Il labirinto

D'Agoult- Liszt

Marie met the Hungarian Franz Liszt in 1833 in Paris. He was an upcoming composer and musician, yet a man below her social standing. Their friendship developed based on books that they shared and discussed together beginning with the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Nerval and George Sand. Later works they discussed included Volupté, by Sainte-Beuve and Oberman, by Senancour.

Liszt believed that "The artist is the living expression of God, of nature, and of humanity." Through art, one could experience God, he said. Liszt was also an Utopian, who had read the Sainte-Simonian socialist thinkers, which he introduced to Marie. Having lived a sheltered life, she was unaware of the great physical misery experienced by the common people who lived outside of her aristocratic world. Liszt's egalitarian views fed Marie's romanticism, and they fell in love.

In the spring of 1833, Marie's family moved to Croissy and she could not see Liszt. Only their letters kept their relationship alive. She feared never seeing him again, and wrote, "I am alone, alone with one great thought, and that thought is you. I love you with all my heart." In the autumn of 1834 her family returned to Paris and they became lovers.

Marie struggled with keeping their affair secret. She was haunted by melancholy and even madness, with worry about the scandal their affair would cause to her family and society. Liszt, a free thinker, told her that up till now she had been keeping secret all the passions and ideas that were "pure" within herself and that it was a decision between herself and God as to eloping with him, staying with her husband, or even taking holy orders.

Their love relationship developed with greater intensity and in August, 1835 her husband granted her a divorce. Her family disowned her and she suffered from being separated from her children, as women had no custody rights after a divorce at this time. When Marie took the step of living openly with Liszt, she was shunned by her family and was the source of much gossip from the aristocratic circles she had been accustomed to.

They traveled Europe together as he composed and performed, and they had three children together. They also lived with female author George Sand and her lover Frédéric Chopin for a while. They gathered thinkers, writers, artists, musicians and eventually revolutionaries in their salon wherever they lived, encouraging the free expression of ideas.

Their creativity, passion, and love of ideas kept them together even though they differed in many of their attitudes and opinions. However, Liszt's protracted absences and well-publicized philandering brought an end to their tumultuous affair in 1839, with the final split taking place in 1844.