Smolensk, Russia, February 1837 and February 1860
Belatedly, Adelaide received John’s final utterances belatedly. He had passed away two weeks earlier and had been buried ten days before. She hadn’t stood at his deathbed, having been banished from their marriage bed for many years; nor did she attend the funeral, for which she had not been invited. Another woman had long since taken her place: a usurper whose tears could dampen cheeks and soak a handkerchief just as well.
The news had traveled with uncanny punctuality. A letter in Adrien’s nearly illegible handwriting arrived in Smolensk the day after John’s death, dated January 24. My dear mother, I regret being the bearer . . . the wording was absurdly formal. Adelaide had raised Adrien alone until his flight to Moscow at seventeen, a little over a year ago. A father might be a stranger; still, his fame could erase a mother’s devotion with ease.
There was no mention of a funeral in Adrien’s note, and for a moment Adelaide contemplated sending a carriage to Moscow. How perfectly she could present herself, clad in widow’s black, at the Povarskaya Street residence, startling the servants and discomfiting the mistress. How she could insist on every detail: the black horses for the carriage, the music at the funeral, the artist commissioned to craft the death mask, which, already cast, was beyond alteration.
Yet such an ambush would merely fuel gossip. Adelaide had no intention of feeding the chatter of inconsequential people. To change her conduct merely because John had died would be surrender. What did it matter if no one—not even Adrien—remembered that she, Adelaide Field, remained legally John’s wife and that it was her right to accompany his coffin from the Moscow Reformed Church chapel to Vvedenskoye Cemetery? Once known as the German Cemetery, it had since become a final gathering place for all foreigners: Germans, Italians, French, Polish, and English, among them Protestants and Catholics as well as those who were godless like John.
Clotilde Charpentier, who could play music no better than a hen could paddle in the Patriarch’s Ponds, would trudge behind John’s coffin, her face veiled heavily to shield herself from the January wind and the crowd’s scrutinizing gazes.
When John first took up Clotilde as a mistress, he compared her to a pet rabbit—soft, compliant. Clotilde was a woman easy to love, he explained to Adelaide, who listened with quiet patience, sure he expected her to. Love, she replied, was rarely meant to be simple. Not for you, he said, but you’re different. Most people don’t want to wage war in the realm of love. Most people, Adelaide thought to remind him, don’t want war at all, yet show me someone whose life hasn’t been shaped by one battle after another.
That discussion dated from years past. Napoleon Bonaparte, already having sacrificed half a million soldiers in Russia, remained an emperor chasing fresh triumphs. John and Adelaide, still young enough to trust their own fantasies, believed in their respective destinies: he longed for a woman to worship him; she longed to master her art and stand as his equal.
He was the first to admit defeat by leaving her for Clotilde. He made it clear that no musical gift was required of a woman who wished to devote herself to him. For Adelaide, the insult touched music as much as the arrangement itself. If not for music, Adelaide and John would never have met in this life. His mistresses were, in truth, chances that fate had offered.
A woman easy to love was never truly beloved, though that mattered little now. Let the Muscovites gossip about the absent widow at the funeral. People could be generous when they chose, but more often they were cruel. Either way, they would misjudge Adelaide.
Thus, with a swanlike calm, her long neck tilting slightly, her face veiled, Adelaide greeted the Moscow guest. For years she had, like a dutiful bride-to-be assembling a trousseau, been gathering mourning and half-mourning finery of the finest sort: laces and beads from the best Moscow suppliers who boasted Parisian ties rather than Prussian; lengths of silk and satin and linen and cotton, all deeply black, far superior to the flimsy, faded fabrics worn by ordinary widows. She had not deigned to haggle with Madame Bassett, Smolensk’s premier French couturière, who promised mourning attire so enviable that a bride might envy old age. If Madame Field must live as a widow, her clothes would reflect that status. She had been a widow of sorts long before John’s death, though the phrase veuve de paille was never uttered to her face. It was time to discard that straw role and dress in her finest mourning.
The fashionable young man announced himself as Nicholas Yakovlev, a friend of Adrien’s. Naturally Adrien had not made the journey himself. If this wounded her, it was not something the guest should witness.
When Yakovlev spoke of the clergyman who had attended the deathbed, Adelaide expressed astonishment that John had asked for a minister.
“Monsieur Field did not, but his friends insisted.”
His friends—that would be Moscow’s idle ladies: Countess Khomyakova, Princess Tuchkova, Countess Orlova, and others in their circle. Brimming with purpose, they hovered around any death worth noting. It was only fitting that their pious faces be seen at the departure of a genius. They would pride themselves on preserving the soul of “the Englishman,” restless for too long. That he was Irish would be of no consequence to them.
“I’m surprised Adrien didn’t object,” Adelaide said. “His father followed Voltaire. Adrien must know that.”
The visitor only bowed his head.
“I suppose you’ll say Adrien had to follow Leon’s orders.”
“Monsieur Leon has managed the household. Madame should not blame Adrien.”
Leon, twenty-two that year, illegitimate, rarely missed a chance to curry favor with any woman who could advance his fortunes; a tenor, he would sing for mere scraps of attention. Adelaide indicated Yakovlev should continue.
In his accented English, Yakovlev recited John’s dying exchange with the clergyman from St. Andrew’s Church. “Are you a Protestant?” he was asked. “No.” “So perhaps you’re a Catholic?” “No.” “Then perhaps you’re a Calvinist?” “Not exactly that. I’m not a Calvinist, but a claveciniste.”
Adelaide lifted her veil to regard Yakovlev. “Did he say claveciniste?”
“Monsieur Field was always fond of a good pun,” Yakovlev replied with a smile. “The world will remember his wit.”
People often preferred quotable mediocrity to a genuine masterpiece. Adelaide lowered her veil. “Rehearsed,” she said. “He didn’t speak French well. He must have prepared those final words.”
Yakovlev again bowed, unwilling to conspire with a jilted woman.
“I used to correct his French correspondence.”
“Madame is known for her many talents.”
Adelaide wondered from which corner Adrien had dragged this insolent creature. “He may have considered other valedictions,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were twenty such versions.”
“Perhaps Madame has forgotten that Monsieur Field was not known for prolific output.”
What was Adrien’s aim in sending her this man? Adrien must know she would not be cowed by anything. To sting her, then? That gadfly had enlisted a partner in his crusade against his mother. “How did you meet Adrien?” Adelaide asked. “My son makes such clever acquaintances in Moscow.”
“I wouldn’t presume any close friendship,” Yakovlev replied. “But Adrien thought Madame might help resolve a business matter.”
“He owes you money? Is he not his father’s heir?”
“Monsieur Field,” the young man said, with genuine sorrow, “left him some unsettled business.”
So Yakovlev proved to be more spider than gadfly.
A husband fated for immortality had ended up a debtor, a third-rate comedian laboring over his last lines; a gifted child who’d squandered his promise, consorting with moneylenders. Adelaide nodded, acknowledging Yakovlev’s claim. Then, in a warmer tone, she asked if he had heard that Pushkin had died the day before. “One of my husband’s sharpest friends,” she added.
Yakovlev said he had heard. “An irredeemable loss,” he declared. “For Russia and for humanity.”
Would this young man, so quick to echo the prevailing sentiment, wound his mother? Adelaide allowed that Pushkin would be remembered for all time by friends and strangers. She did not add: unlike John Field. And yet, like any man, Pushkin’s body would feed the earth. What did being remembered matter? When a life ends, night falls. All future dawns belong to others. Men die, often forgotten.
That thought returned to Adelaide when, seventeen years later, she learned Adrien had perished in a roadside tavern where he often played the pianoforte or violin for vodka. Adelaide shed no tears. A grieving mother could disarm people. She would be labeled heartless because she would not surrender to sorrow.
Six years after that, death found Adelaide as well. She had arranged everything, just as she had for marriage and widowhood, yet she did not rehearse any last words for those gathered at her bedside. Only once did she lift her eyes to the ceiling and utter, Hold your tongue.
Madame Field was speaking to herself, the women claimed, but Katerina, the orphan Adelaide had raised, insisted she was addressing a specter. “Ghost, what ghost?” the women laughed; Madame Field was not superstitious.
Adelaide did not defend Katerina. By then she no longer engaged with anyone. Instead, she heard music. For a moment she fancied it could be John, playing his pieces for her, waiting for her to rejoin him. Would that not be a gentler ending?
Listening again, she recognized Chopin’s nocturnes rather than John’s. Performed by someone more adept than John. God, perhaps.
Poor John. Who would remember him after her death? And his music? Adelaide would join Adrien in Smolensk Cemetery, far from where John lay. She had known both men well. Knowing John had made it easier to release him; knowing Adrien had made it harder. They had been men of extraordinary talent, their ambitions even larger, but their failures had been greater still. If she felt any disappointment, it was in how little they had understood her, how little they had cared to know her.
Adrien left no trace, another nameless musician. John, with his modest fame, would become a footnote in Frédéric Chopin’s life. If someone wrote John Field’s biography, it would be a slim volume, and Adelaide, his estranged wife, would appear only in a few lines. Music had chosen him, and he remained its instrument. Music had come to her by chance, yet she had forged a life from coincidences, from Pondicherry to Paris to Moscow. Her story was more surprising, less predictable. And now, like him, she would die, soon to be forgotten.
“Enough!” Adelaide cried, with a force that frightened Masha, the maid trying to spoon medicine into her clenched mouth. In eleven years of service, Masha had never heard her mistress speak with such volatility. She looked toward Doctor Staudt, wondering if he had given the wrong instructions, unaware that Madame Field was rejecting not the medicine but, for the first time, life itself.
__________________________________
From Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li . Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Copyright © 2026 by Yiyun Li. All rights reserved.
