Smolensk, Russia, February 1837 and February 1860
Belatedly, John’s last words reached Adelaide. He had been dead for a fortnight, buried for ten days. She was not at his deathbed, having been banished from their marriage bed for decades; nor did she attend the funeral, to which she received no invitation. Another woman had long since taken her place: a usurper’s tears could wet cheeks and soak handkerchiefs equally well.
The news had traveled in a timelier manner. A letter in Adrien’s nearly illegible handwriting arrived in Smolensk the day after John’s death, on the twenty-fourth of January. My dear mother, I regret being the bearer . . . so on and so forth. The wording was ridiculously formal. Adelaide had raised Adrien alone until his defection to Moscow at seventeen, a little over a year ago. A father could be a stranger; still, his fame readily effaced a mother’s care.
There was no mention of a funeral in Adrien’s letter, and for a moment, Adelaide indulged the thought of ordering a carriage for Moscow. How flawlessly she could present herself, decked in her widow’s weeds, at the house on Povarskaya Street, surprising the servants and embarrassing the mistress. How inexorably she could disapprove: the choice of black horses for the carriage, the music played at the funeral, the artist hired to make the death mask, which, already cast, it was too late to alter.
But such an ambush would only provoke gossip. Adelaide had no intention of providing yet more entertainment for irrelevant people. To change her behavior simply because John had died would be a surrender. What did it matter if no one—not even Adrien—recalled that she, Adelaide Field, was still John’s wife by law, and that it was her right to accompany his coffin from the chapel of the Moscow Reformed Church to Vvedenskoye Cemetery? Once called the German Cemetery, it now made room for all the foreigners to congregate in eternity: Germans, Italians, French, Polish, and English, among them Protestants and Catholics as well as godless men like John.
Clotilde Charpentier, who could play music no better than a hen could float and paddle in the Patriarch’s Ponds, would walk behind John’s coffin, with a heavy black veil to shield herself from the January wind and people’s appraising looks.
When John had first taken up Clotilde as a mistress, he had compared her to a pet rabbit, soft and compliant. Clotilde was a woman easy to love, he explained to Adelaide, who listened calmly, as she knew he would expect her to. Love was surely not meant to be an easy undertaking, she said. 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 of reminding him, don’t want war of any kind, but find me a single person whose life has not been marked by wars, one after another.
That conversation had taken place years ago. Napoleon Bonaparte, having already lost half a million soldiers in Russia, was still an emperor dreaming of new conquests. John and Adelaide were both young enough to believe in their own dreams: he wanted a woman to idolize him; she aspired to be a virtuoso in her own right, an equal to him.
He was the first to admit defeat by leaving her for Clotilde. No musical gift, he made amply clear, was required of a woman willing to dedicate her life to him. For Adelaide, the insult was as much to her as to music, the other party in the ménage à trois she thought they had both agreed to. If not for music, Adelaide and John would not have met in this life. His mistresses were all chance encounters.
A woman easy to love was never truly loved, though it mattered little now. Let the Muscovites say what they wished about the widow absent at the funeral. People could be generous when they chose to, but more often they were cruel. Either way, they would be wrong about Adelaide.
So, with a swanlike equanimity, her long neck sloped ever so slightly, her face hidden behind a veil, Adelaide greeted the visitor from Moscow. For a few years, like a diligent bride-to-be working on her trousseau, she had been accumulating mourning and half-mourning costumes of the most desirable quality: laces and beads from the choicest vendors in Moscow, those with Parisian connections instead of Prussian; rolls of silk and satin and linen and cotton, all extravagantly black, unlike the flimsy, faded stuff worn by common widows. She had not deigned to haggle with Madame Bassett, the best French dressmaker in Smolensk, who promised mourning attire enviable enough to make a bride yearn for old age. If Madame Field must live as a widow, her dresses would suit her status. And she was a widow of sort long before John’s death, though no one used the term veuve de paille to her face. It was time to shed the straw part and dress up in her best weeds.
The fashionable young man introduced himself as Nicholas Yakovlev, a friend of Adrien’s. Naturally Adrien had neglected to make the journey himself. If this pained her, it was not for the visitor to witness.
When Yakovlev mentioned the clergyman who attended the death-bed, Adelaide expressed surprise that John had asked to see a pastor.
“Monsieur Field did not, but his friends insisted.”
His friends—these would have been the idle ladies of Moscow society, Countess Khomyakova and Princess Tuchkova and Countess Orlova and others in their circle. Buzzing with purpose, they swarmed the scene of any promising death. It was only fitting that their pious faces should be seen to mark the departure of a genius. They would pride themselves on having preserved the soul of “the Englishman,” wayward for too long. That he was actually Irish would make no difference.
“I’m surprised Adrien didn’t object,” Adelaide said. “His father was a follower of Voltaire. Adrien must know that.”
The visitor only bowed his head.
“I suppose you’ll say that Adrien had to follow Leon’s orders.”
“Monsieur Leon has been in charge of the household. Madame must not blame Adrien.”
Leon, twenty-two that year, a bastard, rarely missed an opportunity to ingratiate himself with any woman who could advance his position; a tenor, he would sing for scraps of attention. Adelaide indicated that Yakovlev should carry on.
In his accented English, Yakovlev performed 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 look at Yakovlev. “Did he say claveciniste?”
“Monsieur Field was always fond of a good pun,” Yakevlov said with a smile. “The world will remember his wit.”
People often preferred quotable mediocrity to a true masterpiece. Adelaide lowered her veil. “Rehearsed,” she said. “He didn’t speak French well. He must have prepared those final words.”
Yakovlev again bowed his head, reluctant to conspire with a jilted woman.
“I used to correct his French correspondence.”
“Madame is known for her many talents.”
Adelaide wondered from which crevice Adrien had excavated this insolent creature. “He may even have considered other valedictions,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were twenty such compositions.”
“Perhaps Madame has forgotten that Monsieur Field was not renowned as prolific.”
What was Adrien’s intention in sending her this man? Adrien must know she was not to be crushed by anything. To sting her, then? That gadfly had enlisted a comrade in his campaign against his mother. “How did you meet Adrien?” Adelaide asked. “My son makes such clever friends in Moscow.”
“I wouldn’t presume any close friendship,” Yakovlev replied. “But Adrien thought Madame might help clear up a business matter.”
“He owes you money? Is he not his father’s heir?”
“Monsieur Field,” the young man said, with an air of genuine sadness, “left him some unresolved business.”
So, Yakovlev was more spider than gadfly.
A husband destined for immortality had ended up a debt-ridden, third-rate comedian, laboring over his closing 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 the news that Pushkin had died the previous day. “One of my husband’s most brilliant friends,” she added.
Yakovlev said he had heard. “An irredeemable loss,” he said. “For Russia and for mankind.”
Would this young man, so ready to parrot the general opinion, cause pain to his mother? Adelaide said that no doubt Pushkin would be remembered in perpetuity by friends and strangers. She did not add: unlike John Field. And yet Pushkin’s body, like any other, would be food for worms. What did it signify, to be remembered? When a life ends, night falls. All the daybreaks hence belong to others. Men die, nearly always to be forgotten.
This thought returned to Adelaide when, seventeen years later, the news reached her that Adrien had died, in a roadside tavern where he often played the pianoforte or the fiddle in exchange for vodka. Adelaide had no tears. A weeping mother could disarm people. She would be called callous because she did not allow herself to be subjugated by grief.
Six years after that, death came for Adelaide. She had arranged everything, just as she had for her bridehood and her widowhood, but she did not rehearse any last words for the hoverers near her bed. Only once, she opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. Hold your tongue, she was heard to say.
Madame Field must be addressing herself, the women said, but Katerina, the orphan Adelaide had raised as a daughter, insisted that she was talking to a ghost. Ghost, what ghost, the women laughed; Madame Field was not superstitious.
Adelaide did not defend Katerina. By then she was no longer attend-ing to any human conversation. Rather, she heard music. For a moment, she fancied that it was John, playing his compositions for her, waiting for her to reunite with him. Wouldn’t that be a kind-enough 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 was to join Adrien in the Smolensk Cemetery, far from where John was buried. She had known both men well. Knowing John had made it easier to relinquish him; knowing Adrien had made it harder. They had been men of prodigious talents, their ambitions more prodigious, but their failures had been greater still. If she felt any disappointment, it was in how little they had known her, how little they had cared to know.
Adrien left no trace, another nameless musician. John, with his minor fame, would become a footnote in the life of Frédéric Chopin. If someone were to write John Field’s biography, it would be a meager volume, and Adelaide, his estranged wife, would occupy only a few lines. Music had been chosen for him, and he remained its puppet. Music had come to her by chance, yet she had forged a life from serendipities, from Pondicherry to Paris to Moscow. Her story was more surprising, less predictable. And now, like him, she would die, to be forgotten soon.
“Enough!” Adelaide said, with a vehemence 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 lack of composure. She looked up at Doctor Staudt, wondering if he had given her the wrong instructions, unaware that Madame Field was saying no not to the medicine but, for the first time, to life.
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From Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li. Used with permission of the publisher, Fararr, Straus, and Giroux. Copyright © 2026 by Yiyun Li. All rights reserved.