Frederick Chopin
Date: 2025-09-21T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Chopin; Frédéric; 1810-1849; Composers -- Poland -- Biography

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Frederick Chopin

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Title: Frederick Chopin

A man of solitude

Author: comte Guy de Pourtalès

Translator: Jr. Charles Bayly

Release date: September 21, 2025 [eBook #76904]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1927

Credits: Sean/IB@DP

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FREDERICK CHOPIN ***

From a Drawing by George Sand.

CHOPIN.

FREDERICK CHOPIN:
A MAN OF SOLITUDE

By
GUY DE POURTALÈS

Translated from the French by
CHARLES BAYLY, JR.

THORNTON BUTTERWORTH LIMITED
15 BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.2

First published . . . 1927

All rights reserved
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

“He used his art only to play
to himself his own tragedy.”
Liszt.

DEDICATION

When I suggested the example of Liszt to a soul stricken but still capable of enthusiasm, I thought also of offering him this story of Chopin. Not that this latter should serve to discount whatever slight exuberance there might be in the former. On the contrary: they complement and complete each other, and show, the one concave and the other convex, the twofold visage of that symbolic being whom we call the artist. Or, the sensitive man, the cognizant—he, in short, whom we envy.

One of these masks portrays glory and passion: the other, sorrow and loneliness.

I quite realize the romantic sound of these four words in an age when they are so out-moded. But if I agree that in our time every thing possible has been tried, indeed, to eliminate from our orchestra those harps, those tremolos, those rubatos, those great billows of harmony that transported three admiring generations with the struggles between heaven and hell, it is nevertheless necessary only to open a newspaper at the section on the courts of law, to gaze into the show windows of the picture dealers, or to hear a saxophone, to convince myself that the themes of the human legend have in no degree changed. The rhythm, the harmonies, are different, but our responsive vibrations are just the same as they were in the most guileless epochs.

The real disaccord between our parents and us is that the ugly—or what they called the ugly—has been incorporated to-day in the beautiful—or what we call the beautiful. In other words, there are to-day no such things as beauty and ugliness, harmony and discord, there is no longer any æsthetic prohibition. As one of our sages, Paul Valéry, has written: “I see the modern man as a man with an idea of himself and of the world that is no longer fixed.... It has become impossible for him to be a man of a single viewpoint, to hold, really, to one language, to one nation, to one faith, to one physical type.” Let us add: to one music.

Thanks to the rigorous method of science, it has become easy to believe everything, or nothing. To love everyone, or no one. But do we gain other than in childishness and dotage? I question whether this new abundance enriches us more than their apparent poverty fertilized our fathers. This mass of sensations and perceptions has not increased our lucidity any more than the steam siren and the typewriter have added new notes to our scale. And yet we should hardly consent to the loss of one of these recent contributions.

But if a very ironic, very cynical jazz enchants me, it in no way removes the pleasure I feel in hearing Chopin. I should be sorry not to be able to savour two such different forms of modern sadness, the one born in New Orleans and the other in a Warsaw garret. To pursue still further the little problem which the two parallel existences of Liszt and Chopin pose for our reflection, let us say that on certain days we are more apt for action, for youth, for expenditure in any form; on other days for reserve, for shrinking, for incertitude, for concentration, and—even though the word has lost its beauty—for mystery.

The life of Liszt is an open book. He wrote it everywhere in ink and in adventure. Of the life of Chopin almost nothing remains. His nature protected him from needless experiences, and fate furthermore decreed that a great many of his letters and relics should be burned in a house in which his sister lived at Warsaw in 1863. We can discover him therefore only in his music, in a few scraps of correspondence, and in the memories of his friends. Meanwhile, his life was always so simple and so logical that a slight commentary is necessary to understand it, as an appoggiatura enhances the value of a note. Save for two or three journeys, the outside world had little chance to penetrate this imagination that ever turned inward. Its poetry lies in whatever qualities of possibility and of song that were added to the illusions of his days. Badly served in love, in friendship, in everything that demanded blindness or excessive pedal, this clear-sighted sufferer saw himself in only one mirror: the ebony of his piano. “Piano, marvellous instrument,” he said. Naturally, since the piano is an orchestra in itself. But it is something more: it is an instrument. Hence a soul. It was the only one Chopin ever knew; and he made his piano his only legatee.

If Liszt has given you the daring to seize the joys of the moment and a little confidence in yourself, Chopin can become not less a brotherly companion. His life is that of your anxious shadow. His music is perhaps nothing but the risen song of your inner loneliness.

All art is rich above all in the measure of what you yourself bring to it. Every soul possesses you in the measure of the effort you make to receive it. Welcome this one as the purest expression, for which there are no words, of what there is in love that must remain for ever inexpressible.

G. de P.

CONTENTS

CHAP. | | PAGE
I | “An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman” | 17
II | The Childhood of Chopin | 20
III | The Birth of the Poet | 25
IV | “Sorrow” and “Ideal” | 30
V | Revolution at Warsaw and Solitude at Vienna | 43
VI | “I doubt whether there is a city on Earth where more pianists are to be found than in Paris” | 55
VII | Happy Years, Working Years | 67
VIII | Marie Wodzinska and the Dusk | 76
IX | First Sketch of George Sand | 94
X | Letters of Two Novelists | 103
XI | The Chartreuse of Valdemosa | 127
XII | “If music be the food of love, play on” | 144
XIII | On some Friendships of Chopin, and on his Æsthetics | 159
XIV | Misunderstandings, Loneliness | 177
XV | Chagrin, Hate | 192
XVI | The Story of an Estrangement | 205
XVII | Swan Song | 228
XVIII | “The Cypresses have their caprices” | 247
XIX | The Death of Chopin | 251
XX | An Epitaph for a Poet | 257
| Sources | 263
| Index | 267

CHAPTER I
“An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman”

“An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman...” This portrait of Chopin, penned by a hand he loved, should stand as the frontispiece of this study. Naïve painters in the Middle Ages—who also came to pray for pardon—hung their expiatory offerings in the shadows of the cathedrals. This once caressing woman’s hand, now dead, surely yielded, while writing these words, to the inner necessity of knowing absolution. It added: “There was never anything more pure and at the same time more exalted than his thoughts...”

And perhaps with faint trembling: “... but this being only understood that which was inherent within himself. One would have needed a microscope to peer into his soul, where so little light of the living ever penetrated.”

A microscope has never helped to reveal a soul. No optical instruments are necessary in order to follow the teaching of Liszt: let us try to see with our hearts.

At the head of these pages must stand a name; because that name breathes life into the whole being of whom we write: Poland. Ever since 1795 that unhappy country had been completely dismembered, until Napoleon, that great poet of geography, after his first campaign in Prussia, created the Duchy of Warsaw (1807). This was to last until the fall of the Emperor, that is, barely eight years. Yet these eight years were sufficient to endow the Poles with a singularly youthful hero worship for France.

Now in 1806, a certain M. Nicolas Chopin, professor of French, entrusted with the education of the son of the Countess Skarbek, married in the village of Zelazowa Wola, six leagues from Warsaw, a Mlle. Justine Krzyzanowska. He was of French origin, a native of Marainville, a small village near the Hill of Sion, in the heart of Lorraine, the history of which is so curiously interwoven with that of Poland. The fiancée of this one-time clerk who had become a teacher was a girl of twenty-four, of an impoverished noble family. In the household of the Countess she held, as did others of rank, the position of attendant and lady-in-waiting, according to the tradition of such proud, poor seigneurs.

Close to the seigneurial dwelling, which was screened by a group of trees, stood a small house flanked by an outside staircase. Right through it ran a passage, at the end of which could be seen the court, the stables, and, at a distance, the fields of alfalfa and of colza. Here the young couple settled down. At the right of the entrance were three low rooms where one could touch the ceiling. After a time a girl was born, and was named Louise. This obscure event was rapidly succeeded by the French campaign in Prussia—Tilsit, Austerlitz, Jéna, Wagram, and the Polish eagles flying in the train of the Imperial eagles. Haydn died while the cannon of Napoleon were thundering for the second time under the walls of Vienna. When four shells had fallen close to him, the old composer said to his terrified servants, “Why this panic? Remember that wherever Haydn is no accident can happen.” Stendhal, a commissioner in the army, was present at his obsequies. He afterwards made the following note: “Why is it that all Frenchmen who are really great in literature—La Fontaine, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Bossuet—should have met together about 1660? Why should all the great painters have appeared about 1510? Why, since these two happy periods, has nature been so sparing? Will music have the same fate?”

Yet Beethoven at that date was writing the Quatuor serioso and the sonata in E flat major, which is called The Farewells. He had already composed six of his symphonies, the Kreutzer Sonata, the Appassionata, and Fidélio. Liszt, Schumann and Wagner were approaching. Goethe was flourishing; Byron was publishing his first verses. Shelley and Keats were outlining theirs. Balzac, Hugo, Berlioz were warming the school benches. And on the 22nd of February, 1810, at six o’clock in the evening, in the little house in Zelazowa Wola, was born Frederick François Chopin.

He came into a world of music. For exactly at that moment, under the windows of his mother, rustic violins were giving a serenade for a village wedding.

CHAPTER II
The Childhood of Chopin

On the first of October of that same year, Nicolas Chopin was made professor of French at the Warsaw High School, and the whole family moved to the capital. They were immediately absorbed into the urban life and never returned to the country. Warsaw was indeed a fertile soil where one quickly took root among its Italian palaces and its wooden huts. Its swarming population mingled Asiatic pomp with the filth of Esquimaux. Here were to be met the bearded Jew, the nun, the young girl in a silken cloak, and the mustachioed Pole, in caftan, with belt, sword, and high red boots.

M. Chopin bestirred himself to increase his income, because his family had grown. After Louise and Frederick, Isabelle and then Emilie were born. In 1812 he became professor at the School of Artillery and Engineers and in 1815 obtained the same post in the Preparatory Military Academy. Finally he turned his own home into a small boarding-school for the children of the rich.

It is not difficult to imagine the surroundings, the manners, and the customs among which Frederick grew up in this united and busy household. A somewhat rigid modesty and the domestic virtues of the family protected him from rough contacts with reality. It was thus, said Liszt, that “his imagination took on the velvety texture of plants which are never exposed to the dust of the highways.”

Here, then, was a child, very gentle, very pale, sprightly, with the sensibilities of a little girl, and dominated by two passions: his love for his mother and his love for the piano. He had been placed before the keyboard at a very early age and had returned to it of his own accord, drawn by the keys. Music drew tears and cries from him. It became at once a necessary evil. He was also very fond of his sisters, and chose four friends among his father’s pupils: Fontana, Titus Woyciechowski, and the Wodzinski brothers.

To celebrate his eighth birthday, he played at the benefit of the poet, Niemcewicz. He had been dressed in the English fashion, with a velvet coat and a large turn-over collar. And when his mother, afterwards, questioned him about his success, asking what the audience had liked best, he replied with pride, “My collar.”

The Polish aristocracy, and even the Grand Duke Constantin himself, the Governor of Warsaw, became interested in the child. He was commanded to appear before this redoubtable prince—and played for him a march of his own composition.

“Child,” asked the brother of the Tsar, “why do you always look upwards?”

But is it not heavenward that poets look? Chopin was “neither an intellectual prodigy nor a little thinking animal,” writes one of his biographers, “but a simple, modest child who played the piano as naturally as the birds sing....”

He had teachers. First Zywny, a venerable gentleman of over sixty, a native of Bohemia, a violinist and a good teacher. He was absorbed in the cult of Bach, a passion which he instilled in his pupil; and the depth of such childish enthusiasms is well known. Then, in 1824, at the time when Frederick was sent to college, his father replaced Zywny by Elsner, a Silesian professor who taught him harmony and composition. Without being a very famous musician, Elsner was something of a personage, a composer of operas, symphonies, masses, and a Director of the Conservatory. He had the virtue of never suppressing Chopin’s personal gifts: “Let him alone,” he said. “If he leaves the main road and the traditional methods, it is because he has his own ways, and some day his work will show an originality that no one possesses to-day. He follows a unique path because his gifts are unique.”

One can applaud this happy prophet. Elsner was a retiring man. He lived in two cells in an old monastery in the rue des Jésuites. His pupils saluted him on the right shoulder, according to the Polish fashion, and he responded by a kiss on each cheek. In his annual report to the Conservatory he writes: “Chopin, Frederick (3rd year pupil), astonishing capability, musical genius.”

Chopin worked well at college also, and took prizes; in short, he was a fluent and charming youth, and gay to the point of clownishness, like many melancholics. His comrades adored him, above all because of his talent for mimicry and imitation, which showed to what a point he felt the grimaces of souls. He acted plays with his sisters, who wrote comedies for the children. He edited a paper.

These minor events enamelled the surface of a life without scratches. Three facts alone should be remarked. In May and June, 1825, in two concerts at the Conservatory, Chopin played an Allegro of Moschelès’ and improvised for the Emperor Alexander, who gave him a ring. During the course of the same year, he published his Premier Rondo in C minor (op. 1), dedicated to Mme. Linde, the wife of the Head of the school. Then, the next summer, he was invited to the Château d’Antonin by Prince Radziwill.

Playing in public had already lost its novelty. On the other hand, publishing his music was a new joy, which he tasted with naïve ardour. And if the piece was neither very profound nor very scholarly, it had at any rate his personal imprint. “A lady,” said Schumann somewhat later in speaking of this little work, “would find it most delicate, most charming....” Note how already they hasten the advent of the ladies! Such is the first blossom of this chaste soul.

The stay at the Château d’Antonin, in the summer of 1826, revealed to Chopin the pleasures that can come from material plenty and refinements of the spirit, when these are linked together by skilled hands. This was precisely what the young aristocrat needed to awaken his æsthetic response. It is a luxury which the strong scorn; but a sensitive heart would have difficulty in dispensing with a judicious distribution of these amenities, ranging from perfect food to works of art, from physical luxury to the subtleties of the mind, and subduing this heart, despite itself, to the domination of the delicious. I myself should think it very interesting to know all about the furnishings, the pictures, the guests, the conversations to be seen and heard during the summer of 1826 at Prince Radziwill’s. Unfortunately, these details cannot be known with any degree of certainty. After all, it may be sufficiently enlightening that Chopin called Antonin “a paradise” and that he found the young princesses “divine.” But it is certain that from that time on his nostalgia for that perfect harmony derived from the union of fatherland, a sumptuous dwelling and radiant young beings, shattered his transport into invincible regrets.

CHAPTER III
The Birth of the Poet

When he was asked, after one of his improvisations at the piano, improvisations that were a mixture of brilliance that was always slightly sombre, and of tenderness that was at once poignant and dramatic, by what name this atavistic desolation that seemed too old for his young existence should be called, he replied with the Polish word zal. It was a word that he repeated, that he loved, a word susceptible of varied meanings and which included sometimes every tenderness and all humility, and sometimes only rancour, revolt, and glacial vengeance. It is a word also that holds at one and the same time connotations of inconsolable sorrow, and menace, or fruitless bitterness, a word, in short, that could be applied to all those cruel and poet Hamlets whom we call Slavs. From his sixteenth year zal was the bright enemy of his fortune, an enemy armed each day anew when one has a romantic heart and when the destruction of oneself seems the most brilliant solution of life. In knowing himself and then in cultivating himself without opposition, Chopin accomplished the rare miracle of becoming absolutely himself before life had taught him anything. Himself against life, in spite of life. The sum of knowledge that was necessary to him he possessed at sixteen. It was reduced to the seven notes of the scale, which were sufficient for the expression of all his thoughts. He was tortured by the need of no other nourishment than the search for his own style. That was his method of attaining the truth. Apart from his piano, the universe, indeed, was but literature.

Furthermore, his father allowed him to leave school at seventeen to give himself up entirely to his music. He was given a little attic study with an old piano and a table. There he wrote his first works. And it was at this time that, testing his powers, he acquired the astonishingly original touch and style that were soon to amaze the artistic world. The following year, he composed his Variations on the La ci darem la mano of Mozart, of which Schumann said as he thumbed it over: “Eusebius came in softly the other day. You know that ironic smile with which he tries to intrigue you. I was at the piano... Eusebius put a piece of music before us, with these words, ‘Hats off, gentlemen—a genius!’ We were not to see the title. I turned over the pages mechanically. The veiled joy of music without sound is like something magical. And then, it has always seemed to me that each composer offers to the eyes a physiognomy of notes that is the essence of the man. Beethoven has a different look from Mozart, on paper. But here I fancied that quite strange eyes, the eyes of a flower, the eyes of a basilisk, the eyes of a peacock, the eyes of a virgin were marvellously regarding me. But what was the astonishment of the hearers on reading the title: opus 2... Chopin? I had never heard the name.”

Listen to the almost prophetic tone of that surprise: “Eyes of a flower, eyes of a basilisk, eyes of a peacock, eyes of a virgin.” This splendid musical portrait paints in completely the Polish swan testing for the first time the flutter of his wings.

He took flight very shortly after, at the beginning of September, 1828, on his first journey. A friend of his father’s, Professor Jaroçki, took him to Berlin, where the professor had to attend a scientific meeting. Frederick was in an ecstasy of enthusiasm. After five days of jolting in the diligence the travellers reached the Prussian capital and put up at the Hôtel du Kronprinz. Chopin’s first visit was to the factory of the Kisting pianos, his second to the Academy of Singing, his third to the Opera, where they were giving Ferdinand Cortez by Spontini, and The Secret Marriage by Cimarosa. “I followed these operas with great pleasure,” he wrote home, “but I must admit that the music of Handel approaches most nearly the musical ideal that I have adopted.... To-morrow they give Freyschutz; that is exactly the music that I want.” He saw Spontini at a distance, and the young Mendelssohn. He dined at the Congress of Naturalists. “Yesterday there was a banquet in honour of the scholars. What caricatures! I divided them into three groups.” At the table he sat next a professor from Hamburg, who, talking to Jaroçki, so far forgot himself as to take Chopin’s plate for his own and begin drumming on it. “A true scientist, eh? Nothing was lacking, not even the big deformed nose. I was on pins and needles during the drumming, and when it was finished had nothing better to do than to rub off the finger-marks with a napkin.” This incident was the object of a long report in which can be seen his stubborn disgust. Then there were the toilettes of the ladies. Details? None. That struck closer home than the compulsory visits to the Geological Museum.

Finally, after a fortnight, they re-entered their travelling carriage to take once more the road for Warsaw. Arriving at Zullichau, between Frankfurt-am-Oder and Posen, they found a shortage of horses and were obliged to stop and wait for fresh ones. What should they do? By chance the postal relay station was also the tavern. Professor Jaroçki seized the opportunity to dine. Chopin spied a piano. He opened it, sat down and began to let his fingers wander. An old traveller came and sat quietly near him, then another, then silently all the household, the postmaster, his wife, his daughters, and the neighbours. What a surprise was this nightingale blown by the wind from fairyland! Suddenly the head of the postillion was framed in the window, and he thundered out:

“All aboard! The horses are harnessed.”

“Devil take the spoil-sport,” replied the postmaster furiously.

They begged the young man, who had already arisen, to sit down again.

“Go on, please go on,” said the ladies.

“I’ll give you extra horses if necessary,” added the postmaster.

And the old traveller said in his turn:

“Sir, I am an old-fashioned musician and I know what I am talking about. I, also, play the piano. If Mozart had heard you, sir, he would have taken your hand. I, a nobody, dare not....”

When Chopin stopped, this curious audience seized him and carried him out in triumph.

A Schumann overwhelmed, that enthusiastic postmaster, that timid musicaster trembling with emotion, these were the signs that a new poet was born among men.

CHAPTER IV
“Sorrow” and “Ideal”

But it was not until the following year that he was to find his voice. One evening at the Opera, he noticed in a small part a young singer with a clear tone, fair hair, and an attractive mouth. He learned that her name was Constance Gladkowska, and that she was still a pupil at the Conservatory. The impression this girl produced on him was strong, but altogether pure and childlike. To get the ribbon that tied her hair, to die holding it hidden on his breast, would have satisfied his longings. And so delicate was this sentiment that at first he confided it to no one. Besides, another thought wrung him more: the thought of leaving Warsaw, because he well knew that he had exhausted its musical resources.

In July, 1829, his father furnished him with a little money, which had been saved with difficulty, and the young composer, on whom from all sides so many hopes were now centred, was able to leave for Vienna. His first visit there was to Haslinger, the music publisher, a great eulogist who received him with open arms and already called him “the new star of the North.” But Chopin, who was not yet twenty, was cautious and sceptical. He was presented to Count Gallenberg, the superintendent of the Imperial theatres; he was urged to give a concert. “What reassures Count Gallenberg,” he wrote to his family, “is that I shall not tax his purse. I am going to play for nothing. I am acting the disinterested and the dilettante. I am a musician for love of the art.”

The concert took place at the Imperial Theatre on the 11th of August, at seven in the evening. The orchestra played a Beethoven overture, some airs of Rossini. Then the delicate Chopin, already sickly looking, came on to the platform. An old lady sitting in the first row said in a whisper, “What a pity the young man doesn’t make a better appearance!” But Chopin’s whiteness was from rage rather than nervousness, because the orchestra, not having been able to decipher his Variations, had forced him to change the programme. He therefore improvised on a theme from The White Lady, then on the Polish air, Chmiel.

With the one exception of Liszt, no one has ever improvised like Chopin. Under his elegant hand there opened a new world of velvet tragedies, of ravishing sorrows, where each hearer trembled as he discovered a memory of his own griefs. And old men as well as young schoolgirls followed with delight these exquisite whisperings. But the power of poets—what is it, if not to draw singing from one’s own soul, the secret of which they know better than oneself?

So successful was this first concert that Chopin resolved to give another a week later. This time he played his Krakoviak, which the orchestra had rehearsed, and his Variations on the La ci darem. Count Lichnowsky, Beethoven’s friend, was present and applauded wildly. The public, the musicians, and the critics could not conceal their surprise, for everything was new about Chopin, both the substance and the form. “The public recognized a great artist in this young man... On the ground of the originality of his playing and of his compositions one could almost attribute genius to him,” said the Wiener Theaterzeitung; and the Allgemeine Musikalische: “The exquisite delicacy of his touch, the indescribable dexterity of his technique, the finish of his nuances, which reflect the deepest sensitiveness, the clarity of his interpretation and of his compositions, which bear the marks of a great genius, all reveal a virtuoso favoured by nature, who has flashed above the horizon without previous heralding, like one of the most brilliant meteors.” One single criticism, that Chopin made of himself: he plays too softly, he lacks brilliance and resonance. “They are almost of one voice in saying I play too softly, too tenderly, rather, for this public,” he writes to his family. “They are accustomed to the great drums of their virtuosos. But I prefer them to say that I played too softly than too brutally.” And in another letter: “It is my way of playing, and I know it gives infinite pleasure to women and artists.”

Thereupon he left for Prague, accompanied to the diligence by all the Viennese musicians, whom he had conquered in so short a time. Even Czerny, with whom Chopin had several times played duets, was there. Chopin thought him “a fine man and more sensitive than his compositions.” He visited Prague, where he made the acquaintance of the famous violinist Pixis, and of Alexandre Klengel, the composer of forty-eight fugues considered the finest since Bach. Klengel interested Chopin greatly, and they spent half a dozen hours together, at the piano and in conversation. Then Frederick left for Dresden, viâ Teplitz, a watering-place on the frontier of Bohemia and Saxony, where he passed the evening at the château of Prince Clary.

A small but “respectable” company were assembled there: the men of the house, an Austrian general, an English naval captain, a Saxon general sewed up in decorations, some young men and girls. After tea, the Princess asked Chopin if he would “deign” to seat himself at the piano. The artist replied that he would “deign,” and asked for a subject for improvisation. The Prince’s maître de musique proposed a theme from Rossini’s Moses, and Chopin launched forth upon embroideries so lovely that he was obliged to return to the piano four times. They tried to keep him at Teplitz, but he would not consent. A restlessness, a certain nervousness, pushed him on to continue his journey. Something was working deeply in him. Dresden hardly interested him. He stayed there a few days doing nothing, then left for Breslau, and returned at length to Warsaw on September 12th.

Three weeks later, while writing a waltz, he found out what ailed him. “I have, perhaps to my sorrow, found my ideal. For six months now I have dreamed of her each night, and I have never spoken a word to her. It was for her that I composed the Adagio of my Concerto (in F minor, op. 21), as well as the Waltz (op. 70, no. 3), written only this morning and which I am sending to you. Notice the passage marked with a cross. No one, except you, will know the meaning of it. How happy I should be, my dear friend, if I could play it to you! In the fifth bar of the trio, the bass carries the melody as far as the high E flat, in the key of G flat. I should not tell you this, as I am sure you would have noticed it for yourself.”

This confidence was addressed to Titus, the friend beloved above all others because he too was a musician, and Chopin found at once the two words that were henceforth to be the keys to his whole life: “sorrow” and “ideal.” They give an atmosphere. Perhaps they give too much; but if they have since then lost something of their meaning, can we not give back to them in spirit a living poetical value? In this Europe which was open to romanticism and fervently breathed a too magnificent vocabulary lived the faith that moves and the candour that engenders deeds of love and of history. An evil age, “An age of fools and follies,” says M. Charles Maurras. Perhaps. But an age in which ideas and dreams have more than a rhetorical value puts a high price on art. And no one was less satisfied than Chopin with mere words. Those which he himself used translate exactly the accents of his piano. When he wrote that to his sorrow he had discovered his ideal, doubtless he did not suspect what a true note he had struck. Here, fixed for ever, is the musical theme in which, thanks to him, millions of beings were to discover the joys of hopelessness.

In this sorrow, in this ideal, he was of course thinking of Constance Gladkowska. He wrote again some time later: “You cannot imagine how sad Warsaw seems to me. If I were not so happy with my family, I would not care for this place. Oh! how bitter it is to have no one with whom to share sorrow and joy! How dreadful when the heart is oppressed to be unable to unfold it. You know what I mean. Many times I pour into my piano what I should like to confide to you.”

He heard much music, and was greatly struck by the last of Beethoven’s trios. Never, he said, had he heard anything greater. He composed. He went to the Opera. Mlle. Gladkowska made her debut in Paër’s Agnes and he admired her playing, her beauty, the range of her voice. “Her phrasing and nuance are delicious. At first her voice trembled slightly, but she soon got over that. She was overwhelmed with applause.” He made her acquaintance, accompanied her at the piano, felt that he should die of sadness and uncertainty. Ought he to leave? Must he stay? He decided to accept an invitation from Prince Radziwill and went to spend one autumn week at Antonin. He was received as a personage, and played duets with the Prince, who was the author of an orchestration of Faust.

Two charming Eves graced this paradise—“I mean the two young princesses, pleasant, musical, and gentle creatures. As for the Princess Mother, she knows that it is not birth that makes a man.”

The young princesses knew it, too, and they amused themselves by taking lessons from this artist with the complexion of a girl. Wanda allowed him to play with her fingers, to which he had to teach the correct position. Elise did his portrait. “Princess Wanda has a real musical instinct. There is no need to be constantly saying to her: here, crescendo, there, piano... here more slowly, there faster... I had to promise to send her my Polonaise in F minor.” He wrote another Polonaise, for piano and violoncello. “It is a brilliant piece for women to play.” He did not forget Constance, even though Princess Elise was so ravishing. But he realized the possibility of being charmed in all innocence by two beings at once. Nor did he forget his dear Titus of the silent, savage heart. In a moment of expansion he wrote to him: “I might anoint my body with the rarest perfumes of Byzantium and you would still refuse to embrace me if I had not bound you by a kind of magnetic attraction. But there are secret forces in nature....”

Returning to Warsaw, he decided to give a concert which Constance would attend. She could not fail to understand that it was to her alone that he dedicated his young fame. The concert actually took place on the 17th of March, 1830, when he had just completed his twentieth year. The event aroused an extraordinary amount of attention. The hall was crowded. The programme, of the usual variegated order, announced music by Elsner, Kurpinski, a hunting-horn solo, some singing. Chopin’s part consisted of his Concerto in F minor and a fantasia on national airs. But the effect was not all that he had hoped. The connoisseurs alone had realized and appreciated his originality as an artist. But Constance, sitting in the front row, smiled at him and he felt repaid.

A second concert, several days after the first, was a more brilliant success, and the Rondo à la Krakoviak aroused acclamations. From all over the house came cries: “A third concert! A third concert!” This time it really seemed as though the critics, the crowd, and the musicians were of one accord in declaring Chopin Poland’s greatest pianist and composer. But the weeks slipped by without bringing him real happiness. His love for Titus and Constance both sustained and tormented him. He carried their letters next his heart. For them alone he composed, and his latest music seemed to him worthless till they had heard it. “Work drives me on. I am composing hard. Often I turn night into day and day into night. I live in a dream and sleep while I am awake. Yes, worse still, it is as though I must sleep for ever, for I am for ever feeling the same thing. But instead of gathering strength from this somnolence, I am tortured further and weaken myself the more....” He worked on his Adagio in E major, which was to be “romantic, calm, melancholy,” and to evoke “crowds of gentle memories. It should be like a reverie on a moonlit spring night.... What does it matter if it is bad? You will see in it my fault of doing badly against my will. But that is because, also against my will, something has entered my heart by way of my eyes. It drives me, torments me, although I love it and cherish it.”

An unexpected treat was given him by the arrival of a celebrated German singer, Sontag, who gave a series of six concerts. To her Prince Radziwill presented Chopin, who experienced a moment of enthusiasm. She was not beautiful, but charming beyond description, and she enchanted the circle in which she moved. Frederick was allowed the honour of seeing her in her morning peignoir, and brought Constance to her. But the transit of the singer was no more than a meteoric interlude and Chopin slid back into his uncertainties. Departure seemed more and more necessary for his musical development, and on the other hand the fear of losing his love paralysed him. On September 4th he wrote to Titus:

“I have fits of fury. I still have not budged. I haven’t the strength to name a day for leaving. I have a presentiment that if I leave Warsaw I shall never see my home again. I believe that I am going away to die. How sad it must be not to die where one has always lived! How dreadful it would be for me to see at my deathbed an indifferent doctor or servant instead of all my own folk! I should like to stay with you for a few days; perhaps I might find some peace again. But as I cannot, I limit myself to roaming the streets, crushed by my sadness, and I return—but why? To pursue my fancies. Man is rarely happy. If he is destined to only a few short hours of bliss, why should he renounce his illusions. They too are fugitive.”

More curious still is his letter of September 18th, where he makes this singular confession:

“You are mistaken in thinking, like so many others, that my heart is the reason for my prolonging my stay here. Be assured that I could rise above all if it were a question of my own self, and that, if I were in love, I could manage to dominate for several more years my sad and sterile passion. Be convinced of one thing, I beg, that is, that I too consider my own good and that I am ready to sacrifice everything for the world. For the world;—I mean, for the eye of the world; in order that this public opinion which has so much weight with us may contribute to my sorrow. Not to that secret suffering that we hide within ourselves, but to what I might call our outward pain... As long as I am in good health, I shall work willingly all my life. But must I work more than my strength permits? If it is necessary, I can do twice what I do to-day. You may not be master of your own thoughts, but I am always. Nothing could make me drop them as the leaves from the trees. For me, even in winter, there is always verdure. Of course, I am speaking only of the head! In the heart, on the other hand... good Lord! there is tremendous heat! No wonder the vegetation there is luxurious.... Your letters lie upon my heart, next to the ribbon (Constance’s), for though they do not know each other, these inanimate objects nevertheless feel that they come from friendly hands.”

In short, this irresolute knew well that the very base of his nature was his musical instinct; that this instinct would conquer all, his desires, his comfort, his peace; that his “secret suffering,” if it was inevitably necessary, still amounted to less than that stubborn march towards a future of melody and solitude.

Coming out of church one day he saw Constance. “My eyes caught her glance. I tore off into the street and it took a quarter of an hour to pull myself together. Sometimes I am so mad that it is terrifying. But on Saturday week I leave, come what may. I shall pack my music in my trunk, her ribbon in my soul, my soul under my arm and,—away I go, in the diligence!”

Finally, on October 11th, he gave a last concert, in which Mlle. Gladkowska assisted. Frederick played his whole Concerto in E minor, a work that he had just finished, and a Fantasia on Polish Airs. Mlle. Gladkowska, dressed in white and crowned with roses, sang the cavatine from Rossini’s Lady of the Lake. “You know the theme: O quante lagrime per te versai,” wrote Chopin to Titus. “She rendered the tutto detesto to the G flat admirably. Zielinski said the G alone was worth a thousand ducats. After leading her off the stage I played my Fantasia on the setting of the moon. This time at least I understood myself, the orchestra understood itself and the audience understood us.... Now nothing remains but to strap my trunk. My outfit is ready, my orchestrations are recopied, my handkerchiefs hemmed, my new trousers have been tried on.” What was he still waiting for?

It was as though destiny offered him one final chance. He did not take it.

The 1st of November, 1830, was the date fixed; he was to leave for Vienna. In the morning a whole troupe set forth. Elsner, friends, musicians, conducted him as far as Wola, the historic suburb where, in earlier times, the election of the kings had taken place. They held a banquet. They played a cantata composed by Elsner in his honour. They sang:

“May your talent, native of our soil,
Display itself in all and everywhere,
Be you on the Danube’s shores,
Or by the Spree, the Tiber or the Seine.
Cherish the customs of your fathers,
And, by the notes of your music,
Our mazurkas and our Kracoviennes,
Sing the glory of your native land.
Yes, you shall realize our dreams.
Know always, Chopin, that you by song
Shall glorify your native land.”

Chorus:

“To leave your fatherland is naught,

Because your soul remains with us.

We raise our prayers for your happiness,

And shall cherish your memory in our hearts.”

He is pale, the young prince, when they present him with a silver cup filled with his native soil. And now he bursts into sobs.

As for Constance, she never saw him again. Two years later she married a country gentleman. Then, the blue eyes that the poet had loved,—by what strange trick of fate should they be deprived of light? Constance became blind. Sometimes, however, she would sit once more at the piano and sing that lovely song: Quante lagrime per te versai.... Someone who knew her towards the end of her life told how “from her eyes, which remained starry in spite of their blindness,” would then fall the tears.

CHAPTER V
Revolution at Warsaw and Solitude at Vienna

Titus Woyciechowski rejoined Chopin at Kalisz. Older than he by several years, he was in appearance and character just the opposite of Frederick; a tall strong youth with clear, determined features, speaking rarely, but with just as passionate a melomania. His huge hands, chiselled to grasp the sword of his ancestors, as soon as they rested on the keys of the piano developed an airy delicacy. Slender, deep-eyed Frederick, however, with his complexion like a child’s, led on a leash this powerful, submissive dog. They passed by Breslau, and then went to Dresden, where a whole week evaporated in calls, parties, and theatres.

Armed with letters of introduction, Chopin betook himself to pay his respects to Mme. Dobrzyçka, a Pole and Grand Mistress of the Court of Princess Augusta. This lady occupied an apartment of the royal castle. She received him graciously, and invited him to spend an evening with her in a little group of her friends. Chopin accepted, suspecting strongly that he would have to pay with his art, but he made it a rule never to refuse anything to his compatriots. On the appointed day he made his entrance in the salons of the Grand Mistress, where he found only three or four people; some ladies and a man of some thirty years, clean shaven, whom he took to be a scholar or an abbé of the Court. Mme. Dobrzyçka presented him to her guests: “One of our young compatriots, M. Frederick Chopin, an artist of great talent, who won’t refuse to let us hear one of his mazurkas, an echo of our far-off country.” Chopin sat down at the piano. He felt inspired, his head filled with poetry, his heart with memories; Constance, his sisters, the ancient city of Warsaw, floated before his eyes. In a dozen ways, he expressed them with that careless grace, that naked emotion which owed nothing to any model. He was heard in the deepest silence. Then the Grand Mistress rose and came to him, with tears in her eyes. “Thank you. You have given a delightful hour to Their Royal Highnesses.” With a deep bow she designated the two ladies and the clean-shaven gentleman. They were the Infanta Augusta, her sister-in-law, and Prince Jean, the future King of Saxony, whom he had taken for a doctor of theology. Next day these personages sent him sealed letters addressed to Their Majesties the King and Queen of the Two Sicilies and to His Serene Highness the Prince of Lucca, recommending “Frederick Chopin, an incomparable artist for whom the most brilliant future is in store.”

Under these happy auspices Frederick and Titus arrived in Vienna towards the end of November. They set out to find an apartment and, for 50 florins a month, rented three rooms in Kohlmarkt.

But this fickle city had already forgotten the artist it had once acclaimed. Haslinger, the publisher, refused to buy his works, and Chopin would not consent to part with them for nothing. “Maybe he thinks,” he said, “that if he affects to treat them as bagatelles I shall take him seriously and give them to him for love. He is wrong. My motto shall be: Pay, brute.” But these small cares faded suddenly away when the events which were taking place in Poland began to filter into the newspapers. On the 29th of November, indeed, the revolution broke out in Warsaw. This ancient people, reduced to slavery, was attempting once again to regain its liberty. They got their news in crumbs: on November 29th, eighteen conspirators had set out for the Palais de Belvédère, where the Grand Duke Constantin resided, in order to seize him. But they were too late. “The bird had flown,” and, leading his Russian troops, had already withdrawn from the walls of Warsaw. Freed for the time, the entire town had arisen against its oppressors. The next day a new Government was formed, the war of independence proclaimed, and everywhere thousands of volunteers were enlisting.

From the very first Titus and Frederick were wild with enthusiasm. Titus fitted himself out from head to foot, and without further delay left to join his brothers in arms. Left alone, Chopin lamented his own inaction, but what could he do with those delicate hands of his, with his useless talent? On a gamble, without definite plan, he hired a post-chaise and struck out on the trail of Titus. But he was unable to overtake him and, in the sombre winter dusk, his warlike ardour seemed suddenly so futile that he ordered his driver to turn about and go back to Vienna. There he found a letter from his father, who, guessing the feelings of his son, besought Frederick not to allow himself to be turned from his career. Let the many sacrifices that had been made at least be allowed to bear fruit! So Chopin stayed. But the ordeal was hard to bear in this Austria of Metternich, entirely hostile to Poland. The artists he knew avoided him, and more than once as he passed he overheard the murmur that God’s only error was to have created the Poles. His mail reached him now only after long delays and he lived in anguish. He learned of the march of the Russian General Paskewitch on Warsaw. Already he saw the town in flames, his family and Constance massacred. He spent his time in writing, he who had such a horror of letter paper. “I seem to be dreaming, to be still with you. These voices which I hear, and which are unfamiliar to me, are like carnival clackers. It is nothing to me to-day whether I live or die.... Why am I left behind? Why am I not taking my share of the danger with you?” The Christmas festivities only aggravated this drama of unrest. Dante was right when he said that a happy memory is the worst misery of unhappy days. That Christmas eve he went to the Church of St. Etienne, and there, standing in the darkest corner under the dome, he leaned against a Gothic pillar and dreamed of the family Christmas tree, lighted with candles, of the modest presents he and his sisters gave each other, of the traditional supper where the whole family gathered about the table and broke the holy bread that the lay brothers of the convents had distributed during Advent.

He passed the holidays largely alone in his room, which he thus describes: “It is large and has three windows; the bed faces them, my marvellous piano is at the right, the sofa at the left, between the windows a mirror and in the centre of the room a big mahogany table. The floor is waxed. It is quiet. In the morning an unbearably stupid servant wakens me. I get up and have my coffee, which I often take cold, as playing makes me forget breakfast. About nine o’clock my German teacher arrives. After that I play. Then Hummel (the son of the composer) comes to work on my portrait while Nidecki studies my concerto. I stay in my dressing-gown until noon. Then a funny little German, Herr Leidenfrost, arrives, with whom I go for a walk on the pavement. Then I go to lunch wherever I may be invited or else at the Café Zur Böhmischen Köchin, which is frequented by all the University students.... Afterwards I make calls, come in at dusk, dress, arrange my hair, dress, and go to some party or other. About eleven or twelve o’clock, never later, I come home, play, cry, laugh, read, go to bed, and dream of you.”

In this same letter to his friend Matuszinski, he adds on Christmas Day (1830):

“I wanted so desperately to have a letter from you. You know why. What joy news of my angel of peace gives me! How I should like to sound all the chords, not only those that evoke stormy feelings but those that sound the lieder whose half-stilled echoes yet hover on the shores of the Danube.... But I cannot live as I please.... You advise me to make a poet’s choice. Don’t you realize that I am the most irresolute being on earth, and that I have made only one single fortunate choice in my whole life? All these dinners, parties, concerts, balls, bore me. I am overwhelmed with them. I cannot do what I wish; I must be dressed, powdered, shod, have my hair dressed, and play the quiet man in the drawing-room, only to return home and thunder on the piano. I have no confidant, I have to ‘do the polite’ with everybody. Forgive these complaints, my dear Jean, they calm me and give me relief. One point in your letter made me very gloomy. Has there been any change? Has anyone been ill? I could easily believe it of such a tender being.... Reassure her and tell her that as long as my strength permits, till death, yes, until after death, my ashes shall be scattered under her feet. More... all this is not enough, and you may tell her much more.... I should have done it myself, but for the dread of people’s gossip. Be my interpreter to her. The day before yesterday I dined at a Mme. Bayer’s, a Pole whose name is Constance. I love her society because of this reminder. Her music, her handkerchiefs, her napkins are marked with her initial.”

“January 1, 1831.—I received your letter. I do not know what is taking place in me. I love you all more than my life. Write to me. So you are with the army? Our poor families! What are all our friends doing? I live with you. I should like to die for you, for all of you. If you leave, how can you deliver my message? Look after my family. One might believe evil.... How sadly the year begins for me. Perhaps I shall not see its end. Embrace me. Are you leaving for the war? Return a colonel. Ah! why cannot I be even your drummer boy! If you think it unnecessary, do not give her my note. I don’t remember what I wrote. You may read it. It is perhaps the first and the last.”

Then he notes in his little pocket-diary: “This bed, where I sleep ... perhaps it has already held a corpse. Who was it? Was he more wicked than I? Had he parents, sisters, a mistress? Now all is peace for him. I am sure that to die is the noblest human act. Or, on the other hand, is birth the noblest?...” Later a few scattered lines about Constance: “Did she love me or is she playing a part? How hard it is to guess. Yes, or no? Yes, no, yes, no?... Yes, surely. But God’s will be done.”

Thus Chopin stands wholly self-revealed, nervous, lonely, horribly sensitive. All the pains of the world are latent in him, and a few simple joys. But the man developed with extreme slowness. The poet clung to his youth, which had furnished the difficulties he needed. He had given himself over, as women do, unconsciously to suffering, and it was by that alone that he was to become adult.

Yet the two years since his first love for Constance Gladkowska had already produced admirable work. It was not without a certain pride that Chopin bound into his work such pages as the Waltz in D flat major (op. 70, no. 3), in which he had earlier called Titus’s attention to a confidential passage, the sketches of his Etudes, the first of his Nocturnes and the two Concertos (in E minor, op. 11, and in F minor, op. 21). If in construction, in skeleton, they still owe much to Hummel, in their flesh and blood they are entirely Chopin. The orchestral parts are weak because he was not able to think orchestrally, but the piano parts have an originality and poetry that bear the stamp of eternity. Liszt later said of the adagio of the Second Concerto, for which Chopin had a marked predilection, that the whole piece had “an ideal perfection,” that “his sentiment by turn radiant and full of pity, evoked a magnificent country bathed in light, some dowered valley of Tempe that one might have selected as the site of a tragic tale, a heartbreaking scene. It might be called an irreparable sorrow enfolding the human heart against a background of the incomparable splendour of nature.”

There is truth in these somewhat florid words. But it is difficult to reduce to the average vocabulary what slips so swiftly out of ordinary experience and opens to our most complex senses an entirely new universe. An analysis of music is the most futile of intellectual exercises, because it can build on nothing but emotion. Look at concert audiences. They are made up for the most part of lovers and old people. For they understand, remember, and seek again this powerful inexpressible thing in which they find the best that is in themselves. Even Chopin still did not know what he was giving. He was hampered by classic forms. But he carried in him the joy of a growing knowledge, developed and assimilated in his first sorrows.

The winter dragged on as best it could, and Chopin, with somewhat more pleasure than he admitted, went from party to party. He let his whiskers grow, or rather one whisker, the other was not necessary, “because I only show my right profile to the audience.” He spent many an evening at the house of Dr. Malfatti, Court Physician and former doctor to Beethoven, a happy sybarite and philanthropist who lived in a smart villa surrounded by a garden. And then spring returned and the doctor’s peach and cherry trees were covered with pink and white snow. There, on St. John’s Day, they had a fête by moonlight. Out on the terrace, in the bridal air that rose from the orangery, wafted by the fountain sprays, Chopin played, while the Viennese listened to the sad-eyed foreigner who in sombre colours paraphrased a joyous waltz of Strauss.

He went to concerts, met plenty of musicians but, Slavik the violinist excepted (another Paganini, who played ninety-six staccato notes with a single sweep of his bow), none of them impressed him greatly. Vienna offered him nothing to love. Waltzes, nothing but waltzes, were played on all sides, and although they were laughed at, still the editors would publish nothing else. He was ill and admitted it to his friends, but forbade them to inform his family. He planned another departure, and had his passport arranged without knowing very definitely whether he should name France, Germany, or England. Italy attracted him also, but there were revolutions in Bologna, Milan, Ancona, Rome. In his indecision, he might have settled the matter by a throw of dice had that not been to tempt fate somewhat. He ended by deciding on London and, at all events, had added to the passport: “by way of Paris.” For the moment he was pacified and furnished with a few landmarks on which to fasten his imagination. He packed, made his good-bye calls, and reserved a seat in the diligence for July 20 (1831).

A few days before his departure, a letter reached him from his compatriot, Witwicki, the writer, a family friend. It touched his most sensitive spot. “... Keep always in view the idea of nationality, nationality and yet again nationality. It is a word that means little for an ordinary artist, but not for a talent like yours. There is native melody just as there is a native climate. The mountains, the forests, the waters, and the meadows have their native voice, an inner voice, though not every soul is aware of it.... Every time I think of it, dear M. Frederick, I nurse the sweet hope that you shall be the first to be able to imbibe the vast treasures of Slav melody. Seek out the popular Slav melodies as the mineralogist seeks out the stones and minerals of the mountains and the valleys. I hear that in Vienna you fret and languish. I can put myself in your place; no Pole could be happy when the life or death of his own country is in question. But remember always, dear friend, that you left us not to languish but to perfect yourself in your art and to become the consolation and glory of your family and your country.”

He left on July 20th and, by way of Salzburg, reached Munich, where he stayed for several weeks. Then he set out again, and reached Stuttgart. There, on the 8th of September, he learned of the capture of Warsaw by the Russians. Under the shock of this frightful news he turned to his piano and his grief burst into harrowing improvisation. This was the first germ of the Etude in C minor (op. 10, no. 12) that is called The Revolutionary. “What a change! What a disaster!... Who could have foreseen it?” he wrote, several weeks later.

These words may sound somewhat feeble. But Chopin did not love great, strong words. In him emotion always took on a moderate accent. Nevertheless, in his pocket-notebook he gave free rein to his feelings: “The suburbs burned! Matuszinski and Titus surely killed! Paskewitch and that dog Mohilew flee from the beloved town. Moscow commands the world! Oh, God, where are you? Are you there and do not venge yourself? Are you not surfeited with Russian massacres? Or else,—or else,—are you not yourself, indeed, only a Muscovite?”

The young exile little suspected that he was to be, according to Paderewski’s beautiful metaphor, the ingenious smuggler who would enable the prohibited Polonism to escape across the frontiers in his portfolios of music, the priest who would carry to the scattered Poles the sacrament of nationalism.

CHAPTER VI
“I doubt whether there is a city on Earth where more pianists are to be found than in Paris”

When the stage-coach in which Chopin rode had passed the walls of Paris, the young musician climbed up on the seat beside the driver. He hardly knew where to look, at the monuments or at a crowd so thick it might be thought another revolution. However, it was only the joy of living again that had brought the people into the streets and forced the horses down to a walk. The driver felt impressively at home among all these symbolic costumes of the bourgeois gentlemen, and pointed them out to his passenger. Each political group had its own livery. The School of Medicine and the Young French parties were distinguished by their beards and cravats. The Carlists had green waistcoats, the Republicans red, and the Saint Simoniens blue. Many strutted about in tailed coats, called à la propriétaire, which fell to their heels. There were artists dressed after Raphaël, with hair to their shoulders and wide-brimmed tam-o’-shanters. Others affected the Middle Ages,—numbers of women dressed as pages, as musketeers, as hunters. And in this swarm were hawkers brandishing their pamphlets: “Ask for The Art of Making Love and Keeping It; ask for The Loves of the Priests; ask for The Archbishop of Paris and the Mme. la Duchesse de Berry.” Frederick was at first somewhat scandalized. Later he was agreeably surprised to see a group of youths march by, crying: “Poland! Poland!” “That is in honour of General Ramorino, the Italian who is trying to deliver our Polish brothers from the Russian boot,” explained the driver. They were obliged to stop the carriage for the crowd to pass. Eventually they reached the posting station and Chopin dismounted, had his baggage loaded on a cabriolet, and betook himself to a house agent, who provided him with two rooms on the fifth floor at 27, Boulevard Poissonnière.

He liked these quarters because his windows had a balcony from which he could see the succession of boulevards. The endless perspective of trees hedged in between two rows of houses astonished him. “It is down there,” he thought, “that the history of France is being written.” Not far away, in the rue d’Enfer, M. de Chateaubriand was editing his memoirs and he too wrote: “What happenings have taken place before my very door! But after the trial of Louis XVI and the revolutionary uprisings, all trials and uprisings are insignificant.” And at the same time, a plainly dressed young woman was writing in her garret novels which she signed with the name George Sand, and exclaimed: “To live, how sweet! How good it is, in spite of griefs, husbands, boredom, debts, relatives, tittle-tattle, in spite of bitter pangs and tedious annoyances. To live, how intoxicating! To love, to be loved! That is happiness, that is Heaven!”

The day after his arrival Frederick plunged into the crowd and exulted in his solitude. It was more complete here than in the depths of the German forest, and it at once stimulated and frightened the artist. He floated with the tide, until suddenly the crowd thickened, became organized, and Chopin found himself carried along by a compact column who, with flags at their head, were marching to acclaim Ramorino. Then fear seized him in good earnest, and breaking away, he returned home by back streets, and climbed to his balcony where he witnessed from above that storm of enthusiasm. Shops were shut and a squadron of hussars arrived at a gallop and swept away the populace, who hissed and spat at the soldiers. Till midnight there was an uproar which approached a riot. And Chopin wrote to Titus: “I can’t tell you what a disagreeable impression the horrible voices of this angry mob gave me.” Decidedly he did not like noise, or crowds; politics were not in his line.

Music, music, his only escape, because it is the only way of thinking with the emotions. “Here alone can one know what singing is. With the exception of Pasta, I do not believe there is a greater singer in Europe than Malibran-Garcia.” He spent his evenings at the Académie Royale or at the Italian Opera. Veron managed the Académie, where Habeneck conducted. At the Italian Opera Rossini and Zamboni were in the bill. He heard Lablache and Malibran in Il Barbieri di Siviglia, in Otello, and in L’Italiana in Algeri. Under the stimulus of his pleasure he wrote again to Titus: “You can have no idea what Lablache is like. Some say that Pasta’s voice is weakening, but I have never in my life heard one so divine. Malibran has a range of three octaves; in her own genre her singing is unique, uncanny. She plays Othello; Schroeder-Devrient, Desdemona. Malibran is small, the German larger. Sometimes you think Desdemona is going to strangle Othello.”

Chopin had a letter of introduction to Paër, who put him in touch with Cherubini, Rossini, and the pianist then more famous than any of the others, Kalkbrenner. With beating heart Chopin went to see this supreme master at his house. He was a tall man, stiff and cold, with the bearing of a diplomat, and an unstable glance. He put on the airs of a gentleman, was doubtless too polite, and certainly very pedantic. Marmontel says of him that his playing was smooth, sustained, harmonious, and perfectly even, and that it charmed more than it astonished; that his left hand had an unequalled dexterity and that he played, without moving his head or body, with splendid style in the grand manner. “A giant!” said Chopin. “He crushes everybody, myself included.” In Kalkbrenner the young artist specially admired the purist, the man who talked at the piano, the language of Cicero.

The master and the unknown played several pieces for each other. When Chopin had finished his Concerto in E minor, Kalkbrenner said to him: “You have the style of Cramer and the touch of Field,” which was without doubt the greatest compliment he could find. Divining in this unexpected disciple the great man of to-morrow, he explained his faults, trotted out again his lack of method, even pencilled his concerto. He tried to decipher it. But if he succeeded in the first part, he was stopped at the beginning of the second by insurmountable difficulties, for its technique was entirely new. Nevertheless, he stated with assurance that nothing short of three years of study under his direction would make Chopin master of a new piano school. Frederick was disquieted. Three years more study! What would his family say? “However, I will submit to it,” he thought, “if I can be sure of making a big advance.” But, by the time he had reached home again, he no longer doubted. “No, I will never be a copy of Kalkbrenner.... No, he shan’t destroy in me that hope, daring, I admit, but noble, of creating a new world for myself.” A quarter of a century earlier than Wagner, here in this young man of twenty years was the certainty of the same destiny.

We must be grateful to M. Nicolas Chopin for having upheld his son’s faith. “But, my dear fellow,” he wrote to him, “I cannot see how, with your capacities which he (Kalkbrenner) said he remarked, he can think that three more years of work under his eyes are necessary for you to become an artist and the head of a new school. You know that I have done everything I could to further your inclinations and develop your talent, that I have opposed you in nothing. You know also that the technique of playing took you only a short time to learn, and that your mind has been busier than your fingers. If others have spent whole days in practising scales, you have rarely passed an hour on the works of others. Experts can distinguish genius from its earliest moments, but they cannot prophesy the peak it will reach.”

Even more remarkable was the letter from his sister Louise, who had run to Elsner to lay before him the dilemma in which the whole family was plunged. The aged teacher, like the young sister, had soon found traces of a calculating self-interest in the proposal of the virtuoso. And they said so, they who had simple hearts, they who had faith. “Elsner was angry. He cried ‘Jealousy already,—three years, indeed!’ and tossed his head. Then he added: ‘I know Frederick. He is good, but he has no pride, no ambition; he is easily swayed. I shall write him what I think of all this.’ Sure enough, this morning he brought a letter which I am sending you. He went on talking to us about this business. We who judge men in the simplicity of our hearts thought Kalkbrenner the most honest man in the world; but Elsner was not altogether of this opinion. He said: ‘They recognized a genius in Frederick, and they are afraid of being supplanted by him. That is why they would like to have their hands on him for three years, so that they could stop the growth that Nature would develop if she were left alone.’ Elsner does not want you to imitate, and he expresses himself well when he says: ‘No imitation is worth the original.’ As soon as you begin imitating you cease to be creative, and, although you are young, your own conceptions may be better than those of many others.... Then, M. Elsner does not only want to see in you a concert player, a famous virtuoso, which is easier and less worth while, but he wants to see you attain the goal towards which Nature is urging you and for which she has made you. What irritated him extremely was, as he says, ‘the presumption and arrogance that after having run over your orchestration would pick up a pencil to strike out passages without ever having heard the concerto with the full effect of the orchestra.’ He says that it would have been quite another thing to have advised you when you write concerto, to shorten the allegro: but to make you erase what was already written, that he cannot pardon. Elsner compared it to taking a seemingly unnecessary pillar away from a house that had already been built, with the result of changing everything in eliminating what was deemed bad. I think that Elsner is right in declaring that to be superior it is necessary to excel not only one’s teachers but also one’s contemporaries. You can excel them by imitating them, but then, that is following in their tracks. And he says that you, who already know what is good and what is better, should now be making your own path. Your genius will guide you. One more thing, he said. ‘Frederick has drawn from his native soil this distinguishing particularity: the rhythm—shall I say?—which makes him as much more original and characteristically himself as his ideas are more noble than others.’ He would like you to retain that. We do not understand these things as well as you do, my dear little Fritz, and we cannot advise you; we can only send you our comments.”

It is beautiful, this letter. It is not literature, but it goes to the root of the matter. Frederick followed its councils and preferred to remain himself, even were it at the expense of a rapid success. Meanwhile, Kalkbrenner had the wisdom not to be annoyed at seeing this prize pupil refuse to allow himself to be convinced. Their friendship persisted. It was even Kalkbrenner who presented him to the directors of the famous house of Pleyel. Chopin attached himself to other artists, particularly to Hiller, pianist, composer, and musical critic, and to Franchomme, the celebrated violoncellist, both of whom aided him to organize his opening concert.

This took place on the 26th of February, 1832, in the Salons Pleyel. Frederick had got it up with the greatest care amid constantly renewed difficulties. He had recruited for the occasion five violinists (among them Urhan, Liszt’s friend, and Baillot), who were to play Beethoven’s Quintette. Mlles. Tomeoni and Isambert were to sing. Kalkbrenner, Stamati, Hiller, Osborne, Sowinski and Chopin were to play a Grande Polonaise for six pianos, composed by Kalkbrenner himself; then Chopin was to play his Concerto in F minor and his Variations on the “La ci darem” of Mozart. The Grande Polonaise for six pianos disquieted him. “It is a mad idea, isn’t it?” he wrote to Titus. “One of the grand pianos is very large: it is Kalkbrenner’s; another is very small: that is mine.” He never loved show. Besides, concerts for the general public were always odious to him. So on this evening of February 26th, there stepped on the platform a very pale young man, whose attitude betrayed a very sincere annoyance much more than it did a dramatic inspiration. The hall was only half-filled and that mostly with Poles, critics and musicians. In the front row could be seen the handsome features of Liszt. A stunning silence descended when Chopin had slipped his first caresses over the keyboard.

Then there arose from the piano a voice such as no one, ever, had heard before. Yet each recognized in it the cry of his innermost self. It was neither a tale, nor a brilliant commentary, but the simple song of life; an authentic revelation; the essential word of the heart. By means of a delicate rightness, which is the strength of the pure, Chopin transported these connoisseurs. Liszt himself, whose “doubled and redoubled applause was not sufficient to express his enthusiasm,” saw here the revelation of “a new phase of poetic feeling side by side with innovations in the form of the art.” From that evening he gave him his warm friendship. Fétis, the sharp but influential critic, declared: “Here is a young man who, abandoning himself to his natural feelings, and following no model, has discovered, if not a complete renovation of piano music, at least a part of what we have long been vainly seeking: an abundance of original ideas which fit into no earlier classification.”

Chopin accepted these eulogies without pride and without false modesty, because he totally lacked all vanity. The receipts were counted; they barely sufficed to cover expenses. But that was nothing in comparison to another disappointment: the French public had not attended. The artist’s object, therefore, had not been achieved. When, towards midnight, he returned to his room, Chopin believed that fate had pronounced an unfavourable verdict, and he conceived the idea of leaving for America.

He had hardly any money left. His friends were still few, being limited to a small number of artists and compatriots. Ah, how happy Meyerbeer must be, having just had produced his Robert the Devil, a mine of gold and glory! Chopin confided to Titus: “Chance brought me here. Here one can certainly breathe freely. But perhaps one also sighs more, too. Paris is everything that you want it to be. Here you can amuse yourself, be bored, laugh, cry, do whatever you like without anyone giving you a glance. I doubt whether there is a city on earth where more pianists are to be found than in Paris, or more asses and virtuosi. Ah, how I wish I had you with me. If you only knew how sad it is not to be able to relieve one’s soul. I like the society of people. I make friends easily, and am up to my ears in acquaintances; but there is no one, no one who can understand me. My heart always beats, so to speak, in swoons, and I resent it and should like a pause,—solitude,—with not a single soul to see me or speak to me all day long. Above all, I detest hearing my bell ring when I am writing to you.”

However, it rang a good deal, that little bell, and was mostly pulled by that worst of the bores, the deadly, the awful, the ridiculous Sowinski. “He is just coming in to see me. It is something big, and strong, and it wears a tiny moustache; it sits down at the piano and improvises without knowing why. It bangs, it knocks, it crosses its hands without rhyme or reason; for five minutes at a time it batters a defenceless key. It has enormous fingers made rather to hold the reins and the whip somewhere in the wilds of the Ukraine. It has no other virtues than a tiny moustache and a big heart.... When shall we see each other again? Maybe never, because I assure you that my health is wretched. Outwardly, I am gay, but within I am consumed. Dark forebodings, restlessness, insomnia, home-sickness, indifference to everything. Pleasure in life, then immediately afterwards,—longing for death....”

Other friends come and go through Chopin’s little apartment: Albert Grzymala, Count Plater, Liszt, Berlioz, who arrives from Rome and has great plans, Polish refugees. But money these young people have practically none, and Frederick, in spite of the “little reinforcements” that his father sends him, sees his resources vanish.

As for love, that was a luxury of which he must not think. The memory of Constance faded after Isabelle informed her brother of the marriage of that faithless one: “Like you I marvel that anyone could be so callous. It is easy to see that a fine château was a greater attraction. She had feeling only in her singing!” But chastity is the natural estate of the poor, and pleasure was a word that Chopin did not even understand. Living just below him, however, was a fresh, pretty woman. They met sometimes on the stairs, smiled, occasionally exchanged a few words. She heard from his room the passionate harmonies that this handsome male angel invented... for whom? Once she said to him:

“Come and see me some evening. I am often alone and I adore music.”

He refused, blushing. Yet a regret escaped him on paper, in his cold room: “I should have found a hearth, a fire. It would be nice to warm myself at it.”

CHAPTER VII
Happy Years, Working Years

“To-morrow,” he wrote to his family, “to-morrow I cross the seas.” He crossed the Boulevards and encountered Prince Valentin Radziwill.

This Radziwill family seems to have had a special influence on the life of Chopin. What beautiful analogies one could draw in comparing this encounter with such another when some pope, king, lord or fermier-général changed in one instant the fortunes of an artist apparently condemned to the miscarriage of his genius. It seems that there are between art and opulence secret and unconscious fructifications. François I never seems to us more inspired than in paying the debts of Clément Marot or in welcoming Leonardo da Vinci on the terrace of Amboise, nor Jules II more sympathetic than when climbing the scaffoldings of Michelangelo. Never does Elizabeth of England seem more intelligent than when she commissions The Merry Wives of Windsor from the pen of Shakespeare, and Fouquet, Treasurer-General, is remembered only because he subsidized La Fontaine. Had they dictated their biographies themselves, these great princes would doubtless have made no mention of such trivial gestures. In the same way, this Radziwill dreamed not of adding a meritorious line to his life when, meeting on the Boulevards this pitiful compatriot, he proposed to take him that very evening to see Baron de Rothschild. It is, however, from that casual proposal that the glory of Chopin dates.

Baron de Rothschild received the most exclusive society. Chopin was asked to play and he acceded with good grace. In a moment he captured the elegant world, and on the morrow was bombarded with invitations and requests for lessons. The Maréchale Lannes, Princess de Vaudemont, Count Apponyi, and Prince Adam Czartoryski made themselves his protectors. The lessons he gave cost no less than twenty francs an hour. He changed his lodgings twice and finally installed himself at No. 5 Chaussée d’Antin. Everybody began to talk of this poet who, in the evening, in the rare salons where he would consent to play, would people the darkness with a conclave of fairies. He called it “telling little musical stories.” They were tales of infinite variety, since it was above all in improvising that he showed his boldness. The incompleteness of his sketches opened the avenues of the imagination wherein the spirit lost itself. Chopin possessed to a high degree this power of suggestion, the artist’s most precious gift. He talked to himself, did not finish, and left to his hearers the pleasure of having clothed with notes for an instant forms and feelings which then evaporated into nothingness. “Divine gambols,” said Berlioz on hearing them. “A cloud of love, winter roses,” said Liszt. “By the wonderful gate,” he added, “Chopin leads you into a world where everything is a delightful miracle, a mad surprise, a miracle come true. But you must be initiated to know how to cross the threshold.” And Frederick confided once to his friend Franz:

“I am not at all the person to give concerts. The crowd intimidates me; I feel asphyxiated by their breaths, paralysed by their curious stares, mute before these strange faces. But you, you are destined for it, because when you don’t win your public, you know how to knock them dead.”

Chopin himself would not have had the strength. He only sought to win them. Furthermore, was it really this that he wanted? The public mattered so little to him. It was his own pain that he chanted and enchanted. He did not like to express himself through others and, Bach, Beethoven and Mozart apart, he interpreted none but himself.

For Chopin, as later for Wagner, the superfluous was the only necessity. The money that was now coming in more or less abundantly, was spent in poetic pleasures; a smart cabriolet, beautifully cut clothes, white gloves, expensive suppers. He took great pains with the furnishing of his apartment, putting in crystal lustres, carpets and silver, and he insisted on being supplied with flowers in all seasons. When his new women friends came—Countess Delphine Potoçka, Princess Marceline Czartoryska, Mlle. O’Meara, Princess de Beauvau, the rule was that they should bring a rose or orchids that the artist would put in a vase and endlessly contemplate, like a Japanese enraptured by a unique print.

Happy years, working years. Chopin composed a solid portion of his work. In 1833 he published five Mazurkas, the Trio for piano, violin and violoncello, three Nocturnes, the twelve great Etudes dedicated to Liszt, the Concerto in E minor, and in 1834 the Grand Fantasia on Polish airs, the Krakoviak for piano and orchestra, three more Nocturnes, the Rondeau in E flat major dedicated to Caroline Hartmann, four new Mazurkas, and the Grand Waltz in E flat major. His works were played by the greatest of the virtuosi at many concerts: Liszt, Moschelès, Field, Kalkbrenner and Clara Wieck. Liszt said of him: “A sick-room talent,” and Auber: “All his life he slays himself.” For Chopin, in spite of his success, was still suffering from nostalgia, and one day when his friend and pupil Gutmann was playing the third Etude, in E major, Chopin, who said he had never written a lovelier melody, cried suddenly, “Oh, my country!” Truly, for this young man of twenty-four, the mother country was always the strongest passion. He gave a Dantesque sadness to this name of Poland, more powerful on his heart than the call of a mistress. The hurt must have been deep indeed for Orlowski, in writing to his people, to take note of it as of a tubercular illness. “Chopin is well and vigorous,” he says. “He turns all the women’s heads. The men are jealous. He is the fashion. Doubtless we shall soon be wearing gloves à la Chopin. But home-sickness is burning him up.” The fact was that Poland remained the living spring, the reservoir whence he drew his dreams and his sentiments, the only effective rhythm,—in sun, the dynamo of his energies. Inspiration is chance caught on the wing. But art is not found hidden like the dove in the magician’s hat. Perhaps it is only perfect self-knowledge, the true perception of one’s own limitations, and the modulations that life teaches to our youthful fine enthusiasms. The Marquis de Custine wrote to Chopin: “When I listen to you I always think myself alone with you, and even perhaps with greater than you! or at least with all that is greatest in you.”

In the spring of ’34 Chopin and his friend Hiller went together to the Festival of Music at Aix-la-Chapelle. There they encountered Mendelssohn, who took a liking to the Pole and never tired of listening to his playing. He called him the first among pianists, and always reproached him, as well as Hiller, for the Parisian mania for a pose of despair. “I look like a schoolmaster,” he said, “while they resemble dandies and beaux.”

They returned by Düsseldorf and Cologne to Paris, where Chopin had the pleasure of seeing and entertaining his friend Matuszinski, who had just been made professor at the Ecole de Médecine. This was a period of the greatest serenity, for to his quiet fame Chopin could add the joy of daily companionship with one of his “brothers.” He exerted himself, entertained guests, played in public more than he usually did. On the 7th of December, at the Théâtre Italien, he appeared at a concert organized by Berlioz in honour of Harriet Smithson, the Irish actress he had just married. On Christmas Day, at the Salle Pleyel, he played, with Liszt at the other piano, a duet by Liszt on a theme of Mendelssohn. On the 15th of February, 1835, he took part in a concert at the Salle Erard, and on April 4th he played for the benefit of the Polish refugees. Berlioz wrote in the Rénovateur, “Chopin, as a player and as a composer, is an artist apart. He has no point of resemblance to any other musician I know. Unhappily, there is no one but Chopin himself who can play his music and give it that original turn, that impromptu that is one of its principal charms; his execution is veined with a thousand nuances of movement of which he alone has the secret, and which cannot be indicated... The detail in his mazurkas is unbelievable; then he has found a way to make them doubly interesting by playing them to the last degree of softness, with superlative piano, the hammers touching the strings so lightly that one is tempted to bend the ear over the instrument as one might at a concert of sylphs and pixies.”

But the crowd always awards the palms to brilliance, and Chopin, deciding that it had not given his Concerto in E minor the reception he expected, declared that he was neither understood nor made for concerts, and made up his mind to abstain from appearing in public for a long time.

Nevertheless, he played once more in public, on the 26th of April, 1835, at the Conservatory. This was the only time he ever appeared in that famous hall. He played his Polonaise brillante, preceded by an Andante Spianato.

He found compensation for these slight professional disappointments in the friendship of the Italian Bellini, towards whom he was drawn by a quick sympathy and whom he often saw. He was further distracted by an interest in a celebrated beauty, Countess Delphine Potoçka.

She was twenty-five, of regal bearing, with a delicately chiselled nose, a most passionate mouth, and the high, pensive forehead of the true voluptuary. Her whole appearance suggested a slender and puissant goddess, but whatever luxuriance she had was cooled by the severity of her glance.

Miçkiewicz said that she was “the greatest of all sinners,” and Krasinski apostrophized her in a poem in the manner of Mephistopheles: “O stay, for thou art true beauty.” Frederick let himself float in the sensual rayonnement of this beautiful animal of love. For the first time his head was turned. The sumptuous voice of Delphine enchanted him. He accompanied her at the piano, strove to make her soul be born again, to give it back its flower, and watched for possible beautiful vibrations; but the soul was the servant of this imperial flesh. Once or twice, however, she seemed to come out of her lethargy, to spread herself on an admirable note that sprang from the depths of her unconscious self, but immediately after, the shrieks, the laughter, the exigencies of this ravishing hysteric extinguished these gleams. And as the platonic love towards which Chopin wanted to direct her seemed to Delphine both comic and impossible, she gave herself before he had ever dreamed of asking her.

The adventure was of short duration. The Countess had a jealous husband, who, by cutting off her allowance, obliged this prodigal lady to make a prompt departure for Poland, whence she did not return till later on. But she retained a lasting affection for Chopin. The only lines from her to the artist that have been discovered furnish discreet witness to the fact:

“I shall not annoy you with a long letter, but I do not want to remain longer without news of your health and your plans for the future. I am sad to think of you abandoned and alone... Here my time is passed in an annoying fashion, and I hope not to have still more vexations. But I am disgusted. Everyone for whom I have done anything has repaid me with ingratitude. On the whole, life is one long dissonance. God bless you, dear Chopin. Good-bye.”

“One long dissonance,” so had Liszt already spoken. There was in these tormented bodies an invincible straining towards the suavest harmonies. At least in these beings—male or female—in whom the feminine predominates. But this is not the case with Chopin, whose musical travail was always virile. He would have subscribed to the words of Beethoven: “Emotion is good only for women; for man, music must draw fire from his spirit.” And even more, perhaps, to those quoted by Schumann from the German poet Johann-Paul Richter: “Love and friendship pass through this earth veiled and with closed lips. No human being can tell another how much he loves him; he knows only that he does love him. The inner man has no language; he is mute.”

CHAPTER VIII
Marie Wodzinska and the Dusk

In the summer of 1835, Chopin learned that his parents were going very shortly to Carlsbad to take the cure and he decided on the spot to get there first. The sentiments that bound him to his own people were still the most vital that he knew. So he left, his heart melting with tenderness. When he saw them, after five years of separation, he wrote to his sisters, who had remained at Warsaw, with transports that might have been mistaken for those of a rapturous lover.

“Our joy is indescribable. We do nothing but embrace one another... is there any greater happiness? What a pity we are not all together! How good God is to us! I write just anyhow; to-day it is better to think of nothing at all, to rejoice in the happiness we have attained. That is all I have to-day. Our parents have not changed; they are just the same; they have only grown a little older. We walk together, holding the arm of our sweet little mother... We drink, we eat together. We coax and bully each other. I am simply overflowing with happiness. These are the very habits, the very movements with which I grew up; it is the same hand that I have not kissed for so long... And here it has come true, this happiness, this happiness, this happiness!”

For their part, the father and mother found their son not in the least changed. It was joy inexhaustible, but brief, and like a preface to profounder emotions. For Frederick was invited to Dresden, to his friends the Wodzinskis, and he already felt those annunciatory quiverings, that exquisite fear, those physiological presentiments which notify our inner being of the imminent conception of love.

In his father’s boarding-school Chopin had had as comrades the three Wodzinski brothers, and since his childhood he had known their younger sister Marie. This great land-owning family had moved to Geneva for the education of the children, and had lived there during the years of the Polish Revolution. They had lived at first in a house in the Place St.-Antoine, and later in a villa on the shore of the lake, and they had not been long in gathering round them the flower of Genevese society and of the foreign colony. Familiar guests in their drawing-rooms were Bonstetten, Sismondi, Mlle. Salandin de Crans, Prince Louis Napoleon and Queen Hortense.

Marie was nineteen years old. The trace of Italian blood which flowed in her veins (through the Orsettis, who had come from Milan to Poland with Bona Sforza, the betrothed of one of the last kings of the dynasty of Jagellons), this trace had made her dark-haired, lively, with great black eyes and a full-lipped mouth the smile of which, a poet said, was passion incarnate. Some called her ugly, others ravishing. This means that in her face, half Slav, half Florentine, everything derived from the expression. “The brunette daughter of Euterpe,” she was called by Prince Napoleon, who liked to listen to her playing the piano while he smoked his cigar in the Place St.-Antoine. For Marie practised all sorts of minor talents; piano, singing, composing, embroidery, painting, without the will or the ability to fix her preference. The most pertinent thing about her, was her charm, the profound reaction, possibly unconscious, of a very rich temperament. From her fourteenth year she had been passionately loved. Readily she used her power over men, disconcerting them with coquetry. Her imagination was rapid, her memory exact.

Such was the childhood companion whom Chopin was to meet again at Dresden, where the Wodzinski family were settled for a time. Frederick was more curious than moved at seeing her again. He even wondered if it were not simply a matter of musical interest, Marie having formerly been one of his small pupils. She still occasionally sent him one of her compositions. Had he not only a few weeks before replied to one of these communications by sending her in turn a page of his own music? “Having had to improvise in a drawing-room here the very evening that I received it, I took for a subject the lovely theme of a Marie with whom, years ago, I used to play hide-and-seek... To-day I take the liberty of offering to my honourable colleague, Mlle. Marie, a little waltz I have just written. May it give her a hundredth part of the pleasure I felt when playing her Variations.”

So he arrived at Dresden. He saw her once again. He was won. He loved her. This town, which he had already visited twice, seemed altogether new and enchanting. In the mornings Marie and Frederick went out together, filled with delicious melancholy. They walked along the terrace of Bruhl and watched the flow of the Elbe, sat under the chestnuts of the Grossgarten, or lingered in ecstasy in the Zwinger Museum before Raphaël’s Madonna.

Together they paid a call on that Grand Mistress of the Court who had a few years before taken such pride in producing Chopin for Their Saxon Highnesses. In the evening the family visited one of Marie’s uncles, Palatin Wodzinski, who had presided at the last meeting of the Polish Senate before the fall of Warsaw. Exiled, the greater part of his wealth confiscated, the old man was now living at Dresden, the second capital of his ancient kings, surrounded by his prints, his books and his medals. He was an aristocratic little man, with a smooth face and a white wig. In his day he had soldiered, had received Napoleon at Wilna, and had been taken prisoner at Leipzig, at the side of the dying Poniatowski. He had the serious defect of a dislike for music, and now that they were playing every evening at his house he spent his time observing, rather peevishly, that his little niece was turning her shining eyes on this maker of mazurkas. Still more did he disapprove of certain sighs and whisperings that came from a corner of the room where this inseparable couple isolated themselves under the very nose of everybody. So he coughed loudly, adjusted his toupée, and addressed his sister-in-law:—

“An artist, a little artist without a future... Ah! that is not what I have dreamt of for your daughter.”

“Two children,” replied the Countess, laughing. “An old friendship.”

“We all know where that leads to...”

“But he is a child of the house, just as Antoine, Félix and Casimir were Professor Chopin’s children. Why sadden the poor boy? He is so tender, so obliging.”

And Frederick continued his love duets at the piano or on the terrace, in spite of the Palatin’s rebuking eyebrows and under the mother’s indulgent eyes. A whole month slipped by in these passionate new experiences. Then he had to think of leaving. One September morning he went up for the last time to the salon where the girl was awaiting him. A handful of roses strewed the table. She took one and gave it to him. The hour of eleven struck from the clock on the Frauenkirche. Chopin stood rigidly before her, pale, his eyes fixed. Perhaps he was thinking of that death of the self—that parting always is, whatever it promises for the future. Or was he listening to the melodic rhythm of his pain? In any case the only expression of sorrow that welled to the surface was the theme of a waltz. He sat down at the piano and played it, hiding thus all the cries of his loneliness.

Later, Marie called it La Valse de l’Adieu. It is worth noting that Chopin, restrained by an insurmountable pride, never published it. He did write it out, however, recopied it, and gave it to his friend on that last day with this very simple dedication: “For Mlle. Marie, Dresden, September, 1835.” Fontana published it after the death of the composer (Posthumous Works, op. 69, no. 1, Waltz in A flat major). One wants to catch in it “the murmur of two lovers’ voices, the repeated strokes of the clock, and the rumble of wheels scorching the pavement, the noise of which covers that of repressed sobs.” It is possible, after all, in spite of Schumann and his mute language. Be that as it may, Chopin kept the flower Marie gave him. We shall find it later, placed in an envelope and marked by him for whom sorrow and the ideal had always the scent of an autumn rose.

On his way back, Chopin stopped at Leipzig, where he again saw Mendelssohn, who took him straight to Wieck, his daughter, Clara, and Robert Schumann. The small house of the Wiecks’ that day sheltered the three greatest composers of the age.

After his arrival in Paris, Chopin shut himself up at home in order to live in close relationship with the loved face that now bloomed in his desert. He wrote. He received letters. These were, on both sides, a little flat, because neither of them knew how to talk well except through music. But what of it? A lover’s pen is not necessarily literary nor abounding in sentiments. There are even those who, in their exigency, scorn the worn vocabulary of love. To the novices and the pure, the palest nuances are enough to show the naked heart. Listen with Chopin’s delicate ear to the gossamer letters of Marie Wodzinska:

“Though you do not like either to receive or to write letters, I nevertheless want to profit by the departure of M. Cichowski to send you news of Dresden since you left. So I am annoying you again, but no longer by my playing. On Saturday, when you had gone, all of us went about sadly, with our eyes full of tears, in the room where only a few minutes before we had still had you with us. Father came in presently, and was so sorry not to have been able to say good-bye. Every minute or so Mother, in tears, would speak of some traits of ‘her fourth son Frederick,’ as she called you. Félix looked quite cast down: Casimir tried to make his jokes as usual, they did not come off that day as he played the jester, half-crying. Father teased us and laughed himself only to keep from crying. At eleven the singing master arrived; the lesson went very badly, we could not sing. You were the subject of all conversation. Félix kept asking me for the Waltz (the last thing of yours we had received and heard). All of us found pleasure in it, they in listening and I in playing, because it reminded us of the brother who had just left us. I took it to be bound; the German opened his eyes wide when he saw a single page (he did not know by whom it had been written). No one to dinner; we kept staring at your place at the table, then too at ‘Fritz’s little corner.’ The small chair is still in place and probably will be as long as we keep this apartment. In the evening we were taken to my aunt’s to spare us the sadness of this first evening without you. Father came to fetch us saying that it was as impossible for him as it had been for us, to stay in the house that day. It was a great relief to leave the spot that kept renewing our sorrow. Mother talks to me of nothing but you and Antoine. When my brother goes to Paris, think a little of him, I beg you. If you only knew what a devoted friend you have in him,—a friend such as one rarely finds! Antoine is good-hearted, too much so, because he is always the dupe of others. And he is very careless; he never thinks of anything, or rarely, at least... When by some miracle you have an impulse to write: ‘How are you? I am well. I have no time to write further,’ add, I beg, yes or no to the question I want to ask you: Did you compose ‘If I were a little sun up there, for none but you would I want to shine’? I received this a day or so ago and I have not the courage to sing it, because I fear, if it is yours, that it would be altogether changed, like Wojak, for instance. We continually regret that you are not named Chopinski, or at least that there is not some indication to show that you are Polish, because then the French would not be able to dispute with us the honour of being your compatriots. But this is too long. Your time is so precious that it is really a crime to make you spend it reading my scrawls. Besides, I know you do not read them all through. Little Marie’s letter will be stuck away in a corner after you have read a few lines. So I need not reproach myself further about stealing your time.

“Good-bye (simply). A childhood friend needs no fine phrases. Mother embraces you tenderly. Father and my mother embrace you sincerely (no, that is too little) in the most—I do not yet know how to say it myself. Joséphine, not having been able to say good-bye, asks me to express her regrets. I asked Thérèse: ‘What shall I say to Frederick for you?’ She answered: ‘kiss him and give him my regards.’

“Good-bye,
“Maria.

“P.S. When you started out, you left the pencil of your portfolio on the piano. This must have been inconvenient on the way; as for us, we are keeping it respectfully as a relic. Once again, thank you very much for the little vase. Mlle. Wodzinska came in this morning with a great discovery. ‘Sister Maria, I know how they say Chopin in Polish,—Chopena!’”

Frederick replied, sent his music, and above all, composed. The year 1836 opened under the sign of Marie. He published the Concerto in F minor and the Grande Polonaise for piano and orchestra. He wrote the Ballade in G minor, which is the monument to his love.

It is not deliberately that an artist discovers and then fashions the residue of his amorous experiences. He receives his joys and sufferings within himself and leaves them to ferment. It is only after the rude labour of his conflicts with himself, after the corrosion of each of his illusions, under the salt of his tears, that the costly fruit of which he bears the germ can be born. From this obscure chemistry, from the disillusionment which Marie’s letters, little by little, brought to him, came the Ballade in G minor (op. 23). Schumann called it one of the most bitter and personal of Chopin’s works. He might have added, the saddest, and thus the most passionate, for there is no passion without pain. Here we see passion itself crucified, and hear its cries.

How powerful is the instinct of the poet to submit his pain to the form of narrative, like a heroic tale! For in theory the ballad is a song with accompaniment. Under this form of legend Chopin transposed the ancient malady of man, which had become for a second time his own. It is in this way, by what it tells us of him, involuntarily, that the Ballade in G minor, irresistible in its unique and unhappy sentiment, retains an accent that flatters us. It convinces us that we also are marked by the sign of love.

Schumann, who saw him again that summer, at Leipzig, tells of the magical hours they spent together at the piano. To listen to the dreamer was to become oneself the dream of his spirit. But nothing could be more exasperating than Chopin’s habit of drawing his finger rapidly from one end of the keyboard to the other at the end of each piece, as though forcibly to drive away the dream he had created.

A curious detail: in the original edition of the Ballade, there appears in the last bar of the introduction a D, evidently written with an E flat and corrected later. Saint-Saëns writes on this subject: “This supposed E gives a dolorous accent which is quite in keeping with the character of the piece. Was it a misprint? Was it the original intention of the author? This note marks a dissonant accent, an effect of surprise. But dissonances, sought out to-day like truffles, were then distrusted. From Liszt, whom I questioned on the subject, I could obtain only this reply: ‘I prefer the E flat....’ I concluded from this evasive answer that Chopin, in playing the ballad, sounded the D; but I am still convinced that the E flat was his original idea and that cowardly and clumsy friends persuaded him to the D.”

I reproduce this detail for the lovers of sources, for those who like to surprise in the heart not the sweetest tones, but the most pure. They will understand the distinction.

Thus Chopin worked, economized, and prepared for his next meeting with Marie. He refused an invitation from Mendelssohn, who wanted him to come to Düsseldorf for a music festival. He refused Schumann, although he had signed his invitation “with love and adoration.” He reserved all his forces for a trip to Marienbad, which he finally took in July, 1836.

On a radiant summer morning Chopin reached the wooded hills round the little Austrian watering place where his loved one was awaiting him. The effect was so powerful that he closed his eyes as from a shock of pain. In that instant, even before seeing her, a presentiment came to him that he had reached the summit of his joy. He knew the unreasonable agony advanced by false joys, finished, experienced, emptied, almost before they have begun to exist. However, Marie’s agitated face steadied him and gave him back his confidence. But a shade of uneasiness, a slight tendency on the part of Marie and her mother to be more ceremonious than they had been the year before, left him anxious.

Nevertheless, they resumed the intimate family life which he loved. Forebodings fled. There were walks in that agreeable country-side, musical séances, evening talks, stories of his Paris life, memories. Frederick shone with his talent for mimicry. He imitated famous artists, assaulted the keys with a great waving of arms and hands, went, as he said, “pigeon-shooting.” The Wodzinskis lived in a villa. In their garden spread a tall lime-tree. During the hot hours of the afternoon Marie and Frederick took refuge in its shade and the girl sketched in charcoal the ever slightly grave features of this friend who was at once so childlike and so mature.

On August 24th they all returned to the beloved town of Dresden. There they spent two more weeks. Two weeks which were to lead fatally to the crisis. At dusk on the 7th of September, two days before Chopin’s departure, he asked Marie to be his wife. She consented. That is all we know, except that the Countess also gave her consent but imposed the condition of secrecy. They were obliged to hide the decision from the father, whom they would without doubt persuade, but whose family pride made a rapid consent improbable. Besides, he thought Chopin in delicate health. Frederick departed, carrying with him this promise and his own despair. He knew that the presentiment of Marienbad had not deceived him, and already he had lost his faith in happiness.

However the Wodzinskis wrote to him,—especially the Countess. Marie added little postscripts. Here is Mme. Wodzinska’s first letter:—

“14 Sept., ’36.

“Dear Frederick:

“As we agreed I am sending you a letter... I should have sent it two days ago if it had not been for a tooth which I had extracted and from which I suffered greatly. I cannot sufficiently regret your departure on Saturday; I was ill that day and could not put my mind on the dusk. We spoke of it too little.

“The next day I could have talked of it further. M. de Girardin says: ‘To-morrow is always a great day.’ We have it still ahead of us. Do not think I retract what I said,—no. But we must discuss the path to follow. I only beg of you to keep the secret. Keep it well, because everything depends on that... On October 15th I shall be at Warsaw. I shall see your parents and your sisters; I shall tell them that you are well and in excellent spirits: however, I shall say nothing of the dusk.... Good-bye, go to bed at eleven o’clock and until January 7th drink eau de gomme. Keep well, dear Fritz: I bless you with all my soul, like a loving mother.

“P.S. Marie sends you some slippers. They are a little big, but she says you are to wear woollen stockings. This is the judgment of Paris, and I trust you will be obedient; haven’t you promised? Anyway, remember that this is a period of probation.”

The dusk, it was so, among themselves, that they called Chopin’s love. No chance name was ever more appropriate.

To a letter which her brother Casimir sent off the next day, Marie added these lines: “We cannot console ourselves for your departure; the three days that have just passed have seemed like centuries; have they to you? Do you miss your friends a little? Yes,—I answer for you, and I do not think I am mistaken; at least I want to believe not. I tell myself that this yes comes from you (because you would have said it, wouldn’t you?).

“The slippers are finished; I am sending them to you. I am chagrined that they should be too large, in spite of the fact that I gave your shoe as a measure, carissimo maestro, but the man is a common German. Dr. Paris consoles me by saying this is good for you as you should wear very warm woollen stockings this winter.

“Mamma has had a tooth out, which has made her very weak. She has had to stay in bed ever since. In two weeks we leave for Poland. I shall see your family, which will be a joy for me, and that sweet Louise,—will she remember me? Good-bye, mio carissimo maestro. Do not forget Dresden for the present, or in a little while Poland. Good-bye, au revoir. Ah, if it could be soon!

“Maria.

“Casimir says that the Sluzewo piano is in such ramshackle condition that it cannot be used. So think about a Pleyel. In the happy days, not like to-day (as far as we are concerned), I hope to hear you play on the same piano. Au revoir, au revoir, au revoir! That gives me hope.”

Such is the most passionate letter Chopin ever received from Marie Wodzinska. In October another letter from the Countess, another postscript from Marie.

“October 2nd—Dusk.

“Thank you ever so much for the autographs. Will you please send some more? (Mamma makes me write this.) Now we are leaving at once for Warsaw. How I shall rejoice to see all your family and next year you!... Good-bye, till May, or June at the latest. I recommend to your memory your very faithful secretary.

“Marie.”

In January, 1837, Countess Wodzinska was disturbed about a Pleyel piano Chopin had sent her. She thanked him for a new supply of autographs, and added this slightly ambiguous sentence at the end of her letter: “From now on we must inform ourselves still more prudently about our loved one.” Marie put in her postscript, her “imposition,” one would like to say.

“Mother has been scolding. I thank you so much,—so much. And when we see each other again I shall thank you even more kindly. You can see how lazy I am about writing, because to put off my thanks till our next meeting spares me many words to-day. Mamma has described to you our way of life. There is nothing left for me to say, except that it is thawing; which is great news, isn’t it? This tranquil life we lead here is what we need, so I like it,—for the present, I mean, because I should not like it to be always so. One takes what comes with as good grace as possible, when things cannot be different from what they are. I occupy myself a little to kill time. Just now I have Heine’s Germany, which interests me enormously.

“But I must stop and leave you to God’s grace. I hope I do not need to repeat to you the assurance of the sentiments of your faithful secretary.

“Marie.”

This time Chopin must have discovered in the colourless words not the least gleam of the dusk. The night had completely fallen. He took down the album Marie had given him the year before to write in it a page of music. For a year the pages had remained virgin. Chopin said: “I could not have written anything at all in it, not if I had tried a hundred years.”

Now he could fill it, because he realized that Marie’s love was dead. So he wrote on the first page a Lento con gran expressione and eight other melodies to the words of Witwicki and Miçkiewicz. Soon after, he received in reply this letter, the last:—

“For Frederick Chopin.

“I can only write you a few words to thank you for the lovely scrapbook you have sent me. I shall not try to tell you with what pleasure I received it, as it would be in vain. Accept, I beg you, the assurance of the gratitude I owe you. Believe in the life-long attachment of our whole family for you, and particularly of your naughtiest pupil and childhood friend. Good-bye. Mamma sends her dearest love. Thérèse is always talking of her ‘Chopena.’

“Good-bye,—think of us,
“Maria.”

It is hard to say whether it was heart or intelligence that was wanting in this young woman. Besides,—it scarcely matters. Love is not within the compass of all little girls any more than happiness is made for difficult souls. “Perhaps we are worth more than happiness,” said Liszt to Mme. d’Agoult.

Chopin accepted the breaking of his engagement in silence. But neither his heart nor his body recovered, ever. His friend Camille Pleyel took him to London for a few days, to distract him. There he was very ill. His latent tuberculosis seems to have begun its ravages at that time.

The Marquis de Custine wrote him: “You have gained in sympathy, in poetry; the melancholy of your compositions goes deeper into the heart than ever before. One is alone with you even in the midst of the crowd. It is not a piano, it is a soul...”

Chopin gathered the notes of Marie Wodzinska and placed them, with the rose of Dresden, in an envelope on which he wrote these two Polish words: “Moïa Biéda,” my grief. They found this poor packet, after his death, tied with a loving ribbon.

CHAPTER IX
First Sketch of George Sand

Some six years before this romance in such few words, we glanced at the face of a woman bending over her paper and watched her enthusiastic hand pen these words: “To live, how sweet! How good it is, in spite of griefs, husbands... in spite of bitter pangs. To live,—how intoxicating! To love, to be loved! That is happiness, that is Heaven!” During these six years neither this heart, nor this body, nor this hand had much slackened. To live, indeed, was the vital business of George Sand, dumpy, greedy, and so formidably endowed for all the extravagances of the spirit and the flesh. Nothing was too strong for this small woman, so solid of head and of body. And no one had bested her. In spite of her “bitter pangs,” her chagrin, for and against a boorish and rapacious husband, this great-granddaughter of the Maréchal de Saxe, this daughter of a daughter of the people had pretty well solved the double tactical problem of happiness that she had set herself: love and fame—enough to satisfy the most exigent appetites. At twenty-seven, this provincial had written her first book and taken her first lover. At thirty she could have said, like her ancestor the Maréchal: “Life is a dream. Mine has been short, but it has been beautiful.” Now, in her thirty-fourth year, this surprising pagan thought herself finished, and for ever disgusted with pleasure. She had not yet learned that the malady of desire, once it has opened in a being its ever-living wound, has but a feeble chance of healing. At least before the season of the great cold.

But, to this malady of desire, Aurore Dudevant added a taste for lengthy associations. Heart and head she was made for them,—and from them had contracted the habits of bed and of thought. Jules Sandeau had given her her pen name, her theories of “love free and divine,” and her first experience of love. The disappointment that followed this trial plunged her into war against all yokes, even that of sentiment. Still, perhaps yoke is too heavy a word. Pressure is enough. To rid herself, however, of such disturbing memories, she chose an intelligent thaumaturgist, and, against love, a marvellous antiseptic: the writer Mérimée. She confessed as much, at a later date, in a curious letter: “On one of those days of weariness and despair I met a man of sublime self-confidence, a man who was calm and strong, who understood nothing of my nature and who laughed at my troubles. The vitality of his spirit completely fascinated me; for a week I thought he had the secret of happiness, that he would teach it to me, that his scornful indifference would cure me of my childish susceptibilities. I believed that he had suffered like me, and that he had triumphed over his surface emotions. I do not yet know if I was wrong, if this man is strong by reason of his greatness or of his poverty.... At any rate, at the age of thirty I behaved as a girl of fifteen would not have done. The experience was a complete failure.”

This woman, so smothered in words, sometimes found a phrase that plumbed the depths. She adds a little farther on, in that same letter to Sainte-Beuve: “If Prosper Mérimée had understood me, he might perhaps have loved me, and if he had loved me he might have vanquished me, and if I had been able to submit to a man I should have been saved, because my liberty devours and kills me.” Here is the real misfortune of this gross temperament. It needed a master and from that time sought it only among the weak. Her slight physiological inversion induced psychological aberrations from which sprang all the wrongs which this fine thinking animal committed against her own peace.

Thus, there was thenceforth in the life of George Sand an absent being. We can take those words to mean a kind of ideal lover, lord of her thought and minister to her flesh, this marvellous twin self who arouses our instincts but never satiates them, who invents our dearest pains and stirs up our devils, yet like an angel bears us up to the mystical union of souls. The difficulty is to find united in one being all the colours of our own neurosis. We all join the chase, however, giving each his own name to the pursuit. George Sand called it “the search for her truth.” After all, why not? One might call truth the rhythm from which our engines derive the greatest potential power, whether this be for pleasure, for pain, for work, or for love. But we must do Sand this justice, that next to her private ills the general ill, “the suffering of the race, the view, the knowledge, meditation on the destiny of man” also impassioned her elastic soul. She often succeeded in forgetting herself in order to understand others. She knew how to let her intelligence ripen, to give maturity to her thoughts. Yet, in spite of the part she took in the idealistic battles of the century, in spite of the intellectual influence which she exerted at such an early age on the minds of her time, this woman’s profound lament was that of her Lélia: “For ten thousand years I have cried into the infinite,—‘Truth, truth!’ For ten thousand years the infinite has answered,—‘Desire, desire!’”

But here is this désenchantée, after her period of despair in 1833, suddenly writing: “I think I have blasphemed Nature, and God perhaps, in Lélia; God, who is not wicked, and who does not wreak vengeance upon us, has sealed my mouth by giving me back my youthful heart and by forcing me to admit that he has endowed us with sublime joys.” She had just dined at the side of a fair young man of twenty-three, with arrogant eyes and no eyelashes, with a slender waist and beautiful, aristocratic hands, who scoffed loudly at all social idealism and bent over to breathe in the women’s ears: “I am not gentle, I am excessive.” He scoffed both at the “labouring classes” and at the “ruling,” at St.-Simon and at the Abbé de Lamennais. He even said: “I am more interested in the way Napoleon put on his boots than in all the politics of Europe.” Women felt that his real interest was love.

He paid immediate attention to his already celebrated neighbour with the olive skin, who sent him a few days later the two volumes of her Leila with these inscriptions: the first: “To Monsieur mon gamin d’Alfred;” the second “To Monsieur the Viscount Alfred de Musset, respectful regards from his devoted servant, George Sand.”

We know to-day in all its details the story of this liaison and its magnificent expenditure of sorrows. We shall retain only certain crystals, the bitter dregs left in their hearts by the excesses of two fierce and consummate imaginations. It can be said that they devoured each other. Their desires differed: the one more brutal, more ravenous, less merciful; the other evil, maniacal, but savouring in little bites the marrow of their mutual suffering. “Contract your heart, big George,” he said. And she: “I no longer love you, but I still adore you. I no longer want you, but I cannot now do without you.” They departed for Venice, where these two sadists took vengeance on each other for their double impotence: cerebral with him, physical with her. And they continued nevertheless to desire and adore each other in spite of their outworn senses and spent joys. Then came those tortures that are self-inflicted for the stimulation of the senses. They soon had nothing left but the taste of their tears. Finally, in the very middle of the crisis, each of the two lovers sought refuge according to his own temperament: George in work and Alfred in sickness. Then the saviour appeared in the form of a handsome Venetian doctor on whom, at the very bedside of the delirious poet, fell the brunt of the reillumined desires of the other victim. No more pity, when the beast is once more at large. And no more despair, when the dry scales fall from an old love to leave naked a new body that melts to softness at the first touch of unfamiliar lips.

Musset departed. The three of them cultivated a curious relationship. The following summer George wrote to Alfred: “Oh! that night of rapture, when, in spite of ourselves, you joined our hands and said: ‘You love each other and still you love me; you have saved me body and soul!’” And for his part Musset cried: “Poor George, poor dear child! You thought yourself my mistress,—you were only my mother....” There the word is spoken. That physiological inversion we mentioned could at once assume another form. But the mot juste is really that of mother. Because Sand was above all maternal, protective, the mistress genetrix. She needed to endow everything about her with the sentiment of maternity. A few months later on, when everything was over between them, the shrieks she uttered in her Journal Intime over this badly quenched love were again those of a mother deprived of her suckling. “I love you! I would submit to every torture to be loved by you, and you leave me! Ah! poor man, you are mad... It is your pride that leads you... Oh, my poor children, how unhappy your mother is!... I want to surround myself with pure and distinguished men. Away with the strong; I want to see the artists: Liszt, Delacroix, Berlioz, Meyerbeer. I shall be a man among them and we shall gossip and talk. Alfred shall hear our bad jokes... Alas, if I only had him to-day! What haste I am in to have him! If I had only a few lines from you once in a while, just a word, permission to send you sometimes a little two-penny picture bought on the quai, cigarettes I made myself, a bird, a toy... Oh, my blue eyes, you will never look at me again! Lovely head, I shall never see you bend over me again, or wrap you in sweet languor. My little body, warm and supple, you will never stretch yourself out on me, as Elisha on the dead child, to quicken it!” “Ah! who will care for you, and for whom shall I care?”

This was the punishment for loving a man devoid of passion. The depth of her being, when she stirred it well, sent up always the same hope: “I need to suffer for someone. I must nourish this maternal solicitude, which is accustomed to guard over a tired sufferer.”

A fancy for a kind of tribune of the people intervened to heal the still live sore: she thought herself in love with Everard, he whom his contemporaries called Michel de Bourges. She yielded him the virginity of her intelligence. A cold love. The love of a slave who admires a handsome captain and a just legislator. But no giving, no suffering, nothing to blast deep caves of passion into the soul. Besides, Michel de Bourges was anti-artist. She wanted to avenge art with irony. “Berlioz is an artist,” she wrote to the master of rhetoric. “Perhaps he is even criminal enough to think secretly that all the people in the world are not worth a rightly placed chromatic scale, just as I have the insolence to prefer a white hyacinth to the crown of France. But rest assured that one can have these follies in one’s head and not be an enemy of the human race. You are for sumptuary laws, Berlioz is for demi-semi-quavers, I am for liliaceous plants.”

This lawyer was nevertheless jealous underneath his coldness. He was even tiresome. George Sand saw Liszt, found him handsome, and received him at Nohant with his mistress, Marie d’Agoult. Envying their still-young love, she noted in her diary: “What fearful calm in my heart! Can the torch be extinguished?” It was not the torch that was dying but the burned out candle lighted by the philosopher whose penholder she had aspired to be. And still the old stubborn idea reappeared: “My sweetest dream... consists in imagining the care I might give you in your feeble old age.” One important service she received from Michel was the winning of her action for divorce from Casimir Dudevant.

In the summer of 1836 she shook off the lover’s chain and broke the hobble of a husband. She was free. On the spot she turned over her two children, Maurice and Solange, to a young tutor by the name of Pelletan, whom, to know him better, she put to the test by becoming his mistress. Then she left for Geneva to join Liszt and the Countess d’Agoult. She returned in the early autumn and settled for a time in Paris with this couple, who were beginning to tire of solitude. All three of them went to the Hôtel de France in the rue Laffitte. This sedate bourgeois tavern became a communal dwelling of artists. On the stairs one passed Eugène Sue, Miçkiewicz, the singer Nourrit, the Abbé de Lamennais, Heinrich Heine. The musical gentlemen, with Liszt at the head, spoke of nothing but Chopin.

“Bring him to me,” demanded George.

He came one evening with Hiller. Mr. Sand and Miss Chopin saw each other for the first time.

Returning home, Chopin said to his friend: “What an antipathetic woman that Sand is! Is she really a woman? I’m inclined to doubt it.”

CHAPTER X
Letters of Two Novelists

While Frederick Chopin, in the year 1837, was living out the slow decomposition of his love, George Sand was back at her little Château de Nohant. There she spent long months alone, with her children and her work. The summer brought her the Liszt-d’Agoult ménage, nights of music, new dreams of happiness. Then her mother died unexpectedly, and she was obliged to return to Paris, while the Countess and Franz took the road for Italy. She planned to rejoin them there, but was prevented by a sudden inclination for the new tutor of her children, Félicien Mallefille. The rupture with Michel de Bourges still bled feebly, but George felt that she had finally “slain the dragon,” and that this attachment, more stubborn than she had dreamed, would be cured by a gentle affection, “less enthusiastic, but also less sharp,” and, she hoped, lasting. She was mistaken. Six months were sufficient to drain this spring to the bottom. Nevertheless she had pity on this rather vapid lover, who never interested her physically. For several months more she dragged him about with her luggage between Paris, Fontainebleau, and Nohant.

In January of 1838, the great Balzac stumbled one fine evening into this country seat and stayed for several days. The two novelists passed the nights in gossip and confidences. Balzac set down his still warm impressions for Countess Hanska: “I reached the Château de Nohant on Holy Saturday, about half-past seven in the evening, and I found comrade George Sand in her dressing-gown, smoking an after dinner cigar, in front of her fire in an immense empty room. She had lovely yellow slippers ornamented with fringe, bewitching stockings and red trousers. So much for her state of mind. As to physique, she had doubled her chin like a prebendary. She has not a single white hair in spite of her frightful misfortunes; her swarthy complexion has not changed; her fine eyes are as brilliant as ever; she has the same stupid air when she is thinking, because, as I told her after studying her, her whole countenance is in her eye. She has been at Nohant for a year, very sad and working prodigiously. She leads about the same life that I do. She goes to bed at six in the morning and gets up at noon; I go to bed at six in the evening and get up at midnight. But, naturally, I conformed to her habits, and for three days we have gossiped from five o’clock in the evening, after dinner, till five in the morning. The result is that I know her, and she knows me, better after these three talks than during the whole of the preceding four years, when she used to visit me while she was in love with Jules Sandeau and when she was attached to Musset... It was just as well that I saw her, for we exchanged mutual confidences regarding Jules Sandeau... However, she was even more unhappy with Musset, and now there she is, in profound seclusion, raging at both marriage and love, because in each she has found nothing but disappointment.

“Her right male was hard to find, that is all. All the harder because she is not amiable, and, consequently, loving her will always be beset with difficulties. She is a bachelor, she is an artist, she is big, generous, loyal, chaste; she has the features of a man. Ergo, she is not a woman. While I was near her, even in talking heart to heart for three days, I felt no more than before the itch of that gooseflesh of gallantry that in France and in Poland one is supposed to display for any kind of female.

“It was to a friend I was talking. She has high virtues, virtues that society regards askance. We discussed the great questions of marriage and of freedom with a seriousness, a good faith, a candour, a conscience worthy of the great shepherds who guide the herds of men.

“For, as she said, with immense pride (I should not have dared think of it myself), ‘Since by our writings we are preparing a revolution in the customs of the future, I am not less struck by the inconveniences of the one state than by those of the other.’

“We spent the whole night talking of this great problem. I am absolutely in favour of liberty for the young girl and bondage for the woman, that is, I want her to know before marriage what she is undertaking: I want her to have considered everything; then, when she has signed the contract, after having weighed the chances, to be faithful to it. I gained a great point in making Mme. Dudevant realize the necessity of marriage; but she will come to believe in it, I am sure, and I feel that I have done good in proving it to her.

“She is an excellent mother, adored by her children; but she dresses her daughter Solange like a little boy, and that is not right.

“She is like a man of twenty, morally, because she is chaste, modest, and only an artist on the outside. She smokes inordinately, she plays the princess, perhaps, a little too much, and I am convinced that she portrayed herself faithfully as the princess in Le Secrétaire Intime. She knew and said of herself, before I told her, just what I think,—that she has neither power of conception nor the gift of constructing plots, nor the ability to attain to the truth, nor the art of pathos; but that, without knowing the French language, she has style. This is true. She takes fame, as I do, lightly enough, and has a profound scorn for the public, whom she calls Jumento.

“I shall tell you of the immense and secret devotion of this woman for these two men, and you will say to yourself that there is nothing in common between the angels and the devils. All the follies she has committed entitle her to glory in the eyes of great and beautiful souls....

“Anyway, it is a man she would like to be, so much so that she has thrown off womanhood, and is no longer a woman. A woman attracts and she repels, and, since I am very masculine, if she produces that effect on me, she must produce it on men who are like me. She will be unhappy always. And so,—she is now in love with a man who is her inferior, and in that covenant there is only disillusionment and disappointment for a woman with a beautiful spirit. A woman should always love a man greater than she, or she be so blinded that it is the same as though he were.

“I have not come from Nohant unscathed. I carried away one enormous vice; she made me smoke a hooka with Lattakieh; it has suddenly become a necessity to me...”

Balzac’s eye and ear were not mistaken in their diagnosis. Yet he could neither fully see nor fully hear what was passing behind the windows of this being who was more complex than he knew. This spring of 1838 germinated once again the strong dark violet of a new love.

George Sand had been to Paris several times. She had seen Chopin again. And the drama of pleasure, of difficulties, of pains, had involved them. Both Sand and Chopin had come through too many sufferings to turn the new page of their story with anything but distrust and uncertainty. But with Chopin it had all been buried in silence, and his music alone had received his queries and his secret raptures. We may consult all his work of this period, which witnesses magnificently to this: the Twelve Studies, dedicated to Mme. d’Agoult (Vol. 2, op. 25), the Impromptu (Op. 29), the Second Scherzo (Op. 31), the Two Nocturnes (Op. 32), the four mazurkas of op. 30 (C minor, B minor, D flat major, and C sharp minor), the three Valses Brillantes of op. 34, and four other mazurkas (op. 33) dedicated to Mlle. la Comtesse Mostowska.

As for George, the first hint of her new passion is found in a letter to her friend, Mme. Marliani, dated the 23rd of May, where she says: “Pretty dear, I have received your letters and have delayed replying fully, because you know how changeable the weather is in the season of love. There is so much yes and no, if and but, in one week, and often in the morning one says: This is absolutely intolerable, only to add in the evening: Truly, it is supreme happiness. So I am holding off until I may tell you definitely that my barometer registers something, if not stable, at least set fair for any length of time at all. I have not the slightest reproach to make, but that is no reason to be happy....”

Yet it was not to Mme. Marliani that she showed the singular and interesting fluctuations of her sentimental barometer, but to Count Albert Grzymala, a close friend of Chopin. But here is what she wrote him at the beginning of that summer:

“Nothing could ever make me doubt the loyalty of your advice, dear friend; may you never have such a fear. I believe in your gospel without knowing or examining it, because once it has a disciple like you it must be the most sublime of all gospels. Bless you for your advice, and be at peace about my thoughts. Let us state the question clearly, for the last time, for on your final reply on this subject will depend my whole future conduct, and since it had to come to this I am vexed at not having conquered the repugnance I felt to questioning you in Paris. It seemed to me that what I was to hear would blanch my poem. And, indeed, now it has browned, or rather it is paling enormously. But what does it matter? Your gospel is mine when it prescribes thinking of oneself last and not thinking of oneself at all when the happiness of those we love claims all our strength. Listen to me well, and reply clearly, categorically, definitely. This person whom he wants, ought, or thinks he ought to love, is she the one to bring him happiness? Or would she heighten his suffering and his sadness? I do not ask if he loves her, if he is loved, if she is more or less to him than I. I know, approximately, by what is taking place in me, what must be happening to him. I want to know which of us two he must forget and forsake for his own peace, for his happiness, for his very life, which seems to me too precarious and frail to withstand great sorrows. I do not want to play the part of a bad angel. I am not Meyerbeer’s Bertram and I shall never fight against a childhood friend, provided she is a pure and lovely Alice. If I had known that there was a bond in the life of your child, a sentiment in his soul, I should never have stooped to inhale a perfume meant for another altar. By the same token, he would without doubt have drawn back from my first kiss had he known I was as good as married. We have neither of us deceived one another. We gave ourselves to the wind that passed, and for a few minutes it carried us both into another region. But we had, none the less, to come back down here, after this celestial embrace and this flight through the empyrean. Poor birds, we have wings, but our nest is on the ground, and when the song of the angels calls us on high, the cries of our family recall us below. For my part, I have no wish to abandon myself to passion, although there is in the depths of my heart a fire that still occasionally threatens. My children will give me the strength to break with anything that would draw me away from them, or from the manner of life that is best for their education, their health, their well-being.... Thus I am unable to establish myself at Paris because of Maurice’s illness, etc., etc. Then there is an excellent soul, perfect, in regard to heart and honour, whom I shall never leave, because he is the only man who, having been with me for a year, has never once, for one single minute, made me suffer by his fault. He is also the only man who has ever given himself absolutely and entirely to me, without regret for the past, without reserve for the future. Then, he has such a good and wise nature that I can in time teach him to understand everything, to know everything. He is soft wax on which I have put my seal. When I want to change the imprint, with some precaution and patience I shall succeed. But it cannot be done to-day, and his happiness is sacred to me.

“So much for me. Tied as I am, bound fairly tightly for years to come, I cannot wish that our child should on his side break the bonds that hold him. If he should come to lay his existence in my hands, I should be indeed dismayed because, having already accepted another, I could not offer him a substitute for what he had sacrificed for me. I believe that our love could last only under the conditions under which it was born, that is, that sometimes, when a good wind blows us together, we should again make a tour among the stars and then leave each other to plod upon the ground, because we are earth children and God has not decreed that we should finish our pilgrimage together. We ought to meet among the heavens, and the fleet moments we shall pass there shall be so beautiful that they shall outweigh all our lives below.

“So my task is set. But I can, without ever relinquishing it, accomplish it in two different ways; the one, by keeping as aloof as possible from C[hopin], by never seeking to occupy his thoughts, by never again being alone with him; the other, on the contrary, by drawing as close to him as possible without compromising the position of M[allefille], to insinuate myself gently into his hours of rest and happiness, to hold him chastely in my arms sometimes, when the wind of heaven sees fit to raise us and transport us up to the skies. The first way will be the one I shall adopt if you tell me that the person is fit to give him a pure, true happiness, to care for him, to arrange, regularize, and calm his life, if, in fact, he could be happy through her and I should be an impediment. If his spirit strongly, perhaps madly, perhaps wisely scrupulous, refuses to love two different beings, in two different ways, if the eight days I might pass with him in a whole season should keep him from inner happiness for the rest of the year,—then, yes, then I swear to you that I should try to make him forget me. I should adopt the second way if you should say one of two things: either that his domestic happiness could and should do with a few hours of chaste passion and of sweet poetry, or that domestic happiness is not possible to him, and that marriage or any union that resembled it would be the grave of this artist soul, that he must at any cost be saved from it and even helped to conquer his religious scruples. It is thereabouts that I arrive in my conjectures. You shall tell me if I am mistaken; I believe the person charming, worthy of all love and all respect, because such a being as he could love only the pure and the beautiful. But I believe that you dread marriage for him, the daily bond, real life, business, domestic cares, everything in a word that seems remote from his nature and detrimental to the inspiration of his muse. I too should fear it for him; but on this point I can say nothing and decide nothing, because there are many aspects under which he is quite unknown to me. I have seen only the side of his being that is warmed by the sun. You shall therefore settle my ideas on this point. It is of the very greatest importance that I should know his position, so that I can establish my own. If it were left to me, I should so arrange our poem that I should know nothing, absolutely nothing of his positive life, nor he of mine, and that he should follow all his own ideas, religious, social, poetic, artistic, without question from me, and vice versa, but that always, in whatever place or at whatever moment of our lives we might meet, our souls should be at their apogee of happiness and goodness. Because, I am sure, one is better when one loves with a heavenly love, and, far from committing a sin, one comes near to God, the fountain-head of this love. It is perhaps this, as a last resort, that you must try to make him thoroughly understand, my friend, and without opposing his ideas of duty, of devotion and of religious sacrifice, you may put his heart more at ease. What I fear above anything in the world, what would be most painful to me, what would make me decide even to make myself dead for him, would be to see myself become a horror and a remorse in his soul. I cannot (unless, quite apart from me, she should be tragic for him) fight against the image and memory of someone else. I have too much respect for decency for that, or rather it is the only decency I respect. I will steal no one from anyone, except captives from jailers and victims from executioners and, consequently Poland from Russia. Tell me if it is a Russia whose portrait haunts our child. Then I would ask heaven to lend me all the seductions of Armida to keep him from throwing himself away on her. But if it is a Poland, let him be. There is nothing like a native land, and when you have one you must not take another. In that case, I shall be an Italy to him, an Italy which one goes to see and where one enjoys the days of spring, but where one does not stay, because there is more sun than there are beds and tables, and the comforts of life are elsewhere. Poor Italy! The whole world dreams of her, desires her, and sorrows for her, but no one may live with her, because she is unhappy and cannot give the happiness which she has not. There is a final supposition that I must tell you. It might be possible that he no longer loves the childhood friend at all, and that he would have a real repugnance towards any alliance, but that the feeling of duty, the honour of a family, or what not, demands a remorseless sacrifice of himself. In that case, my friend, be his good angel. I could scarcely meddle in it, but you should. Keep him from too sharp attacks of conscience, save him from his own virtues, prevent him, at all costs, from sacrificing himself, because in this sort of thing (I mean marriage or those unions that, without the same publicity, have the same binding power and duration), in this sort of thing, I say, the sacrifice of him who gives his future is not in proportion to what he has received in the past. The past is something appreciable and limited; the future is infinite, because it is unknown. The being who, for a certain known sum of devotion, demands in return the devotion of a whole lifetime, asks too much, and if he on whom the demand is made is hard pressed to defend his rights and satisfy at the same time both generosity and justice, it is the part of friendship to save him and to be the sole judge of his rights and his duties. Be firm in this regard, and believe that I, who detest seducers, I, who always take the part of outraged and deceived women, I who am thought the spokesman of my sex and who pride myself on so being; I, when it has been necessary, have on my authority as a sister or mother or friend broken more than one engagement of this kind. I have always condemned the woman when she has wanted to be happy at the expense of the man; I have always absolved the man when more was demanded of him than it is given to freedom and human dignity to undertake. A pledge of love and faithfulness is criminal or cowardly when the mouth speaks what the heart disavows, and one may ask anything of a man save a crime or a cowardice. Except in that case, my friend, that is to say except he should want to make too great a sacrifice, I believe we must not oppose his ideas, nor violate his instincts. If his heart can, like mine, hold two quite different loves, one which might be called the body of life, the other the soul, that would be best, because our situation would dominate our feelings and thoughts. Just as one is not always sublime, neither is one always happy. We shall not see each other every day, we shall not possess the sacred fire every day, but there will be beautiful days, and heavenly flames.

“Perhaps we should also think of telling him my position regarding M[allefille]. It is to be feared that, not knowing it, he might conjure up a kind of duty towards me which would irk him and come to oppose the other painfully. I leave you absolutely to judge and decide about this confidence; you may make it if you think the moment opportune, or delay it if you feel that it would add to his too recent sufferings. Possibly you have already made it. I approve of and confirm anything and everything you have done or will do.

“As to the question of possession or non-possession, that seems secondary to the question we are now discussing. It is, however, an important question in itself, it is a woman’s whole life, her dearest secret, her most pondered philosophy, her most mysterious coquetry. As for me, I shall tell you quite simply, you, my brother and my friend, this great mystery, about which everyone who mentions my name makes such curious observations. I have no secrets about it, no theory, no doctrine, no definite opinion, no prejudice, no pretence of power, no spiritual aping—in fact, nothing studied and no set habit, and (I believe) no false principles, either of licence or of restraint. I have trusted largely to my instincts, which have always been worthy; sometimes I have been deceived in people, never in myself. I reproach myself for many stupidities, but for no platitudes or wickednesses. I hear many things said on the question of human morality, of shame and of social virtue. All that is still not clear to me. Nor have I ever reached a conclusion. Yet I am not unmindful of the question; I admit to you that the desire to fit any philosophy at all to my own sentiments has been the great preoccupation and the great pain of my life. Feelings have always been stronger than reason with me, and the limits I have wanted to set for myself have never been of any use to me. I have changed my ideas twenty times. Above everything I have believed in fidelity. I have preached it, practised it, demanded it. Others have lacked it and so have I. And yet I have felt no remorse, because in my infidelities I have always submitted to a kind of fatality, an instinct for the ideal which pushed me into leaving the imperfect for what seemed to me to come nearer to the perfect. I have known many kinds of love. The love of the artist, the love of the woman, the love of the sister, the love of the mother, the nun’s love, the poet’s love,—I know not what. Some have been born and dead in me within the same day without being revealed to the person who inspired them. Some have martyred my life and have hurled me into despair, almost into madness. Some have held me cloistered for years in an excessive spirituality. All of it has been perfectly sincere. My being passed through these different phases as the sun, as Sainte-Beuve said, passes through the signs of the zodiac. To one who watched my progress superficially I would have seemed mad or hypocritical; to one who watched, reading me deeply, I seemed just what I am, a lover of beauty, greedy for truth, very sensitive of heart, very weak of judgment, often absurd, always sincere, never small or vindictive, hot tempered enough, and, thank God, perfectly forgetful of evil things and evil people.

“That is my life, dear friend. You see it is not much. There is nothing to admire, much to regret, nothing for good souls to condemn. I am sure that those who have accused me of being bad have lied, and it would be very easy to prove it if I wished to take the trouble to remember and recount it; but that bores me, and I have no more memory than I have rancour.

“Thus far I have been faithful to what I loved, absolutely faithful, in the sense that I have never deceived anyone, and that I have never been unfaithful without very strong reasons, which, by the fault of others, have killed the love in me. I am not inconstant by nature. On the contrary, I am so accustomed to loving him who loves me, so difficult to inflame, so habituated to living with men without consciousness of being a woman, that really I have been a little confused and dismayed by the effect produced on me by this little being. I have not yet recovered from my astonishment, and if I had a great deal of pride I should be greatly humiliated to have fallen full into an infidelity of the heart, at the very moment when I believed myself for ever calm and settled. I think this would be wrong; if I had been able to foresee, to reason, and combat this inroad; but I was suddenly attacked, and it is not in my nature to govern myself by reason when love possesses me. So I am not reproaching myself, but I realize that I am still very impressionable and weaker than I thought. That matters little; I have small vanity. This proves to me that I should have none at all, and should never make any boast of valour and strength. This makes me sad, for here is my beautiful sincerity, that I had practised for so long and of which I was a little proud, bruised and compromised. I shall be forced to lie like the others. I assure you that this is more mortifying to my self-respect than a bad novel or a hissed play. It hurts me a little; this hurt is perhaps the remains of pride; perhaps it is a voice from above that cries to me that I must guard more carefully my eyes and my ears, and above all my heart. But if heaven wishes us to remain faithful to our earthly affections, why does it sometimes allow the angels to stray among us and meet us on our path?

“So the great question of love is raised again in me! No love without fidelity, I said only two words ago, and certainly, alas! I did not feel the same tenderness for poor M[allefille] when I saw him again. Certainly since he went back to Paris (you must have seen him), instead of awaiting his return with impatience and being sad while he is away, I suffer less and breathe more freely. If I believed that a frequent sign of C[hopin] would increase this chill, I would feel it my duty to refrain.

“That is what I wanted to get to—a talk with you on this question of possession, which to some minds constitutes the whole question of faithfulness. This is, I believe, a false idea; one can be more unfaithful or less, but when one has allowed one’s soul to be invaded, and has granted the simplest caress, with a feeling of love, then the infidelity is already consummated, and the rest is less serious; because whoever has lost the heart has lost everything. It would be better to lose the body and keep the soul intact. So, in principle, I do not believe a complete consecration to the new bond would greatly increase the sin; but, in practice, it is possible that the attachment might become more human, more violent, more dominating, after possession. It is even probable. It is even certain. That is why, when two people wish to live together, they must not outrage either nature or truth in recoiling from a complete union; but when they are forced to live apart, doubtless it is the part of prudence. Consequently, it is the part of duty and of true virtue (which is sacrifice) to abstain. I have not reflected seriously on this and, if he had asked me in Paris, I should have given in, because of this natural straightness that makes me hate precautions, restrictions, false distinctions and subtleties of any kind. But your letter makes me think of scuttling that resolution. Then, too, the trouble and sadness I have endured in again experiencing the caresses of M[allefille], the courage it has taken to hide it, is a warning to me. So I shall follow your advice, dear friend. May this sacrifice be a kind of expiation for the perjury I have committed.

“I say sacrifice, because it would be painful for me to see this angel suffer. So far he has had great strength; but I am not a child. I saw clearly that human passion was making rapid progress in him and that it was time we parted. That is why, the night before my departure, I did not wish to stay with him and why I almost sent you both home.

“And since I am telling you everything, I want to say to you that only one thing about him displeased me; that is, that he himself had bad reasons for abstaining. Until then I thought it fine that he should abstain out of respect for me, from timidity, even from fidelity for someone else. All that was sacrifice, and consequently strength and chastity, of course. That is what charmed and attracted me most in him. But at your house, just as he was leaving us, and as if he wished to conquer one last temptation, he said two or three words to me that did not answer to my ideas. He seemed, after the fashion of devotees, to despise human grossness and to redden at the temptations he had had, and to fear to soil our love by one more transport. This way of looking at the last embrace of love has always been repugnant to me. If the last embrace is not as sacred, as pure, as devoted as the rest, there is no virtue in abstaining from it. These words, physical love, by which we call what has no name under heaven, displease and shock me, like a sacrilege and at the same time like a false notion. Can there be, for lofty natures, a purely physical love, and for sincere natures a purely intellectual one? Is there ever love without a single kiss and a kiss of love without passion? To despise the flesh cannot be good and useful except for those who are all flesh; with someone one loves, not the word despise, but the word respect must serve when one abstains. Besides, these are not the words he used. I do not exactly remember them. He said, I think, that certain acts could spoil a memory. Surely, that was a stupid thing to say, and he did not mean it? Who is the unhappy woman who left him with such ideas of physical love? Has he then had a mistress unworthy of him? Poor angel! They should hang all the women who degrade in men’s eyes the most honourable and sacred thing in creation, the divine mystery, the most serious act of life and the most sublime in the life of the universe. The magnet embraces the iron, the animals come together by the difference of sex. Plants obey love, and man, who alone on this earth has received from God the gift of feeling divinely what the animals, the plants and the metals feel only materially, man in whom the electric attraction is transformed into an attraction felt, understood, intelligent, man alone regards this miracle which takes place simultaneously in his soul and in his body as a miserable necessity, and he speaks of it with scorn, with irony or with shame! This is passing strange! The result of this fashion of separating the spirit from the flesh is that it has necessitated convents and bad places.

“This is a frightful letter. It will take you six weeks to decipher it. It is my ultimatum. If he is happy, or would be happy through her, let him be. If he would be unhappy, prevent him. If he could be happy through me, without ceasing to be happy through her, I can for my part do likewise. If he cannot be happy through me without being unhappy with her, we must not see each other and he must forget me. There is no way of getting around these four points. I shall be strong about it, I promise you, because it is a question of him, and if I have no great virtue for myself, I have great devotion for those I love. You are to tell me the truth frankly. I count on it and wait for it.

“It is absolutely useless to write me a discreet letter that I can show. We have not reached that point, M[allefille] and I. We respect each other too much to demand, even in thought, an account of the details of our lives....

“There has been some question of my going to Paris, and it is still not impossible that if my business, which M[allefille] is now looking after, should be prolonged I shall join him. Do not say anything about it to the child. If I go, I shall notify you and we will surprise him. In any case, since it takes time for you to get freedom to travel, begin your preparations now, because I want you at Nohant this summer, as soon and for as long as possible. You shall see how happy you will be. There is not a hint of what you fear There is no spying, no gossip, no provincialism; it is an oasis in the desert. There is not a soul in the country who knows what a Chopin or a Grzymala is. No one knows what happens in my house. I see no one but intimate friends, angels like you, who have never had an evil thought about those they love. You will come, my dear good friend, we shall talk at our ease and your battered soul will regenerate itself in the country. As for the child, he shall come if he likes; but in that case I should like to be forewarned, for I should send M[allefille] either to Paris or to Geneva. There is no lack of pretexts, and he will never suspect anything. If the child does not want to come, leave him to his ideas; he fears the world, he fears I know not what. I respect in those I love everything I do not understand. I shall go to Paris in September myself, before the final departure. I shall conduct myself with him according to your reply to this letter. If you have no solution for the problems I put, try to draw one from him, ransack his soul; I must know what he feels.

“But now you know me through and through. This is such a letter as I do not write twice in ten years. I am too lazy, and I do so hate talking about myself. But this will spare me further talk on that subject. You know me by heart now, and you can fire at sight on me when you balance the accounts of the Trinity.

“Yours, dear good friend, yours with all my heart. Ostensibly I have not spoken of you in all this long chat. That is because it seemed as though I were talking of myself to another me, the better and the dearer of the two, I swear.

“George Sand.”

Let us, above all, admire the woman’s method of so conducting her battle that she necessarily remains victorious, no matter what the attacks or shifts of the enemy. Everything is foreseen, arranged, admitted, except the omission to become the lover of George Sand. Besides, she must have known perfectly well that the little “Russia” she pretended to fear had already surrendered her arms, that Chopin had flung her out of his proud heart. But such a letter, such a rare psychological document, deserves to be included intact in the dossier of this love. The personality of the writer becomes clearly illuminated, even—perhaps above all—in what it tries to hide. One feels the intelligence; weighs the slightly heavy goodness, once more maternal, pelicanish; one wonders at the moist-lipped desire of a woman of thirty-four for the “child” of twenty-eight, who looked still younger and whose very purity intoxicated the voluptuous woman enamoured of it. She called it “doing her duty.” It is all a matter of well-chosen words. She admitted also: “I must love or die,” which is less pretentious.

To sum up the matter, be it admitted that Chopin needed a fine, generous tenderness after the poor, dried-up little romance he had hidden in an envelope. He also needed care. George began by sending him to Doctor Gaubert, who sounded him, and swore that he was not phthisical. But he needed air, walks, rest. The new lovers set out in quest of solitude.

Paris soon heard that the novelist had left with her three children: Maurice, Solange and Chopin, for the Balearic Isles.

CHAPTER XI
The Chartreuse of Valdemosa

As a matter of fact, they had agreed to meet at Perpignan, because Chopin’s decent soul stuck at advertising his departure, and at proclaiming his resounding luck. Perhaps, too, George wanted to smooth the pride of poor Mallefille. So the two left in their own way, and came together at Perpignan in the last two days of October. George was happy, at peace. She had travelled slowly, visiting friends on the way, and passing through Lyons, Avignon, Vaucluse, and le Pont du Gard. Furthermore, it was not so much a question with her of travelling as of getting away, of seeking, as she always said on such occasions, some nest in which to love or some hole in which to die. Doubtless she hardly remembered having made the same trip with Musset four years before, when they had encountered fat Stendhal-Beyle on the steamship. Chopin, for his part, did not stop on the road; he had four days and four heroically borne nights by mailcoach. Yet he descended “fresh as a rose and as rosy as a turnip.” Grzymala, Matuszinski and Fontana alone knew of this journey, which he wanted to conceal even from his family in Poland. Fontana undertook to forward his mail. Chopin had a little money on hand because he had sold Pleyel his first Preludes for two thousand francs, a quarter of which he had received.

They all embarked for Barcelona on board the Phénicien, on “the bluest sea, the purest, the smoothest; you might call it a Greek sea, or a Swiss lake on its loveliest day,” wrote George to her friend Marliani just before they left. They stopped a few days at Barcelona, where they visited the ruins of the Palace of the Inquisition.

Then a fresh embarkation on the El Mallorquin. The crossing was made on a mild and phosphorescent night. On board all slept, except Chopin, Sand and the helmsman, who sang, but with a voice so sweet and so subdued that he too seemed to be half-asleep. Chopin listened to this rambling song that resembled his own vague improvisations. “The voice of contemplation,” said George. They landed at Palma, on Majorca, in the morning, under a precipitous coast, the summit of which is indented with palms and aloes. But learning to their amazement that there was no hotel, nor even rooms where they could live, they sought out the French Consul and, thanks to him, succeeded in discovering the house of a certain Señor Gomez. It was outside the town, in a valley from which could be seen the distant yellow walls of Palma and its cathedral. This uncomfortable oasis, which had to be furnished and equipped with all accessories, was called The House of the Wind. The travellers were at first jubilant.

“The sky is turquoise,” wrote Chopin to Fontana, “the sea lapis-lazuli, the mountains emerald. The air is like heaven. In the daytime there is sunshine, and it is warm, and everybody is in summer dress. At night, you hear songs and guitars on all sides for hours on end. Enormous balconies hung with vines, houses dating from the Moors.... The town, like everything here, resembles Africa. In short, life is delicious. My dear Jules, go and see Pleyel, because the piano has not yet arrived. How was it sent? Tell him he will soon receive the Preludes. I shall probably live in an enchanting monastery, in the most lovely country in the world; the sea, mountains, palms, a cemetery, a crusaders’ church, a ruined mosque, thousand-year-old olive trees.... Ah! dear friend, I now take a little more pleasure in life; I am near the most beautiful thing in the world, I am a better man.”

This House of the Wind was rented for a hundred francs a month. But as it did not completely satisfy their appetite for isolation, and as they wanted something more “artistic,” more rare, they found three rooms and a garden full of oranges for thirty-five francs a year in the Chartreuse of Valdemosa itself, two leagues away. “It is poetry, it is solitude, it is everything that is most enchanting under the sky; and what sky! what country! We are in a dream of happiness,” Sand wrote. This joy at once expressed itself in too long walks. Chopin wore himself out, tore his feet on the stones of the paths, caught cold in the first rain. He had hardly been there a few days when he was forced to take to his bed with bad bronchitis. The tuberculosis, momentarily checked, came on again, in spite of a temperature of 65 degrees, in spite of roses, lemons, palms, fig trees in bloom. “The three most celebrated doctors of the Island came together for a consultation. One sniffed what I had expectorated, another tapped me where I had expectorated, the third listened while I expectorated. The first said I would die, the second said I was about to die, the third said I was already dead. But I go on living as I have always lived.... I cannot forgive Jeannot (Dr. Matuszinski) for not having given me any instructions about this acute bronchitis which he should have foreseen when I was at home. I was barely able to escape their bleedings and cuppings and suchlike operations. Thank God, I am myself again. But my sickness delayed my Preludes, which you will receive God knows when.... In a few days I shall be living in the most beautiful spot in the world; sea, mountains, everything you could want. We are going to live in an enormous old ruined monastery, abandoned by the Carthusians, whom Mendizabal seems to have driven out just for me. It is quite close to Palma and incomparably marvellous: cells, a most romantic graveyard.... In fact, I feel I shall be well off there. Only my piano is still lacking. I have written direct to Pleyel, rue Rochechouart. Ask him about it and tell him I was taken sick the day after I arrived, but that I am already better. Do not say much in general about me or my manuscripts.... Do not tell anyone I have been ill; they would only make a fuss about it.”

Here was George in action. She had her hands full. She wrote, managed the household as well as her novels, explored the shops of the little town, gave their lessons to her two children and nursed the third, who claimed her every other moment. “He improves from day to day and I hope that he will be better than before. He is an angel of gentleness and goodness.” But the material side of life became more and more difficult. They lacked everything, even mattresses, sheets, cooking-pots. They had to buy expensive furnishings, write to Buloz, the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, and borrow. Soon The House of the Wind became uninhabitable. The walls were so thin that under the autumn rains the lime swelled like a sponge. There was no stove, of course, as in all so-called hot countries, and a coat of ice settled on the travellers’ shoulders. They had to fall back on the asphyxiating warmth of braziers. The invalid began to suffer greatly, coughed incessantly, could hardly be nourished, because he could not stand the native food, and George was obliged to do the cooking herself. “In fact,” she wrote, again to her friend Marliani, “our trip here has been, in many ways, a frightful fiasco. But here we are. We cannot get out without exposing ourselves to the bad season and without encountering new expenses at every step. Besides, it took a great deal of courage and perseverance to install myself here. If Providence is not too unkind, I think the worst is over, and we shall gather the fruit of our labours. Spring will be delicious, Maurice will regain his health.... Solange is almost continually charming since she was seasick; Maurice pretends she lost all her venom.”

The invalid, whom they hid at the back of the least damp room, became an object of horror and fear to the natives. Service was refused. Señor Gomez, learning that it was a matter of lung trouble, demanded the departure of his tenants after a complete replastering and whitewashing of his house at their expense and an auto-da-fé of the linen and furnishings. The Consul intervened, and sheltered the miserable emigrants for a few days. At last, on the fifteenth of December, a beautiful day, they set out for their monastery. Just before they started, Chopin wrote again to Fontana: “I shall work in a cell of some old monk who had perhaps in his soul a greater flame than I, but stifled and mortified it because he did not know what to do with it.... I think I can shortly send you my Preludes and the Ballade.”

As for George Sand: “I shall never forget,” she wrote later on in her Winter at Majorca, “a certain bend in the gorge where, turning back, you espy, at the top of a mountain, one of those lovely little Arab houses I have described, half-hidden among the flat branches of cactus, and a tall palm bending over the chasm and tracing its silhouette against the sky. When the sight of the mud and fog of Paris gives me the spleen, I close my eyes and see again as in a dream that green mountain, those tawny rocks, and this solitary palm tree, lost in a rose-coloured sky.”

The Chartreuse of Valdemosa... The name alone, associated with the names of Chopin and Sand in this African setting, evokes an image which is not only romantic and picturesque, but fixed, as in a poem. Here is the scene of their sickly passion. We still love the picture, mingled with the music into which this Nordic consumptive threw his heart-rending sweetness. What indeed would Majorca be in the story of human dreams without this encampment of the rainy winter of 1838? This abandoned island has no other worth than its unhappy monastery, which for two months served as the prison of a hopeless love. Because no search, even between the lines of their letters, reveals any happiness. George tried in vain to blow the embers of her tired heart, and kindled but a tender pity, full of nostalgia, raising with each puff of smoke the memory of those terrible Venetian delights. And Chopin, bruised by a thousand little sufferings, proud and lacking in virility, felt the strength for pleasures ebbing from him day by day. In one way or another, nerves got the upper hand. Work alone was deliverance for them, and solitude, riveting them together, filled them with fraternity.

Valdemosa is an enormous pile of masonry. An army corps could be lodged in it. There are the quarters of the Superior, cells for the lay brothers, cells for the novices, and the three cloisters that constitute the monastery proper. But that is all empty and deserted. The oldest part is fifteenth century, and is pierced by Gothic windows over which creep vines. In the centre is the old Carthusian cemetery, without stones or inscriptions. A few cypresses frame a tall cross of white wood and a pointed well-head, against which have grown up a pink laurel and a dwarf palm. All the cells were locked and a yellow sacristan jealously guarded the keys. Although he was extremely ugly, this fat satyr had wronged a girl who with her parents was spending a few months in that solitude. But he gave as an excuse that he was employed by the State to protect only the painted virgins.

The new cloisters, girded by evergreens, enclosed twelve chapels and a church decorated with wood carvings and paved with Hispano-Moresque majolica. A Saint Bruno in painted wood, provincial Spanish in style, is the only work of art in this temple. The design and colour are curious, and George Sand found in the head an expression of sublime faith, in the hands a heartbreaking and pious gesture of invocation. “I doubt,” she said, “if this fanatical saint of Grenoble has ever been understood and depicted with such deep and ardent feeling. It is the personification of Christian asceticism.” The church, alas! is without an organ, according to the Carthusian regulations.

Sand, Chopin, and the children occupied three spacious cells, vaulted, with walls three feet in thickness. The rooms faced south, opening on to a garden-plot planted with pomegranates, lemon trees, orange tress. Brick paths intersected this verdant and fragrant pleasaunce. And on the threshold of this garden of silence Chopin wrote to Fontana three days after Christmas:

“Can you imagine me thus: between the sea and the mountains in a great abandoned Carthusian monastery, in a cell with doors higher than the porte-cochères in Paris, my hair uncurled, no white gloves, but pale, as usual? The cell is shaped like a coffin; it is high, with a cobwebbed ceiling. The windows are small.... My bed faces them, under a filigreed Moorish rose-window. Beside the bed stands a square thing resembling a desk, but its use is very problematic. Above, a heavy chandelier (this is a great luxury) with one tiny candle. The works of Bach, my own scrawls and some manuscripts that are not mine,—that is all my furniture. You can shout as loud as you like and no one will hear; in short, it is a strange place from which I am writing.... The moon is marvellous this evening. I have never seen it more beautiful.... Nature here is kind, but the men are pirates. They never see strangers, and in consequence don’t know what to charge them. So they will give you an orange for nothing but ask a fabulous price for a trouser button. Under this sky one feels permeated with a poetic sentiment that seems to emanate from all the surrounding objects. Eagles hover over our heads every day and no one disturbs them.”

But it was in vain that he sought to enjoy himself there; this rather lofty setting did not suit Chopin. He had too great a taste for intimate habits, for sophisticated surroundings, to feel at his ease in these unfurnished rooms where his mind had nothing on which to fasten. And then, unfortunately, they had come in for the height of the rainy season, which at Majorca is diluvian. The air is so relaxing in its humidity that one drags heavily about. Maurice and Solange were perfectly well, “but little Chopin is very exhausted, and still coughs a great deal. For his sake, I am impatient for the return of good weather, which cannot be long now in coming.” His piano at last arrived, a joy that carried with it forgiveness for everything. Chopin worked, composed, studied. “The very vaults of the monastery rejoice. And all this is not profaned by the admiration of fools. We do not see so much as a cat,” apart from the natives of the country, a superstitious and inquisitive people, who climbed, one after another, up to this old monastery in the charge of one ancient monk and a few devils. In order to get a look at them they came to have their beasts blessed. It became a holiday of mules, horses, donkeys, goats and pigs. “Real animals themselves,” said George, “stinking, gross and cowardly, but nevertheless them superb, nicely dressed, playing the guitar and dancing the fandango.... I am supposed to be sold to the devil because I do not go to Mass, nor to the dances, and because I live alone in the mountains, teaching my children the rule of participles and other graces.... In the middle of all this, comes the warbling of Chopin, who goes his own pretty way, and to whom the walls of his cell listen with astonishment.”

One evening they had an alarm and a ghost which made their hair stand on end. First there was a strange noise, like thousands of sacks of nuts being rolled across a parquet floor. They rushed out of their cells to investigate, but the cloister was as deserted as ever. Yet the noise drew nearer. Soon a feeble light illuminated the vaulting, torches appeared, and there, enveloped in red smoke, came a whole battalion of abominable beings; a horned leading devil, all in black, with a face the colour of blood, little devils with birds’ heads, lady devils and shepherdesses in pink and white robes. It was the villagers celebrating Shrove Tuesday who had come to hold their dance in one of the cells. The noise that accompanied their procession was that of the castanets that the youngsters clacked with a sustained and rolling rhythm. They stopped it suddenly to sing in unison a coplita on a musical phrase which kept recurring and seemed never to end.

This was a shock to poor Chopin’s nerves. It was worse when Maurice and Solange disappeared in the echoing depths of the monastery, or when George left him for excursions that lasted whole days. Then the deserted cloister seemed to him full of phantoms. Returning from one of her nocturnal explorations among the ruins, George surprised him at his piano, white, with haggard eyes, and it took him several minutes to recognize her. Yet it was then, during or after these spells of nervous exaltation, that he composed some of his most beautiful pages.

Sand affirms that several of the Preludes were begotten of these agonies. “There is one,” she says, “which came to him one lugubrious rainy evening that plunged his soul into a frightful depression. Maurice and I had left him that day feeling very well, to go to Palma to buy some necessities for our camp. The rain had come, torrents were unloosed; we made three leagues in six hours, coming back in the midst of the flood, and it was full night when we arrived, without shoes, abandoned by our driver in the midst of untold dangers. We had hurried on account of our patient’s anxiety. It had indeed been lively; but it had, as it were, congealed into a kind of resigned despair, and he was playing, in tears, his fine prelude. When he saw us come in, he rose with a great cry; then he said to us with a vague stare and in a strange voice: ‘Ah, I knew you were dead!’ When he had recovered himself and saw the state we were in, he became ill at the thought of our past dangers; but he then swore to me that while he was awaiting us, he had seen it all in a dream, and that, unable to tell what was dream and what was reality, he had become quiet and as though drugged while playing the piano, convinced that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake; heavy drops of icy water fell with a regular beat on his chest, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops that were really falling on the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even angry at what I meant by the words ‘imitative harmony.’ He protested with all his strength, and rightly, at the puerility of these auditory imitations. His genius was full of the mysterious harmonies of nature, rendered in his musical thought by sublime equivalents and not by a slavish mimicry of outside sounds. That evening’s composition was full of the raindrops sounding on the resonant tiles of the monastery, but they were transposed in his imagination and in his music into tears falling from heaven on his heart.”

There has been a great deal of discussion as to what Prelude this might be. Some call it No. 6, in B minor, others No. 8, in F sharp minor, or the 15th, in D flat major, or the 17th, or the 19th. In my own opinion there is no possible doubt. It is certainly the Sixth Prelude, where the drops of sorrow fall with a slow inexorable regularity on the brain of man. But it matters little, after all. Each one will find it where he will, at the bidding of his own imagination. Let us credit music with this unique power, that of adapting itself to us rather than us to it, of being the Ariel that serves our fancy. Here is the place to recall Beethoven’s words: “You must create everything in yourself.” Liszt, so fond of psychology and æsthetics, said that Chopin contented himself, like a true musician, with extracting the feeling of pictures he saw, ignoring the drawing, the pictorial shell, which did not enter into the form of his art and did not belong to his more spiritual sphere. Then, returning to that rainy twilight when his friend had composed so beautiful a melody, Liszt wondered if George Sand had been able to perceive in it the anguish of Chopin’s love, the fever of that overexcited spirit; if the genius of that masculine woman could attain “to the humblest grandeurs of the heart, to those burnt offerings of oneself which have every right to be called devotion.” Probably not. She never inspired a song in this miraculous bird. The only one that came to him through her was that moment of agony and grief.

The next day he played over again, with comments and finishing touches, this unique musical expression snatched from his depths. But she understood it no better. All the incompatibility of these two natures is revealed here. “His heart,” said Liszt, “was torn and bruised at the thought of losing her who had just given him back to life; but her spirit saw nothing but an amusing pastime in the adventurous trip, the danger of which did not outweigh the charm of novelty. What wonder that this episode of his French life should be the only one of which his work showed the influence? After that he divided his life into two distinct parts. For a long time he continued to suffer in an environment material almost to the point of grossness, in which his frail and sensitive temperament was engulfed; then,—he escaped from the present into the impalpable regions of art, taking refuge among the memories of his earliest youth in his beloved Poland, which alone he immortalized in his songs.”

Chopin soon acquired a horror of Majorca. He felt seriously ill. In addition, he had little taste for the country, and less still for this Spanish monastery where his imagination failed to find the intimate warmth and urbanity in which alone it could unfold. His spirit was wounded to the quick; “the fold of a rose leaf, the shadow of a fly, made him bleed.” He was dying of impatience to get away, and even Sand confessed that “these poetic intervals which one voluntarily interpolates into life are but periods of transition, moments of repose granted to the spirit before it again undertakes the exercise of the emotions.” Underline these words, so luminous in the analysis of their characters. For this deceived woman Valdemosa was a poetic interlude, a time of waiting, an intellectual vacation. Already she was dreaming only of taking up again the exercise of her feelings, while for Chopin, his life was done, his emotions were exhausted. There was but one joy left to which he aspired: the great peace of work. “For the love of God, write,” he enjoins Fontana. “I am sending you the Preludes. Re-copy them with Wolf. I think there are no mistakes. Give one copy to Probst (publisher) and the manuscript to Pleyel. Out of the 1,500 francs he will give you, pay the rent on my apartment up to the first of January, that is, 450 francs. Give the place up if you think you can find another for April....”

This savours of a return, and is like an odour of Paris. The life at the monastery was becoming really unbearable. A servant left them, swearing they were plague infected. They had all the trouble in the world to procure supplies, thanks to the bad faith of the peasants, who made them pay ten times too much for everything. The skimmed goat’s milk meant for Chopin was stolen from them. No one would consent to wait on the consumptive, whose health declined. Even their clothes mildewed on their backs. There was nothing for it but flight from this hard-hearted land.

They strapped their baggage at last, nailed up their boxes,—and were refused a carriage in which to go down to Palma. They were obliged to do the three leagues by birlocho, a sort of wheelbarrow, Chopin barely able to breathe. At Palma he had a dreadful hæmorrhage. Nevertheless, they embarked on the one boat of the island, on which a hundred pigs were already grunting. The artist was given the most miserable bunk, as they said it would have to be burned. The next day, at Barcelona, he lost a full bowl of blood and drooped like a ghost. But it was the end of their miseries. The Consul and the commandant of the French naval station took them in and had them put on board a sloop-of-war, Le Méléagre, whose doctor succeeded in arresting Chopin’s hæmorrhage.

They rested eight days at an inn. On the fifteenth of February, 1839, George wrote to Madame Marliani: “My sweet dear, here I am at Barcelona. God grant that I get out soon and never again set foot in Spain! It is a country that I do not relish in any respect.... Read Grzymala the part about Chopin, and warn him not to mention it, because after the good hope the doctor gives me, it is useless to alarm his family.”

A few days later, they landed at Marseilles. It was perfect happiness.

“At last, my dear, I am here in France.... A month more and we should have died in Spain, Chopin and I; he of melancholy and disgust; I of fury and indignation. They wounded me in the tenderest spot in my heart, with their pinpricks at a being who was suffering before my eyes; I shall never forgive them, and if I write of them it shall be with gall.”

To François Rollinat, the real confidant of her life: “Dear friend, I should not like to learn that you have suffered as much as I during my absence....”

Such was the brilliant return from this honeymoon.

CHAPTER XII
“If music be the food of love, play on”

Nietzsche, on a very dark day, wrote to a friend: “Isn’t it a work of art: to hope?” In landing at Marseilles in the early spring of 1839, Chopin and George Sand built a work of art, because they hoped, because they were overflowing with that inexplicable enthusiasm that the most banal things inspire at certain predestined hours. Anything sufficed: an expected letter, a beautiful face, the shadow of a church on the street, the reassuring words of a doctor, to convince them that this was the dawn of a convalescence that would dry their almost rotted love and ripen it, transmute it into a peaceful and lasting friendship. Sometimes nothing more than a chance landscape is enough to change the rhythm of souls.

At Majorca, one might wonder if the deserted monastery was not a sort of Dantesque Purgatory from which Sand explored the Hells and the invalid felt himself already rising towards Heaven. “This Chopin is an angel,” George had written. “At Majorca, while he was sick unto death, he wrote music that had the very smell of Paradise; but I am so used to seeing him in Heaven that neither his life nor his death seems likely to prove anything for him. He does not know himself on which planet he exists.”

At Marseilles, a good town of grocers, perfumers, soap sellers, their feet were once more on the earth. They settled at the Hôtel de Beauvau, saw a physician, and decided to await the summer in the south. This resolution was not carried out without a certain amount of boredom, but boredom itself contributes to rest, which was so necessary after their voyage of miscarried love. They had, besides, to shut themselves up against the mistral and the pests that entered by all the doors. But they lay hidden. Dr. Cauvières regularly sounded Chopin’s lungs, made him wear cupping glasses, put him on a diet and pronounced him well on the way to cicatrization. He could begin to play again, to walk, to talk like anybody else, he whose voice for weeks had been nothing more than a breath. He slept a great deal. He busied himself with the publication of his works, wrote to Fontana on the subject of their dedications, and discussed with him the price of his new compositions. For he had to think of the future, about the Paris apartment he had decided to re-rent: “Take Schlesinger the 500 francs you will receive from Probst for the Ballade.” “Schlesinger is trying to cheat me, but he makes enough out of me; be polite to him.” “Tell him I shall sell the Ballade for France and England for 800 francs and the Polonaises for Germany, England and France for 1,500.” He grew angry. He stood out against the publishers and would cede nothing. “As for money, you must make a clear contract and not hand over the manuscripts except for cash....” “I should rather give my manuscripts as I did before, for a low price, than stoop to these....” He returned to the charge in April: “Keep everything till I come back since they are such Jews. I have sold the Preludes to Pleyel and have so far received only 500 francs. He has the right to do as he pleases about them. As for the Ballade and the Polonaises, do not sell them either to Schlesinger or to Probst... get them back... Enough. Enough for you and for me. My health improves but I am angry.” “It is not my fault if I seem like a toadstool that poisons you when you dig it up and eat it. You know perfectly well that I have never been of any use to anyone, not even myself. Meanwhile, they continue to regard me as not tubercular. I drink neither coffee nor wine, only milk. I keep in the warmth and look like a young lady.”

In March the famous singer Nourrit died at Naples and it was rumoured that he had committed suicide. His body was brought to Marseilles the following month, and a funeral service was arranged at Notre-Dame-du-Mont. To honour the memory of a friend whom he had seen so often at Liszt’s and had even entertained himself, Chopin agreed to take the organ during the Elevation. Although the instrument was squeaky and out of tune, he drew from it what music he could. He played The Stars of Schubert, which Nourrit had sung a short time before at Marseilles: and, renouncing all theatricality, the artist played this melody with the softest stops. George was in the organ stall with a few friends, and her fine eyes filled with tears. The public did not recognize the novelist in this little woman dressed in black.

In May, Chopin was strong enough to take a short trip to Genoa with his mistress. It was a beautiful interlude. They visited the palaces, the terraced gardens, the picture-galleries. Did she think of that journey of almost four years earlier, when with Musset she first put foot on this Italian soil? Genoa is perhaps the only town where their love was not overcast. She has written that to see it again was a pleasure. I do not know if the word is sincere but it does not ring true. Something like a wrinkle of fatigue, however, can be seen in the statement which she made, on her return, to Mme. Marliani: “I no longer like journeys, or rather, I am no longer in such condition that I am able to enjoy them.” One hopes, too, that Chopin knew nothing of that first Genoese visit, because, for a distrustful heart, such a picture would have been terrific.

On May 22nd, they left Marseilles and started for Nohant, where they planned to spend the entire summer. After a week of jolting, they at last reached the wide, well-cultivated district of Berry, “studded with great round walnut trees” and cut by shady roads that George loved. All at once, there was the modest village, the church with its tiled roof, and, bordering the square, the château. A country château that symbolized the double origin, royal and plebeian, of this woman of thirty-five years whom all Europe regarded with admiration, and who brought to the nest her little one, her new little one, a noble and diaphanous young man who seemed to have dropped down like a sea-bird into this ancient French country-side.

Dear woman, must we admire you for the period of rest you accorded to this beautiful weary soul? We know that you were bad for him, sometimes, because you were sound, ardent, and, in spite of everything, curious about that inviolable mind, about those limbs without desire. But we have seen too that you knew your rôle of guardian. “Of whom shall I take care?” you cried, when your other invalid had left you because he could no longer bear the sufferings with which you seasoned your pleasure. Dear woman, nevertheless! You cannot be judged by any common standards, you with your hot blood and your heart always so soon feasted by the very strength of its own hungers. The enormous labour you accomplished was but the result of your own energies. They burdened you with work. They tired you out like a man. You never found those horrible mental tasks too stupid, those tasks from which they feigned to derive an elastic and libertarian moral, when you were really made but for love and travail and the old human order. This is all rather amusing, and sad as truth. But we must thank you for having in some sort made Musset and broken that easy fop to healthy sorrows. We cannot blame you, as others do, for having finished Chopin. You fought for him a long time against his malady. If you bruised him further, it is because even your friendship was costly. But always, it was your best that you gave.

Now that we have seen you enter Nohant with this new prey to your tenderness, let us say with Shakespeare: “If music be the food of love, play on.”

Chopin never liked the country. Yet he enjoyed Nohant. The house was comfortable. After Majorca and Marseilles, it was a joy to have a large room, fine sheets, a well-ordered table, a few beautiful pieces of furniture. Without being luxurious, the big house had a pleasant air. There was a sense of ease. He was spoiled, petted. An old friend of George’s, Dr. Papet, ran up at once to examine the invalid thoroughly. He diagnosed a chronic affection of the larynx: he ordered plenty of rest and a long stay in the country. Chopin submitted with no difficulty to this programme, and adopted a perfectly regulated, wise way of living. While George went back to the education of her children and her job as a novelist, he corrected a new edition of Bach, finished his Sonata in B flat minor, the second Nocturne of op. 37 and four Mazurkas (op. 41). They dined out of doors, between five and six o’clock. Then a few neighbours dropped in, the Fleurys, the Duteils, Duvernet, Rollinat, and they talked and smoked. From the first, they all treated Chopin with respectful sympathy. Hippolyte Chatiron, George’s half-brother, who lived with his wife in the immediate neighbourhood, a kind of squireen, good-natured and convivial, formed a passionate friendship for him.

When they had gone Chopin played the piano in the twilight; then at Solange’s and Maurice’s bedtime, he too went to bed and slept like a child. As for George, she took up the Encyclopædia and prepared the lessons for the next day. Truly a family life, such, exactly, as Chopin understood best; such also as he needed during his working periods.

“I am composing here a Sonata in B flat minor,” he wrote to Fontana, “in which the Funeral March you already have will be incorporated. There is an allegro, then a scherzo in E flat minor, the March, and a short finale of about three pages. After the March the left hand babbles along unisono with the right. I have a new Nocturne in G major to accompany the one in G minor, if you remember it. You know I have four new Mazurkas: one from Palma in E minor, three from here in B major, in A flat major, and C sharp minor. To me they seem as pretty as the youngest children seem to parents who are growing old. Otherwise, I am doing nothing; I am correcting a Paris edition of Bach’s works. There are not only misprints, but, I believe, harmonic errors committed by those who think they understand Bach. I am not correcting them with the pretention of understanding him better than they, but with the conviction that I can sometimes divine how the thing ought to go.”

Every evening, during that hour of music that Chopin dedicated to George alone, she listened and dreamed. She was a choice listener. Without doubt, it was in those moments that these two souls, so impenetrable to each other, understood each other best. She fully realized that he was the extreme artist type; that it would never be possible to make him accept any jot of reality; that his continued dream was too far from the world, too little philosophic for her to be able to follow into those unpeopled regions. But it was, nevertheless, sweet to be the object of such a man’s preference. Cruel also, because if Chopin kept usurious account of the least light given him, “he did not take the trouble to hide his disappointment at the first darkness.” His fantastic humour, his profound depressions, at once interested and worried the amateur of emotions in George. But a kind of terror gripped her heart at the thought of a new obligation she would assume if Frederick were definitely to install himself with her. She was no longer under the illusion of passion. She was afraid of having some day to struggle against some other love that might conquer her and prove the death of this frail being she had torn from himself. Then she stiffened. One more duty in a life already so burdened, would this not be precisely a defence against temptation—an even greater chance for her to attain to that austerity towards which she felt herself drawn by the old depths of religious enthusiasm of which she had never freed herself? How should she settle the matter? She compromised by leaving it for time to tell.

As for Chopin, this peaceful lot was too perfectly fitted to the measure of his strength for him to dream of any change. He was radiating all his gentleness, he was creating; such was his beautiful present, his only possible future. While he improvised George opened a scrapbook and wrote: “The genius of Chopin is the most profound and pregnant of feeling and emotions that has ever existed. He makes a single instrument speak the language of the infinite. He knows how to gather into ten lines that even a child could play poems of immense elevation, dramas of unequalled power. He never needs great material means.... He needs neither saxophone nor bass horns to fill the soul with terror; neither Cathedral organs nor the human voice to give it faith and exultation. There must be great advances in taste and artistic intelligence if his works are ever to become popular.... Chopin knows his strength and his weakness. His weakness lies in the very excess of that strength, which he cannot control. His music is full of delicate shades of feeling and of the unexpected. Sometimes, rarely, it is bizarre, mysterious, and tormented. In spite of his horror of the unintelligible, his overpowering emotions sometimes sweep him unconsciously into regions known to him alone.”

Towards the end of the summer, they all decided to return to Paris. Sand was persuaded that she could not manage to finish the education of her children without assistance. Maurice was eager to learn drawing; Solange was difficult, a little sullen, stubborn. George also had to see her publisher, Buloz, the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes. Chopin wanted to get to his pupils again and resume their lessons, the main source of his revenue. So they bombarded friends with letters, asking them to find two apartments not too far from each other. Grzymala, Arago and Fontana started a search. From Nohant, instructions rained on the heads of the three friends.

Chopin asked them to choose a dove-like wallpaper, glowing and glossy, for his rooms. Something else for the vestibule, but still respectable. If there was anything more beautiful, more fashionable, they were not to hesitate to get it.

“I prefer something simple, modest, elegant, to the loud, common colours the shopkeepers use. That is why I like pearl-grey, because it is neither striking nor vulgar. Thank you for the servant’s room, because it is really essential.”

For George, it was vital that the house should be quiet. There must be three bedrooms, two next to each other, and one separated by the drawing-room. Close to the third there must be a well-lighted work-room. Drawing- and dining-room must be next each other. Two servants’ rooms and a cellar. Inlaid floors in good condition if possible. But most of all, quiet,—“no blacksmith in the neighbourhood.” A decent staircase, windows facing south. “No young ladies, no smoke or unpleasant odours.” Chopin even took the trouble to sketch the plan of this imagined suite.

Soon they had good news. Chopin was to live at 5, rue Tronchet, while George was to have two small pavilions in a garden at 16, rue Pigalle. Nohant was in a state of joy, and Frederick, always so particular about matters of elegance, now began to think of his clothes. He wrote again to Fontana: “I forgot to ask you to order a hat for me at Duport’s, rue de la Chausée d’Antin. He has my measure and knows what I want. Show him this year’s shape, not too exaggerated, because I don’t know how you are dressing now. Also, drop in on Dautremont, my tailor, on the Boulevards, and tell him to make me a pair of grey trousers. Will you choose a dark shade, for winter trousers, something good, not striped, but plain and soft. You are English; so you know what I ought to have. Dautremont will be glad to know that I am coming back. I also need a black velvet waistcoat, but one with very little ornament and not loud,—a plain waistcoat, but elegant. If he has no very fine velvet, let him make a waistcoat of fine wool, but not too open....” In recompense for all these errands: “... I shall keep changing the second part of the Polonaise for you till the end of my life. Yesterday’s version may not please you either, though it put my brain on the rack for eighty seconds. I have copied out my manuscripts in good order. There are six with your Polonaises, not counting the seventh, an impromptu, which may be worthless. I can’t judge of it, myself, because it is too new. Titus advises me to compose an oratorio. I have asked him in reply why he is building a sugar mill rather than a Dominican monastery. As you are such a clever fellow, you can arrange so that neither black thoughts nor suffocating cough shall bother me in my new rooms. Arrange for me to be good. Erase, if you can, many episodes of my past. And it would be no bad thing if I set myself a task that will last me several years. Finally, you would oblige me by growing much younger, or in finding a way of arranging for us to be not yet born.

“Your old Frederick.”

Both Frederick and George settled in Paris in October of that year, 1839. But they were soon convinced that after a whole year of existence together it would be difficult to live apart. Chopin still had need of attentions, precautions. He gave up his lodging to Dr. Matuszinski, and moved with his furniture to the lower floor of one of the two pavilions in the rue Pigalle.

So these longed-for years of great and perfect work, unrolled themselves in about the desired rhythm. During the morning, the professors for Maurice and Solange succeeded one another. In Chopin’s part of the house it was a procession of pupils. His lessons lasted at least an hour, sometimes more. It often happened that the master would play the pieces himself. On one occasion he played from memory to one of his pupils fourteen Preludes and Fugues of Bach. And as the young girl expressed her admiration for this tour de force, “One can never forget them,” he said, smiling. “For a year I have not practised a quarter of an hour at a time. I have no strength, no energy. I am always waiting for a little health to take all that up again, but—I am still waiting.” Such efforts exhausted him. He used to take a little opium in a glass of water, and rub his temples with eau-de-Cologne.

“The final triumph,” he continued, “is simplicity. When you have exhausted all the difficulties, and have played an immense quantity of notes, simplicity emerges in all its charm, as the final seal of art. Anyone who expects to achieve it at the outset will never succeed in so doing; you cannot begin at the end.”

The afternoon was generally devoted to the personal work of the two artists. In the evening they met at George’s, and dined together; then someone or another of the intimates of the household came to see them. The salon was café au lait in colour, decorated with very fine Chinese vases always filled with flowers in the Chopinesque mode. The furniture was green; there was a sideboard of oak laden with curiosities and, on the wall, the portrait of the hostess by Calamatta and several canvases by Delacroix. The piano was bare, square, ebony. Chopin almost always sat at it. At one side, George’s bedroom could be seen, where two mattresses on the floor covered with a Persian rug served as a bed.

Sand arose late, because she sat up most of the night. Chopin polished and put the final touches to his works, the first versions of which had in general come to him during the summer. His creation was entirely spontaneous. It gushed forth during a walk, an hour of meditation, or it might unfold sudden and complete, while he was sitting before his piano. He played it to himself, sang it, took it up again, modified its accents. Then began that immensely laborious quest of perfection, which will always be, whatever people may say, the essential mandate of the artist. “He locked himself in his room for whole days at a time, weeping, walking up and down, shattering his pens, repeating or changing a single bar a hundred times, writing it down only to rub it out again, and beginning all over again the next day with minute and despairing perseverance. He spent six weeks on one page, only to write it finally as he had jotted it down in the first flush.” In noting these things, George was exasperated with the genuine surprise of facile creators who are not tortured by any yearning for finality. But, like Giotto, who, when the Pope asked for a perfect example of his knowledge, wanted to send only a true circle, so Chopin, having filled one line with all the ornament of his thought, came back to exquisite nudity, the final and sufficient symbol of the idea. So a poet works. So he squeezes his universe into the smallest possible limits, makes it as heavy as a crystal, but gleaming from a thousand facets. That is what made that great blackener of paper, Sand, say that Chopin could compress into a few bars “poems of immense elevation, dramas of unequalled power.” Mozart alone, she thought, was superior to him, because he had the calm of health, and so the fullness of life. But who knows what happy accidents illness may bring to art? It is certain that Chopin’s breathlessness, his nervousness, brought to his virile inspiration those qualities of languor, those weary echoes by which he touches us most finely.

CHAPTER XIII
On some Friendships of Chopin, and on his Æsthetics

It was not only furniture and habits that were held in common in the rue Pigalle, but friends as well. Sharing,—that was the great doctrine of Pierre Leroux, George’s new director of conscience and “preacher of eternal Truth in its steady progress.” According to this philosophic typographer, it passed from people to people according to mysterious laws, becoming incarnate now in one, now in another, and had just settled in Poland. The mission of the Poles was thus all equality, fraternity, love. Chopin smiled at this, without revealing his opinion. But he often invited his compatriots, who joined all of George’s friends: Leroux, Delacroix, Pauline Viardot, the great singer, and Heinrich Heine at the head. Frederick introduced the Grzymala brothers, Prince Czartoryski, Franchomme, the violoncellist, Fontana, the poets Slowacki and Krasinski, the artist Kwiatkowsky, and above all Miçkiewicz, the author of Dziady (or The Feast of the Dead), whom they thought profounder than Goethe and Byron.

He was an ecstatic, a visionary, inspired, at any rate, and, like Socrates, St. John, or Dante, was smitten occasionally with “intellectual falling-sickness.” At such times he became fired with an eloquence that enraptured his listeners and sent them into veritable trances. George Sand, so sensitive to disturbances, either the highest or the lowest, found herself ravished to the point of ecstasy before the sublime abstractions of this dreamer, the whispers of his soul, by which she was led into those dangerous regions where reason and madness go hand in hand. Ecstasy is contagious. Assuredly it is an evil for simple souls; but with the great spirits, such as Apollonius of Tyre, Moses, Swedenborg, Pierre Leroux, Miçkiewicz, and, who knows, George Sand, perhaps, is it not a sacred enthusiasm, a divine faculty of understanding the incomprehensible, “capable of producing the most noble results when inspired by a great moral and metaphysical cause?” This is the question George put to herself in her Journal. Meanwhile, this Miçkiewicz gave at the College de France a course of lectures full of logic and clarity. He was great hearted, had himself perfectly in hand, and reasoned with mastery. But he was transported into exaltation by the very nature of his beliefs, by the violence of his partially savage instincts, the momentum of his poetic faith, and the sentiment, so fecund in all these exiles, of the misfortunes of their fatherland.

Chopin also believed in the mystic aureole of this saintly bard. He did not know that Miçkiewicz, overjoyed at having been able to win so great a convert as George, thought her lover “her evil genius, her moral vampire, her cross, who tortured and would possibly end by killing her.” How surprising such a judgment from one who received secret communications from the other world! Fortunately, Sainte-Beuve came along, lent his delicate ear to Miçkiewicz and declared that if he had eloquence his faults should be noticed as well. However delicate Chopin’s perceptions, he no longer regarded them because for him Miçkiewicz was the great bell that tolled the sorrows of Poland. Who could be more stimulating than this apostle prophesying the resurrection of his country? The Redeemer was announced. The Saviour was about to arise, and his coming must be hastened by deeds of faith and by repentance.

Sometimes in the evening the seer came to the rue Pigalle accompanied by several of his compatriots. He would retire into a dim corner of the little salon and read his Infernal Comedy or one of his Ballades, some new poem filled with the odour of his forests. Or else, in a divine delirium, he would improvise. That great Slavic dismay, mute and passive, soon appeared on the face of the exiles and was prolonged in a silence loaded with memories. Then Chopin would rise and seat himself at the piano. The lamp would be still further lowered. He would begin with feathery arpeggios, stealing over the keys in his usual way, until he encountered the blue note, the pitch which seemed to correspond best to the general atmosphere. Then he would start one of his favourite pieces, the Etude in thirds from the second volume, for instance (G sharp minor). One of his compatriots called it The Siberian because it symbolized the journey of the deported Pole. The snow falls on the endless plains. (An ascending and descending scale for each hand pictures this universal infinity in a striking manner.) You hear the bells of the troika that approaches, passes, and disappears towards the horizon. And each one of them has seen a brother or a friend pass by, escorted by two Russian police who were taking him off for ever. Or else a scherzo takes shape, crystallizes: an old popular refrain that Frederick has heard in his childhood at the doors of the village inn. All of them, recognizing it, follow with muted humming from between tightened lips, while tears cover their faces. And the artist varies it, scans it softly, throws it up and catches it again, neglects the colouring, seeking only the design. For him the design is the soul. In spite of effects of resonance, of cloudlike fluidity, it is the design he pursues, the pure line of his thought. One of the friends who heard him writes: “His eyes burned with a feverish animation, his lips became blood-red, his breath short. He felt, we felt, that part of his life was running out with the sounds.” Suddenly a little dry cough, a sudden pause in a pianissimo passage, and in the dim light Chopin raises his fine white face with black-circled eyes.

But the evenings did not always end on this affecting scene. Sometimes, on the contrary, there would burst out from behind the piano the Emperor of Austria, an insolent old man, a phlegmatic Englishman, a sentimental and ridiculous Englishwoman, a sordid old Jew. It was again Chopin, past master of grimaces, who, after having drawn tears from all eyes, wrinkled their faces with fits of laughter.

Among George Sand’s old friends was a delicate, pale, nervous little man, with however, a will and a mind so strong that he stands out from his time like a bronze figure in an Olympus of plaster casts. In his own profession he was at once the most violent, the steadiest, the purest of creators. But, as in art everything is, as he said, a matter of the soul, here is an opinion which coming from his pen has some weight. He wrote: “Times without number, I have talked intimately to Chopin, whom I like greatly. He is a man of rare distinction and the truest artist I have ever met. He is of that small number that one can admire and esteem.”

This man was named Eugène Delacroix. His very young friend, Baudelaire, said of him that he loved the big, the national, the overwhelming, the universal, as is seen in his so-called decorative painting or in his big machines. What could be farther from Chopin’s whole æsthetic? But they had both a certain taste for the conventional, especially in the arts which were not their own. Delacroix, the powerful innovator, liked only the classic in literature, only Mozart in music. Chopin, in painting, greatly preferred M. Ingres to Delacroix. Opposite as they were in culture, in tendencies, in taste, yet Chopin and Delacroix understood each profoundly in their hearts. Delacroix, a great lover and connoisseur of music, soon placed Chopin directly after Mozart. As for Chopin, who loved and respected the man, he continued to detest his painting. It was above all in temperament that they were brothers. “... A mixture of scepticism, politeness, dandyism, of burning will, of finesse, of despotism, and finally of an especial kind of goodness, and of restrained tenderness that always goes with genius.” Well now, who is the subject of this portrait that so resembles Chopin? It is still Baudelaire talking of Delacroix. A hater of crowds, a polished sceptic, a man of the world entirely preoccupied in dissimulating the cholers of his heart,—such characteristics applied to either of them. Both violent, both reserved, both modest, such were these aristocrats born among the people. Delacroix taking his old servant to the Louvre to explain the Assyrian sculpture to her, or Chopin playing the piano for his valet,—these are pictures which give a better critical estimate than ten pages of abstractions. Let us add that both of them were invalids, both sufferers, both tubercular, and that the only revenge they could take upon life was to live by the spirit. I should say: by the emotional spirit. Exquisite judges of nuances, music furnished them with incomparable ones. Mozart was their God because his science naturally was equal to his inspiration. Of the works of Beethoven they said: “Vulgar passages side by side with sublime beauty.” To the ear of Delacroix he was sometimes diffuse, tortuous; to Chopin’s too athletic, too Shakespearean, with a passion that always bordered on a cataclysm. Yet the painter admired him because he found him modern, entirely of his own times. That is precisely the reason that made him suspect to Chopin, who before everything demanded a delicately decanted wine, a liqueur from which rose the bouquet of memory. Nietzsche said later on: “All music begins to have its magical effect only from the moment when we hear the language of our past in it.” Now that exile, Chopin, never heard anything but the oldest voices of his memory. That was his poetry.

“When Beethoven is obscure,” he said, “and seems to lack unity, the cause is not the rather savage, pretended originality, for which people honour him; it is that he turns his back on the eternal principles; Mozart never. Each of the parts has its own direction which, even while harmonizing with the others, forms a song and follows it perfectly. In that is the counterpoint, punto contrapunto. It’s the custom to learn harmony before counterpoint, that is, the succession of notes that lead up to the chords. Berlioz pounds out the chords and fills up the intervals as best he can. In music, the purest logic is the fugue. To know the fugue thoroughly is to know the element of all reason and all deduction.”

Sand tells us that one day she came to Delacroix’s studio to take him to dine at her house where Chopin was asking for him. She found him at work, his neck wrapped in woollens, just like her “regular invalid,” coughing like him, and husky, but raging none the less against Ingres and his Stratonice. They joined Chopin. He did not like the Stratonice either; he found the figures mannered, but the “finish” of the painting pleased him. In everything he was a lover of the exact, of the finished.

“About colour,” he said, “I don’t understand a thing.”

They dined. At dessert, Maurice asked his master to explain the phenomenon of reflections to him, and Delacroix drew a comparison between the tones of a painting and the sounds of music. Chopin was astonished.

“The harmony of music,” explained the painter, “is not only in the construction of chords, but also in their relations, their logical sequence, their sweep, their auditory reflections. Well, painting is no different. The reflection of reflections...”

Chopin bursts out: “Let me breathe. One reflection is enough for the moment. It’s ingenious, new, but it is alchemy to me.”

“No, it’s pure chemistry. The tones decompose and recompose themselves constantly, and the reflection is not separated from the relief.”

Here is Delacroix well in the saddle. He explains colour, line, flat tones; that all colour is an exchange of reflections; that what M. Ingres lacks is half of painting, half of sight, half of life, that he is half a man of genius, the other half an imbecile.

But Chopin is not listening. He rises and goes to the piano. He improvises an instant, stops.

“But,” cries Delacroix, “it’s not finished.”

“It’s not begun. Nothing comes to me... Nothing but reflections, shadows, reliefs that won’t become clear. I look for colour, and can’t even find design.”

“You’ll never find one without the other, and you are going to find both of them.”

“But if I only find moonlight?”

“You will have found a reflection of a reflection.”

Chopin returned to his theme without seeming to begin again, so vague was his melody. Then the blue note sounded, and they were transported into the heavens, straying with the clouds above the roofs of the square.

Several times already we have noticed this blue note. It did not alone proceed from the characteristic Chopin pitches. It was the song of his touch, the timbre of his hand. Like Liszt, Chopin had a distinct state of consciousness in each of his fingers. He managed to disassociate their impressions, to make them transmit to his brain a harmony of infinitely varied manual sensations. It was a whole education in technique and observation which taught a new method of self-knowledge, how to think of oneself in a new way.

For him, a good technique had for its object not the ability to play everything with an equal tone but to acquire a beautiful quality of touch in order to bring out nuances perfectly. “For a long time,” he said, “pianists have gone against nature in trying to give equal tone to each finger. On the contrary, each finger should play its proper part. The thumb has the greatest strength, because it is the largest and most independent of the fingers. After that comes the little finger, at the other end of the hand. Then the index, the principal support of the hand. Then the middle finger, the weakest of all. As for its Siamese twin, some pianists try, by putting all their strength into it, to make it independent. That is impossible, and perfectly useless. So there are several kinds of tones, as there are several fingers. It is a matter of profiting by these differences. This, in other words, is the whole art of fingering.”

Chopin had worked a great deal on these questions of transcendental mechanics. Taking his hand, which was small, people were surprised by its bony resistence. One of his friends has said that it was the frame of a soldier covered with the muscles of a woman. Another, on the contrary, thought it a boneless hand. Stephen Heller was stupefied to see him cover a third of the keyboard, and compared his hand to the jaw of a snake opening suddenly to swallow a whole rabbit in one mouthful.

He had invented a method of fingering all his own. His touch was, thanks to this care, softer than any other in the world, opposed to all theatricality, and of a beauty that charmed from the first bars. In order to give the hand a correct position, he had it placed lightly on the keyboard in such a way that the fingers struck the E, F sharp, G sharp, A sharp, and B. This was, to his mind, the normal position. Without changing it, he made his pupils do exercises designed to give independence and equality to the fingers. Then he put them at staccato, to give them lightness, then at staccato-legato, and finally at accented-legato. He taught a special system to keep the hand in its close and easy position while using the thumb in scales and in arpeggio passages. This perfect ease of the hand seemed to him a major virtue, and the only means of attaining exact and equalized playing, even when it was necessary to pass the thumb under the fourth or fifth finger. But these exercises explain also how Chopin executed his extremely difficult accompaniments (unknown until his time), which consist in striking notes that are very distant from each other. We can easily understand how much he must have shocked the pianists of the old school by his original fingering, which had always the object of keeping the hand in the same position, even while passing the third or fourth finger over the fifth. Sometimes he held it completely flat, and thus obtained effects of velvet and of finesse that threw Berlioz, and even Liszt, into ecstasy. To acquire the independence of the fingers, he recommended letting them fall freely and lightly, while holding the hand as if suspended in the air without any pressure. He did not want his pupils to take the rapid movements too soon, and made them play all the passages very forte and very piano. In this way the qualities of sound were formed of themselves, and the hand was never tired. It is he who, always for the purpose which he considered so important, of gaining the independence of the fingers, conceived the idea of making his pupils play the scales with an accent on each third or fourth note. He was very angry when accused of being too free in his handling of the beat. “Let your left hand be your precentor,” he said, “while your right hand plays ad lib.”

Reading these rapid technical indications ought not to be disheartening. In every art the technique and the material are the living joys of the intelligence. They are the beautiful secrets of the potter. Chopin, moreover, did not leave a method. He dreamed of it, but it all remained in the state of a project. The big, the developed, the scholarly frightened him. He always inhabited closed regions where he did not much like to be accompanied. He never felt the strength to compose an opera. His teachers and his friends pressed him to do it. “With your admirable ideas,” demanded M. de Perthuis, “why don’t you do an opera for us?”

“Ah, Count,” replied Chopin, “let me write only piano music. I do not know enough to build operas.”

He had a taste for the rare and the finished rather than for great applause. It was in the detail that he excelled. His most pregnant harmonic inventions are made of nothings, but of nothings essential to the character of his art. Professor Kleczynski, one of his compatriots to whom I am indebted for several of these details, has written: “Given the richness of his talent, he, like Schumann, disappointed us a little. But on the other hand, putting his whole soul into the little things, he finished and perfected them in an admirable manner.” It is precisely in these “little things” that Chopin was great. Perhaps for him nothing was little. Indeed, where does the little end, and the big begin? Without doubt he put his soul into everything from which he expected a pitch of perfection.

“When I am ill-disposed,” he said, “I play on an Erard piano, and easily find a ready-made tone; but when I feel keyed up, and strong enough to discover my own tone, then I need a Pleyel piano.”

Another friend of Chopin’s was Liszt, a friend by heart and by profession. People often tried to pitt one against the other, to persuade each of them that the contrast of their methods, of their playing as of their characters, made them rivals. But this was not so, and if Chopin sometimes seemed rather retiring, and even timid before the other great virtuoso of his time, it is because the women interfered.

George Sand and Marie d’Agoult had known each other for a long time. Before the reign of Chopin George had gone to Geneva, where she had sojourned for a season in the intimacy of this pretty, romantic left-handed establishment. Then Franz and Marie had come to spend a summer at Nohant. On both sides there had been curiosity, admiration, but also secret jealousies. The Countess prided herself on her writing. She had a noble style, a sceptical but well-furnished mind, and, except in love, balance in everything. With George, spontaneity carried the day. She had at first a temperamental sympathy for this beautiful tall woman who threw her bonnet over the great houses of the Faubourg. It was a brilliant putting into practice of her theories on love and liberty. “You seem to me the only beautiful, estimable and truly noble thing that I have seen shine in the patrician sphere,” she wrote to her. “You are to me the true type of the Princess of romance, artistic, loving and noble in manner, language, and dress, like the daughters of the Kings in heroic days.” But this extravagant admiration was entirely literary. So also was it with Marie d’Agoult, who was much more interested in the almost illustrious novelist than in this strange descendant of a line of kings and of a bird-seller. She soon decided to withdraw Liszt from her influence, and it was with displeasure that she saw the arrival of that Chopin whose sweet and profound genius her lover prophesied. So they became cold. They separated. George sent the Countess to all the devils.

But Liszt continued to see Chopin because he loved him. No one played the Pole’s compositions better than he, because no one knew them better, nor had sounded them more deeply and played them more in his concerts. “I love my music when Liszt plays it,” said Chopin. In the work which Liszt dedicated, later on, to his friend, he compares the Etudes, the Preludes, and the Nocturnes to the masterpieces of La Fontaine. I do not know that anyone has made a truer comparison. Two great poets, who tried to hold the very-big in the very-little, and who salted with irony their daily-wounded hearts. This is the place to recall the words of Heine, who called Chopin “the Raphaël of the pianoforte.” In his music “each note is a syllable, each bar a word,” and each phrase a thought. He invented “those admirable harmonic progressions by which he dowered with serious character even those pages which, in view of the lightness of their subject, seemed to have no claim to such importance.” It is by their sentiment that they excel, and on closer examination one recognizes, according to Liszt, those transitions that unite emotion and thought, these degrees of tone of which Delacroix speaks. Of the classic works of Chopin, Liszt admired above all the adagio of the Second Concerto, for which Chopin himself had a marked predilection. “The secondary melodies belong to the author’s most beautiful manner; the principal phrase is of admirable breadth: it alternates with a recitative that strikes the minor key and is like an antistrophe.” In several of the Etudes and of the Scherzos Liszt discovers the concentrated exasperation, the proud and ironic despair of Fritz. Yet it takes a trained ear, because Chopin allowed hardly a suspicion to be entertained of the “secret convulsions” that disturbed him. His character “was made up of a thousand nuances which, in overlapping, disguised each other in an indecipherable manner.” And Liszt, whose intelligence always stands out so sharply, wrote this fine comment on the last works of Chopin: “He used his art only to play to himself his own tragedy.” After having sung his feeling, he set himself to disintegrate it. But even then, the emotion that inspired these pages remains pure nobility, their expression rests within “the true limits of the language of art,” without vulgarity, without wild shrieks, without contortion. “Far from being diminished, the quality of the harmonic stuff becomes only more interesting in itself, more curious to study.”

Needless to say Chopin considered himself a romantic, and yet he invoked two masters: Bach and Mozart; Bach, whom he admired boundlessly, without a single reserve, and Mozart, in whom he found “the laws of all the liberties of which he made abundant use.” And yet he would not admit that “one should demolish the Greek architrave with the Gothic tower, nor that one should abolish the pure and exquisite grace of Italian architecture to the profit of the luxuriant fantasy of Moorish buildings... He never lent the lightest approval to what he did not judge to be an effective conquest for art. His disinterestedness was his strength.” (Liszt.) We know that Beethoven, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, frightened him. It seems stranger that he should not have liked Schumann more. He found Mendelssohn common, and he would not willingly listen to certain works of Schubert, “whose contours were too sharp for his ear, where the feelings seemed to be stripped naked. All savage brutality repelled him. In music, as in literature, as in the habit of life, everything that approached melodrama was torture to him.” Apropos of Schubert he said to Liszt one day:

“The sublime is defamed when the common or the trivial takes its place.”

Even in Mozart he found blemishes. He regretted certain passages of Don Juan, the work that he adored. “He managed,” Liszt always said, “to forget what was repugnant to him, but to reconcile himself to it was always impossible.” Romantic that he was, yet he never engaged in any of the controversies of the epoch. He stood apart from the battles into which Liszt and Berlioz wholeheartedly threw themselves, but he brought to their group, nevertheless, convictions that were “absolute, stubborn, and inflexible.” When his opinions had prevailed, like a true grand Seigneur and party leader, he kept himself from pushing his victory too far, and returned to all his habits of art and of the spirit.

How often did Liszt bend over the keyboard at Chopin’s side to follow the sylph-like touch! He studied it with love and infinite care, and he was the only one who succeeded in imitating it. “He always made the melody undulate ...; or else he made it move, indecisive, like an airy apparition.” This is the famous rubato. But the word conveys nothing to those who know, and nothing to those who do not know, and Chopin ceased to add this explanation to his music. If one has the intelligence it is impossible not to divine this rule of irregularity. Liszt explained it thus to one of his pupils: “Look at those trees; the wind plays in their leaves and awakens life in them, yet they do not stir.” His compositions should be played “with this kind of accented and prosodic balance, this morbidezza of which it is difficult to grasp the secret when one has not often heard Chopin himself play.... He impressed upon all of them some mystery of nameless colour, of vague form, of vibrating pulsations, that were almost devoid of materiality, and, like imponderable things, seemed to act upon the soul without passing through the senses. Chopin also liked to throw himself into burlesque fantasies; of his own accord he sometimes evoked some scene from Jacques Callot, with laughing, grimacing, gambolling caricatures, witty and malicious, full of musical flings, crackling with wit and English humour like a fire of green boughs. One of these piquant improvisations remains for us in the fifth Etude, where only the black keys are played,—just as Chopin’s gaiety moved only on the higher keys of the spirit.”

It was to his compatriots that he demonstrated it most willingly, to a few choice friends. It is said that even to-day the pupils of his pupils shine in the reflected glory of these preciously transmitted recipes. Doubtless there will always be born here or there a Chopinian soul; but can the intangible be taught? Liszt said: “Chopin passed among us like a phantom.”

CHAPTER XIV
Misunderstandings, Loneliness

In October, 1839, King Louis-Philippe expressed a desire to hear Chopin play, and had him invited with Moschelès, the pianist, to Saint-Cloud. Count de Perthuis received the two artists at the entrance of the castle. They had to cross a succession of rooms before arriving at the Salon Carré, where the royal family were informally gathered. Round the table sat the Queen with her work-basket, Madame Adélaïde, the Duchess of Orleans, and the ladies-in-waiting. Near to these, the fat King filled his arm-chair. Chopin and Moschelès were welcomed as old friends. They took turns at the piano. Chopin played his Nocturnes and Etudes, Moschelès his own Etudes; then they played as a duet a sonata by Mozart. At the end of the andante there was a shower of “delicious!” “divine!” and they were asked to repeat it. Chopin’s fervour electrified the audience, so much so that he gave himself up to a real “musical delirium.” Enthusiasm on all sides. Chopin received as a souvenir a cup of silver-gilt, Moschelès a travelling-case.

Such an evening was exactly what was needed to stimulate Chopin to work. The three years of the rue Pigalle (1839–1842) which opened under these royal auspices, were just such as he had wished; years of great and perfect labour. If the year 1839 saw the publication of only Trois valses brillantes, it was pre-eminently the year of the Preludes, perhaps the most rare and perfect of Chopin’s masterpieces. Then came the famous Sonata in B flat minor of which Schumann said strangely enough: “... A certain pitiless genius blows in our face, strikes anyone who tries to stand out against him with a heavy fist, and makes us listen to the end, fascinated and uncomplaining... but also without praise, because this is not music. The sonata ends as it began, in a riddle, like a mocking Sphinx.”

Following this, Chopin gave to the world in 1840 and 1841 four Nocturnes, the second and third Ballades, a Scherzo, three Polonaises, four Mazurkas, three new Etudes, a Waltz, the Fantasy in F minor, the Tarantella, and a Concerto Allegro.

In the spring of 1841 he consented to play again in public at Pleyel’s. The hall was crowded, naturally, for at that time Chopin and Liszt were making the greatest sensation at Paris. It was Liszt himself, that enthusiastic heart, who claimed the honour of reporting it for the Gazette Musicale. Here are a few of the variations and cadenzas from the pen of the pianist:

“On Monday last, at eight in the evening, the Salon Pleyel was magnificently lighted; to the foot of the carpeted and flower-covered stairway a limitless line of carriages brought the most elegant women, the most fashionable young people, the most celebrated artists, the richest financiers, the most illustrious of the great Lords, the whole élite of society, a whole aristocracy of birth, fortune, talent, and beauty.

“A large grand piano was open on a stage; they pressed about it; they sought the closest places, already they lent their ears, collected their thoughts, and said that they must not lose a chord, a note, an intention, a thought of him who was to be seated there, and they were right to be thus greedy, attentive, religiously stirred, because he whom they awaited, whom they wanted to see, to hear, to admire, to applaud, was not only an accomplished virtuoso, a pianist expert in the art of making notes, was not only an artist of great renown. He was all that, and more than all that; he was Chopin.

“... It is only rare, at very long intervals, that Chopin is heard in public, but what would be a certain cause of obscurity and neglect for anyone else is precisely what assures him a renown beyond the whim of fashion, and what puts him out of the reach of rivalry, jealousy and injustice. Chopin, holding aloof from the excessive turmoil which for the last several years has driven executive artists from all parts of the world, one on top of another, and one against another, has remained constantly surrounded by faithful disciples, enthusiastic pupils, warm friends, who, while protecting him from vexing quarrels and painful slights, have never ceased to spread his works and with them admiration for his genius and respect for his name. Therefore this exquisite celebrity always on a plane, excellently aristocratic, has been free from every attack. He has been surrounded by a complete absence of criticism, as though posterity had rendered its verdict; and in the brilliant audience which flocked about the too long silent poet, there was not a reticence, not a restriction; there was but praise from every mouth.”

Chopin was satisfied with his friend. Some weeks later he left for Nohant, full of ideas, but with no real pleasure. “I am not made for the country,” he said, “although I do rejoice in the fresh air.” That was really very little. For her part, Sand wrote: “He was always wanting Nohant, and could never stand Nohant.” His rural appetite was soon sated. He walked a little, sat under a tree, or picked a few flowers. Then he returned and shut himself in his room. He was reproached for loving the artificial life. What he really loved was his fever, his dimmed soul, his position as Madame Sands’ “regular invalid.” Without realizing it, he cultivated the old leanings of his childhood, his irresolution, his most morbid sensibility, all the refinements of luxury and of the spirit. What he did not like he set himself, unthinkingly, to hate: the plebeian side of George’s character, her humanitarian dreams, her friends who were democratic by feeling and by birth, especially Pierre Leroux, dirty, badly combed, with a collar powdered with dandruff, who was continually turning up to beg subsidy. Oh, how good it was to see Delacroix appear, the perfect dandy, looking as if he had just stepped out of a bandbox! He and Frederick had the air of two princes strayed into evil company at the table where Leroux and Maurice’s studio friends exaggerated their open collar garb. Together the two artists humorously bewailed George’s toleration of such freedom. What would Liszt have said, Liszt so particular in such matters, Liszt who, called himself a “professor of good manners?” But Madame Sand had small sympathy with such regard for appearances. She overrode the bursts of coarse laughter, the shouts, the disputes of her guests, the familiarity of her servants, the drunkenness of her brother Hippolyte. She heeded nothing but the sincerity of heart, listened to nothing but ideas, and insisted that “flies should not be taken for elephants.” She termed the exasperation of Chopin unhealthy, incomprehensible, and refused to see in it anything but the caprices of a sick child of genius. He retired into his room and sulked. He was not visible except at meal times when he looked on the company with suspicion, with disgust.

A rather painful incident marked the summer of 1841. It arose through Mlle. de Rozières, a pupil of Chopin’s, who was George’s friend and the mistress of Antoine Wodzinski. Chopin thought her an intriguer, a parasite, and he was displeased that she had been able to insinuate herself into intimacy with George. More than that, he thought her ostentatious, loud, and grandiloquent in the expression of her friendship. But what loosed his anger was that Antoine, inspired perhaps by Mlle. de Rozières, had sent to the Wodzinski family a replica of his, Chopin’s bust, by the sculptor Dantan. What equivocal intention might they not read into such an action? What might Marie, his old fiancée, think? Frederick was aghast, and complained to Fontana, who had given the statue to Antoine. “I gave Antoine no permission,” he wrote to him.... “And how strange this will appear to the family... They will never believe that it was not I who gave it to him. These are very delicate matters in which there should be no meddling touch... Mlle. de Rozières is indiscreet, loves to parade her intimacy, and delights in interfering in other people’s affairs. She will embellish all this, exaggerate it, and make a bull out of a frog, and it won’t be for the first time. She is (between ourselves) an insipid swine, who in an astonishing manner has dug into my private affairs, thrown up the dirt, and rooted around for truffles among the roses. She is a person that one must on no account touch, because when one has touched her the result is sure to be an indescribable indiscretion. In fact, she is an old maid! We old bachelors, we are worth a lot more!”

On her side, George revealed the great man’s irritation to this young lady. She unfolded on this friendly heart, because was she not attacked from below and pierced with pin pricks each time that she took sides against the pronouncements of her friend? “If I had not been a witness to these extravagant neurotic likes and dislikes for three years, I should by no means understand them, but unfortunately I am too used to them,” she wrote. “I tried to cheer him up by telling him that W. was not coming here; he could count on that. He hit the ceiling, and said that if I was certain, apparently it was because I had told W. the truth. Thereupon I said ‘Yes.’ I thought he would go mad. He wanted to leave. He said I would make him look like a fool, jealous, ridiculous, that I was embroiling him with his best friends, that it all came from the gossip that had been going on between you and me, etc., etc.... Anyway, as usual, he wanted no one to suffer from his jealousy but me.” And further on: “I have never had any rest and I never shall have any with him. With his distressing nature, you never know where you are. The day before yesterday he passed the whole day without saying a syllable to anyone at all.... I do not want him to think he is the master. He would be so much the more suspicious in the future, and even if he gained this victory he would be in despair, because he does not know what he wants, nor what he does not want.”

Certainly Chopin was jealous, but a meaning slightly different to the usual one should be attached to the word. It was not the jealousy of a lover. His jealousy extended to all the influences, the desires, the curiosities, and the friendships of his mistress. It was the wild need of absolute possession. He had to know at each moment that all of George’s vital sources were born in his own heart, that if he was the child in fact, he was the father in spirit. He had to feel that his reign effaced preceding reigns, abolished them, and that in adopting him, in loving him, George was born anew. He would have liked her to be ignorant of the very existence of evil, never to think of it in speaking to him, and without ceasing to be good, tender, devoted, voluptuous, maternal, still be the pale, the innocent, the severe, the virginal spouse of his soul. “He would have demanded but that of me, this poor lover of the impossible,” noted Sand. And when he found himself losing this universal possessorship, which his love should have given him, he would have nothing more to do with it. He repulsed feeble substitutes.

Assuredly, he had some reason to be jealous of everyone, of a too-forward servant, of the Doctor, of the great simpleton of a cousin, half bourgeois, half lout, who brought game to the mistress of Nohant, of a beggar, a poacher with a strong face,—because this invalid with sharpened nerves well understood what troubles, what desires these passers-by aroused in a woman for whom the “exercise of the emotions” was the true law of knowledge; of a woman,—who, he well knew, had no fear, and no scruples in the face of this kind of experience. So he found the wit to torment her. “He seemed to be gnawing softly to amuse himself, and the wound that he made penetrated the entrails.” Then he would leave her presence with a phrase that was perfectly polite, but freezing, and once more shut himself up in his own room. During her nights of toil, George served as her own écorché, stripped the elusive soul of her lover, and, good woman of letters that she was, traced their double portrait in her Lucrezia Floriani. Was it obtuseness, sadism, or an obscure vengeance that led her the next day to make Chopin read these pitiless reconstructions? But the artist saw nothing, or at least he seemed not to. He bent over the pages, he admired, he praised; but as always, he gave out nothing of his inner self, and if Lucrezia delivered herself in writing, Prince Karol returned to his room where the light sounds of the piano interpreted all of his suppressed misery. He, also, clung to his grief, and even to the outward signs of his grief, “Take good care of my manuscripts,” he advised Fontana. “Don’t tear them, don’t dirty them, don’t spoil them.... I love my written pain so much that I always tremble for my papers.”

“The friendship of Chopin...” wrote George. Or else: “Our own story had no romance in it.” And even: “His piano was much more his torment than his joy.” This shows to what a point beings who have mingled their lives can reserve their souls. Here are two such—very penetrating, very greedy, who yet were never wedded.

In the Autumn of 1842 George Sand and Chopin left the rue Pigalle to move to Nos. 5 and 9 in the Square d’Orléans. Between them at No. 7 lived their great friend Mme. Marliani, the wife of a Spanish politician. Near neighbours were Pauline Viardot and the sculptor Dantan. Here they established a kind of commune which provided diversion for them, and where freedom was “guaranteed.” Each one worked and lived at home. Their meals were taken, at the common expense, at Mme. Marliani’s. Chopin had a large salon for his pianos; Sand, a billiard room. His quarters were furnished in the modern style of Louis-Philippe, with a clock and empire candelabra on the mantelshelf. Behind one of the pianos was a painting by Frère of a caravan on the desert, above the other a Coignet pastel of the Pyramids. During the day they seldom met, but in the evening they dropped in on one another like good country neighbours. Chopin always cultivated elegant society, and received at his house his titled and amorous pupils. But he received only with a good deal of distaste the innumerable pianists and priers who now came to call on him and solicited his support.

One day Chopin’s valet brought in the card of a M. W. de Lenz, a Russian virtuoso and writer on musical subjects. He would have stood less chance than any, this enemy of his Poland, of being received by Chopin if the card had not borne in pencil the words “Laissez passer: Franz Liszt.” He therefore decided to have this slightly importunate gentleman in, and begged him to be seated at the piano. Lenz played well. It was apparent that he was a pupil of Liszt. He surpassed himself in one or two of Chopin’s Mazurkas, and like his master, added a few embellishments. Chopin was both amused and a little irritated.

“He has to touch everything, this good Franz! But a recommendation from him deserves something; you are the first pupil who has come from him. I shall give you two lessons a week. Be punctual; with me everything runs on schedule. My house is a pigeon-cote.” As M. de Lenz had expressed a lively desire to make the acquaintance of Mme. Sand, Chopin invited him to call again as a friend. He arrived, therefore, one evening, and Chopin presented him to George, to Pauline Viardot, to Mme. Marliani. Sand, hostile and reserved, said not a word, for she detested Russians; but Lenz pointedly seated himself at her side. He noticed that Chopin was fluttering about “like a little frightened bird in a cage.” In order to relieve the tension, Chopin asked Lenz to play the Invitation to the Waltz, an elegant specialty of the Russian, who several years before had revealed it to Liszt himself. Lenz played it, slightly intimidated. On which George continued to remain silent. Chopin held out his hand amiably, then Lenz seated himself with some embarrassment behind the table on which a Carcel lamp was burning.

“Aren’t you coming to St. Petersburg some time?” demanded the stranger, addressing Sand.

“I should never lower myself to a country of slaves!”

“You would be right not to come. You might find the door shut.”

The disconcerted George opened her big eyes which Lenz described in his notes as “beautiful big heifer’s eyes.” Chopin, however, did not seem displeased, as if he enjoyed having his mistress put out of countenance. She arose, went to the fireplace where a log was flaming, and lighted a fat Havana cigar.

“Frederick, a spill!” she cried. He rose and brought the light.

“At Petersburg,” went on George, blowing out a cloud of smoke, “probably I could not smoke a cigar in a drawing-room?”

“In no drawing-room, Madame, have I ever seen a cigar smoked,” replied this badly brought up Lenz, looking at the pictures through his glasses.

Nevertheless, it must be supposed that these robust manners were not altogether displeasing, for the day after this visit while Chopin was giving him his lesson, he said to Lenz:

“Madame Sand thinks she has been rude to you. She can be so pleasant. She liked you.”

One can divine what obscure attractions this sensualist obeyed. At times victories of the flesh are preceded by victories of wit. But Chopin was not the man for that sort of thing, Chopin who had so little muscle, so little breath, and such a delicate skin “that a prick of a gnat made a deep gash in him.” The whole complication came about because he still loved with passion, while she had, for a long time, dwelt in affection. Her “little Chopin” she loved, she adored, but in the same way that she loved Maurice and Solange.

In the months during which they lived apart, she was constantly disturbed about his health. She knew that he did not take care of himself. She wrote to one person and another to ask them to keep a discreet watch. Wasn’t he forgetting to drink his chocolate in the morning, his bouillon at ten o’clock? They must make him take care of himself, and not go out without his muffler.

But, he had found a new way to exalt still further the sentiments which, from their very lack of balance, are an active stimulant to artistic production; he would not worry her, he would leave her in ignorance of his moral and physical illness, of his agonies, of his hæmorrhages. Let her, at least, have the peace necessary for her work. In every willing sacrifice to love there are humble joys, all the deeper for remaining hidden; but it is the most deeply buried love that nourishes the most.

George now passed part of her winters in the country, while Chopin wore himself out in Paris. It was a problem not to let her notice anything. His letters were gay, confiding. Sickness holds aloof, so he pretends, and only happiness is ahead. “Your little garden (in the Square d’Orléans) is all snowballs, sugar, swans, ermine, cream cheese, Solange’s hands, and Maurice’s teeth. Take care of yourself. Don’t tire yourself out too much with your tasks. Your always older than ever, and very, extremely, incredibly old,

“Chopin.”

Perhaps he had never felt more alone, this “little sufferer,” as his maternal friend calls him. But he was the essential solitary.

Forty years later than that time, I see another who resembles him, and who also feeds upon a terribly hard me, a me which, no more than that of Chopin, could expand over other beings, bleed on them, because he was too high, too savage, too shamed; that is Nietzsche. It is not surprising that Nietzsche loved Chopin like a chosen brother. The love of both was too great for their hearts.

When I hear played the Nocturne in C Minor (op. 48), where, under so much repressed suffering, there still bursts forth, mingled with sadness, this ideal which is built only upon the creative joys of the spirit, I think of a page written by Nietzsche in a loggia overlooking the Barberini Square at Rome, in May, 1883. This is that beautiful Night Song through which pass the blue and black visions of Chopin, his flower-like glance, his young girl’s eyes, and his heart so “extremely, incredibly old.” Some fragments of these strophes seem to me to furnish for the Nocturne of which I speak—and for the final solitudes into which the poet is now entering—a commentary worthy of them. Before calling them to mind I should say that a tradition among the Polish artists has it that this piece was composed one stormy day when Chopin had taken refuge in the Church of St.-Germain des Prés. He listened to the Mass under the rolling thunder and, coming back home, improvised the fine chorale that forms the centre of this solemn Elevation. But that does not for a moment prevent me from associating this prayer with the pagan song of Nietzsche. Quite the contrary: both the one and the other have this transport, this point of enthusiasm, which draws the cry from the philosopher: “There is in me a desire for love which itself speaks the language of love.”

THE NIGHT SONG

“It is night: now the voice of the trickling fountains rises higher. And my soul, also, is a trickling fountain.

“It is night: now all the songs of the lovers awake. And my soul, also, is a lovers’ song.

“There is in me something unappeased, and unappeasable, that struggles to raise its voice. There is in me a desire for love which itself speaks the language of love.

“I am light: ah! if I were night! But this is my solitude, to be enveloped in light.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

“My poverty is that my hand never rests from giving; my jealousy, to see eyes full of waiting and nights illuminated with desire.

“Oh, misery of all those who give! Oh, eclipse of my sun! Oh, desire of desiring! Oh, the devouring hunger in satiety!”

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

Thus sang Zarathustra.

CHAPTER XV
Chagrin, Hate

It seems that it was about 1842 that life for Chopin began to lower its tone. For whom should he cultivate even the will to get well, now that love was no longer ahead, but behind him? Lovers who feel the power of suffering desiccating in them abandon themselves immediately to the soft call of Death. If they disappear, they are reproached for having been weaklings; if they survive, for having been cynics. They themselves do not suspect that they are emptied of their substance like those hollow trees still full of leaves which a gust of wind will vanquish. Chopin, dying, thought himself eternal.

In the spring of 1842, his childhood friend, Matuszinski, succumbed to tuberculosis. In May, 1844, his father passed away at Warsaw. It was the end of a just man. He closed his eyes looking at the portraits and the bust of his beloved son, and asked that after death his body should be opened because he feared being buried alive.

These two shocks were terrific for the artist, yet he wrote to his own people: “I have already survived so many younger and stronger people than I that it seems I am eternal.... You must never worry about me: God gives me His Grace.” In view of his persistent depression, George conceived the idea of inviting Frederick’s oldest sister and her husband, the Jedrzeïewiczs, to Nohant. It was necessary to warn them of the great changes they were to see in their brother’s health. George wrote to them:

“You will find my dear child very thin and greatly changed since the time when you saw him, yet you must not be too fearful for his health. In general, it has not changed for more than six years, during which I have seen him every day. A strong paroxysm of coughing every morning, and each winter two or three more considerable spells, each lasting only two or three days, some neuralgic pain from time to time, that is his regular state. For the rest, his chest is healthy, and his delicate organism has no lesion. I am always hoping that with time it will grow stronger, but at least I am sure that with a regulated life and care it will last as long as any other. The happiness of seeing you, mixed though it be with deep and poignant emotions, which may perhaps wound him a little the first day, nevertheless will do him immense good, and I am so happy for him that I bless the decision you have made.... For a long time he has cared for nothing but the happiness of those whom he loves, instead of that which he can no longer share with them. For my part, I have done everything I could to soften this cruel lack, and though I have not made him forget it, I have at least the consolation of knowing that, after you, I have given and inspired as much affection as is possible.”

George even wrote to Mme. Nicolas Chopin to assure her that henceforth she would consecrate her life to Frederick and regard him as her own son.

So Louise and her husband came in 1844 to spend part of the summer at Nohant, and the joy that Chopin experienced was translated into a new feeling of gratitude for his friend. Some of the bitterness left his soul, making him stronger and more courageous. Even confidence returned for a time. The filial and family side of his tenderness was thus reënforced.

When they had gone, Frederick clung even more closely to his “dear ones,” those pieces of himself. He saw them again in dreams. He looked for their places on the sofa, preserved like a relic an embroidered slipper forgotten by his sister, and used the pencil from her pocket-book as in other days Marie Wodzinska had used his. He sent them news of the autumn, of the garden. He entered into the most minute details, even to speaking of the tiny bear which went up and down on the barometer. How clearly one sees all that he lacked, this deficient lover!

On their walks he followed the others on a donkey so as to tire himself less. But the autumn was cold and rainy, and Chopin passed more time before the piano than out of doors. He returned to Paris and reinstalled himself in the Square d’Orléans at the very beginning of November. George was seriously concerned this time about “her dear corpse,” and recommending him to friends while she stayed in the country. This period is marked in one way and another by a blaze of affectionate solicitude. Chopin did not want her to worry, and continued to hide the progress of his malady. Without his knowledge, George got information about him. “He must not know....” “I cannot rid myself of these preoccupations which make up the happiness of my life....” “Decidedly I cannot live without my little sufferer.” She realized that “Chip’s” constitution was attacked in a very serious way. He was visibly declining. The bad winter, nerves, irritation, the persistent bronchitis were perhaps the causes. In any case, love was still powerful. But love had apparently taken refuge in family feeling. “... Let him never have the least inquietude about any of you,” wrote George to Louise, “because his heart is always with you, tormenting him at every moment and turning him toward his dear family.”

During the winter of 1845, and the spring of 1846, he was ill with influenza, yet he made none but the usual plans and proposed to spend the summer at Nohant. Before leaving, he gave a little dinner. “Music, flowers, grub.” For guests: Prince Czartoryski and his wife (the latter, it may be said in passing, was the most brilliant and the most authentic of the feminine pupils of her master); Princess Sapieha, Delacroix, Louis Blanc, Pauline Viardot; in short, old friends. But on his arrival at Nohant everything seemed strange to him, as in a house abandoned by life. He moved his piano and rearranged his table, his books of poetry, his music. “I have always one foot with you,” he wrote to Louise and her husband, “and the other in the room next door where my hostess works, and none at all in my own home just now, but always in strange places. These are without doubt imaginary places, but I don’t blush for them.”

His delight was to make Pauline Viardot sing the Spanish melodies that she had noted down herself. “I am very fond of these songs. She has promised me to sing them to you when she goes to Warsaw. This music will unite me with you. I have always listened to it with great enthusiasm.”

But we must look below the surface, because in the depths of all these beings who lived in common a drama was preparing. One can say that it had been brewing for several years. And neither George nor Frederick was to be responsible for its explosion, but the children.

First there was Maurice, the oldest, a young man of twenty-two adored and very much spoiled by his mother, wretchedly brought up, a dabbler, as the whim took him, in painting and literature, and a collector of lepidoptera and of minerals, he promised, in sum, to become a fairly complete type of the intelligent failure. He was not without talent; he had charm and gaiety, touched, however, with bitterness and gruffness. Since the trip to Majorca, he had had time to get accustomed to Chopin, having seen this friend of his mother every day, so to speak. But if there had been at first a certain sympathy between them, it quickly flagged, and for several years now they had not got on. No doubt, this is easily explained. Maurice loved his mother above everything, and he saw clearly that her life was not easy, or smooth; he came upon disputes, he was exasperated by the nervousness of the so-called great man, who was to him merely a difficult, reserved, and sometimes ill-natured invalid. Perhaps he even suffered from the ambiguous smiles that followed the two celebrated lovers. And then his father, the mediocre Dudevant, must occasionally have let fall outrageously gross witticisms when his son came to see him. Maurice was chilled also by the character of Chopin, by the aristocratic manners, the often disdainful eye of this puzzling and encumbering parasite. Children never forgive a stranger who allows himself a criticism, much less if it is well founded. Chopin made one, severe enough, concerning Maurice and Augustine. This Augustine was a relation of Mme. Sand, daughter of her cousin, Adèle Brault, who belonged to the side of the family that was entirely bourgeois and who was nothing else than a lady of easy virtue. Out of pity for the girl, George had taken her into her home, where Augustine, charming and tender-hearted, had become the favourite of all the young people with one exception, Solange. Chopin did not like Augustine. He took Solange’s side. As for Maurice, the born enemy of his sister, he was for Augustine to such a degree that he was suspected of having become her lover. George denied this vociferously, with authority, but Chopin willingly believed it, first because of his intuition, secondly because Solange tried, by all manner of means, to fix the idea in his head.

A strange child, this Solange. Physically, she was the image of her great-grandmother, Marie-Aurore of Saxe, that is to say, blonde, fresh, beautifully built. In character, she was cold, brilliant and lively, passionate, vain, very excitable, sullen, possibly false, certainly strong willed, vicious without any doubt, absolutely unbalanced. This neurotic, who might have developed in such a very interesting way, they always regarded as hard-hearted. They pestered her, they soured her, they made her ruthless. Pauline Viardot contended that she did wrong for the love of it. She was, in point of fact, innately ardent and unhappy. A nature such as this has need of being loved deeply, and her trials came above all through jealousy. Offences slowly recorded by her heart made it solitary and injurious. Her mother herself said: “She is nineteen years old, she is beautiful, she has a remarkable mind, she has been brought up with love under conditions of happiness, growth and morality, which should have made of her a saint or a heroine. But this century is damned, and she is a child of this century.... Everything is passion with her, an icy passion, that is very deep, inexplicable and terrifying.” Whose fault was that? It is only in families that one finds these refined hatreds which are one of the sad aspects of love.

For a long time the mystery of this soul had attracted Chopin. Solange was essentially a coquette. Ever since her puberty she had practised the power of her troubled age on him, and this man of nerves had not seemed insensible. Did he not rediscover in her the seductions and even that free and animal grace that George must have had at fifteen? A lover loves, in the daughter of his mistress, the happiness that he has missed, and the rejuvenated memory of his sufferings. Solange was less frank than her mother; she was even somewhat perverse. She tried a few games that were not altogether innocent; first from predilection, and also to appease the amorous rancour that she vowed against her own people. It would be fine to avenge her own spurned heart by stealing Chopin’s tenderness from her mother. Another of his attractions for Solange was his elegance, his distinction, his high worldly connections. For she was a snob, and it was delicious to flee to the great friend’s salon, which was filled with countesses, when that of her mother resounded with the roars of Maurice and his comrades, or the “great thoughts” of Pierre Leroux. Lately there had even been found there a herd of poet-workmen to whom the novelist was stubbornly attached.

Here then was a whole obscure drama daily averted but daily reawakened, sown with misunderstandings, and complicated by embarrassments. For Sand, many times, wanted to talk it out with her lover, to force him to interfere, but he shied away, or even openly took Solange’s part. George tried in vain to break her daughter. Rather she broke herself against the sharp edges of the character which in many ways were so like her own.

It was Chopin who suffered the most from these misunderstandings, because he could never relieve himself by words, by vain explanations, because he could never express anything except in music. His nervousness increased. He allowed himself to become exasperated to the point of tears by incidents affecting servants. He could not conceive that an old servant could be dismissed, and Mme. Sand, that good communist, was quite capable of reconstructing her household with a sweep of her arm. It was a calamity. Frederick’s Polish valet de chambre was dismissed “because the children (Read: ‘Maurice and Augustine’) did not like him.” Then it was the old gardener, Pierre, who was turned off after forty years of service. Next came the turn of Françoise, the chambermaid, to whom, nevertheless, George had dedicated one of her books. “God grant,” wrote Frederick to his sister, “that the new ones will please the young man and his cousin more.” He was tired. And, when he was tired he was not gay. That reacted on everyone’s spirits. He felt old.

George also felt old. She was forty-two. And even while correcting a passage in her Lucrezia Floriani, she was thinking so strongly of herself, and of her first lover, that she returned for the first time in fifteen years to the little wood she could see from her window, where she used to meet Jules Sandeau. It was in this “sacred wood” that her flight from the conjugal house had been decided, in 1831. There she searched, and there she found a tree under which her lover had been in the habit of waiting for her. Their initials cut into the bark were still faintly visible. “She went over in her memory the details and the whole story of her first passion, and compared them to those of her last, not to establish a parallel between the two men, whom she did not dream of judging coldly, but to ask her own heart if it could still feel passion and bear suffering.... ‘Am I still capable of loving? Yes, more than ever, because it is the essence of my life, and through pain I experience intensity of life; if I could no longer love, I could no longer suffer. I suffer, therefore I love and I exist.’” And yet she felt that she must renounce something. What then? The hope of happiness? “‘At a certain age,’ she finished by thinking, ‘there is no other happiness than that which one gives; to look for any other is madness.’... So La Floriani was seized with an immense sadness in saying an eternal farewell to her cherished illusions. She rolled on the ground, drowned in tears.”

This summer’s end of 1846 was a trying period, a period of crises. The sky itself was full of storm. Yet Chopin worked. He wrote to the loved ones at Warsaw. He told them all the stories which one must pack into a letter when one wishes to hide one’s true feelings. The giraffe at the Jardin des Plantes was dead. The Italians had reopened in Paris. M. Le Verier had discovered a new planet. M. Faber of London, a Professor of Mathematics, had built a machine that sang an air of Haydn, and God Save the Queen. “I play a little, and also write a little. I am one moment happy about my Sonata with the violoncello, and the next unhappy; I throw it in the corner and then take it up again. I have three new Mazurkas (in B major, F minor, and C sharp minor, dedicated to Countess Czosnowska. These are his last works—op. 63 and 65). When I am composing them I think they are good; otherwise one would never compose. Later on comes reflection, and one rejects or accepts. Time is the best judge and patience the best master. I hope to have a letter from you soon, yet I am not impatient, and I know that with your large family it is difficult for each one to write me a word, especially as with us a pen is not enough. I don’t know how many years we would have to talk to be at the end of our Latin, as they say here. So you must not be surprised or sad when you do not receive a letter from me, because there is no real reason, any more than there is with you. A certain sadness blends with the pleasure of writing to you; it is the knowledge that between us there are no words, hardly even deeds.... The winter does not promise badly, and by taking care of myself a little it will pass like the last, and God willing, not worse. How many people are worse off than I! It is true that many are better, but I do not think about them.”

Have we noticed those words: “Especially as with us a pen is not enough...?” There sounds the exquisite mute on Chopin’s plaints. For George the pen was enough. Everyone around Frederick, in default of being happy, was noisy. They played comedies. They got up tableaux vivants and charades. Pantomime, over which the whole world was soon to go crazy, was Chopin’s invention. It was he who sat at the piano and improvised while the young people danced comic ballets, with the assistance of a few guests: Arago, Louis Blanc. But no one suspected that between George and Frederick the break was complete. Desire had been dead for a long time. And now tenderness, affection, the attachment of the soul, no longer existed but on one side. In weeping over her lost youth in the “sacred wood,” George had shed her last tears.

Thenceforth she was to be only a mother, pitilessly a mother, and only of her two children. She was busy now in marrying off Solange. Two or three aspirants succeeded each other at Nohant, one after the other, among them Victor de Laprade, followed by a young Berry lad, with whom Solange flirted gaily.

Then one fine day, a dispute burst out between Maurice and Chopin over some silly question. One of those grave, irreparable disputes. The two wounded each other unmercifully. A moment later they embraced, “but the grain of sand has fallen into the quiet lake, and little by little the stones fall in, one by one,” wrote George. It soon began again. Maurice spoke of leaving the group and the house. His mother took his side, naturally. So Chopin bowed his head. It was he who would go. No one said a word to restrain him.

He started out in the first days of November. Seven years and a half before, he had arrived at Nohant for the first time, his physique already much deteriorated. That is nothing, however, when the soul is strong. But on this late autumn day that, too, had collapsed.

They saw the invalid, wrapped in rugs, getting into his carriage. With his hand, pale and dry, he made a sign of farewell. No one understood its meaning, not even himself. He was about to get into his grave.

CHAPTER XVI
The Story of an Estrangement

There was a great deal of sickness in Paris. Grzymala had just passed seventeen days without sleeping; Delacroix, more ill than ever, dragged himself nevertheless to the Luxembourg. Chopin too, tried to put people off the scent, as he had done all those past years. But at length he was forced to admit that he had not the courage to leave his own hearth for an instant. New Year’s Day, 1847, arrived. He sent George the customary bonbons, and his best wishes, and, smothered in coats, had himself driven to the Hôtel Lambert, to his friends the Czartoryskis.

At Nohant, they kept up the semblance of happiness. Pantomime raged. Scenery was brushed up, costumes were made. This united family played out its comedy also. But suddenly the luggage was packed for a return to Paris early in January, leaving Solange’s fiancé, M. des Préaulx, stranded. And hardly had they been settled a month in the Square d’Orléans when everything was unsettled again by the entrance on the scene of a new actor: the sculptor Clésinger. He was a man of thirty-three, violent, full-blooded, enthusiastic, who had just made a name in the exhibitions and achieved fame at the first stroke. He had asked to do a bust of Mme. Sand, came to call, saw Solange and was lost. She was almost as quickly inflamed. The projected marriage with M. des Préaulx was postponed in spite of the misgivings of George, who had gathered decidedly vexing information about the sculptor. “A hot-tempered and disorderly gentleman, a one-time dragoon, now a great sculptor everywhere conducting himself as though he were in the café of the regiment, or in the studio,” said Arsène Houssaye. All decisions were postponed. The novelist took her daughter back to Nohant immediately after the first days of Holy Week, at the beginning of April.

Chopin at once had a very decided opinion about these events. First; regret to see the Berry union fall through, as it seemed to him a very sweet and proper one. Then, an instinctive dislike made him hostile to the “stone tailor,” as he called Clésinger. He wrote to his people: “Sol is not to be married yet. By the time they had all come to Paris to sign the contract, she no longer wanted it. I am sorry, and I pity the young man, who is very honest and very much in love; but it is better that it should have happened before the marriage than after. They say it is postponed till later on, but I know what that means.” George, for her part, confided her difficulties to a friend: “Within six weeks she has broken off a love affair she had hardly felt, and she has accepted another on which she is ardently set. She was engaged to one when she drove him off and became engaged to another. It’s odd, it’s above all bold; but still, it is her right, and fortune smiles on her. She substitutes for a gentle and modest marriage a brilliant and burning one. She has it all her own way, and is taking me to Paris at the end of April.... Work and emotion take up all my days and all my nights.... This wedding must take place suddenly, as though by surprise. Also it is a deep secret I am confiding to you, and one that even Maurice does not know. (He is in Holland.”)

Above all, Chopin was not to know anything,—Chopin, who was now refused all intimate participation in the family affairs. George really knew she had met her master this time, in his fierce Clésinger who boasted that he would attain his ends at any cost. He appeared suddenly at La Châtre, he repeatedly met Solange in the woods, he demanded a definite answer. Naturally she said yes, since she loved him. George was forced to give in, despite her apprehensions, her terror. On the 16th of April, she called her son to the rescue because she was afraid, she needed to be reassured. She added at the end of the letter: “Not a word of all this to Chopin; it does not concern him, and when the Rubicon is crossed, ifs and buts do only harm.”

When the Rubicon is crossed.... One more time! How many times had she crossed it during her life, this old hand at ruptures? And yet she pretended not to see that this was the critical point of her long liaison. The marriage of Solange, this fact, indeed, entirely outside of her own love-life, had become the plank to which the hand of the pianist still clung, and she kicked it away with her heel.

Chopin heard whispered gossip about the affair, but he said nothing, he questioned no one. He waited for a renewal of confidence. If all the mystery astonished him, if he even guessed at the deliberate and childish side of the now obvious rupture of his friendship, he made no sign. As always, it was his health that paid for his muzzled pangs. He was taken gravely ill. But it was no longer George who nursed him; it was Princess Marceline Czartoryska. She sent a bulletin of his health to Nohant. “One more trouble added to all the rest,” replied George on May 7th. “Is he really seriously ill? Write to me, I count on you to tell me the truth and to nurse him.” Yet on that very day she wrote in her Journal with a calmer pen: “Here I am at the age of forty-three with a constitution of iron, streaked with painful indispositions, which give me, however, only a few hours of spleen, dissipated the next day.... To-day my soul is well, and my body also.” Was it that day that she was sincere, or the next, the 8th of May, when she said to Mlle. de Rozières: “I am sick with worry and am having an attack of giddiness while writing to you. I cannot leave my family at such a moment, when I have not even Maurice to save the proprieties and protect his sister from wicked insinuations. I suffer a great deal, I assure you. Write to me, I beg. Tell Chopin whatever you think best about me. Yet I dare not to write him, I am afraid of disturbing him, I am afraid that Solange’s marriage displeases him greatly and that he has a disagreeable shock each time I speak to him about it. Yet I could not make a mystery of it to him and I have had to act as I have done. I cannot make Chopin the head and counsellor of the family; my children would not accept him, and the dignity of my life would be lost.”

Had it been a question of dignity it would have been better to have thought of that earlier. Had it been a question of sparing Chopin’s health, then it was too late for that, too. She did not even perceive the contradictions in her letter. The poor great artist remained firm in his determined silence, and desperately proud.

Yet George had just published her Lucrezia Floriani, already the funeral march of her love. But Chopin continued to see in it nothing but “beautiful characters of women and men, great naturalness and poetry.” This would force her to confess differently, to explain herself further. For there was always in her this impetuous need of justification which drove her, at the decisive moments of the beginning or of the end of a love affair, to acknowledge the forces that motivated her. To whom should she, this time, fling the comments of her sick brain, and expose the fatigue of a body which thenceforth would be able to demand but the briefest of gratifications? Eight years before she had written to Count Grzymala to show of what she was capable, and that a heart like hers could pass through the most diverse phases of passion. If the whole horizon of love had been traversed, it seemed right, even useful, to call a halt at the threshold of the oncoming night. So she took a sheet of paper and wrote to the same confidant—he of the first and of the final hour—the following lines:

“12th May, 1847.

“Thank you, my dear friend, for your good letters. I knew in a vague and uncertain way that he was ill twenty-four hours before the letter from the good Princess. Thank that angel also for me. How I suffered during those twenty-four hours it is impossible to tell you. Whatever had happened I was in such a position that I could not have budged.

“Anyway, once again he is saved, but how dark the future is for me in that quarter!

“I do not yet know if my daughter is to be married here in a week, or at Paris in a fortnight. In any case, I shall be in Paris for a few days at the end of the month, and if Chopin can be moved I shall bring him back here. My friend, I am as happy as can be over the marriage of my daughter, as she is transported with love and joy, and as Clésinger seems to deserve it, loves her passionately, and will give her the life she wants. But in any case, one suffers a great deal in making such a decision.

“I feel that Chopin must for his part have suffered also at not knowing, at not understanding, and at not being able to advise anything; but it is impossible to take his advice on the real affairs of life into consideration. He has never seen facts truly, nor understood human nature on a single point; his soul is all poetry and music, and he cannot bear what is different from himself. Besides, his influence in my family affairs would mean for me the loss of all dignity and of all love for and from my children.

“Talk to him and try to make him understand in a general way that he should refrain from thinking about them. If I tell him that Clésinger (whom he does not like), deserves our affection, he will only hate him the more, and will bring on himself Solange’s hatred. This is all very difficult and delicate, and I know of no way of calming and restoring a sick soul who is irritated by efforts to heal him. The evil that consumes this poor being, both morally and physically, has been killing me for a long time, and I see him go away without ever having been able to do him any good, since it is the anxious, jealous and suspicious affection he has for me that is the principal cause of his sadness. For seven years I have lived like a virgin with him and with others; I have grown old before my time, without effort or sacrifice even, so tired was I of passions and so irremediably disillusioned. If any woman on earth should have inspired him with the most absolute confidence, it was I, and he never understood that; and I know that many people are accusing me, some with having exhausted by the violence of my senses, others with having made him desperate with my outbursts. I believe you know the truth. He complains of me that I have killed him by privation, while I was certain that I should kill him if I acted otherwise. See how I stand in this dismal friendship, in which I have made myself his slave whenever I could without showing an impossible and culpable preference for him over my children, in which the respect that I had to inspire in my children and in my friends has been so delicate and so important to preserve. I have achieved in this respect prodigies of patience of which I did not believe myself capable, I, who had not the nature of a saint like the Princess. I have attained to martyrdom; but Heaven is inexorable against me, as though I had great crimes to expiate, because in the midst of all these efforts and sacrifices, he whom I love with an absolutely chaste and maternal love is dying a victim of the mad attachment he bears for me.

“God grant, in His Goodness, that, at least, my children be happy, that is to say, good, generous, and at peace with their consciences; because I do not believe in happiness in this world, and the law of Heaven is so strict in this regard that it is almost an impious revolt to dream of not suffering from all external things. The only strength in which we can take refuge is in the wish to fulfil our duty.

“Remember me to our Anna, and tell her what is in the bottom of my heart, then burn my letter. I am sending you one for that dear Gutmann, whose address I do not know. Do not give it to him in the presence of Chopin, who does not yet know that I have been told of his sickness, and who does not want me to know it. His worthy and generous heart has always a thousand exquisite delicacies side by side with the cruel aberrations that are killing him. Ah! If Anna could but talk to him one day, and probe into his heart to heal it! But he closes it hermetically against his best friends. Good-bye, my dear, I love you. Remember that I shall always have courage and perseverance and devotion, in spite of my suffering, and that I do not complain. Solange embraces you.

“George.”

What contradictions again, and how this time each phrase rings false! The only truths that shine out here in spite of the author are the twitchings of her will in the affair of her daughter, and her decision to be finished with Chopin. She is, once more, in the pangs of delivery, and a woman when a prey to that ill sticks at nothing. It was in spite of her also—and perhaps because there is in love affairs as in those of art, a sort of symmetry, a secret equilibrium—that this last association had opened almost nine years earlier and is closed to-day on a letter to the same man. These nearly nine years lie completely between these two missives, of which the one expressed the initial desire to unite two opposite souls by forcing nature; the other, to jilt the ill-assorted partner—“all poetry and music”—for whom the practical part of existence and the realities of the flesh remain the true grounds of illusion. It is vain to try to comment further on so perfectly intelligible a conflict. I am trying to be just in giving neither right nor wrong to either of the two persons concerned. Each brought his own contribution to the establishment, and, as it usually happens, the one who had eaten his first took from the other that in which he was more rich. George was bound to remain the stronger because she had nothing left to give. Chopin was bound to founder because his very wealth had ruined him.

On the 20th of May, Solange was married in haste, almost by stealth, at Nohant. M. Dudevant was present at this curious wedding, where his daughter did not even sign her name on the register, but the pseudonym of her mother. The latter, having strained a muscle, had to be carried to the church. “Never was a wedding less gay,” she said. Evil presentiments were in the air. There followed yet another engagement,—that of Augustine, Maurice’s friend, whom the young man wanted to marry to his friend Théodore Rousseau, the painter. Then certain strange events occurred. The engagement of Augustine was abruptly broken off on some absurd pretext. In reality this was the revenge of Solange. Out of her hate for her cousin and bitterness against her brother, she informed Rousseau of the relationship she assigned to them. They separated. George was outraged and complained with bitterness. Then the Clésinger couple, two months married, returned to Nohant and raised the mask, and there took place between George and her son on the one side, and the sculptor and his wife on the other, scenes of unprecedented violence.

“We have been nearly cutting each other’s throats here,” wrote the unfortunate Sand to Mlle. de Rozières. “My son-in-law raised a hammer against Maurice, and would perhaps have killed him if I had not thrown myself between them, striking my son-in-law in the face, and receiving a blow of his fist in the chest. If the priest, who was present, and friends and a servant, had not interfered by main force, Maurice, who was armed with a pistol, would have killed him on the spot. Solange fanned the flame with cold ferocity, having caused these deplorable furies by backstairs gossip, lies, unimaginable slanders, without having had here from Maurice or from anybody whatever the slightest shadow of teasing or the hint of a wrong. This diabolic couple left yesterday evening, riddled with debt, triumphant in their insolence, and leaving a scandal in the country-side that they can never live down. Lastly, I was confined to my house for three days by the blow of a murderer. I do not want ever to see them again, never again shall they put foot in my house. They have gone too far. My God! I have done nothing to deserve such a daughter.

“It was quite necessary for me to write part of this to Chopin; I was afraid he might arrive in the middle of a catastrophe, and that he would die of pain and shock. Do not tell him how far things went; they are to be kept from him if possible. Do not tell him I wrote to you and if M. and Mme. Clésinger do not boast of their behaviour, keep it secret for my sake....

“I have a favour to ask of you, my child. That is to take complete charge of the keys of my apartment, as soon as Chopin has left (if he has not already), and not to let Clésinger, or his wife, or anyone connected with them set foot in it. They are supreme robbers and with prodigious coolness they would leave me without a bed. They carried off everything from here, down to the counterpanes and candlesticks....”

It is most important to note two things. In this first letter to Mlle. de Rozières, Sand supposes that Chopin has already left the Square d’Orléans, or is on the point of so doing. We shall see why later on. In the second letter—which I shall reprint below—notice the date: July the twenty-fifth. These points will serve to shed a certain light on a situation that is at first glance obscure, but which becomes clear enough if these two landmarks are kept in sight.

“Nohant, 25 July.

“My friend, I am worried, frightened. I have had no news of Chopin for several days, for I don’t know how many days because in the trouble that is crushing me I cannot keep count of the time. But it seems too long a time. He was about to leave and suddenly he does not arrive, he does not write. Did he start? Has he been stopped, ill somewhere? If he were seriously ill, wouldn’t you have written me when you saw his state of illness prolonged? I myself, should already have left if it had not been for my fear of passing him, and for the horror I have of going to Paris and exposing myself to the hate of her whom you think so good, so kind to me....

“Sometimes I think, to reassure myself, that Chopin loves her much more than he does me, looks sourly at me and takes her part.

“I would rather that a hundred times than know him to be ill. Tell me quite frankly how matters stand. If Solange’s frightful maliciousness, if her incredible lies sway him,—so be it! Nothing matters to me if he only gets well.”

Chopin had already suffered too much, renounced too much to come to heel again and let himself be recaptured by the cries of this despoiled mother, this hardened mistress. He did not want her pity. He did not even give her his. Solange came to him. She had little difficulty in convincing him that she was right, his distrust and suspicions had so crystallized. Did not all the darkness in which they tried to keep him hide still other breaches of faith, other riddances? His long docility had turned at one bound into bitter disgust. “The cypresses also have their caprices,” he said. It was his only complaint. He wrote to George, but neither his letter, nor the one he received in reply has been preserved. The lovers who had given each other eight years of their lives could not consent to preserve in their archives the bulletin of their supreme defeat. On the other hand, if we do not know the terms in which they drew up the act of dissociation, we do know their echo.

To Delacroix alone Chopin showed the letter of farewell he had received. “I must admit that it is atrocious,” this friend wrote in his Journal under the date of July the twentieth. “Cruel passions, long-suppressed impatience come to the surface; and as a contrast which would be laughable if the subject were not so sad, the author from time to time takes the place of the woman and spreads herself in tirades that seem borrowed from a novel or a philosophical homily.”

If I have underlined the date, July the twenty-fifth, above, where George complains of having been abandoned, it is to make the fact stand out more clearly that already, five days before, on the twentieth, Delacroix in his diary signals the existence of the letter of rupture, which he describes as atrocious. So the astonishment of George may be called astonishing. Note well her duplicity. There can be no doubt that she foresaw its effect too well to suppose for an instant that Chopin would come running to Nohant. Rather she counted on his moving out. Yet she still wanted to play a part, to pose as the victim. Though she had decided on the break, she feared the fame and the friends of Chopin, who, later on, might search out the truth in the name of history. So in her third letter to Mlle. de Rozières she wrote thus:

(No date.)

“... Sick to death, I was about to go and see why no one wrote to me. Finally, I received by the morning post a letter from Chopin. I see that, as usual, I have been duped by my stupid heart, and that while I passed six sleepless nights torturing myself about his health, he was engaged in talking and thinking ill of me with the Clésingers. Very well. His letter has a ridiculous dignity and the sermons of this good pater familias shall serve as lessons to me. A man warned is worth two. From now on I shall be perfectly easy in that regard.

“There are many points about the affair that I can guess, and I know what my daughter is capable of in the way of calumny. I know what the poor brain of Chopin is capable of in the way of prejudice and credulity.... But my eyes are open at last! and I shall conduct myself accordingly; I will no longer allow ingratitude and perversity to pasture on my flesh and blood. From now on I shall remain here, peaceful and entrenched at Nohant, far from the bloodthirsty enemies that are after me. I shall know how to guard the gate of my fortress against the scoundrels and madmen. I know that meanwhile they will be tearing me to pieces with their slanders. Well and good! When they have glutted their hatred of me, they will devour each other.

“... I think it magnificent of Chopin to see, associate with, and approve Clésinger, who struck me, because I tore from his hands a hammer he had raised against Maurice. Chopin, whom all the world told me was my most faithful and most devoted friend! Marvellous! My child, life is a bitter irony, and those who have the folly to love and believe must close their careers with a lugubrious laugh and a despairing sob, as I hope will soon be my lot. I believe in God and in the immortality of my soul. The more I suffer in this world, the more I believe. I shall quit this transitory life with a profound disgust, to enter into life eternal with a great confidence....”

She took up her pen a fourth time, on August the 14th:

“I am more seriously ill than they think. Thank God for it. I have had enough of life, and I am packing up with great joy. I do not ask you for news of Solange; I have it indirectly. As for Chopin, I hear nothing further of him, and I beg you to tell me truthfully how he is; no more. The rest does not in the least interest me and I have no reason to miss his affection.”

There is a strong dose of the “mélo” that Chopin thought so hateful in several passages of these documents, and the evident desire to extract all possible pathos. But without doubt certain authentic accents are to be found as well. It is probable that she herself would not recognize them any too clearly. George Sand had suffered from this rupture of which she was the cause, the agent and the victim. If the same cries are no longer to be heard as in the Venetian days, it is because thirteen years had passed since the de Musset experience. But perhaps I am making her part seem too easy. For what are years to passionate hearts? No, growing old is a poor reason. The only true one is that this woman no longer tears anything living from her soul. If she has not yet arrived at the time of the great cold, of which we have already spoken, at least she has come to that of the first serenities. A favourable epoch for her literature. She took advantage of it so well that she chose it precisely for L’Histoire de ma Vie, the best of her books.

As for Chopin, to complain was not in his nature. Even in these mortal weeks all his pain had a beautiful discretion. As before, as always, it rose and fell within himself. No blame passed his lips. To Louis Viardot (the husband of the singer), who questioned him, he replied simply: “Solange’s marriage is a great misfortune for her, for her family, for her friends. Daughter and mother have been deceived, and the mistake has been realized too late. But why blame only one for this mistake that was shared by both? The daughter wished, demanded, an ill-assorted marriage; but the mother, in consenting, has she not part of the blame? With her great mind and her great experience, should she not have enlightened a girl who was impelled by spite even more than by love? If she had any illusion, we must not be without pity for an error that is shared. And I, pitying them both from the depths of my soul, I am trying to bring some consolation to the only one of them I am permitted to see.”

He wanted to inform his sister about these happenings, but could not at first manage to do it. To write certain words is sometimes so great a cruelty to oneself! At last, after having burned several sheets of paper, he succeeded in giving the essentials in his Christmas letter.

“25 December, 1847.

“Beloved children,

“I did not reply to you immediately because I have been so horribly busy. I am sending you, by the usual channel, some New Year pictures.... I spent Christmas Eve in the most prosaic way, but I thought of you all. All my best wishes to you, as always....

“Sol is with her father, in Gascony. She saw her mother on the way. She went to Nohant with the Duvernets, but her mother received her coldly and told her that if she would leave her husband she might return to Nohant. Sol saw her nuptial room turned into a theatre, her boudoir into a wardrobe for the actors, and she wrote me that her mother spoke only of money matters. Her brother was playing with his dog and all he found to say to her was: ‘Will you have something to eat?’ The mother now seems more angry with her son-in-law than with her daughter, though in her famous letter she wrote to me that her son-in-law was not bad, that it was her daughter who made him so. One might think she had wanted to rid herself at one sweep of her daughter and of me, because we were in the way. She will continue to correspond with her daughter; thus her maternal heart, which cannot completely do without news of her child, will be appeased for a moment and her conscience lulled to sleep. She will think herself in the right, and will proclaim me her enemy, for taking the part of the son-in-law she cannot tolerate, simply because he married her daughter, while I really opposed the marriage as much as I could. Singular creature, with all her intelligence! A frenzy seizes her, and she spoils her life, she spoils her daughter’s life. It will end badly with her son, too, I predict and am certain. To excuse herself, she would like to pick holes in those who wish her well, who believe in her, who have never insulted her, and whom she cannot bear near her because they are the mirror of her conscience. That is why she has not written me a single word; that is why she is not coming to Paris this winter; that is also why she has not said a single word to her daughter. I do not regret having helped her to bear the eight most difficult years of her life, those in which her daughter was growing up, those in which she was bringing up her son; I do not regret all that I have suffered; but I do regret that her daughter, that perfectly tended plant, sheltered from so many storms, should have been broken at her mother’s hands by an imprudence and a laxity that one might pass over in a woman of twenty years, but not in a woman of forty.

“That which has been and no longer is will not be written in the annals. When, later on, she delves into her past, Mme. Sand will be able to find in her soul only a happy memory of me. For the moment she is in the strangest paroxysm of maternity, playing the rôle of a juster and a more perfect mother than she really is, and it is a fever for which there is no remedy, especially when it takes possession of an excitable imagination that is easily carried away.

“... A new novel by Mme. Sand is appearing in the Débats, a novel in the manner of the Berry novels, like La Mare Au Diable, and it begins admirably. It is called François Le Champi.... There is talk also of her Mémoires; but in a letter to Mme. Marliani, Mme. Sand wrote that this would be rather the thoughts she has had up until now on art, letters, etc.... and not what is generally meant by memoirs. Indeed, it is too early for that, because dear Mme. Sand will have many more adventures in her life before she grows old; many beautiful things will still happen to her, and ugly ones too...”

The irony is hardly malicious, and “the enemy” who would “tear her to pieces” is very gentle. Indeed one must admire the way the artist holds his temper in hand. The same day he wrote to Solange:

“... How the story of your two visits to Nohant saddened me! Still, the first step is taken. You have shown heart, and this was followed by a certain rapprochement, since you have been begged to write. Time will do the rest. You know you must not take everything that is said at face value. If they no longer want to know a stranger like me, for instance, that cannot be the lot of your husband, because he belongs to the family... I feel suffocated, have headaches, and beg you to excuse my erasures and my French...”

This was in January, 1848. February. Soon it would be ten months since George and Frederick had separated. But Chopin did not get well. Quite the contrary. His broken tenderness had not only killed his heart, it had dried up the one source of his consolation, music. Since 1847, the bad year, as he called it, Chopin composed nothing more.

“She has not written me another word, nor I to her,” he confided again to his sister on the 10th of February. “She has instructed the landlord to let her Paris apartment.... She plays comedies in the country, in her daughter’s wedding-chamber; she forgets herself, acts as wildly as only she can, and will not rouse herself until her heart hurts too much, a heart that is at present overpowered by the head. I make a cross above it. God protect her, if she cannot discern the true value of flattery! Besides, it may be to me alone that the others seem flatterers, while her happiness really lies in that direction and I do not perceive it. For some time her friends and neighbours have been able to make nothing of what has been going on down there of late, but they are probably used to it already. Anyway, no one could ever follow the caprices of such a soul. Eight years of a half-steady life were too much. God permitted them to be the years when the children were growing up, and if it had not been for me I do not know how long ago they would have been with their father and no longer with her. And Maurice will run off at the first opportunity to his father. But perhaps these are the conditions of her existence, of her talent as a writer, of her happiness? Don’t let it bother you,—it is already so far away! Time is a great healer. Up till now, I have not got over it; that is why I have not written to you. Everything I begin I burn the next moment. And I should have so much to write to you! It is better to write nothing at all.”

They saw each other again one last time, on the fourth of March, 1848, quite by accident. Chopin was leaving Mme. Marliani’s as Mme. Sand was going in. She pressed his trembling and icy hand. Chopin asked her if she had recently had news of her daughter.

“A week ago,” she replied.

“Not yesterday, or the day before?”

“No.”

“Then I inform you that you are a grandmother. Solange has a little girl, and I am very happy to be the first to give you the news.”

Then he bowed and went down the stairs. At the bottom he had a pang of remorse, and wanted to go back. He had forgotten to add that Solange and the child were doing well. He begged a friend who was with him to give Mme. Sand this additional information, because going up steps had become a frightfully painful business. George came back immediately. She wanted further talk, and asked for news about himself. He replied that he was well, and left. “There were mischievous meddlers between us,” she said later in telling of this minute in the Histoire de ma Vie.

As for Chopin, he reported this fortuitous encounter with her mother to Mme. Clésinger, and added, “She seemed to be in good health. I am sure that the triumph of the Republican idea makes her happy....”

Eight days before, in fact, the Revolution had burst. It must have been singularly displeasing to Prince Karol. He wrote again to Solange: “The birth of your child gave me more joy, you may well believe, than the birth of the Republic.”

CHAPTER XVII
Swan Song

For twenty years Chopin had been playing hide-and-seek with revolutions. He had left Warsaw a few weeks before that of 1830. His projected trip to Italy in the spring of 1831 had been put off because of the insurrections at Bologna, Milan, Ancona, Rome. He had arrived in Paris a year after the “Three Glorious Days,” but still he had witnessed from his balcony on the Boulevard Poissonnière the last squalls of the storm. Louis-Philippe was then King of France. Now he was abdicating after a reign of little more than seventeen years, just the length of Chopin’s stay at Paris. ’48 promised to be a bad year for artists. Very bad for Chopin, with that gaping wound in his heart, and the phthisis against which he no longer even struggled. He decided to leave France for a time, and to undertake a tour in Great Britain that Miss Stirling, a Scotch lady whom he greatly liked, proposed to organize. She had been his pupil for four years. But his friends advised him to give a last concert in Paris before leaving. He allowed himself to be persuaded. This was at the beginning of February.

In eight days all the tickets were sold, three hundred seats at 20 francs in the Salons Pleyel. “I shall have all Parisian society,” he wrote to his family. “The King, the Queen, the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Montpensier have each taken ten places, even though they are in mourning and none of them can come. Subscriptions are coming in for a second concert, which I shall probably not give because the first one already bores me.” And he adds the next day: “My friends tell me that I shall not have to bother about anything, only to sit down and play... They are writing to my publisher from Brest and Nantes to reserve places. Such enthusiasm astonishes me, and I must begin playing to-day, if only for the sake of my conscience, because I play less than I used to do. (Before his concerts Chopin always practised on Bach.) I am going to play, as a curiosity, the Mozart trio with Franchomme and Allard. There will be neither free programmes nor free tickets. The room will be comfortably arranged, and can hold three hundred people. Pleyel always jokes about my foolishness, and to encourage me for this concert, he is going to have the stairs banked with flowers. I shall be just as though I were at home, and my eyes will meet, so to speak, none but familiar faces... I am giving a great many lessons. I am overwhelmed with all sorts of work, yet, with all that, I do nothing... If you leave I shall move, too, because I doubt if I could stomach another summer such as the last in Paris. If God gives us health, we shall see each other again, and we shall talk, and embrace each other.”

It is not only lassitude that this letter breathes; does one not read beneath the weary smiles the certainty of an approaching end? This gathering of friends, this atmosphere of flowers and wreaths, has about it something funereal. We detect in the eagerness of this élite of worldlings and of artists an anxiety, something like a presentiment of the twilight of a whole peaceful and elegant epoch. Poet and King are passing away. Society is hastening to catch the last perfume of the ancient lilies of France, and of the young Polish rose. Sweeping closer was the triumph of George Sand, of the philosophers with dandruff, and of Barbès.

Frederick Chopin’s supreme concert took place on Wednesday, the 16th of February, 1848, one week before the abdication of Louis-Philippe. Everything about it was extraordinary. The room was decorated with flowers and carpets. The list of the selected audience had been revised by Chopin himself. The text of the programme had been steel-engraved in English script, and printed on beautiful paper. It read:

Part One

Trio of Mozart, for piano, violin and violoncello, by MM. Chopin, Allard and Franchomme.

Airs sung by Mlle. Antonia Molina di Mondi.

Nocturne

Barcarolle } composed and played by M. Chopin.

Air sung by Mlle. Antonia Molina di Mondi.

Etude

Berceuse } composed and played by M. Chopin.

Part Two

Scherzo, Adagio and Finale of the Sonata in G Minor for piano and violoncello, composed by M. Chopin and played by the composer and M. Franchomme.

Air nouveau from Robert the Devil, by Meyerbeer, sung by M. Roger.

Preludes

Mazurkas } composed and played by M. Chopin.

Valses

Accompanists: MM. Aulary and de Garaudé.

The Barcarolle is that of 1846 (op. 60). The Berceuse (op. 57) dates from 1845. As for the Nocturne and the Etude that were announced, one can only guess. The Sonata for piano and violoncello is the last work he published. As to the Preludes and the Mazurkas we are again at a loss. But it is known that the Waltz chosen was that which is called “The Waltz of the Little Dog” (op. 64, no. 1).

Chopin appeared. He was extremely weak, but erect. His face, though pale, showed no change. Neither did his playing betray any exhaustion, and they were sufficiently accustomed to the softness and surprises of his touch not to wonder that he played pianissimo the two forte passages at the end of his Barcarolle. One is glad to know that for that evening he chose this lovely plaint, the story of a lovers’ meeting in an Italian country-side. Thirds and sixths, always distinct, turn this dialogue for two voices, for two souls, into a very easily read commentary on his own story. “One dreams of a mysterious apotheosis,” Maurice Ravel has said of this piece. Perhaps, indeed, it is an inner climax, the glorification of his unexpressed tenderness.

The effort was so great that Chopin nearly fainted in the foyer when he had finished. As for the enthusiasm of the public, it hardly needs to be mentioned. “The sylph has kept faith,” said the Gazette Musicale, a few days later, “and with what success, what enthusiasm! It is easier to tell of the welcome he received, the transports he excited, than to describe, to analyse, and to lay bare the secrets of an execution that has no like in our earthly world. When we can command the pen that traced the delicate marvels of Queen Mab, no bigger than the agate that shines on the finger of an alderman... it will be as much as we can do if we succeed in giving you an idea of a purely ideal talent into which the material hardly enters. No one can interpret Chopin’s music, but Chopin: all who were present on Wednesday are as convinced of that as we are.”

Chopin arrived in London on the 20th of April, 1848, and settled in a comfortable room in Dover Street with his three pianos: a Pleyel, an Erard and a Broadwood. He did not arrive alone: England was invaded by a swarm of artists fleeing the Continent, where revolutions were breaking out on all sides. But Miss Stirling and her sister, Mrs. Erskine, had thought of everything, and already society and the Press were talking of Chopin’s visit.

At first, the change of air and of life seemed favourable to his health. He breathed more easily and could make a few calls. He went to the theatre, heard Jenny Lind sing, and the Philharmonic play, but “their orchestra is like their roast beef, or their turtle soup: energetic, serious, but nothing more.” His greatest trouble was the lack of all rehearsals, and Chopin, before giving a concert, always demanded rehearsals of the most detailed kind. For this reason he decided not to appear in public. In addition, his spirits were low, because of the bad political news from Poland. Furthermore, he learned with pain of the complete misunderstandings of the Clésinger couple, of a possible separation, and he thought at once of George. It was to be hoped that this unhappy mother would have no new tears to shed!

Soon he was again overwhelmed with fatigue. He was obliged to be out very late every evening, to give lessons all day long in order to pay for his costly rooms, his servant, and his carriage. He began again to spit blood. Still he was received with many attentions by diverse great lords and ladies: the Duke of Westminster, the Duchesses of Somerset and Sutherland, Lord Falmouth, Lady Gainsborough. Miss Stirling and her sister, who adored him, wanted to drag him about to all their friends. Finally, he played in two or three drawing-rooms for a fee of twenty guineas, a fee that Mme. Rothschild advised him to reduce a little “because at this season (June) it is necessary to make prices more moderate.” The first evening took place at the Duchess of Sutherland’s, at which were present the Queen, Prince Albert, the Prince of Prussia, and more than eighty of the aristocracy, among them the old Duke of Wellington. Stafford House, the ancient seat of the Sutherlands, struck the artist with admiration He gave a marvelling description of it: “All the royal palaces and old castles are splendid, but not decorated with such taste and elegance as Stafford House. The stairs are celebrated for their splendour, and it is a sight to see the Queen on these staircases in a blaze of light, surrounded by all those diamonds, ribbons, and garters, and descending with the most perfect elegance, conversing, stopping on the different landings. In truth, it is regrettable that a Paul Veronese could not have seen such a spectacle and left one more masterpiece.”

Dear Chopin, he did not dream that in looking at such a picture we should have hunted only for his poor bloodless face! What do this ephemeral glitter and all these tinsel grandeurs mean to us beside his little person, so wasted, but near to our hearts. We see the magnificence of this gala evening merely for his sake, obscure actor in a fête where nothing seems extraordinary to us save his feverish glance. “I suffer from an idiotic home-sickness,” he wrote, “and in spite of my absolute resignation, I am preoccupied, God knows why, with what is to become of me.” He played at the Marquis of Douglas’s, at Lady Gainsborough’s, at Lord Falmouth’s, in the midst of an affluence of titled personages. “You know they live on grandeur. Why cite these vain names again?” Yet he cites a great many. Among celebrities, he was presented to Carlyle, to Bulwer, to Dickens, to Hogarth, a friend of Walter Scott, who wrote a very beautiful article about him in the Daily News. Among the “curiosities,” was Lady Byron. “We conversed almost without understanding each other, she in English, I in French. I can understand how she must have bored Byron.” Mr. Broadwood, the piano manufacturer, was among the most attentive of his bourgeois friends. Occasionally he had a visit from him in the mornings. Chopin told him one day that he had slept badly. Coming in that evening, he found on his bed a new spring mattress and pillows, provided by this faithful protector.

These various recitals brought Chopin about five thousand francs, no great sum, all told. But what did money matter? What could he do with it? He had never been more sad. Not for a long while had he experienced a real joy, he confided to Grzymala. “At bottom I am really past all feeling. I vegetate, simply, and patiently await my end.”

On the 9th of August he left London for Scotland, where he went to the house of his friends the Stirlings and their brother-in-law, Lord Torphichen. The excellent Broadwood had reserved two places for him in the train so that he might have more room, and had given him a Mr. Wood, a music-seller, as a companion. He arrived in Edinburgh. His apartment was reserved in the best hotel, where he rested a day and a half. A tour of the city. A halt at a music shop where he heard one of his Mazurkas played by a blind pianist. He left again in an English carriage, with a postilion, for Calder House, twelve miles from Edinburgh. There Lord Torphichen received him in an old manor surrounded by an immense park. There was nothing in sight but lawns, trees, mountains and sky. “The walls of the castle are eight feet thick. There are galleries on all sides and dark corridors hung with an incalculable number of ancestral portraits of all colours and costumes, some Scotch, others in armour, or again in panniers. There is nothing lacking to satisfy the imagination. There is even a little Red Riding Hood in the form of a ghost. But I have not yet seen her.” As for his hosts, they were perfect, discreet and generous. “What splendid people my Scots are!” wrote Chopin. “There is nothing I can desire that I do not immediately receive. They even bring me the Paris papers every day. I am well. I have peace and sleep, but I must leave in a week.”

These Stirlings of Keir were a very ancient family. They went back to the fourteenth century, and had acquired wealth in the Indies. Jane and her older sister, Mrs. Erskine, had known Chopin in Paris. They were two noble women, older than Frederick, but the younger still very beautiful. Ary Scheffer painted her several times, because she represented to his eyes the ideal of beauty. It was said that she wanted to marry Chopin. To those who spoke to him about it, “As well marry her to Death,” he said.

Life was agreeable at Calder House; quiet mornings, drives in the afternoon, and in the evening music. Chopin harmonized for the old lord the Scotch airs that the latter hummed. A picture that does not lack piquancy. But the poor swan was restless. He thought always of George, of whom he had just received news through Solange. It was bad. As the proclamations which had ignited Civil War, even in the provinces, were attributed to her, she had been in bad odour in her Nohant world. Taking refuge at Tours, “she is stuck in a sea of mud,” wrote Chopin to his sister, “and she has dragged many others with her.” A filthy lampoon was circulating about her, published by the father of that same Augustine whom Chopin detested. This man complained that “she had corrupted his daughter, whom she had made the mistress of Maurice, and then married to the first comer... The father cites Mme. Sand’s own letters. In one word, a most dirty sensation, in which all Paris is interested to-day. It is an outrage on the part of the father, but it is the truth. So much for the philanthropic deed she thought she was doing, and against which I fought with all my strength when the girl came into the house! She should have been left with her parents, not put into the head of this young man, who will never marry except for money. But he wanted to have a pretty cousin in the house. She was dressed like Sol, and better groomed, because Maurice insisted on it.... Solange saw the whole thing, which made them uncomfortable... Hence, lies, shame, embarrassment, and the rest.”

All the rancours, all the bitternesses are seen coming to the surface again. And immense regrets. “The English are so different from the French, to whom I am attached as to my own people,” he wrote again in this same letter to his family. “They weigh everything by the pound sterling, and love art only because it is superfluous. They are excellent people, but so original that I understand how one could oneself become stiff here: one changes into a machine.”

He was obliged to leave Calder House to give several concerts. Manchester at the end of August; Glasgow at the end of September; Edinburgh at the beginning of October. And if everywhere he reaped the same success, the same admiring surprise, a kind of tempered enthusiasm, yet most of the criticisms noted that his playing was no more than a kind of murmur. “Chopin seems about thirty years old,” said the Manchester Guardian. (He was thirty-eight.) “He is very frail of body, and in his walk. This impression vanishes when he seats himself at the piano, in which he seems completely absorbed. Chopin’s music, and the style of his playing, have the same dominant characteristics; he has more refinement than vigour; he prefers a subtle elaboration to a simple grasp of the composition; his touch is elegant and quick without his striking the instrument with any joyful firmness. His music and his playing are the perfection of chamber music... but they need more inspiration, more frankness of design, and more power in the execution to be felt in a large hall.”

These are the same discreet reproaches that were made in Vienna in 1828. But only his friends knew how ill he was, and how he now had to be carried up the stairs. He remained chic, however, as refined in his dress as a woman, exercised about his linen, his shoes, insisting on their being irreproachable. His servant curled him every morning with an iron. The imperious side of his nature revealed itself. Everything weighed him down: attentions, even affection, became heavy on his shoulders, like his greatcoat or even his cashmere shawl. These are the irritations of a very sick man: “People kill me with their useless solicitude. I feel alone, alone, alone, although I am surrounded... I grow weaker every day. I can compose nothing, not that the will is lacking, but rather the physical strength... My Scots will not leave me in peace; they smother me with politeness and out of politeness I will not reproach them.” These were his plaints to Grzymala. He was carried to Stirling, to Keir, from one castle to another, from a Lord to a Duke. Everywhere he found sumptuous hospitality, excellent pianos, beautiful pictures, well-selected libraries, hunting, horses, dogs; but wherever he is, he expires of coughing and irritation. What was he to do after dinner when the gentlemen settled down in the dining-room around their whisky and when, not knowing their tongue, he was obliged “to watch them talk, and hear them drink”? A renewal of home-sickness, of sickness for Nohant. While they talked of their family trees, and, “as in the Gospel, cited names and names that went back to the Lord Jesus,” Chopin drafted letters to his friends. “If Solange settles in Russia,” he wrote to Mlle. de Rozières, “with whom will she talk of France? With whom can she prattle in the Berry patois? Does that seem of no importance to you? Well, it is, nevertheless, a great consolation in a strange country to have someone about you who, as soon as you see him, carries you back in thought to your own country.”

He came back at last to London in the beginning of October, to go straight to bed. Breathlessness, headaches, cold, bronchitis, all the regular symptoms. His Scots followed him, cared for him, as did also Princess Czartoryska, who constituted herself his sick-nurse. From that time on, his one dream was to get back to France. As before, on his return from Majorca, he charged Grzymala to find him a lodging near the Boulevards between the rue de la Paix and the Madeleine. He needed also a room for his valet. “Why I give you all this trouble, I don’t know, for nothing gives me pleasure, but I’ve got to think of myself.” And suddenly the old pain bursts forth without apparent rhyme or reason in the very middle of these domestic affairs: “I have never cursed anyone, but at this moment everything is so insupportable to me that it would soothe me, it seems to me, if I could curse Lucrezia!...” Three lines follow which he immediately effaced, and made indecipherable. Then coming back to himself, or having once more swallowed what he could never consent to express, he adds: “But they are suffering down there, too, no doubt; they suffer so much the more in that they are growing old in their anger. As for Solange, I shall eternally pity her.”

So the mystery of this soul remains. No one will ever clearly trace its meetings of the extremes of love, scorn, and hate. The only certain fact is that from the time of his break with George, the life both of his body and of his spirit was finished for Chopin. It will be said that was already condemned. Not more than at the return from Majorca. And his father did not succumb to the same illness until he was seventy-five years old. Chopin had deliberately given up a struggle in which he had no further motive for the will to win. In fact, he says as much: “And why should I come back? Why does God not kill me at once instead of letting me die slowly of a fever of irresolution? And my Scots torture me more than I can bear. Mrs. Erskine, who is a very good Protestant, possibly wants to make a Protestant out of me, because she is always bringing me the Bible, and talking to me of the soul, and marking Psalms for me to read. She is religious and good, but she is very much worried about my soul. She saws away all the time at me, telling me that the other world is better than this, and I know that by heart. I reply by citations from Scripture and tell her that I know all about it.”

This dying man dragged himself again from London to Edinburgh, to a castle of the Duke of Hamilton, came back to London, gave a concert for the benefit of the Poles, and made his will. Gutmann, his friend and pupil, informed him that a rumour of his marriage was circulating in Paris. Those unfortunate Scots, no doubt! “Friendship remains friendship,” replied Chopin. “And even if I could fall in love with a being who would love me as I should want to be loved, I still should not marry, because I should have nothing to eat, nor anywhere to go. A rich woman looks for a rich man, and if she loves a poor man, at least he shouldn’t be an invalid!... No, I am not thinking of a wife; much rather of my father’s house, of my mother, of my sisters... And my art, where has that gone? And my heart, where have I squandered it? I can scarcely still remember how they sing at home. All round me the world is vanishing in an utterly strange manner—I am losing my way—I have no strength at all... I am not complaining to you, but you question and I reply: I am closer to the coffin than to the nuptial bed. My soul is at peace. I am resigned.”

He left at last, at the beginning of the year 1849, to return to the Square d’Orléans, and he sent his last instructions to Grzymala. Let pine cones be bought for his fire. Let curtains and carpet be in place. Also a Pleyel piano and a bouquet of violets in the salon, that the room may be perfumed. “On my return, I want still to find a little poetry when I pass from the salon to my room, where no doubt I shall be in bed for a long time.”

With what joy he saw again his little apartment! Unhappily, Dr. Molin, who alone had the secret of setting him on his legs again, had died not long before. He consulted Dr. Roth, Dr. Louis, Dr. Simon, a homeopath. They all prescribed the old inefficacious remedies: l’eau de gomme, rest, precautions. Chopin shrugged his shoulders. He saw death everywhere: Kalkbrenner was dead; Dr. Molin was dead; the son of the painter Delaroche was dead; a servant of Franchomme’s was dead; the singer Catalani (who had given him his first watch at the age of ten) had just died also.

“On the other hand, Noailles is better,” said one of his Scots.

“Yes, but the King of Spain has died at Lisbon,” replied Chopin.

All his friends visited him: Prince Czartoryski and his wife, Delphine Potoçka, Mme. de Rothschild, Legouvé, Jenny Lind, Delacroix, Franchomme, Gutmann.

And then,—he had not a sou. Absent-minded and negligent, Chopin never knew much about the state of his finances. Just then they were at zero, for he could no longer give a single lesson. Franchomme served as his banker, but he had to exercise his ingenuity, and invent stories to explain the origin of the funds advanced by one or other of his friends. If he had suspected this state of things, Chopin would have flatly refused. The idea of such charity would have been insupportable to him. In this connection there came about a curious happening. The Stirling ladies, wishing to remove this worry, thought of sending to his concierge the sum of 25,000 francs in a sealed and anonymous envelope. Mme. Etienne received the envelope, slipped it behind the glass of her clock, and forgot it. When Mrs. Erskine perceived that Chopin had not received this money she made her confession to the artist. He shouted aloud. “I must have told her a lot of truths,” he told Grzymala, “as, for example, this: ‘that she would have to be the Queen of England to make me accept such princely presents.’” Meanwhile, as the money was not found, the postman who had delivered it to the concierge consulted a fortune-teller. The latter requested, in order to consult his oracles properly, a lock of Mme. Etienne’s hair. Chopin obtained it by subterfuge, upon which the clairvoyant declared that the envelope was under the clock glass. And in truth it was discovered there intact. “Hein! What do you say to that? What do you think of this fortune-teller? My head is in a whirl with wonder.”

As is the case with very nervous people, Chopin’s health was capricious. There were ups and downs. With the return of spring he could go out a little, in a carriage, but he could not leave it. His publisher, Schlesinger, came to the edge of the pavement to talk business to him. Delacroix often accompanied him. He consigned to his Journal notes that remain precious to us.

January 29th. “In the evening to see Chopin; I stayed with him till ten o’clock. Dear man! We spoke of Mme. Sand, that woman of strange destiny, made up of so many qualities and vices. It was apropos of her Mémoires. He told me that it would be impossible for her to write them. She has forgotten it all; she has flashes of feeling, and forgets quickly.... I said that I predicted in advance an unhappy old age for her. He did not think so.... Her conscience does not reproach her for anything of all that for which her friends reproach her. She has good health, which may easily last; only one thing would affect her profoundly: the loss of Maurice or that he should turn out badly.

“As for Chopin, illness prevents him from interesting himself in anything, and especially in work. I said to him that age and the agitations of the times would not be long in chilling me, too. He replied that he thought I had strength to resist. ‘You rejoice in your talent,’ he said, ‘with a sort of security that is a rare privilege, and is better than this feverish chase after fame.’”

March 30th. “Saw in the evening at Chopin’s the enchantress, Mme. Potoçka. I had heard her twice, I have hardly ever seen anything more perfect... Saw Mme. Kalerji. She played, but not very sympathetically; on the other hand, she is really extremely lovely when she raises her eyes in playing, like the Magdalens of Guido Reni or of Rubens.”

April 14th. “In the evening to Chopin’s: I found him very much weakened, hardly breathing. After awhile my presence restored him. He told me that his cruellest torment was boredom. I asked him if he had not known in earlier times the insupportable emptiness that I still sometimes feel. He said that he had always been able to find something to do; an occupation, however unimportant, filled the moments, and kept off those vapours. Grief was another matter.”

April 22nd. “After dinner to see Chopin, a man of exquisite heart, and, I need not say, mind. He spoke to me of people we have known together... He had dragged himself to the first performance of The Prophet. His horror of this rhapsody!”

In May, Chopin burned his manuscripts. He tried to work up a method for the piano, gave it up, burned it with the rest. Clearly the idea of the imperfect, of the unfinished, was insupportable to his spirit.

The doctors having recommended a purer air, a quieter neighbourhood, his friends rented an apartment in the rue de Chaillot, on the second floor of a new house, and took him there. There was a beautiful view over Paris. He stayed there motionless behind his window, speaking very little. Towards the end of June he desired suddenly, and at any cost, to see his own people again. He sent a letter summoning them which took him two days to write.

CHAPTER XVIII
“The Cypresses have their caprices”

“To Madame Louise Jedrzeïewicz.

“Paris, Monday, June 25, 1849.

“My dearly beloveds,

“If you can, come. I am ill, and no doctor can help me as you can. If you need money, borrow it; when I am better I can easily make it and return it to whoever lends it to you, but just now I am too broke to be able to send you anything. My Chaillot apartment is big enough to receive you, even with the two children. Little Louise will benefit in every way. Papa Calasante[1] shall run about all day long; we have the Agricultural Products Exhibition close to us here; in a word, he will have much more time for himself than he did the other time, because I am weaker, and shall stay more in the house with Louise. My friends and all my well-wishers are convinced that the best remedy for me would be the arrival of Louise, as she will certainly learn from Mme. Obreskow’s letter. So get your passport. People whom Louise does not know, one from the North, and one from the South, told me to-day that it would benefit, not only my health, but also my sister’s.

[1] His brother-in-law.

“So, mother Louise and daughter Louise, bring your thimbles and your needles. I’ll give you handkerchiefs to mark, socks to knit, and you shall spend your time for a few months in the fresh air with your old brother and uncle. The journey is easier now; also you don’t need much luggage. We’ll try to be happy here on very little. You shall find food and shelter. And even if sometimes Calasante finds that it is far from the Champs Elysées to town, he can stay in my apartment in the Square d’Orléans. The omnibus goes right from the Square to my door here. I don’t know myself why I want so much to have Louise, it’s like the longing of a pregnant woman. I swear to you that it will be good for her, too. I hope that the family council will send her to me: who knows whether I shan’t take her back when I am well! Then we could all rejoice and embrace each other, as I have already written, but without wigs and with our own teeth. The wife always owes obedience to her husband; so it’s the husband whom I beg to bring his wife; I beg it with my whole heart, and if he weighs it well he will see that he cannot give a greater pleasure either to her, or to me, or do a greater service even to the children, if he should bring one of them. (As to the little girl I do not doubt it.) It will cost money, it is true, but it cannot be better spent nor could you travel more cheaply. Once here, your quarters will be provided. Write me a little word. Mme. Obreskow, who had the kindness to want to write (I have given her Louise’s address), will perhaps be more persuasive. Mlle. de Rozières will also add a word, and Cochet, if he were here, would speak for me, because there is no doubt that he would find me no better. His Æsculapius has not shown himself for ten days because he has at last perceived that there is something in my sickness that passes his science. In spite of that, you must praise him to your tenant, and to all who know him, and say that he has done me a great deal of good; but my head is made that way: when I am a little bit better, that’s enough for me. Say also that everyone is convinced that he has cured a quantity of people of cholera. The cholera is diminishing a great deal; it has almost disappeared. The weather is superb; I am sitting in the salon from where I can admire the whole panorama of Paris: the towers, the Tuileries, the Chambres, St.-Germain l’Auxerrois, St. Etienne du Mont, Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, St. Sulpice, Val de Grâce, the five windows of the Invalides, and between these buildings and me nothing but gardens. You will see it all when you come. Now get busy on the passport and the money, but do it quickly. Write me a word at once. You know that the cypresses have their caprices: my caprice to-day is to see you in my house. Maybe God will permit everything to go well: but if God does not wish it, act at least as though He did. I have great hope, because I never ask for very much, and I should have refrained from this also if I had not been urged on by all who wish me well. Bestir yourself, Monsieur Calasante. In return, I shall give you huge and excellent cigars; I know someone who smokes marvellous ones—in the garden, mind you! I hope the letter I wrote for Mamma’s birthday arrived, and that I did not miss the date too far. I don’t want to think of all that because it makes me feverish, and, thank God, I have no fever, which disconcerts and vexes all the ordinary doctors.

“Your affectionate but very feeble brother,

“Ch.”

CHAPTER XIX
The Death of Chopin

“Mother Louise and daughter Louise” hurried to him at once. Calasante accompanied them. Chopin would have greatly liked to see again the friend of his youth, Titus, who had just arrived at Ostend. But as he was a Russian subject, passport difficulties prevented him from entering France. “The doctors do not allow me to travel,” wrote the invalid, who had hoped to be able to go to meet him. “I drink Pyrenees water in my room, but your presence would be more healing than any medicine. Yours even in death, your Frederick.”

About six weeks glided by without any improvement. Chopin hardly spoke any more and made himself understood by signs. A consultation took place between the Doctors Cruveillé, Louis and Blache. They decided that any change to the South of France was thenceforth useless, but that it would be preferable to take the dying man to quarters that could be heated, and were more convenient, and very airy. After long search, they found what they needed at No. 12, Place Vendôme. Chopin was carried there. One last time he took up his pen to write to Franchomme. “I shall see you next winter, being settled at last in a comfortable manner. My sister will remain with me unless they should call her back for something important, I love you, that is all that I can say for the moment because I am crushed with fatigue and weakness.”

Charles Gavard, the young brother of one of his pupils, often came to see him and read to him. Chopin indicated his preferences. He returned with the greatest pleasure to Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique, in which he appreciated especially the form, the conciseness, and the impeccable taste. It was, in fact, the chapter on “The Different Tastes of Peoples” that Gavard read to him one of the last times.

His condition grew rapidly worse; yet he complained little. The thought of his end did not seem to affect him much. In the first days of October he had no longer strength enough to sit up. The spells of suffocation grew worse. Gutmann, who was very tall and robust, knew better than any how to hold him, to settle him in his pillows. Princess Marceline Czartoryska again took up her service as nurse, spending the greater part of her days at the Place Vendôme. Franchomme came back from the country. The family and friends assembled about the dying man ready to help as they could. All of them waited in the room next to that in which Chopin lived his last days.

One of his childhood friends, Abbé Alexandre Jelowiçki, with whom he had been on cold terms, wanted to see him again when he learned of the gravity of his illness. Three times in succession they refused to receive him; but the Abbé succeeded in informing Chopin of his presence, and was admitted immediately. After that he came back every day. Chopin had great pleasure in recovering this comrade of other days.

“I would not like to die,” he said, “without having received the sacraments, lest I should pain my mother; but I do not understand them as you wish. I can see nothing in confession beyond the relief of a burdened heart on the heart of a friend.”

The Abbé has related that on the 13th of October, in the morning, he found Chopin a little better.

“My friend,” the Abbé said, “to-day is the birthday of my poor dead brother. You must give me something for this day.”

“What can I give you?”

“Your soul.”

“Ah! I understand,” cried Frederick. “Here it is. Take it.”

Jelowiçki fell on his knees and presented the Crucifix to Chopin, who began to weep. He immediately confessed, made his communion, and received extreme unction. Then he said, embracing his friend with both arms in the Polish fashion: “Thank you, dear friend. Thanks to you I shan’t die like a pig.” That day was calmer, but the fits of suffocation began again very shortly. As Gutmann was holding him in his arms during one of these wearing attacks, Chopin said after a long breathless silence:

“Now I begin my agony.”

The doctor felt his pulse and sought for a reassuring word, but Chopin went on with authority:

“It is a rare favour that God gives to a man in revealing the moment when his agony begins; this grace He has given to me. Do not disturb me.”

It was that evening also that Franchomme heard him murmur: “Still, she told me that I should not die except in her arms.”

On Sunday the 15th of October his friend Delphine Potoçka arrived from Nice, whence a telegram had recalled her. When Chopin knew that she was in his drawing-room he said: “So that is why God has delayed calling me to Him. He wanted to let me have the pleasure of seeing her again.”

She had hardly approached his bed when the dying man expressed the desire to hear the voice that he had loved. They pushed the piano on to the threshold of the room. Smothering her sobs, the Countess sang. In the general emotion no one could remember later on, with certainty, what pieces she chose. Yet at the request of Chopin she sang twice.

Suddenly they heard the death-rattle. The piano was pushed back, and all knelt down. Yet that was not the end, and he lived through that night. On the 16th his voice failed, and he lost consciousness for several hours. But he came to himself, made a sign that he wished to write, and placed on a sheet of paper his last wish:

“As this Earth will smother me I conjure you to have my body opened so that I may not be buried alive.”

Later he again recovered the feeble use of his voice. Then he said:

“You will find many compositions more or less sketched out; I beg of you, by the love you bear me, to burn them all, with the exception of the beginning of a Method, which I bequeath to Alkan and Reber to make some use of it. The rest, without exception, must be burned, for I have a great respect for the public, and my efforts are as finished as it has been in my power to make them. I will not have my name made responsible for the circulation of works unworthy of the public.”

Then he made his farewells to each of them. Calling Princess Marceline and Mlle. Gavard, he said to them: “When you make music together, think of me, and I shall hear you.” Addressing Franchomme: “Play Mozart in memory of me.” All that night Abbé Jelowiçki recited the prayers for the dying, which they all repeated together. Chopin alone remained mute; life now revealed itself only by nervous spasms. Gutmann held his hand between his own, and from time to time gave him something to drink. “Dear friend,” murmured Chopin once. His face became black and rigid. The doctor bent over him and asked if he suffered. “No more,” replied Chopin. This was the last word. A few instants later they saw that he had ceased to live.

It was the 17th of October, 1849, at two o’clock in the morning.

They all went out to weep.

From the early morning hours Chopin’s favourite flowers were brought in quantities. Clésinger came to make the death-mask. Kwiatkowski made several sketches. He said to Jane Stirling, because he understood how much she loved him: “He was as pure as a tear.”

CHAPTER XX
An Epitaph for a Poet

The death of an artist is the moment of his transfiguration. There are many who were thought great, whose work nevertheless returns at once to the dust. For others, on the contrary, the state of glory only begins with death. Perhaps, as Delacroix said, in art everything is a matter of the soul. We have not yet reached agreement as to the meaning and value of that little word. But if it were necessary to give a working idea of it, nothing would furnish it better than music. “A cry made manifest,” Wagner called it. Doubtless that means: the most spontaneous expression of oneself. The artist is he who has need to give form to his cry.

Each one sets about it in his own manner. With a life expended sumptuously like that of Liszt, contrast that of Chopin, entirely reserved, not to be plucked by any hand, but so much the more filled with perfume. All that he did not give forth, his love which none could seize, his modesty and his timidity, that constant fever for perfection, his elegancies, his exile’s home-sickness, and even his moments of communication with the unknowable,—all these things are potent in his work. To-day that is still the secret of its strength; music received what men and women disdained. It is for music that he refused himself. How one understands the desolation of Schumann when he learned of the death of the swan, and this beautiful metaphor gushed spontaneously from his pen: “The soul of music has passed over the world.”

Just this must the crowds have dimly felt as they pressed to the Temple of the Madeleine on the 30th of October, 1849. Thirteen days had been required to prepare for the funeral that they wished to be as solemn as the life of the dead had not been. But he was not even a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, this Monsieur Frederick Chopin! No matter. “Nature had a holiday air,” reported the papers. Many lovely toilettes. (He would have been flattered.) All the leaders of the musical and literary world, Meyerbeer at their head, Berlioz, Gautier, Janin. Only George Sand was missing. M. Daguerry, the Curé of the Madeleine, spent two weeks in obtaining permission for women to sing in his church. It is to the obsequies of Chopin that we owe this tolerance. Without that, it would have been impossible to give Mozart’s Requiem. It was played by the orchestra of the Conservatoire, conducted by Giraud. The soloists were hidden by a black drapery behind the altar: Pauline Viardot and Mme. Castellan, Lablache and Alexis Dupont. Lefébure-Wély was at the organ. During the Offertory, they played two Preludes, that in E minor (no. 4) and the 6th, in B minor, written at Majorca in that dusk when Chopin had seen death while the rain fell in torrents on the Chartreuse of Valdemosa.

The coffin was then lowered in the midst of the congregation, while the famous Funeral March, orchestrated by Reber, sounded for the first time. The cords of the pall were held by Prince Czartoryski, Franchomme, Delacroix and Gutmann. Meyerbeer walked behind the hearse. They set out, down the Boulevards, for the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. There the body of Chopin was buried, except the heart, which was sent to Warsaw, where it has since remained in the church of the Holy Cross. A beautiful symbol which accords with that faithful heart.

No eulogy was pronounced. In the moments of meditation that followed the descent of the bier a friendly hand was seen to throw on the coffin that Polish earth that had been given to Chopin on the day he left his country. Exactly nineteen years had passed since then. During all those years the native soil had remained in the silver cup awaiting this supreme use. But now Poland no longer existed. Nowhere but in this delicate handful of earth,—and the work of Chopin: a few score pages in which were to burn for three-quarters of a century the mysticism of a Nation.

On the next 17th of October, in 1850, Miss Stirling went early in the morning to Michon, the florist, who had served Chopin, and bought all the violets she could find. Then she went to Père-Lachaise and placed them on the tomb with a wreath in the name of the family of the dead. At noon, Mass was celebrated in the chapel at the cemetery. Those who were present then went back to the tomb, where Clésinger’s monument was unveiled. It is a mediocre allegory, made by a man who hated Chopin. How could such a thing have been beautiful? Only the medallion has a little life. These words are engraved on the pedestal: “To Frederick Chopin, his friends.” Deputy Wolowski tried to make a speech, but his throat tightened and nothing was heard. All those who were brought together there had been friends of the dead. They were still listening to his voice, his piano, his consumptive cough. One of them recalled a saying of his: “None can take from me that which belongs to me.”

To-day, these remains, pelted by the rain, this sorry Muse bent over its lyre with broken strings, blend well enough with the trees of Mont St.-Louis. There are strollers in this park of the dead. They stop before the bust of de Musset, the handsome boy-lover who spelt his sorrows into such charming rhymes. They make a little pilgrimage to the tomb of Abélard and Héloïse, where a pious Abbess has had these words cut: “The love that united their spirits during their life, and which is preserved during their separation by the most tender and spiritual of letters, has reunited their bodies in this tomb.” This reassures the silent lovers who come secretly to throw a flower at the foot of these two stone symbols lying side by side. But no one is seen on the narrow path that leads from the central avenue to the grave of Chopin. For he did not exemplify the career of a great lover, this musician of souls. No soul was found that could be attuned to his. It never found its lute-maker.

That word makes me think of a letter he wrote to Fontana fourteen months before he died, and in which he throws some light on the depths of his being: “The only unhappiness,” he wrote, “consists in this: that we issue from the workshop of a celebrated master, some sui generis Stradivarius, who is no longer there to mend us. Inexpert hands do not know the secret of drawing new tones from us, and we push back into our depths what no one has been able to evoke, for want of a lute-maker.”

There is a beautiful epitaph for a poet: dead for want of a lute-maker. But where is he, this lute-maker of our lives?

Etoy, October 17, 1926.
77th Anniversary of the death of Chopin.

SOURCES

The sources from which one can gather an authentic documentation of the life of Chopin are extremely scarce. During his life, few people took the trouble to preserve his letters, although he wrote but few. Some, doubtless, attached but little value to them. Others caused them to disappear because they exposed too intimate a part of their lives.

An historic anecdote has it that Alexandre Dumas fils, in the course of a sentimental pilgrimage to Poland in the spring of 1851, fell by chance upon the complete file of letters written by George Sand to Chopin. Dumas brought the file back to France and, having restored it to the novelist, saw her re-read her letters and then throw them into the fire. Doubtless she thus thought to bury in eternal oblivion the sad remains of a love whose raptures and whose pains alike would not return to her. The burning, in 1863, of the Warsaw house of Mme. Barcinska, Chopin’s youngest sister, destroyed other precious relics.

So there remains to us but a very small number of the composer’s letters. Even these were altered at will by their first editor, Maurice Karasowski. Many biographers, however, have placidly copied them, without taking the trouble to collate them with the original texts, or even with the faithful and inexpurgated German translation which M. B. Scharlitt published at Leipzig in 1911. M. Henri Bidou has been the first to restore to us some of these letters in their libelled original form. Karasowski’s work is important, nevertheless, because the author, writing between 1860 and 1863, was intimately associated with Chopin’s sisters and niece, and he gathered from their lips the family traditions. Parts of this I have used particularly those concerned with the composer’s childish years and his death, being convinced that the pious legend is based on fact.

Other episodes, notably the journey to Berlin and his love for Constance Gladkowska, have been borrowed from the work of Count Wodzinski. I have also adopted certain picturesque details furnished by this same biographer, as well as some family information concerning his relation, Marie Wodzinska. Let me say this much once for all, in order not to load my text with references. The curious reader will find all these on a later page in the list of Works Consulted.

The first complete and soundly documented work on the life of Chopin was published by F. Niecks, in London, in 1888. Niecks too had known a number of friends and pupils of the master. His study has therefore an individual flavour which has not been superseded by later works. Elsewhere have been issued a whole series of works on the musician, particularly in Polish, German and English. I cite first of all the monumental Chopin of Ferdynand Hoesick. But if we exclude the imaginative and erroneous little books published in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century (and up to our own day) we must go to the work of M. E. Ganche to discover the first complete and serious study of the Polish musician that has been published in French. The recent volume of M. H. Bidou rectifies certain points in it and amplifies certain others. It is an indispensable work for those who wish to fathom Chopin’s music.

As I lately attempted with Liszt, I have sought here only to discover a face and to replace it in its frame. With this object, I have always allowed my characters to speak and act. I have scrupulously refrained from invention. On the other hand, I have not hesitated to interpret, believing, as I have said several times elsewhere, that every fact draws its enduring value from artistic interpretation. My effort has been only to group events in a certain order, to disentangle the lines of the heart and those of the spirit without trying to explain that which, in the soul of Chopin, has remained always inexplicable; not to lift, indeed, from my subject that shadow that gives him his inner meaning and his nebulous beauty.

PRINCIPAL WORKS CONSULTED

Franz Liszt: F. Chopin. Leipzig (Breitkopf). 1852 and 1923.

George Sand: Histoire de ma vie. 4 vol. Calmann-Lévy. Paris.

—Un hiver à Majorque. 1 vol., ibid. 1843.

—Correspondance.

Maurice Karasowski: F. Chopin. Warsaw, 1862, and new ed. Berlin, 1877 and 1925.

Comte Wodzinski: Les trois romans de F. Chopin. Calmann, Paris, 1886.

Robert Schumann: Etudes sur la musique et les musiciens. Trad. H. de Curzon. Paris, 1898.

M. Karlowicz: Souvenirs inédits de F. Chopin. Paris, and Leipzig, 1904. Trad. F. Disière.

Friedrich Niecks: F. Chopin as a Man and a Musician. London. (Novello), 1882, 2 vol.

Kleczinski: F. Chopin. De l’interpretation de ses œuvres. Paris, 1906.

Wladimir Karénine: George Sand, sa vie et ses œuvres. Plon, 1899–1926. 4 vol. (An important and remarkable work, including a quantity of unpublished documents of which I have made much use.)

Bernard Scharlitt: F. Chopin’s gesammelte Briefe. Leipzig, 1911. (Only authentic and complete text of the letters.)

Samuel Rocheblave: George Sand et sa fille. Paris, 1905.

Elie Poirée: Chopin. Paris, 1907.

Edouard Ganche: Frédéric Chopin, sa vie et ses œuvres. Paris, 10th ed. (Mercure de France), 1923.

Ferdynand Hoesick: Chopin, 3 vol. Warsaw, 1911.

I. Paderewski: A la mémoire de F. Chopin (speech). 1911.

Eugène Delacroix: Journal. Plon, Paris. 3 vol., new ed., 1926.

Opienski: Chopin. Lwow, 1910 (Altenberg).

Henri Bidou: Chopin. (Libr. Alcan). Paris, 1926.

Aurore Sand: Journal Intime de George Sand. Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1926.

INDEX

Abélard, 260
Academy of Singing (Berlin), 27
Académie Royale (Paris), 57
Adagio in E major (Chopin), 37

Adagio of Concerto in F minor (op. 21) (Chopin), 34, 50, 173

Adélaïde, Madame, 177

Agnes (Paër), 35

Agoult, Countess Marie d’, 93, 101–103, 171–172

Aix-la-Chapelle, 71
Albert, Prince, 233
Alexandre, Czar (Emperor), 23
Allard, Monsieur, 229, 230
Allegro (Moschelès), 23
Allgemeine Musikalisches (Vienna), 32
Amboise, 67
America, 64
Ancona, 218
Andante Spianato, 73
Antonin, Château d’, 23–24, 35
Appassionata, The (Beethoven), 19
Apollonius of Tyre, 160
Apponyi, Count, 68
Arago, 153, 203
Archbishop of Paris, 55

Artillery and Engineers, School of (Warsaw), 20

Auber, Daniel François Esprit, 70
Augusta, Princess (Infante), 43–44
Augustine, 197–198, 214, 237
Aulary, Monsieur, 231
Austerlitz, battle of, 18
Avignon, 127
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 33, 69, 150, 174, 229
Baillot, violinist, 62

Balearic Isles, see also Majorca, Palma, Valdemosa, 127–142

Ballade in G minor (op. 23) (Chopin), 85–86, 132, 145

Balzac, Honoré de, 19, 103–107
Barberini, Place (Rome), 190
Barber of Seville, The (Rossini), 57
Barbès, 230
Barcarolle (op. 60) (Chopin), 230–231
Barcelona, 128, 142
Baudelaire, Pierre-Charles, 163
Bayer, Mme. Constance, 48
Beauvau, Hôtel de (Marseilles), 145

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 19, 26, 31, 32, 35, 51, 62, 69, 74, 165, 174

Bellini, Vincenzo, 73
Belvédère, Palais de (Warsaw), 45
Berceuse (op. 57) (Chopin), 230–231
Berlin, 27

Berlioz, Hector, 19, 65, 68, 72, 101, 165, 169, 258

Berry (France), 147 et seq., 240
Berry, Mme. la Duchesse de, 56
Bertram (Meyerbeer), 109
Blache, Dr., 251 et seq.
Blanc, Louis, 195, 203
Böhmischen Köchin, Café zur (Vienna), 47
Bologna, 228
Bona Sforza, 77
Bonstetten, Charles-Victor de, 77
Bossuet, Jaques Bénigne, 19
Bourges, Michel de, 100–101
Brault, Adèle, 197
Breslau, 33, 43
Brest, 229
Broadwood, piano, 232
Broadwood, piano manufacturer, 235
Bruhl, 79
Buloz, publisher, 131, 153
Bulwer, Lord, 234
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 19, 159, 285
Byron, Lady, 234
Calamatta, Louis, 156
Calder House (Scotland), 235
Callot, Jacques, 176
Carlist Party (Paris), 55
Carlsbad, 76
Carlyle, Thomas, 234
Carthusians, Order of, 130
Castellan, Mme., 258
Catalani, Angelica, 243
Cauvières, Dr., 145
Chaillot, rue de (Paris), 246
Chambres des Députés (Paris), 249
Champs Elysées (Paris), 248
Chartreuse of Valdemosa. See Valdemosa
Chateaubriand, François-René, Vicomte de, 56
Chatiron, Hippolyte, 149, 181
Chaussée d’Antin (Paris), 68, 154

Cherubini, Marie-Louis-Charles-Zénobi-Salvador, 58

Chmiel, improvisation from (Chopin), 31

Chopin: Compositions, Pieces, Transcriptions, etc.

Adagio of Concerto in F minor (op. 21), 34, 50, 173

Adagio in E major, 37
Ballade in G minor (op. 23), 85–86, 132, 145
Barcarolle (op. 60), 231
Berceuse (op. 57), 231
Chmiel, improvisation from, 31

Concerto In E minor (op. 11), 40, 50, 58, 70, 72

Concerto in F minor (op. 21), 34, 37, 50, 62, 84

Etude (no. 5), 176
Etude in C minor (op. 10, no. 12), 53
Etude in E major (no. 3), 70
Etude in G sharp minor, 161
Fantasia in E minor, 178
Fantasia on Polish Airs, 40
Funeral March, 150, 259
Grand Fantasia on Polish Airs, 70
Grande Polonaise, 84
Grande Valse in E flat major, 70
Impromptu (op. 29), 108
Mazurkas (op. 41), 149
Mazurka in A flat major, 150
Mazurka in B major, 150, 202
Mazurka in B minor (op. 30), 108
Mazurka in C minor (op. 30), 108
Mazurka in C sharp major (op. 30), 108
Mazurka in C sharp minor (op. 63), 150, 202
Mazurka in D flat major (op. 30), 108
Mazurka in E minor, 150
Mazurka in F minor (op. 63), 202
Mazurka in G major, 150
Mazurka in G minor (op. 30), 108
Nocturne (op. 37, no. 2), 149
Nocturne in C minor (op. 48), 150, 190–191
Nocturne in G major, 150
Polonaise Brillante, 73
Polonaise in F minor, 36
Polonaise for piano and violoncello, 36
Potpourri on the setting moon, 41
Prelude in B minor (no. 6), 258
Prelude in E minor (no. 4), 258
Prelude in B minor (op. 6), 139
Premier Rondo, in C minor (op. 1), 23

Revolutionary, The (Etude in C minor, op. 10, no. 12), 53

Rondeau in E flat major, 70
Rondo à la Krakoviak, 31, 37, 70
Second Scherzo (op. 31), 108
Siberian, The, 161, 162
Sonata in B flat minor, 150
Sonata in E flat minor, 149
Sonata in G flat minor, 178

Sonata in G minor, for piano and violoncello, 230

Sonata with violoncello, 202
Tarantella, 178
Three Mazurkas (op. 33), 108
Trio, for piano, violin, and violoncello, 70
Twelve Etudes (2nd vol., op. 25), 70
Two Nocturnes (op. 32), 108
Valses Brillantes (op. 34), 108, 178

Valse de l’Adieu, in A flat major (op. 69, no. 1), 81

Variations on the La ci darem, 26–27, 31, 32, 62

Waltz in D flat major (op. 70, no. 3), 34, 50

Waltz of the Little Dog, The (op. 64, no. 1), 231

White Lady, The, variations from, 31
Chopin, Emilie, 20
Chopin, Isabelle, 20, 66
Chopin, Louise, 18, 20, 60–62.
See also Jedrzeïewicz, Louise

Chopin, Nicolas, 18, 20, 22, 26, 30, 46, 59, 76–77, 80, 193–194

Chopin, Mme. Nicolas, 18, 19, 76–77, 194, 247–251.

See also Krzyzanowska, Justine
Cichowski, Monsieur, 82
Cimarosa, Domenico, 27
Clary, Prince, 33
Clary, Princess, 33

Clésinger, Jean-Baptiste-Auguste-Stello, 205–227, 233, 256, 260 et seq.

Clésinger, Mme., 214–227, 233, 237, 239, 241.
See also Sand, Solange
Coignet, Jules-Louis-Philippe, 186
Cologne, 71

Concerto in E minor (op. 11) (Chopin), 40, 50, 58, 70, 72

Concerto in F minor (op. 21) (Chopin), 34, 37, 50, 62, 84

Congress of Naturalists (Berlin), 27
Conservatory of Music (Paris), 73, 258
Conservatory of Music (Warsaw), 22, 23, 30

Constantin, Grand Duke, Governor of Warsaw, 21, 45

Cramer, pianist, 58
Crans, Mlle. Saladin de, 77
Cruveillé, Dr., 251 et seq.
Custine, Marquis de, 71, 93

Czartoryski, Prince Adam, 68, 159, 195, 205, 243, 259

Czartoryska, Princess Marceline, 195, 205, 208, 240, 243, 252–255

Czerny, Charles, 32, 33
Czosnowska, Countess, 202
Daguerry, Monsieur, 258
Daily News (London), 234
Dantan, Jean-Pierre, 182, 185
Dante, Alighieri, 46, 159
Danube, The, 41
Dautremont, tailor (Paris), 154
da Vinci, Leonardo, 67
de Garaudé, Monsieur, 231

Delacroix, Eugène, 156, 158, 163–167, 173, 180, 195, 205, 218, 243–246, 257, 259
de Laprade, Victor, 203
Delaroche, Hippolyte-Paul, 243
Desdemona (see also Othello), 58
des Préaulx, M., 205–206
Dickens, Charles, 234
Dictionnaire Philosophique (Voltaire), 252
di Mondi, Mlle. Antonia Molina, 230
Dobrzyçka, Mme., 43–44, 79
Don Juan (Mozart), 175
Douglas, Marquis of, 234
Dover Street (London), 232 et seq.
Dresden, 33, 43, 77–81
Dudevant, Aurore. See Sand, George
Dudevant, Casimir, 101, 197, 214, 222
Dudevant, Maurice. See Sand, Maurice
Dudevant, Solange. See Sand, Solange
Dupont, Alexis, 258
Duport, hatmaker (Paris), 154
Düsseldorf, 71, 86
Duteil, family of, 149
Duvernet, Théophile-Imarigeon, 149, 222

Dziady (The Feast of the Dead) (Miçkiewicz), 159

Ecole de Médecine. See School of Medicine (Paris)

Edinburgh, 235, 238, 241
Elbe, 79
Elizabeth, Queen, 67
El Mallorquin, 128
Elsner, Joseph-Xavier, 22, 37, 41, 60–62
Enfer, rue d’ (Paris), 56
Erard, piano, 171, 232
Erard, Salle, 72

Erskine, Mrs. See also Stirling, family, 232 et seq.

Etienne, Mme., 244

Etude (no. 5) (Chopin), 176

Etude in C minor (op. 10, no. 12) (Chopin), 53

Etude in E major (no. 3) (Chopin), 70
Etude in G sharp minor (Chopin), 161
Eusebius, 26
Euterpe, 78
Everard. See Bourges, Michel de
Faber, Monsieur, 202
Falmouth, Lord, 233–234
Fantasia in E minor (Chopin), 78
Fantasia on Polish Airs (Chopin), 40

Farewells, The (Sonata in E flat major) (Beethoven), 19

Faust (Gounod), 35
Ferdinand Cortez (Spontini), 27
Festival of Music (Aix-la-Chapelle), 71
Fétis, music critic, 63
Fidélio (Beethoven), 19
Field, pianist, 58, 70
Fleury, family of, 149

Fontana, Jules, 21, 127, 128, 132, 141, 145–146, 150, 153, 154–155, 159, 182, 185, 261

Fouquet, Nicolas, 67

France, Hôtel de (Paris), 102

Franchomme, violoncellist, 62, 159, 229, 230, 243, 251–252, 259

François I, 67
Françoise, the chambermaid, 200
François Le Champi (Sand), 224
Frankfurt-am-Oder, 28
Frauenkirche, The (Dresden), 80
Frère, Charles-Théodore, 186
Freyschutz Die (Handel), 27
Funeral March (Chopin), 150, 259
Gainsborough, Lady, 233–234
Gallenberg, Count, 30
Gaubert, Dr., 126
Gautier, Théophile, 258
Gavard, Charles, 252
Gavard, Mlle., 252, 255
Gazette Musicale (Paris), 178–180, 232
Geneva, 77, 102, 171
Genoa, 147
Geological Museum (Berlin), 28
Germany (Heine), 91
Giotto, Ambrogio, 157
Giraud, Monsieur, 258

Gladkowska, Constance, 30, 33–42, 44, 46, 48–50, 66

Glasgow, 238
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, 159
Gomez, Señor, 128, 132
Grand Fantasia on Polish Airs (Chopin), 70
Grande Polonaise (Chopin), 84
Grande Polonaise (Kalkbrenner), 62
Grande Valse in E flat major (Chopin), 70
Grenoble, 134

Grzymala, Count Albert, 65, 108–125, 127, 143, 153, 159, 205, 209–213, 235, 239–240, 242, 244

Gutmann, Monsieur, 70, 241, 243, 252–255, 259
Habeneck, conductor, 57
Hamilton, Duke of, 241
Handel, George Friedrich, 27
Hanska, Countess, 104, 107
Hartmann, Caroline, 70
Haslinger, music publisher (Vienna), 30, 44
Haydn, Joseph, 19, 202
Heine, Heinrich, 91, 102, 159, 173
Heller, Stephen, 168
Héloïse, 260
Hiller, Ferdinand, 62, 71, 102
Histoire de ma Vie (Sand), 221, 227
Hogarth, William, 234
Holy Cross, Church of (Warsaw), 259
Hortense, Queen, 77
House of the Wind, The (Majorca), 128–132
Houssaye, Arsène, 206
Hugo, Victor, 19
Hummel, Jean-Népomucène, 46, 50
Imperial Theatre (Vienna), 31
Infernal Comedy (Miçkiewicz), 161
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 163
Inquisition, Palace of (Barcelona), 128
Invalides, Hôtel des (Paris), 249
Invitation to the Waltz (von Weber), 187
Isambert, Mlle., singer, 62
Italian Opera House (Paris), 57
Italienne à Alger, L’ (Rossini), 57
Italy, 52, 218
Jagellons, dynasty of, 77
Janin, 258
Jardin des Plantes (Paris), 201
Jaroçki, Professor, 27–28

Jean, Prince of Lucca, future King of Saxony, 43–44

Jedrzeïewicz, Calasante, 193, 196, 247–250

Jedrzeïewicz, Louise, 193–195, 237–238, 247–250.

See also Chopin, Louise
Jelowiçki, Abbé Alexandre, 252–255
Jéna, battle of, 20
Jésuites, rue des (Warsaw), 22
Journal (Delacroix), 218, 244–246
Journal des Débats (Paris), 224
Journal Intime (Sand), 99–100, 169, 208
Jules II, 67
Kalerji, Mme., 245
Kalisz, 43

Kalkbrenner, Frédéric-Guillaume, 58–63, 70, 243

Karol, Prince (Sand), 185, 227.
See also Lucrezia Floriani
Keats, John, 19
Keir, The Stirlings of, 236, 239
Kisting, piano factory, 27
Kleczynski, Professor, 170
Klengel, Alexandre, composer, 33
Krakoviak. See Rondo à la Krakoviak (Chopin)
Krasinski, 159
Kreutzer Sonata (Beethoven), 19
Kronprinz, Hôtel du (Berlin), 27
Krzyzanowska, Justine, 18.
See also Chopin, Mme. Nicolas
Kurpinski, 37
Kwiatkowsky, 159, 256
Lablache, Mme. Louis, 57, 258
La Châtre (France), 207
Lady of the Lake, The (Rossini), 41
Laffitte, rue (Paris), 102
La Fontaine, Jean de, 19, 67, 172
Lambert, Hôtel (Paris), 205
Lamennais, Abbé de, 97, 102
Lannes, Maréchale, 68
Lefébure-Wély, 258
Légion d’Honneur, La, 258
Legouvé, Monsieur, 243
Leipzig, 81, 85
Leipzig, battle of, 79
Lélia (Sand), 97
Le Méléagre, 142
Lenz, Monsieur W. de, 186–188
Le Phénicien, 128
Leroux, Pierre, 159–160, 180, 199
Le Verier, Monsieur, 202
Lichnowsky, Count, 32
Lind, Jenny, 232, 243
Linde, Mme., 23

Liszt, Franz, 19, 21, 31, 50, 62, 63, 65, 68, 70, 75, 86, 93, 101, 103, 139, 146, 167, 171–176, 178, 181, 186, 257

Lorraine (France), 18
Louis XVI, King, 56
Louis, Dr., 243, 251 et seq.
Louis-Philippe, King, 177–178, 228–230
Louvre, The (Paris), 164
Lucca, Prince of. See Jean

Lucrezia Floriani (Sand), 185, 200–201, 209, 240

Luxembourg, Musée du (Paris), 205
Madeleine, Church of the (Paris), 240, 258
Majorca, 128–143, 149, 240, 258.
See also Balearic Isles, Palma, Valdemosa
Malfatti, Dr., 51
Malibran, Maria-Félicité Garcia, 57–58

Mallefille, Félicien, 103, 111, 116, 119, 121, 123–124, 127

Manchester, 238
Manchester Guardian, 238
Marainville (France), 18
Mardi Gras, 137
Mare Au Diable, La (Sand), 224

Marliani, Mme., 108, 128, 131, 142–143, 147, 184, 185, 187, 226

Marie-Aurore of Saxe, Queen, 198
Marienbad, 87–88
Marmontel, 58
Marot, Clément, 67
Marseilles, 143–147, 149

Matuszinski, Dr. Jean, 47–49, 53, 71, 127, 130, 155, 192

Maurras, Charles, 34
Mazurkas (op. 41) (Chopin), 149
Mazurka in A flat major (Chopin), 150

Mazurka in C sharp major (op. 30) (Chopin), 108

Mazurka in C sharp minor (op. 63) (Chopin), 150, 202

Mazurka in C minor (op. 30) (Chopin), 108

Mazurka in D flat major (op. 30) (Chopin), 108

Mazurka in E minor (Chopin), 150
Mazurka in F minor (op. 63) (Chopin), 202
Mazurka in G major (Chopin), 150
Mazurka in G major (op. 63) (Chopin), 202
Mazurka in G minor (op. 30) (Chopin), 108
Mémoires (Sand), 224, 245

Mendelssohn, Bartholdy Felix, 27, 71, 72, 81, 86

Mendizabal, Don Juan Alvarez y, 130
Mérimée, Prosper, 95–96
Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shakespeare), 67
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 64, 109, 231, 258–259
Michelangelo, Buomarroti, 67, 174
Miçkiewicz, 91, 102, 159–160
Milan, 77, 228
Mohilew, General, 53
Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin), 19
Molin, Dr., 243
Montpensier, Duke of, 229
Moschelès, Ignace, 23, 70, 177
Moscow, 53
Moses, 160
Moses (Rossini), 33
Mostowska, Countess, 108

Mozart, Wolfgang von, 26, 29, 69, 158, 163–165, 174–175, 177, 229, 230, 255, 258

Munich, 53

Musset, Viscount Alfred de, 98–100, 105, 126, 147, 148, 221, 260

Nantes, 229
Naples, 146
Napoleon I, Emperor, 17, 79

Napoleon III, Emperor. See Napoleon, Prince Louis

Napoleon, Prince Louis, 77, 98
Nidecki, 47
Niemcewicz, Julian-Orsin, 21
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 144, 165, 190–191
Night Song (Nietzsche), 190
Noailles, Duke of, 243
Nocturne (op. 37, no. 2) (Chopin), 149

Nocturne in C minor (op. 48) (Chopin), 150, 190–191

Nocturne in G major (Chopin), 150

Nohant, Château de, 101, 103–107, 147 et seq., 237, 239

Notre Dame de Paris, Church of (Paris), 249
Nourrit, Adolph, 102, 146
Obreskow, Mme., 247–248
O’Meara, Mlle., 69
Opera, The (Berlin), 27
Opera, The (Warsaw), 30, 35
Orleans, Duchess of, 177
Orleans, Duke of, 229

Orléans, Square d’ (Paris), 185 et seq., 242, 248

Orlowski, 70–71
Orsetti, family of, 77
Osborne, pianist, 62
Ostend, 250
Othello (Rossini), 57
Paderewski, Ignace, 54
Paër, Fernando, 35, 58
Paganini, Nicolo, 51
Paix, rue de la, 240
Palma, 128, 142.
See also Majorca, Balearic Isles, Valdemosa
Panthéon, The (Paris), 249
Papet, Dr., 149
Paskewitch, General, 46, 53
Pasta, Giuditta Negri, 57, 58
Pelletan, 102

Père-Lachaise, Cemetery of (Paris), 259 et seq.

Perpignan, 127
Perthuis, Count de, 170, 177
Philharmonic Orchestra (London), 232
Pierre, the gardener, 200
Pigalle, rue (Paris), 154 et seq.
Pixis, violinist, 33
Plater, Count, 65

Pleyel, Camille, 62, 93, 127–128, 129, 130, 141, 146, 229

Pleyel, piano, 90, 91, 171, 232, 242

Pleyel, Salon, 62, 72, 178–180, 229–232

Poissonnière, Boulevard (Paris), 56 et seq., 228

Polonaise Brillante (Chopin), 73

Polonaise in F minor (Chopin), 36

Polonaise for piano and violoncello (Chopin), 36

Poniatowski, Prince Joseph-Antoine, 79
Pont du Gard, 127
Posen, 28

Potoçka, Countess Delphine, 69, 73–75, 243, 245, 254–255

Potpourri on the setting moon (Chopin), 41
Prague, 32–33
Prelude in B minor (no. 6) (Chopin), 258
Prelude in E minor (no. 4) (Chopin), 258
Prelude in G minor (op. 6) (Chopin), 139

Premier Rondo, in C minor (op. 1) (Chopin), 23

Preparatory Military Academy (Warsaw), 20
Probst, music publisher (Paris), 141, 146
Prophet, The (Meyerbeer), 246
Prussia, Napoleon’s campaign in, 18
Prussia, Prince of, 233
Quatuor Serioso (Beethoven), 19
Quintette (Beethoven), 62
Racine, Jean, 19
Radziwill, Prince Antoine, 23–24, 35, 38
Radziwill, Princess, 35
Radziwill, Princess Elise, 24, 36
Radziwill, Princess Marceline, 68
Radziwill, Prince Valentin, 67
Radziwill, Princess Wanda, 24, 36
Ramorino, General, 56
Ravel, Maurice, 231
Reber, Monsieur, 255
Rénovateur, Le (Paris), 72
Republican Party (Paris), 55
Requiem (Mozart), 258
Revolution of 1830 (Poland), 45, 77
Revolution of 1848 (France), 228

Revolutionary, The (Etude in C minor, op. 10, no. 12) (Chopin), 53

Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris), 153
Richter, Johann-Paul von, 75
Robert the Devil (Meyerbeer), 64, 231
Rochechouart, rue (Paris), 130
Roger, Monsieur, 231
Rollinat, François, 143, 149
Rome, 65, 228
Rondeau in E flat major (Chopin), 70
Rondo à la Krakoviak (Chopin), 31, 37, 70
Rossini, Gioachino, 31, 33, 41, 57, 58
Roth, Dr., 243
Rothschild, Baron James de, 68
Rothschild, Baroness, 233, 243
Rousseau, Théodore, 214

Rozières, Mlle. de, 181–182, 208, 215–217, 240

St.-Antoine, Place (Geneva), 77
Saint Bruno, 134
St.-Etienne, Church of (Vienna), 46

Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin de, 96, 117, 161

St.-Etienne du Mont, Church of (Paris), 249

St.-Germain des Prés, Church of (Paris), 190

St.-Germain l’Auxerrois, Church of (Paris), 249

St. John, 159
St.-Louis, Mont (Paris), 260
St. Petersburg, 187
Saint-Saëns, Charles-Camille, 86

St.-Simon, Henri-Jean-Victor de Rouvroy, Duc de, 97

St. Simonien Party (Paris), 55
St.-Sulpice, Church of (Paris), 249
Salzburg, 53
Sand, George, 56, 94 et seq.

Sand, Maurice, 102, 110, 126, 131, 137–138, 150, 153, 155, 166–167, 181, 188, 196–197, 203, 207, 208, 219, 237, 245

Sand, Solange, 102, 126, 132, 137, 150, 153, 155, 188, 197–199, 203, 205–227.

See also Clésinger, Mme.
Sandeau, Jules, 95, 104, 201
Sapieha, Princess, 195
Saxe, Maréchal de, 94
Saxony, King of. See Jean, Prince of Lucca
Saxony, Queen of, 44
Scheffer, Ary, 236
Schlesinger, publisher (Paris), 146, 244
School of Medicine (Paris), 55, 71
Schubert, Franz, 146, 174–175

Schumann, Robert, 19, 23, 26, 29, 75, 81, 85, 86, 170, 174, 178

Scott, Sir Walter, 234
Secret Marriage, The (Cimarosa), 27
Secrétaire Intime, Le (Sand), 106
Seine, The, 41
Shakespeare, William, 67, 149, 174
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 19
Shroeder-Devrient, 58
Siberian, The (Chopin), 161–162
Simon, Dr., 243
Skarbeck, Countess, 18
Slavik, violinist, 51
Slowacki, 159
Smithson, Henrietta, 72
Socrates, 159
Somerset, Duchess of, 233
Sonata in B flat minor (Chopin), 150
Sonata in E flat major (Beethoven), 19
Sonata in E flat minor (Chopin), 149
Sonata in G flat minor (Chopin), 178

Sonata in G minor for piano and violoncello (Chopin), 230

Sonata with violoncello (Chopin), 202
Sontag, German singer, 38
Sowinski, pianist, 62, 65
Spain, King of, 243
Spontini, Gasparo Luigi Pacifico, 27
Sprée, The, 41
Stafford House (London), 233–234
Stamati, pianist, 62
Stars, The (Schubert), 146
Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), 19, 127
Stirling, Jane, 228 et seq., 256 et seq.
Stradivarius, 261
Strauss, Johann, 51
Stuttgart, 53
Sue, Eugène, 102
Sutherland, Duchess of, 233
Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 160
Tarantella (Chopin), 178
Tempe, valley of, 50
Teplitz, 33
Théâtre Italien (Paris), 72
“Three Glorious Days” (Paris), 228
Three Mazurkas (op. 33) (Chopin), 108
Tiber, The, 41
Tilsit, battle of, 18
Titus. See Woyçieckowski, Titus
Tomeoni, Mlle., singer, 62
Torphichen, Lord, 235
Tours, 237

Trio for piano, violin and violoncello (Chopin), 70

Trio for piano, violin and violoncello (Mozart), 230

Tronchet, rue (Paris), 154
Tuileries, The (Paris), 249
Twelve Etudes (2nd vol., op. 25) (Chopin), 70
Ukraine, 65
Urhan, violinist, 62
Val de Grâce Hospital (Paris), 249
Valdemosa, Chartreuse of, 129, 133–142, 258.
See also Palma, Majorca, Balearic Isles

“Valse de l’Adieu” in A flat major (op. 69, no. 1) (Chopin), 81

Valses Brillantes (op. 34) (Chopin), 108, 178

Variations on the La ci darem (Chopin), 26–27, 31, 32, 62

Vaucluse, 127
Vaudemont, Princess de, 68
Vendôme, Place (Paris), 251 et seq.
Venice, 98
Veron, Louis-Désiré, 57
Veronese, Paul, 234
Viardot, Louis, 221
Viardot, Pauline, 159, 185, 187, 195, 258
Victoria, Queen, 234
Vienna, 31, 41, 46, 53, 238
Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 252
Wagner, Richard, 19, 59, 69, 257
Wagram, battle of, 18

Waltz in D flat major (op. 70, no. 3) (Chopin), 34, 50

“Waltz of the Little Dog” (op. 64, no. 1) (Chopin), 231

Warsaw, 20, 33, 35, 36, 38, 44, 45–46, 53, 76, 89, 192, 228, 259

Warsaw, Duchy of, 18
Warsaw High School, 20
Wellington, Duke of, 233
Westminster, Duke of, 233

White Lady, The, improvisation from (Chopin), 31

Wieck, Clara, 70, 81
Wieck, Herr, 81
Wiener Theaterzeitung (Vienna), 32
Wilna, 79
Winter at Majorca (Sand), 132
Witwicki, Polish writer, 52
Wodzinska, Countess, 80–92
Wodzinska, Marie, 76–93, 182, 194
Wodzinska, Mlle. Thérèse, 84, 92
Wodzinski, Casimir, 80, 82, 90
Wodzinski, Count Antoine, 83, 181
Wodzinski, family, 21, 77–93, 181
Wodzinski, Félix, 80, 82
Wodzinski, Palatin, 79–80
Wola, suburb of Warsaw, 41
Wolowski, deputy, 260

Woyciechowski, Titus, 21, 34, 36–39, 43–46, 50, 53, 57, 58, 64, 251

Young French Party (Paris), 55
zal, 25
Zamboni, conductor, 57
Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 191
Zelazowa, Wola, 18, 19
Zielinski, 41
Zullichau (Poland), 28
Zwinger Museum (Dresden), 79
Zywny, 22

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

Transcriber’s Note

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

A closing quotation mark was added after: like an airy apparition on page 175

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Table of Contents

- FREDERICK CHOPIN: A MAN OF SOLITUDE
- DEDICATION
- CONTENTS

- CHAPTER I “An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman”

- CHAPTER II The Childhood of Chopin
- CHAPTER III The Birth of the Poet
- CHAPTER IV “Sorrow” and “Ideal”

- CHAPTER V Revolution at Warsaw and Solitude at Vienna

- CHAPTER VI “I doubt whether there is a city on Earth where more pianists are to be found than in Paris”

- CHAPTER VII Happy Years, Working Years
- CHAPTER VIII Marie Wodzinska and the Dusk
- CHAPTER IX First Sketch of George Sand
- CHAPTER X Letters of Two Novelists
- CHAPTER XI The Chartreuse of Valdemosa

- CHAPTER XII “If music be the food of love, play on”

- CHAPTER XIII On some Friendships of Chopin, and on his Æsthetics

- CHAPTER XIV Misunderstandings, Loneliness
- CHAPTER XV Chagrin, Hate
- CHAPTER XVI The Story of an Estrangement
- CHAPTER XVII Swan Song

- CHAPTER XVIII “The Cypresses have their caprices”

- CHAPTER XIX The Death of Chopin
- CHAPTER XX An Epitaph for a Poet
- SOURCES
- PRINCIPAL WORKS CONSULTED
- INDEX
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE