LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - In his hour of need, Richard Spalding turned to the other great love of his life: music.
He sat at his grand piano and began to play “Vienna, City of My Dreams,” by composer Rudolf Sieczyński.
It was his way of thanking the two nurses from Treyton Oaks Towers in Louisville who came to tell him of his wife’s death and who had cared for her in her final days. Through the piano, he found comfort in the stark reality that his true love of 71 years was gone, taken from him by the coronavirus.
Richard, 96, who survived a mild case of the virus, spent the last days of Cécile’s life with her but was left to grieve alone without family or friends due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Music was the link that brought them together and a passion they shared throughout their life.
It all began when as a U.S. Army corporal, he was stationed at the Toussus-le-Noble Airport near Versailles, France, manning the control tower during the closing stages of World War II. Cécile Jeunet, an artist in training, knew he was the one on that fateful Sunday in April 1945 when in his limited French he mentioned that he played the piano.
His friend, Jack Patterson, cajoled him to spend the afternoon in the nearby village of Gif-sur-Yvette before going on duty that night. The couple met in a café owned by the parents of her friend, Huguette Rouselle, enjoying a glass of white wine as they attempted to understand each other.
Before long the men were on the road back to the base.
Cécile and Huguette offered to walk with them on the 5-kilometer trek.
“When I mentioned that I played piano, suddenly she pushed Huguette out of the way and the next thing I know I was talking to Cécile,” recalls Richard. ”‘I love the piano,’ she said. That’s what caused her to notice me.”
As their deadline approached, the men began to jog back to the base.
“Do you only get passes on Sunday?” Richard recalled that Cécile asked him coyly that first night.
“The way she looked at me and smiled … no girl had ever looked at me like that before. It was love at first sight. It was like a thunderclap,” Richard said of his late wife.
Back on base, the week dragged on and Richard could not get Cécile off his mind. Using the few resources at hand, he asked a British Army telephone operator to connect him with the café.
His conversation with Huguette was going badly when she handed the phone to a man who spoke a little English.
From the conversation came these very distinct words: Cécile, Thursday night, 6 p.m., in Paris, at the Arc de Triomphe.
“I got that all very clearly, we had a date, but I wasn’t even sure I would remember what she looked like,” Richard said.
But he needn’t worry.
“At the Arc, there were hundreds of soldiers and girls, all just milling about. Finally, I saw her coming. She took my hand and said in French ‘Let’s get out of here.’”
The new couple spent that first date walking and talking.
“She showed me all the beautiful things the city had to offer,” he said. “I don’t remember saying I’ll see you again, but somehow we did. After our third date, she took me to her home and I met her mother. We saw each other maybe a dozen times in Paris.”
With the war over, Richard was being sent by the army to Frankfurt, Germany.
“I had a chance to go see her two to three times before I left. I would take a truck or a jeep, hitchhike, whatever was available. I just got there,” he said.
Before he shipped out, there was one last meeting with Cécile.
“I knocked on the door and there she was. I said I’ve come to say goodbye. Cécile walked with me back to the train station across the Seine River. We had never said we loved each other - I’d never even kissed her - but we knew what we had was important.
“The last thing I said to her was ‘je reviendrai,’ or, I’ll be back. She kind of gulped because that was the strongest thing I’d said to her,” he said. “She did not want to marry an American and leave Paris and her family.”
His tour of duty now complete, Richard headed home and back to school to finish his degree in music at the University of Louisville all the while thinking about Cécile.
“I went back to complete my studies and I wore out a French dictionary writing to her. I was thinking about Cécile all the time and she was writing these nice letters and they were affectionate, but not overly so. She was being very careful,” he said.
Richard recalls reading The Courier Journal one day and seeing a photo of local French war bride Josette Bouchet Kearns and her husband William.
“I thought if that guy can marry this French girl, why can’t I marry a French girl? I’m going to ask Cécile to marry me!” he remembered.
Despite his newly found determination, he struggled with the enormity of the idea.
“I was young, inexperienced with no money, I was a student. Who was I to ask a girl to leave her family, her country, the culture and everything she knew and come to live in the west end of Louisville? It was almost out of the realm of possibility.”
But he couldn’t deny his feelings.
“It was 1948 and I wrote her the letter, in which I said, ‘I want to marry you and I hope you’ll say yes.’ I was very nervous about asking Cécile because I didn’t even know how I would get to France. I even asked my sister Pearl to come with me and see to it that I put the letter in the box because I might not have the nerve to go through with it,” he said.
Her response left him on pins and needles.
“Cécile wrote back and said she loved me, but she didn’t know if she could marry me, so I had to get over there,” he said.
Desperate to be with the woman he loved, Richard devised a plan. Using his GI Bill, he applied and was accepted to study piano for the summer at the prestigious Conservatoire américain de Fontainebleau in France.
“As soon as I arrived, I walked all the way to Cécile’s house, but she was working at a design studio. Her father got so excited he ran across the street to a post office to call her workplace. He talks to her boss and told her that Richard had arrived. She’s very excited and exclaims, ‘He’s here,’ to a room full of designers. Everybody knew that Cécile was waiting for her guy to come back. They all said, go, go, go to him,” he said.
At the end of his summer courses, Richard gave Cécile an ultimatum.
“I said in a few days this place is going to be empty. I’m going to have to leave if you don’t say you will marry me. She looked me in the eye and said. ’Oui, yes, I will go.’ That thrilled me to death,” he said.
In an attempt to extend his stay so the couple could marry in France, Richard worked out a deal with his music professor.
“My professor told me if I wanted to stay, he would allow me to attend his classes at the Conservatoire de Paris. I would not be a regular student, I wouldn’t get a diploma, I would be his student,” he said.
The plan worked. Richard lived with Cécile’s parents during his time as a student at the conservatoire.
The couple married on Nov. 6, 1948, and sailed back to Louisville the following year. Richard would eventually become a professor of music at U of L. Cécile immediately found work tutoring students in French.
Over their 71 years of marriage, the couple relocated Cécile’s parents to Louisville, raised three children, and six years ago, moved to a 10th-floor apartment at Treyton Oaks Towers. Cécile’s health had begun to decline with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
“She had several falls and finally one fall sent her to the hospital, and she couldn’t come back to the 10th-floor. We moved to the third floor in the personal care unit. She got worse and worse and finally she was moved to skilled nursing on the second-floor.”
Richard recalls the ordeal of living with the coronavirus while watching the love of his life fade away.
“Our children were not allowed in the building. I had the disease, so they let me be with her. I spent many, many hours every day with her,” he said.
And the coronavirus was not forgiving for his bride.
“Overnight she changed from being a person needing all kinds of help to what seemed like a coma. Soon she is near death and lying there breathing with very shallow breaths. I spent the last two days with her,” he said.
But not the last hours.
“It was midafternoon, and I got so tired I couldn’t stay any longer. I went to the apartment and about an hour later two nurses came, dressed in protective clothing, yellow jackets, masks and gloves on, and they told me she died. It just broke my heart,” he said. “I would have liked to have been there and I missed it by an hour.”
Just a week after Cécile’s passing, fellow French war bride Josette Kearns, the woman whose story inspired Richard to ask Cécile to marry him, who also suffered from the coronavirus, would die.
Two French women, both swept off their feet by American soldiers. Their lives intertwined, becoming friends in a distant land only to die on the same floor at Treyton Oaks mere days apart.
Now Richard is left alone with his memories and the loneliness that comes with losing your soulmate. He looks for solace in a portrait of Cécile and to his beloved piano.
“Every day I play ‘La Vie en Rose,’ the torch song made famous by French chanteuse Edith Piaf,” he said. “I don’t let a day go by that I don’t play it. It was one of her favorites.”
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