Far from home, they were safe from censure; she was no longer afraid. In Weimar, George set about researching his Goethe book. They’d been there only a few days when Franz Liszt came calling on them in their rooms on the Kaufgasse. George had met Liszt before in Vienna and written a “letter” from “Vivian” about him for the Leader. When Liszt walked in the door, the sight of him struck her with physical force. Here was the man for whom women wore bracelets made from the pianoforte strings he broke in the intensity of his playing. He reminded her for a moment of Chapman, in his height, his angularity, his penetrating gaze. But Chapman was a second-rater, and this — this man was a god. He sat and chatted with them in a warm, free manner. She couldn’t quite believe that he was sitting there, in his black frock coat with his long hair flowing to his shoulders, on a chair in their sitting room, in human time and space. He joked about Nélida, the novel written about him a few years before, by his former mistress Madame D’Agoult, the mother of his three children, who had pilloried him for his philandering.
