memoirs, 1933–77 ❧ 43
Ushered into a drawing room in blond Art Deco style of the 1930s with a
splendid Rubens over the fi replace at one end and at the other a somewhat
less-than-splendid portrait of the maîtresse de maison^19 by Balthus, we found a
crowd of people in costumes ranging from full dress or dinner jackets through
suede and tweeds to blue jeans. Their ages, origins, and social position
appeared equally diverse. To greet us, the maîtresse de maison came forward
wearing a faded cotton frock and rather dirty canvas shoes, and dangling a
half-consumed cigarette from her lower lip. As I smothered my astonishment,
she presented me in routine fashion to half a dozen persons and ushered us
into a superb Louis XIV dining room where servants in eighteenth-century liv-
ery were administering a sumptuous buffet.
The introductions did not “take” and Alix had disappeared into the crowd.
I had not yet played in Paris and was totally unknown, nor did I know a soul
in the motley assembly. There was nothing to do until Alix should reappear
for departure but to try to look otherwise than I really felt, namely completely
lost and ill at ease. For what seemed an interminable time, I examined bibelot
after bibelot, simulated curiosity for huge piles of art books and periodicals,
and attentively studied the paintings, which were really worth looking at, until
through the crowd came an American poet–art critic whom I knew. For all the
trash he has written about art, I am prepared to forgive him because of his
introduction to the engraver Roger Vieillard and to his wife, the painter Anita
de Caro. My interest in prints and my sense of their affi nities with the art which
I practice led us rapidly to a close friendship.
After 1967, we spent part of every summer with Annette Gruner Schlum-
berger in Provence. In the evenings there was music, reading aloud, and good
conversation. After 1969, one of my harpsichords took up permanent resi-
dence in the music room, along with a superb Bösendorfer piano and a music
library stocked with classic piano and chamber music that I had brought back
from East Germany.
For some thirty-fi ve years, I had not regularly practiced the piano, being
unwilling to risk its interference with my dealings with the harpsichord and the
clavichord. But now I found that my command of these instruments had long
since become so fi rmly rooted that there was no further danger in returning to
the instrument and loves of my adolescence. In 1968, I had established the latest
of my many visual readjustments in such fashion as to be able, at least for a time,
to sightread again with almost my old fl uency. Leaving aside for the moment the
more abstracted masters such as Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and even Schubert,
I gave myself over to orgies of real piano music; Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt.
In our little circle the piano came to be known as “la maîtresse” and the harpsi-
chord “la légitime.” From summer to summer my piano playing improved, and I
- Mistress of the house, presumably Marie-Laure de Noailles.
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