Le Sud, Journal de la Mediterranee of April 25, 1839, [FOOTNOTE: Quoted in L. M. Quicherat's Adolphe Nourrit, sa vie, son talent, son caractere] shall tell us of Chopin's part in this service:—
At the Elevation of the Host were heard the melancholy tones
of the organ. It was M. Chopin, the celebrated pianist, who
came to place a souvenir on the coffin of Nourrit; and what a
souvenir! a simple melody of Schubert, but the same which had
so filled us with enthusiasm when Nourrit revealed it to us at
Marseilles—the melody of Les Astres. [FOOTNOTE: Die gestirne
is the original German title of this song.]
A less colourless account, one full of interesting facts and free from conventional newspaper sentiment and enthusiasm, we find in a letter of Chopin's companion.
Madame Sand to Madame Marliani; Marseilles, April 28, 1839:—
The day before yesterday I saw Madame Nourrit with her six
children, and the seventh coming shortly...Poor unfortunate
woman! what a return to France! accompanying this corpse, and
she herself super-intending the packing, transporting, and
unpacking [charger, voiturer, deballer] of it like a parcel!
They held here a very meagre service for the poor deceased,
the bishop being ill-disposed. This was in the little church
of Notre-Dame-du-Mont. I do not know if the singers did so
intentionally, but I never heard such false singing. Chopin
devoted himself to playing the organ at the Elevation, what an
organ! A false, screaming instrument, which had no wind except
for the purpose of being out of tune. Nevertheless, YOUR
LITTLE ONE [votre petit] made the most of it. He took the
least shrill stops, and played Les Astres, not in a proud and
enthusiastic style as Nourrit used to sing it, but in a
plaintive and soft style, like the far-off echo from another
world. Two, at the most three, were there who deeply felt
this, and our eyes filled with tears.
The rest of the audience, who had gone there en masse, and had
been led by curiosity to pay as much as fifty centimes for a
chair (an unheard-of price for Marseilles), were very much
disappointed; for it was expected that he would make a
tremendous noise and break at least two or three stops. They
expected also to see me, in full dress, in the very middle of
the choir; what not? They did not see me at all; I was hidden
in the organ-loft, and through the balustrade I descried the
coffin of poor Nourrit.
Thanks to the revivifying influences of spring and Dr. Cauviere's attention and happy treatment, Chopin was able to accompany George Sand on a trip to Genoa, that vaga gemma del mar, fior delta terra. It gave George Sand much pleasure to see again, now with her son Maurice by her side, the beautiful edifices and pictures of the city which six years before she had visited with Musset. Chopin was probably not strong enough to join his friends in all their sight-seeing, but if he saw Genoa as it presents itself on being approached from the sea, passed along the Via Nuova between the double row of magnificent palaces, and viewed from the cupola of S. Maria in Carignano the city, its port, the sea beyond, and the stretches of the Riviera di Levante and Riviera di Ponente, he did not travel to Italy in vain. Thus Chopin got at last a glimpse of the land where nine years before he had contemplated taking up his abode for some time.
On returning to Marseilles, after a stormy passage, on which Chopin suffered much from sea-sickness, George Sand and her party rested for a few days at the house of Dr. Cauviere, and then set out, on the 22nd of May, for Nohant.
Madame Sand to Madame Marliani; Marseilles, May 20, 1839:—
We have just arrived from Genoa, in a terrible storm. The bad
weather kept us on sea double the ordinary time; forty hours
of rolling such as I have not seen for a long time. It was a
fine spectacle, and if everybody had not been ill, I would
have greatly enjoyed it...
We shall depart the day after to-morrow for Nohant. Address
your next letter to me there, we shall be there in eight days.
My carriage has arrived from Chalon at Arles by boat, and we
shall post home very quietly, sleeping at the inns like good
bourgeois.