concluded. ‘The Englishman does not save money, does not think of the future, at most he will insure his life. He is the reverse of the Frenchman, who is frugal and abstemious.’³⁷

London’s wealth had acted as a magnet to foreign composers and musicians from the early eighteenth century, when Handel settled there as a young man. They could earn more from a single London season than from many years of working on the Continent. Handel had his ups and downs but in most years received handsome profits from his operas and oratorios. In the 1760s, Mozart’s father, Leopold, made ‘a good catch of guineas’. Haydn earned a fortune during his two visits in the 1790s, netting around 15,000 gulden (40,000 francs), a dozen times his annual salary from Prince Esterházy.³⁸

‘Here they pursue music like a business, calculating, paying, bargaining,’ noted Mendelssohn on his first visit to London in 1829. The city offered profitable opportunities. Berlioz was brought to London in 1847 on promises of huge performance fees by Jullien (who had also tried unsuccessfully to recruit Pauline Viardot). Jullien failed financially and Berlioz was never paid. But the French composer went on thinking of the English capital as the monied Mecca for music. He wrote in 1853:

After the French Season, ‘the London Season! the London Season!’ is the rejoicing cry of every Italian, French, Belgian, German, Bohemian, Hungarian, Swedish and English singer; and the virtuosos of the nations reiterate it with enthusiasm as they step on to the steam-boat, like Aeneas’ soldiers repeating ‘Italie! Italie!’ as they boarded their vessels.³⁹

Foreign-born musicians played a vital role in the musical life of Victorian Britain. However much the British liked to think about themselves as apart and different from the Europeans, they were culturally dependent upon them. Three immigrants did more to put the islands on the map of European music than any British musicians in the nineteenth century. The Italian-born conductor Michael Costa (1808–84) came to London in 1830 and worked there for over fifty years, raising standards of performance through a series of reforms, including changes to the layout of the orchestra, the rigid disciplining of its musicians, and the introduction of the modern system of a sole conductor with baton (instead of the older system practised by the British in which control was divided between the first violin, a musical director and a Maestro al Cembalo). The German-born conductor August Manns (1825–1907) had worked as a bandmaster for the Prussian army in Berlin before taking over the direction of the Crystal Palace concerts from 1855 to 1901, during which he introduced a large range of new works to the English concert repertoire and championed the music of young British composers, including Charles Stanford, Edward Elgar and Arthur Sullivan. The third important immigrant was Charles Hallé (1819–95), or Karl Halle, as he was called before he came to London. Born in Hagen in Westphalia, Hallé became known as a conductor in Paris, where he moved in the circles of Chopin, Liszt, Sand, and Pauline and Louis Viardot during the 1840s. The revolution of 1848 drove him to London, where he performed as a concert pianist, introducing many new works to the concert repertoire (he was the first pianist to perform the complete Beethoven sonatas in Britain). In 1853, Hallé moved to Manchester, where he set up the Hallé Orchestra and put on concerts at the Free Trade Hall which would raise the British standard of orchestral playing to new heights.

When Verdi came to London with his opera Masnadieri, in June 1847, he was impressed by the enormous fees he could earn there. Instead of getting 20,000 francs for a new opera, as he did in Italy, he could make as much as 80,000 or even 100,000 francs. ‘Oh, if I could just stay here for a couple of years, I would carry off a sackful of these holy coins,’ Verdi wrote to a friend in Milan.⁴⁰ The wealth of London made it one of Europe’s most important cities for the opera industry. The finest singers all went there, lured by higher rates of pay than they could earn in almost any other city in Europe.⁴¹

By 1847, London boasted three main opera venues: Her Majesty’s Theatre (where Masnadieri was put on), previously known as the King’s Theatre; the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden; and the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. There were also smaller opera houses such as the Lyceum, where mainly English operas were performed. The large size of London’s solid middle classes was the basis of this buoyant market: there were at least 200,000 households with an annual income of £300 or more living within easy reach of the city’s theatres by the early 1860s, when the opening of the London Underground and new suburban railways created an even larger catchment area for the opera business.

Unlike the majority of opera companies in continental Europe, where monarchs, states or wealthy patrons subsidized productions until the 1860s, London’s opera houses, although licensed by the state, had long been forced to manage on their own as private businesses. Revenues from subscriptions and box office sales constituted 85 per cent of Covent Garden’s annual income between 1861 and 1867.⁴² These commercial pressures were intensified by the rivalry between the two main opera houses – Her Majesty’s and Covent Garden – which competed with each other for the top singers. James Mapleson and Frederick Gye, the managers of the two respective theatres, were astute businessmen. They selected their repertoire on solely economic grounds (the costs of production and likely profits from the box office), which meant choosing operas, tried and tested on the Continent, whose popularity was guaranteed. The London opera repertoire, as a result, was made up entirely of foreign works.⁴³

The foreign domination of the London music scene made life hard for British composers. Not one British opera was performed during the main season at Her Majesty’s or Covent Garden before the 1870s. The two attempts to establish an English national opera in the off season at Covent Garden – one by the Pyne-Harrison Company from 1858 to 1864 and the other by the Royal English Opera Company in 1864–6 – were both commercial failures. None of the operas performed by these two companies made it into the canon. Vincent Wallace’s The Desert Flower lasted just two weeks in 1863, and Michael Balfe’s Blanche de Nevers was equally a flop.⁴⁴

It was just as difficult for a British composer to break into the concert music repertoire. There were too few commissions for new works, too few orchestras to perform them, and too many works by better-known composers from abroad. Excluded from the serious music scene, the leading British composers focused on more popular forms, particularly ballads for the music hall or home, where good money could be made. Two of the best-selling British ballads of the Victorian era were composed for operas: ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ from Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl (1843); and ‘Scenes That are Brightest’ from Vincent Wallace’s Maritana (1845). Even Arthur Sullivan, the great young hope of British music in the 1870s, could not earn a living from writing serious music and turned his hand instead to composing hymns, parlour songs and operettas in the style of Offenbach. His first surviving effort, Cox and Box (1866), became a staple of the Victorian repertoire, with catchy songs like ‘Rataplan’, which were easy for an amateur to sing, selling tens of thousands of copies. His collaboration with the playwright William Gilbert began in 1871 with a two-act burlesque called Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, commissioned as a Christmas entertainment by the Gaiety Theatre. Its resemblance to Orpheus in the Underworld was noted by reviewers, although more than that is hard to say, because the score is lost.⁴⁵

The British were acutely conscious of their musical inferiority. There were frequently discussions in the music press about why there was no native composer of any note. Foreigners had less difficulty explaining it. Fontane doubted if the English had an ‘ear for harmony’ at all, so much ‘mediocre music’ did they not only tolerate but actively seek out in taverns and music halls. The French critic Henri Moulin thought the English had their strengths in literature, but they were ‘the only people in Europe who were unmusical – they have not produced a single great musician, neither composer nor performer’.⁴⁶ Until Elgar burst onto the international music scene at the turn of the twentieth century, this remained the European view of the English. The most famous statement of it was by the German writer Oscar Schmitz, a frequent visitor to London, in The Land without Music (Das Land ohne Musik, 1904). Schmitz argued that among the many English virtues – commercial practicality and common sense, kindness, humour and so on – the one thing that they lacked was musicality. ‘The English,’ he wrote, ‘are the only cultured race without a music of their own (music-hall ditties excepted). I say music of their own, for perhaps more foreign music is performed in England than in any other country. This means not only that their ears are less discerning, but that their whole inward life must be poorer.’⁴⁷

The same imbalance was evident in the world of fine arts. Along with Paris, London was the centre of the international art market. The major London galleries had dealerships and buyers in all the European capitals. London was awash with artworks from the Continent. According to the import duty figures at Customs House in London, the number of foreign paintings imported into Britain grew from an average of 11,585 per year in the 1840s to over 50,000 per year in the 1870s. The import boom was almost wholly due to the growing spending power of the British middle class (the average value of imported paintings was under £10 in the 1870s).⁴⁸ The taste for foreign art was shaped increasingly by the development of public and commercial galleries, international exhibitions, foreign travel, art journals and influential critics such as Ruskin focusing attention on European art.

By the 1860s, the size and wealth of the London art market was able to attract a growing number of artists. James McNeill Whistler moved to London in 1859. ‘You can earn far more here in a month (don’t say a word of this) than you can there [in Paris] in a year,’ he wrote to the painter Henri Fantin-Latour. For years he tried to convince him to move to England.⁴⁹ Fantin-Latour did not come, but four years later Whistler did persuade his friend Alphonse Legros to settle in London. Legros had achieved only moderate success as a young artist in Paris during the 1850s, but his etchings and paintings received wide acclaim in England, winning medals at the Royal Academy. He married an English woman and taught at the National Art Training School (as the Royal College of Art was named at that time) before becoming the Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College London in 1876.

Gustave Doré made his fortune in the London galleries. Already known for his illustrations, he scored a huge success with an exhibition of his works in London in 1867, prompting him to move there and open his own gallery in Bond Street the following year. His large religious paintings found a lucrative market in a public starved of art in Protestant churches. From 1868 to 1892, two and a half million visitors would pay a shilling each to see the preachy paintings in the Doré Gallery. Doré’s popularity earned him an enormous contract – worth £10,000 per year – to engrave 200 city scenes for London: A Pilgrimage (1872), a book which proved such a success that Doré received commissions from other British publishers and became a regular contributor to the Illustrated London News.

Manet also thought of trying his luck in London, where the success of Doré and his friend Whistler stood in contrast to his own failing fortunes in Paris. ‘I believe there is something to be done over there,’ Manet wrote to Fantin-Latour following a visit to London in 1869. ‘The feel of the place, the atmosphere, I liked it all and I’m going to try and show my work there next year.’ Manet’s plans were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War, when instead he joined the National Guard.⁵⁰

The war brought many other artists to London. James Tissot, another friend of Whistler, arrived in June 1871, having fought in the defence of Paris against the Prussians in the autumn of 1870. Tissot was a wealthy artist of European fame whose many contacts in the London art market enabled him to find buyers there quickly. He spent eleven successful years in London, churning out the sort of paintings that appealed to English high society: portraits of well-dressed ladies, gentlemen in white tie at receptions, and so on. Goncourt reported a rumour that his London studio had ‘an antechamber where one could always find iced champagne at the disposition of his visitors and, outside his workshop, a garden where a servant in silk stockings spent all day brushing and polishing the leaves of the trees’.⁵¹

Gérôme arrived in 1870 with an equally lucrative brand of art tailored for the English market. His highly finished paintings had sold well at Gambart’s French Gallery in Pall Mall during the 1860s. On his arrival in London, Gérôme turned out a series of paintings in the moralizing English realist style, which earned him wide acclaim at the Royal Academy exhibitions of 1870 and 1871.

The Barbizon painter Daubigny had also come to London with a reputation well established by two previous visits to the city, and with a wide range of artistic contacts, including Whistler, Legros and Leighton. Daubigny sold a large number of paintings in London, mainly through Durand-Ruel, who had fled to London with the bulk of his collection from Paris in September, catching the last train from the besieged city before the Prussians cut the railway link. Durand-Ruel was the biggest Paris dealer of the Barbizon painters. His father’s gallery had dealt in them since the 1840s, and when he took over, in 1865, he bought almost no one else. In London, Durand-Ruel took out a lease on a gallery in New Bond Street – unfortunately already named the ‘German Gallery’ – and organized an exhibition of 144 French works he had brought from Paris. Because he was unknown in London, he formed an imaginary committee of the Society of French Artists (most of whom were unaware of their membership of it) and used its name to advertise his gallery.⁵²

Durand-Ruel opened up the London market for the Barbizon painters. But the Impressionists, whose early work he championed, made no headway in England.

When the Franco-Prussian War began, Monet had been on his honeymoon with his wife and their young son at the seaside resort of Trouville in Normandy. They fled to London, where Monet gave The Beach at Trouville to an exhibition organized by Daubigny for the Distressed Peasantry of France. It was admired by Durand-Ruel, who had been following Monet’s work. Another of his Trouville paintings (The Harbour at Trouville) was included by Durand-Ruel in the first annual exhibition of the Society of French Artists in December 1870. There would be eleven exhibitions in the next five years, as Durand-Ruel built up his connections to the French painters and developed a network of clients in London. Through Monet he became acquainted with Camille Pissaro, who on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War had fled with his family to Norwood, then a village on the outskirts of London, where he started painting plein-air scenes in an Impressionist style. Durand-Ruel included at least two of Pissaro’s Norwood paintings in his second exhibition in March 1871, and from then became his main dealer and promoter, buying up a large stock of his work. Neither Monet nor Pissaro sold many paintings in London. British taste was too conservative – too restricted by the conventions of the Royal Academy – to appreciate these avant-garde experimentalists in painted light. Durand-Ruel later claimed that he did not sell a single work by the Impressionists during his year in London.⁵³

For their part, the French artist refugees did not think a lot of their British counterparts. ‘How awful modern English painting is!’ declared Daubigny. ‘They certainly have need of our influence … When they paint fruit or flowers, they appear to be made of glass or sugar. Landscapes seem to be made of chenille or seem to have been brushed in with hair. Figures are as rigid as iron.’ The sculptor Jules Dalou, who arrived in London in July 1871, complained that the British public did not like nudes, unless they were sanitized and scented like ‘English soaps’. Pissaro was scathing about British art, an attitude informed largely by his commercial failure in Britain. ‘My painting doesn’t catch on,’ he wrote from London to the art critic Théodore Duret in June 1871. ‘Here, one is only met with disdain, indifference, and even rudeness; one experiences the jealousy and most selfish defiance of colleagues – here, there is no art: everything is a business matter.’⁵⁴

The idea that the British were no good at art was, like their hopelessness with music, a European commonplace. Moulin put it down to the fact that the English school of painting was only a century old (he dated it from Reynolds and Gainsborough). There was no sense of the sublime, no transcendental wonderment, in British art, he claimed; the dull grey skies were limiting; the English aristocracy favoured genre paintings of their horses and hunting dogs, which, the critic thought, ‘gave the measure of the true industrial genius of this people’.⁵⁵

Louis Viardot was scornful about British art, its public sculptures in particular, having spent the best part of his year in London visiting its collections. He ridiculed the marble statues by Sir Richard Westmacott, the ‘most celebrated sculptor of England’, on the pediment of the British Museum. The figures were meant to represent the ‘progress of civilization’ but they were ‘wanting in harmony, grace, and dignity’, Viardot thought, and would have been better placed at ‘the chief entrance of the docks of London, the naval arsenal at Woolwich, the observatory of Greenwich, or the northern railway’. In Les Merveilles de la sculpture (1869), translated into English as The Wonders of Sculpture (1872), Viardot concluded that there was no English sculpture worthy of inclusion in his book:

‘The English should never meddle in painting.’ Extract of Turgenev’s letter to Pauline Viardot with a sketch of the figures described from a painting at Grosvenor House.

I have met with no single work worth mentioning by a native sculptor in any public or private collection or drawing-room. It is the same in the public gardens, parks, and squares. Could I write a description of the bronze equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, erected in Piccadilly in front of his residence, and opposite that other grotesque statue representing this illustrious statesman and warrior on foot as a Fighting Achilles, which is perfectly nude and perfectly black? The equestrian statue … most resembles Punch mounted on Balaam’s ass – at least so it has been caricatured by the witty Charivari of London, to whose pages it properly belongs.⁵⁶

Turgenev was just as unimpressed by an exhibition of contemporary English painting at Grosvenor House – a ‘frightful, dreadful chamber of horrors!’ as he described it to Pauline Viardot:

Miserable colours, infantile drawing; these gentlemen think to fall back on expression, which, aiming to be profound and poetic, is merely ill-defined, idiotic and sickly. There is a medieval demoiselle with leggings who is picking [sic] apricots on a vine – all in the sky – (from the front Mlle Spartalis)* – which would make you laugh – or cry like a baby! And what ridiculous subjects! For example: a painting two metres long by half a metre wide: at the top an angel with bizarre wings who holds below her a knight in armour – who in his turn holds beneath him a woman dressed in lilac gauze: all three figures dangle in the sky as I have drawn them here [a sketch is attached]. The picture is entitled Rosamunda!! No! The English should never meddle in painting.⁵⁷

4

London was never going to be more than a temporary refuge for the Viardots. Once the war was over and it was safe to return to the Continent, they would go back to Baden or Paris.

In the early months of 1871, the Prussian siege had brought Paris to its knees. People lived in the ruins of buildings which had been destroyed by the daily bombardment. Food stocks became dangerously low. Rationing was introduced – 400 grammes of bread per day per citizen, though how much of it was bread was hard to say. Parisians grew accustomed to horsemeat. ‘As for the two staple items of the diet of the poorer classes, potatoes and cheese,’ Edmond de Goncourt noted in his diary on 7 January, ‘cheese is just a memory, and you have to have friends in high places to obtain potatoes at twenty francs a bushel.’⁵⁸ Authority collapsed. The left-wing leaders of the National Guard took power, forcing the Thiers government and its armed forces to evacuate the capital and retreat to Versailles; there was an uprising by the Paris workers, an urban revolution to reclaim their city from Haussmann’s bourgeoisie; and a Commune was established to introduce their revolutionary demands, including workers’ control of their workplaces. The government rallied its troops and attacked Paris from Versailles. As the troops approached the city, the Communards erected barricades and launched a campaign of terror against ‘counter-revolutionaries’. By the end of May, following a week of street fighting, government troops had reoccupied the capital. There were summary trials and executions of the Communards; over 40,000 were taken prisoner, many of them later deported by military tribunals.

At this point the Viardots were still thinking of returning to Baden. Turgenev was keen on the plan. He had been back to their house in February to check that it was in order, and recalled the ‘happy years’ they had spent there.⁵⁹ Back in London, on 6 May, he wrote to Flaubert that he would remain there until 1 August, when he would return to Baden, stopping off in Paris to see him. ‘Perhaps you will come to Baden, where we shall live for a while like moles, hiding in their holes and you could hide there with us.’⁶⁰ News of the defeat of the Commune did not make them change their minds, even though they were concerned for the safety of their house in the rue de Douai, an area affected by the fighting. On 29 July, the Viardots vacated their house in Devonshire Place and left with Turgenev for Boulogne, where they spent a few days by the sea. They then continued on their journey to Baden, while Turgenev travelled back to London to wind up all their affairs there.

As they crossed the English Channel, the Viardots must have been relieved to be leaving, despite their nervousness about the risks that lay ahead. Pauline did not like the English much. She found them too provincial, too cold and stiff – too uncontinental, in a word. They were not really Europeans after all. Louis was unhappy in London. He could not speak English. He was in poor health, suffering from rheumatism, and the English weather did not help. He was worried about money, about their property in Baden and Paris, both affected by the fighting, and was depressed about the news from France.⁶¹

Turgenev was only slightly happier. In the ten months he spent in England he had done very little work. He needed to feel settled before he could write. The only thing he managed to do much work on, his novella Spring Torrents, remained unfinished in Britain – ‘My cursed story is becoming as drawn out as a rubber band; the devil knows when I will finish it!’ he complained to Annenkov⁶² – and bore no trace of his stay there. Loosely based on the events of his own youth in Germany, the love story is filled rather with nostalgia for his carefree former existence in that country.* Yet in London Turgenev had an active social life, found new literary and artistic friends, and even joined the Athenaeum and Garrick clubs. The lifestyle of the English landed gentry suited him – their love of country sports especially. In August he enjoyed a hunting trip to Pitlochry in Scotland, where he was a guest of the industrialist Ernst Benzon at Allean House, though he did not form a high opinion of the poet Robert Browning, who was there with his son, a keen hunter. ‘Browning is extremely vain and not at all amusing,’ he reported to Pauline. ‘His son gives the impression of a very nice boy with a large red wart on the end of his nose.’⁶³

Turgenev was also drawn to the liberalism of the English. He was closer in his views to their evolutionary politics than to Louis Viardot, whose sympathies were radically republican, bordering on socialist. At the end of May, Turgenev went with Ralston to Cambridge, where they stayed at Trinity. After dinner at High Table in the college hall, they forsook the port in the Master’s Lodge and went instead to the Cambridge Union to listen to a debate by the students, at that time in the middle of their post-exam festivities. The motion was: ‘In the opinion of this House, the Parisian Commune is deserving of sympathy and respect.’ The proposition was defeated by 102 votes to 14, prompting Turgenev to remark to Ralston as they left: ‘Now at last I understand why you English are not afraid of a revolution.’⁶⁴

While Turgenev was in Scotland, the Viardots returned to Baden. They found their house in a ruinous condition, with many of its windows smashed – no doubt by German nationalists who knew its owners to be French. The war and the absorption of the Grand Duchy of Baden into the German Empire had changed the character of the spa town. Gone was the cosmopolitanism of its pre-war days, and in its place was a more uniformly German atmosphere. Feeling they were unwelcome, the Viardots decided to sell their Baden home and return to Paris, where the newly proclaimed republic was more in line with their beliefs. The Baden aristocracy was ‘furious’ with their decision, claiming they had ‘insulted’ the newly proclaimed Emperor Wilhelm and the Empress Augusta, their former friends and patrons in Baden.

Although he did not like Paris, Turgenev accepted their decision to return to France. ‘I am happy and think it is a good idea to go back to the rue de Douai,’ he wrote to Pauline from Edinburgh, where he attended the centenary celebrations for Walter Scott on 12 August and gave a speech which, though cheered and reported in the press, had left him with the impression that ‘no one had the slightest idea’ who he was, nor ‘any interest’ in his subject. ‘And while we’re on the matter [of the rue de Douai], why don’t you install me there, since you have some rooms to let? It would cost me less than a hotel. It’s an idea that came to me just now. Think about it and let’s talk.’⁶⁵

By the end of August, Turgenev had rejoined the Viardots in Baden. It took a while to find a buyer for their properties. The Viardot villa was eventually sold to Moritz Karo, the Hungarian Consul, for 123,000 francs – a big loss on the money spent on it by the Viardots. Turgenev’s house (which he had sold to the Viardots) was purchased by a German businessman from Moscow, Hermann Achenbach. Louis and Pauline returned to Paris in October to move back into the house in the rue de Douai and prepare it for the family – the house was in need of repairs – while Turgenev remained with their children in Baden. Builders in Paris were difficult to find – so many buildings had been damaged in the fighting – and it was only at the end of November that the works were sufficiently completed for Turgenev and the children to rejoin Pauline and Louis. During these last weeks in Baden, Turgenev oversaw the moving out of all the furniture from his mansion – the only home he had really loved. ‘I am feeling sorry to have lost my nest,’ he wrote to Annenkov, ‘but then it is not without reason that I have nomadic Tatar blood.* The sense of settlement is not in me – and any house I have is like a tent.’⁶⁶

* Pauline Viardot was probably the model for the prima donna in George Eliot’s dramatic poem Armgart (1870).

* Turgenev is referring to Robert Burns’s poem ‘John Anderson, My Jo’ (1789):

John Anderson, my jo, John,

When we were first acquent;

Your locks were like the raven,

Your bonie brow was brent;

But now your brow is beld, John,

Your locks are like the snaw;

But blessings on your frosty pow,

John Anderson, my jo.

John Anderson, my jo, John,

We clamb the hill thegither;

And mony a cantie day, John,

We’ve had wi’ ane anither:

Now we maun totter down, John,

And hand in hand we’ll go,

And sleep thegither at the foot,

John Anderson, my jo.

* Turgenev means the Pre-Raphaelite artist Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927).

* The novella could be read as an evocation of Turgenev’s longing for innocent romance – something he had sacrificed to his devotion to Pauline. Sanin, its narrator, recalls his engagement to a German girl he had met in Frankfurt on his European travels thirty years before. To raise money for their marriage he meets the wife of a Russian acquaintance in Wiesbaden, hoping that she might buy his estate in Russia. Seduced by her beauty and alluring power, he follows her to Paris and lives there as her ‘slave’ until she casts him aside.

* The Turgenevs were indeed descendants of the Tatar tribes, which invaded Russia in the thirteenth century. By the fifteenth century they had taken up positions in the military and civil service of Muscovy.