Kyrielle Sonnet For George Sand And Frédéric Chopin Poem by Marieta Maglas

A Kyrielle Sonnet consists of 14 lines (three rhyming quatrain stanzas and a non-rhyming couplet) . Just like the traditional Kyrielle poem, the Kyrielle Sonnet also has a repeating line or phrase as a refrain (usually appearing as the last line of each stanza) . Each line within the Kyrielle Sonnet consists of only eight syllables. French poetry forms have a tendency to link back to the beginning of the poem, so common practice is to use the first and last line of the first quatrain as the ending couplet. This would also re-enforce the refrain within the poem. Therefore, a good rhyming scheme for a Kyrielle Sonnet would be:

AabB, ccbB, ddbB, AB -or- AbaB, cbcB, dbdB, AB.

Whatever George Sand Wants...
By Angeline Goreau
Published: April 20,2003

‚' Discreet nearly to a fault, shy of public performance, delicate and sickly, Frédéric Chopin was perhaps the last man in Europe likely to keep company with the Continent's most notorious woman. ''Something about her repels me, '' he wrote to his family after first meeting George Sand. Her reputation as a cigar-toting sexual outlaw was hardly calculated to appeal to a man of his tastes.

How they came together in the end remains in part a mystery, though there is ample evidence - in a stunningly energetic 40-page letter to a mutual friend - of Sand's campaign to win Chopin over. One guesses Chopin surrendered to the inevitable.

Most contemporaries saw their love affair as the latest of Sand's annexations. Chopin's friend the Marquis de Custine lamented, ''The poor creature does not see that this woman has the love of a vampire.'' The reality was considerably more complex, and in ''Chopin's Funeral, '' Benita Eisler challenges the certainties of earlier biographies and disentangles the story.

Beginning her book with Chopin's death, Eisler underlines the determining role Chopin's illness had on his life. He and his younger sister Emilia both showed signs of early tubercular infection. When he was 16 and she 14, they were sent to a health spa; Emilia died and Chopin recovered. His mother wore mourning for the rest of her life. He never lost the feeling that death shadowed him everywhere.

Eisler astutely speculates that the ''reserve and distance'' Chopin maintained ''between himself and the world was no romantic posture; with his limited energy, he saw preserving and protecting himself as crucial for his art, above all.'' A connection with the passionate, restless Sand represented an enormous risk; the dangers became immediately apparent when the composer nearly died after a winter holed up in a chilly monastery in Majorca with no mod cons. It had been Sand's idea that a trip south would cure Chopin of his chestiness. Instead, he coughed ''basins of blood.'' He never reproached her, but praised the ''angel'' for heroic self-sacrifice and devoted care. Sand herself had a new respect for her lover's fragile grasp on life, noting that ''his sensibility is too finely wrought, too exquisite, too perfect to survive for long.''

The disaster in Majorca shaped their future together: she nursed him back to health at Nohant, her idyllic country retreat, and created ideal circumstances for her household genius to flourish in. Chopin had an apartment off her bedroom, cheerfully hung with red-and-blue Chinese wallpaper. Here Sand catered to him like someone on a divine mission. Predictably, Eisler says, ''the slow drip of dependence'' wore away the relationship. Sand was the ''nurturing parent, '' Chopin the child. Sand had two actual children, Maurice and Solange, in residence, complicating matters. In the end, jealousies that grew out of the little dysfunctional family they formed split Sand and Chopin apart. Because Sand threw all her energy into spinning the breakup for their friends, while Chopin remained discreet, the story behind their alienation seems inscrutable. Eisler comes closer to explaining the whole spectacular mess than any other biographer I've read. Where others more or less follow Sand's self-mythologizing autobiography, Eisler deciphers signs of trouble in the family's construction from the very beginning.

Sand's version gave out that Solange was the spoiler of this familial bliss. But Eisler argues convincingly that Sand set up the nasty scene, relentlessly harping on her daughter's flaws from earliest childhood. Solange was left to the care of servants, who beat her while Sand escaped to Venice on her famous ''honeymoon'' with the poet Alfred de Musset. Returning home, she found ''the saucy, high-spirited 5-year-old had become cringing and submissive.'' Sand's response was to send Solange to boarding school, the first of many. Maurice, the favored son, came home to stay with Mama.

In the end, Chopin was disinvited from the family party when he refused, on principle, to collaborate in Sand's unspeakable treatment of Solange. It was Sand, Eisler points out, who encouraged Chopin's closeness to her children: after the shared ordeal in Majorca, she wrote ecstatically: ''We became a family, our bonds tighter because it was us against the world. Now, we cling to one another with deeper, more intimate feelings of happiness.'' So when Sand decreed that her lover never speak to Solange again or mention her name in Sand's presence, Chopin refused to reject the girl he had come to think of as his daughter. And he saw the ultimatum as a pretext - the ''angel'' had tired of her script.

This was already apparent the summer before, at Nohant, when Sand read aloud the new novel she had just finished, ''Lucrezia Floriani, '' to Chopin and their friend Eugène Delacroix. The book, a roman à clef, left little doubt as to the identity of its originals. Sand took the opportunity to paint herself as a martyred heroine, thwarted by an unlucky habit of falling in love with unworthy men. Her only sin is generosity - ''loving too much'' - but Prince Karol (a stand-in for Chopin) is sulkily jealous and obtuse - a pill of the first water.
Delacroix was ''in agony'' for Chopin. But the reactions of the novel's principals were peculiar: the painter was ''equally mystified by victim and executioner.... Madame Sand was perfectly at ease and Chopin could hardly stop making admiring comments.'' Later, alone with Chopin, Delacroix assumed he would learn Chopin had been putting on an act, yet the composer had nothing but praise for the novel.

History has generally accepted Delacroix's conclusion that ''he hadn't understood a single word.'' Eisler, however, corrects this misunderstanding: a note he left at the end of his life proves that the much-maligned composer chose to protect himself in the only way he could from becoming public like a frog.

George Sand complained that Chopin was petulant, childish, irritable and sulky. Eisler does not dispute these accusations, but she might have pointed out that Chopin's sins were pitifully small compared to the large license people of the period allowed geniuses. Beethoven threw a plate of stew at a waiter, struck a prince with a chair, stood composing trouserless at a window and called his sister-in-law Fatlump. Victor Hugo claimed that he had slept with more than 2,000 women. Byron's quirks included incest. Among the Bad Boys of Romanticism, Chopin was a paragon of virtue, an ideal ''husband.''

Of course, the degree to which Chopin can be safely placed among Romantics is a matter of contention. Following Jeremy Siepmann's lead in ''Chopin: The Reluctant Romantic, '' Eisler develops the theme: ''While the generation that had come of age just before his own in France... had defined Romanticism as a holy war of the 'moderns' (themselves) against the 'ancients' (their literary elders) ... Chopin clung to the past. His musical touchstones were Haydn, Mozart - but especially Bach.'' He felt little affinity for the Romantics who were his contemporaries: Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt. Even in painting, he preferred neoclassical Ingres to the ''radical inventions in color and form'' of Delacroix.''