Free The Gentle Barbarian by V. S. Pritchett Page B

work: there was some local gossip—George Sand indeed wrote to Pauline asking if he were “a good man”—but the friendship seems to have been strictly musical in its interests, though when Gounod suddenly married, his wife made trouble when Louis and Pauline sent her a bracelet.
    On Sundays Turgenev would go off shooting with Louis or would go for charming walks with Pauline. They lay under the trees talking or reading books aloud or in the house he would go through the works she was studying. If there were parties Turgenev danced withher; he was an excellent dancer. On ordinary evenings, the family of aunts sat about reading, knitting and sewing, and an uncle taught Pauline’s rather spoiled little daughter Spanish, Gounod worked on a musical score, and Turgenev told stories.
    Then Louis and Pauline were off again and every few days he was writing to her. The letters begin, Bonjour or Dear Madame Viardot, and there were friendly messages to Viardot. To hers, Viardot often added a postscript. Nothing could have been more correct; but by 1848, his letters often end in ardent phrases in German. She is his “dearest Angel.” Again “Thank you a thousand, thousand times for … you know why … you the best and dearest of women … what happiness you gave me then …” And “Give me your kind and delicate hands so that I can press and kiss them a long time … Whatever a man can think, feel and say, I say it and feel it now.”
    Her hands were beautiful and he worshipped them all his life. In a letter sent to her in 1849 he said in German:
    All day I have been lost in a magical dream. Everything, everything, all the past, all that has been poured irresistibly and spontaneously into my soul … I am whole … I belong body and soul to my dear Queen. God bless you a thousand times.
    In July ‘49 at Courtavenel he went off to a village féte, studied the faces and watched the sweating dancers. He passed the next day alone and wrote to her in German:
    I cannot tell you how much I have thought of you every day, when I got back to the house I cried out your name in ecstasy and opened my arms with longing for you. You must have heard and seen me!
    There is a line in one letter in which, once only, he addresses her as “
du
.” From this and from the paragraphs in German some biographers have thought that Pauline and he had become physically lovers and that German was used to hide the fact from her husband who is said not to have known the language. This is most unlikely: Louis had been many times to Germany; as a capable translator in a bilingual family, he must at least have picked up some German in the course of his business and indeed from Pauline’s singing. German is more likely to be “a tender little language” between intimatefriends and Turgenev, the polyglot, liked to spice his letters with foreign words for he could not use more than a word or two of Russian to her. Perhaps in using German he was simply using the romantic language of the sublime he had learned in Berlin when he was nineteen. Expressions of love are at once more extravagant and frequent in a foreign tongue and, for that reason, have the harmless sense of theatrical fantasy or flattery: platonic love affairs live by words and not deeds. George Sand wrote with the same exaltation in her novels; and young women of the period would expect no less from a correspondent, especially from the Russian “openness.” There is no sign that Pauline ever replied to Turgenev in such terms.
    It is impossible to say more about the nature of this love for the moment; but there is strong reason to suspect that Pauline, duty or no duty, “hot southern blood” (as she once or twice said) or not, was one of those gifted young women who do not feel physical passion until later in life and have something mannish in their nature. And what about the guilt Turgenev may have felt in