Claude Debussy in a portrait by Félix Nadar, circa 1908. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The rumour has circulated for a century in foyers and in anecdote manuals: for Claude Debussy, three women supposedly tried to kill themselves. The true number, the one the documents support, is two. It is more than enough.
The first was called Gabrielle Dupont, Gaby with the green eyes to everyone, the companion of the poor years, the years of Pelléas still in draft and rented rooms in Montmartre. In early 1897 Gaby found in Debussy’s pocket a letter that left no doubt about another relationship. It is Debussy himself who tells what followed, in a letter to his friend Pierre Louÿs of February 1897: a crisis, tears, and a revolver. Gaby survived, and the couple dragged on for a couple more years before breaking up.
The second was his wife. Rosalie Texier, called Lilly, a provincial dressmaker, married on 19 October 1899: on the evening of the wedding Debussy had given a piano lesson to pay for dinner. In June 1904 he met Emma Bardac, a refined singer, the wife of a banker, and within a few weeks he left home. On 13 October 1904, on the eve of their fifth wedding anniversary, Lilly shot herself in the chest. She survived too, but the surgeons gave up trying to remove the bullet, which stayed lodged in a vertebra for the rest of her life. The soprano Mary Garden, the first Mélisande, recounts in her memoirs having seen the wound, a small dark hole under the left breast, and never again being able to look at Debussy in the same way.
The scandal was enormous and did what the most daring music in Europe had not done: it emptied Debussy’s salon. Almost all his friends sided with Lilly, the newspapers embroidered, and the subscription opened to help her gathered illustrious signatures while the composer and Emma took refuge in England. The legend’s third woman is born here, by a kind of budding: two real pistols, in two different stories, round up to three in café talk. Serious biographers, from François Lesure on, count two pistols.
What remains is the question that makes the case interesting for a magazine like this and not just for the crime pages: how much of life enters the music? In the years between the two shots Debussy wrote La Mer, and to the daughter he had with Emma, Chouchou, he dedicated Children’s Corner, the tenderest music we have from him. Biography almost never explains the notes. It surrounds them, the way the sea surrounds an island: it touches it everywhere, and never wets the inside.
A marginal note, a duty in a paper that handles stories like this one: we are talking here about facts from one hundred and twenty years ago, documented by letters and memoirs. The pain they contain, however, is not of an era, it is of all time; and anyone who feels it close to home deserves a hearing today as then.