25 - Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2022
Summary
The love between
Emma and Claude Emma loved Claude, staying by him even when she must have despaired of his behaviour. It was she who initially attracted Debussy towards her. She loved the company of musicians. Marguerite Long described Emma as ‘a woman of genius, who had musical intuition to the most extraordinary degree and was the ideal woman for the artist he was. She had always lived around great musicians.’ It was Emma who first sent Debussy flowers, gave him presents. She knew his impecuni-ous state when she fell in love with him. As Debussy wrote in December 1904, ‘I am poorer than Job … I have terribly little money and Mme B [Bardac] … has no intention of giving me any, nor I of accepting any.’
They both had to suffer gossip, ostracism, scathing comments. Obviously in view of their comparative circumstances Debussy would look like the one to profit materially from their association, but Emma seems to have had no qualms about giving up the certainty of the luxurious life she led with banker Sigismond Bardac. It is often said that she was demanding, unable to give up her love of luxury, frustrated by lack of financial resources and still aspiring to live in the style to which she had become accustomed with her first husband, but there is little evidence that she did not willingly and relatively speedily completely change from being a socially active society lady to a supportive wife and mother who did not hold artistic salons and ‘at homes’. Their official marriage was for legal reasons rather than a desire to ensnare Debussy. He made little of this event, she did not boast of it and there seem to be no comments from those surrounding them. She was willing to sacrifice financial security for love of both the man and the music. There was never any definite promise of inheritance from Osiris. She could never have kept her divorce secret from her uncle and must have been fully aware of his fanaticism about his religion and his belief in fidelity.
Of the two, she had the harder task of maintaining the relationship, having to put up with the inevitable need for isolation and mood swings which were part and parcel of being the wife of a dedicated, often irascible composer.
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- Emma and Claude DebussyThe Biography of a Relationship, pp. 349 - 362Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022