To-day we will hardly permit an artist an extra half-inch of hair, and he must be very well groomed, very prosperous, businesslike, and, in appearance at least, athletic—­even if he must ask his tailor to furnish the look of brawn.  Personally, I prefer the mode of to-day, but with to-day’s fashion we should not have had Chopin, such music as he drew from his familiar and daemon, the piano, and such letters as he wrote about the Gladkovska to his friend Matuszynski: 

“God forbid that she should suffer in any way on my account.  Set her mind at rest, and tell her that as long as my heart beats I shall not cease to adore her.  Tell her that even after my death my ashes shall be strewn under her feet.”

While Chopin was thus mooning over her memory, she seems to have been finding consolation elsewhere than in her music, even as Mozart’s Aloysia had done.  This letter was sent on New Year’s Day, 1831.  After a few more references to her, her name vanishes from his letters, and the incident is closed.  It may best be summed up in the words of James Huneker, who is one of the few writers who has kept his sanity on the subject of Chopin: 

“He never saw his Gladkovska again, for he did not return to Warsaw.  The lady was married in 1832—­preferring a solid merchant to nebulous genius—­to Joseph Grabovski, a merchant at Warsaw.  Her husband, so saith a romantic biographer, Count Wodzinski, became blind; perhaps even a blind country gentleman was preferable to a lachrymose pianist.  Chopin must have heard of the attachment in 1831.  Her name almost disappears from his correspondence.  Time as well as other nails drove from his memory her image.  If she was fickle, he was inconstant, and so let us waste no pity on this episode, over which lakes of tears have been shed and rivers of ink have been spilt.”

This same year, 1831, brought Chopin to Paris, thenceforward his residence and home.  His great elegance of manner, as well as of music, brought him into the most aristocratic dove-cotes, or salons, as they called them, and it is small wonder that he found himself unable to avoid accepting and buttonholing for a while some of the countless hearts that were flung like roses at his feet.  Even George Sand was amazed at his dexterity in juggling with hearts, and, in this matter, praise or blame from George Sand was praise from Lady Hubert.  It seems that he could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as gracefully as from one key to its remotest neighbour.  She says he could manage three flirtations of an evening, and begin a new series the very next day.  Apparently even distance was no barrier, for George Sand declares that he was at the same moment trying to marry a girl in Poland and another in Paris.  The Parisienne he cancelled from his list because, says Sand, when he called on her with another man, she offered the other man a chair before she asked Chopin to be seated.  Chopin conducted himself in Paris very much en prince, according to Von Lenz, and such a sacrilege to the laws of precedence naturally was unpardonable.