Liszt's Kiss: A Novel - Softcover

Dunlap, Susanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743289404 ISBN 13: 9780743289405

Publisher: Atria, 2007

Synopsis

The romantic story of a young female pianist in cholera-ravaged Paris of 1832, whose own tragedy leaves her susceptible to the passions and scandals of the composer Franz Liszt

At the height of the Romantic era in Paris, there was no bigger celebrity than the composer and pianist Franz Liszt. A fiery and gorgeous Hungarian, he made women swoon at soirees and left a trail of broken hearts behind him. Anne, a countess and talented young pianist whose mother has just died of cholera, hears Franz Liszt in concert and is swept up in his allure. The enigmatic Marie d'Agoult, a friend of Anne's late mother, takes her under her wing and introduces her to the artistic world -- despite the objections of Anne's sullen and sorrowful father.

Anne soon finds herself in the midst of dangerous intrigues, discovering a family secret so shocking that her father will go to any lengths to protect it.

With the ominous presence of Paris's most deadly epidemic looming over every turbulent event, Liszt's Kiss is a rich evocation of a remarkable period as seen through the eyes of a sensitive young artist.

About this title

About the Author:

Susanne Dunlap is the author of Émilie's Voice and the former director of development for Connecticut Opera. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Northampton, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

One

Black crape covered the windows of the house. The smells of camphor and death hung in the air. The marquise had died only a few hours ago of cholera, a disease that was supposed to attack the poor who lived in dirty, crowded, airless hovels, not the wealthy who lived in mansions in the faubourg Saint Germain. Anne was too numb to do anything but stare out the long windows of the ballroom at Thérèse, who, her face still streaked with tears, carried a basket full of linens to a corner of the courtyard and poured them in a lump onto a bonfire. Billows of black smoke curled up and merged with the flat, gray sky. It was a precaution, Dr. Magendie said. There was likely no danger to the rest of the household, if everyone took chamomile and wore a camphor sachet.

Anne forced herself to turn away from the window. Just three days ago, the marquise had been seated at the pianoforte in the corner of the room. Her eyes had shone with excitement about the music she had recently heard. The foreign pianists who were in Paris, she said, were the greatest geniuses ever known -- especially Monsieur Chopin and Monsieur Liszt. Most of all Liszt, who was quite new to the city. She had promised that the next time he gave a concert, Anne would go with her, despite the marquis's rule to the contrary. When I was your age, I attended concerts every night. Her mother's voice still echoed in her ears. It had all been so sudden. One moment she was in the bloom of health. Then as they watched, she grew pale, clutched her stomach, and became violently ill. Although Anne herself had seen the passage from torment to peace in her mother's face not even a day later, when the doctor told them that she had died, Anne did not believe him. She was convinced that each time she rounded a corner or entered a room in the great house, she would see the marquise walking toward her, or sitting in a favorite chair and smiling at her, just as before.

"What are you doing here?"

Anne jumped. She turned to see her father leaning heavily on his cane just inside the open ballroom door. "Papa!" She ran toward him. He had retreated to the silence of his library soon after the doctor left, and she had not seen him since the moment of her mother's death.

He shrank away from her, turning so that his shoulder prevented her embrace, and put his hand up to shield his eyes as if he could not bear to look at her, or bear to let her see his tears. Anne stopped a little away from him and balled her reaching hands into fists.

"Leave this room at once. Don't ever come in here again."

Anne knew that pain lay beneath the anger in his voice, but still his tone stung her. "Please -- ," she began.

He turned his head to the side and gestured her through the door. Too tired and bewildered to think of disobeying him, Anne left, casting one more glance over her shoulder at the beautiful Pleyel, yearning to run to the instrument and play out her grief.

Since that time, Anne's pain had come and gone in waves. Sleep -- other than in fitful dozes -- was out of the question. Whenever she closed her eyes, her mother's stricken face floated across the blackness. Anne wished she could picture her happy and well, but even when she managed to think back beyond the time of her illness, the marquise still wore an expression of worried sadness. And yet Anne knew that she had been more often cheerful and lively during her lifetime. Why was it not possible to imagine her thus?

There was something, an event, an explanation, a reason, hidden just out of Anne's sight, behind a curtain across a part of her mind that was beyond her reach. She knew it was there, but she did not have the strength to draw that curtain aside. And what difference would it make? Her mother was no more. She would have to find a way to understand that simple fact.

Pierre Talon pulled the sheet up over the face of the young woman who had been telling him only a few hours ago about her childhood in Bretagne, before she had come to Paris to seek work as a seamstress. With a high, thin voice that breathed through cracked lips, she had begged for water with every other sentence and rambled on and on, clinging to life with a thread of narrative. Her efforts had been futile. She lay there dead now, like the twenty others Pierre had witnessed that evening alone. Evening? It was now morning. Through the high windows in the Hôtel-Dieu he could see the sky softening to a dark gray.

"Come, Pierre, we can do no more here."

Pierre's friend Georges pulled him gently away from the stench and moans of the patients who were still in the grip of cholera. The two of them were only medical students who had come to the University of Paris to study surgery with Andral and Louis. The horrible epidemic promoted them quickly to doctors, as they did their utmost with the rest of the students and physicians to deal with this capricious disease. The authorities had already set up cordons sanitaires, and officiers hygiéniques supervised the clearing of garbage and detritus from the streets. And yet still, cholera ravaged the population.

"I don't think I can bear to spend another minute here," Pierre said. It had been three solid days, with only a few stolen hours of sleep.

Georges draped his arm over Pierre's shoulder. "They admitted fewer today. There is word that the epidemic is abating."

Pierre nodded. Together they walked through the deserted streets back to the lodgings they shared on the rue des Bernardins near the university. Just two rooms, with a stove in the corner for heating and cooking. The furnishings were sparse, but Pierre managed to purchase an old square piano, and sometimes he played comic songs to amuse his friends. When he had the apartment to himself, he chose other pieces: sonatas and rondos, arrangements of arias from the opera. He was not very skillful, but he found it soothed his nerves to feel the keys beneath his hands and to fill the air with music.

In this time of disease and death, music was vital.

When they returned that morning, Georges threw himself on the one upholstered chair, and Pierre sat down at the piano. He played some waltzes by Schubert from a book he had purchased two years ago, when he first came to Paris.

Neither of them said a word but listened to the tender melodies until Pierre was too tired to continue.

Anne felt stiff and awkward in her heavy black silk gown, one of her mother's that Thérèse had made over to fit her, which rustled annoyingly whenever she shifted her position. Her father wore clothes she had not seen him in since the death last year of a courtier he had known most of his life. She noted when they climbed into the carriage that there were moth holes in his black felt coat and that the edges of his black armband had started to fray.

There was no time for a proper funeral: the priest had come to the house the day before and told them he could say the requiem by the tomb. Although Anne thought fear of contagion rather than other circumstances made him discourage them from bringing the marquise's coffin to the church, his tears about his lovely parishioner's untimely death were genuine. So too was his shock when he tried to draw father and daughter together and the marquis refused to give him his hand. "The Lord is merciful. He has left Your Excellency the compensation of a daughter to soothe the lonely hours of grieving," Father Jean had said in the singsong voice so familiar to Anne from mass. Her father did not have to say anything for Anne to understand that he felt her presence there more an insult than a compensation.

The marquis's gloved hands lay in tense stillness on his lap. She wished he would reach over and take hold of her. Such a simple gesture would bring her back to the world she knew instead of leaving her suspended somewhere vacant and strange. Anne turned away and stared out the window of the brougham. They drove in a queue of carriages through a dreary rain north toward Père Lachaise, the cemetery that had become the fashionable place to be buried, to lay the marquise in the family vault. The hearse led the way. Anne and her father sat in the carriage directly behind, and whenever they rounded a curve, she could see the black feathers on the horses' bridles bobbing with each step they took.

To reach the cemetery, they had to drive through the poor districts of Paris. Anne raised her camphor sachet to her nose and kept it there, as much to prevent herself from inhaling the overpowering odor of dead bodies piled up in the streets as to protect herself from the disease they were told in pamphlets and in the daily papers could well up from poisonous miasmas. None of the articles had really explained what a miasma was, but it was invisible and sounded dangerous. And Anne was quite ready to believe that some mysterious, unseen force had been at work to make her mother fall ill so suddenly. Certainly there was no justice in it. The marquise was kind and beautiful, gentle and fair. She alone, of the few people Anne had known in her life, could make her father's face light up with a tender smile.

The marquis had stayed mostly out of sight ever since his wife died. Anne saw Julien bring him trays of food in the library and take them away again hardly touched a short while later. He only emerged when it was time to go to the cemetery. Anne was too frightened of his mood to approach him without being summoned. Yet she did not really know why she feared him. He had never been openly cruel to her. Aside from making his wishes known in the form of immutable rules, he simply ignored her most of the time, leaving it to her mother and Thérèse to see that she had everything she needed and to educate her in all the subjects necessary for a young countess to know. She always kissed his proferred cheek before going to bed, but he accepted the kiss in silence. Special occasions entitled her to a pat on the head when he gave her a gift for her birthday or at Christmas.

When she was l...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0743289404
• ISBN 13: 9780743289405
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352