A harsh winter

In January 1917 Emma received a telegram from the swashbuckling Gabriele d’Annunzio who, although blind in one eye, had returned to battle against medical advice as an aviator, then spent time on the ground constantly in danger in the eastern sector of the Italian Front. Now he was back in Venice with a fever. Always the aesthete, d’Annunzio lived on the Grand Canal in the Casetta Rossa, a miniature palace rented from an Austrian prince. There, musicians turned soldiers who were stationed at gun batteries on the Lido formed his ‘Wartime Quintet’. He hastened to tell Emma that virtuosi in uniform had been performing Debussy's String Quartet at his home on beautiful Stradivarius, Guarneri, Amati and Guadagnini instruments. Emma was to pass on to ‘Mon grand et cher frère’ his gratitude and to give Chouchou his love.

The winter of 1916–7 was particularly harsh. Fuel for domestic purposes was in short supply. Debussy quoted Mélisande's ‘fear of the bitter cold’ in a letter to Dukas, where he brought up the subject twice. ‘My God, I’m cold!’ No wonder he asked Durand when he sent him the first movement of his Violin Sonata, ‘Would it be possible to let me have a bit of wood or coal?’ How grateful he was to receive the promise of a delivery from the coal merchant Monsieur Tronquin. ‘My little daughter jumped for joy when she read your letter. These days little girls prefer sacks of coal to dolls!’ Emma must have been just as grateful in view of her constant aches and pains. As payment, Debussy gave Tronquin the manuscript of a piano piece, thirty-one bars with the epigraph ‘Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon’, a line from Balcon, the first of the Cinq Poèmes de Charles Baudelaire.

Satie's break with Debussy; charity concerts and the Cello Sonata

Since 1911 Satie's bitterness about Debussy's patronising attitude to his success had not diminished. Just as Emma was the pathway when d’Annunzio wanted to communicate with Debussy, it was through her that Satie delivered to Debussy the news of his estrangement. Satie had been completing his ballet Parade, which would receive its first performance by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes on 18 May 1917.