The Polish woman whom Sand refers to may have been the one woman with whom Chopin is definitely known to have planned marriage.  This was Maria Wodzinska.  Her two brothers had boarded years before at the pension which Chopin’s father kept at Warsaw.  The acquaintance with the brothers was renewed in Paris, and when, in 1835, Chopin visited Dresden after a long journey to see his parents, he met the sister, Maria, then nineteen years old, and fell deeply and seriously in love with her.  According to her brother, who wrote a biographical romance on “Chopin’s Three Love Affairs,” Maria, while not classically a beauty, had an indefinable charm.

“Her black eyes were full of sweetness, reverie, and restrained fire; a smile of ineffable voluptuousness played around her lips, and her magnificent hair was as dark as ebony and long enough to serve her as a mantle.”

They flirted at the piano and behind a fan, and he dedicated her a little waltz, and she drew his portrait.  As usual, the different biographers tell different stories, but from them the chief biographer of all, Frederick Neicks, decides that Chopin proposed and Maria deposed.  And here endeth the second of Chopin’s three romances.  So this brings us back to Paris and George Sand, and the year 1837, when Chopin was twenty-eight and George Sand thirty-three.

Thus far we have followed the standard authorities, but the year 1903 has done much in the way of unveiling Chopin’s life.  His letters to his family, and their letters to him, were believed to have perished.  They were in the possession of his sister Isabella Barcinska, and she was living in the palace of Count Zamoyski at Warsaw, in 1863, when a bomb was thrown from a window as the Russian lieutenant-general was passing.  In revenge the soldiers sacked the palace, and burned what they did not carry off.  Chopin’s portrait by Ary Scheffer, his piano, and his Paris furniture perished, and his papers were believed to be among the lost.

But all the while the family was keeping their very existence secret until, after forty years, it was thought proper to give them to the public.

M. Karlovicz was entrusted with this honour, and La Revue Musicale of Paris chosen as the medium.  The letters are said to make a large bulk, but I have been able to see only the first three instalments, of which two are family letters to him.  They are exuberant with tenderness, admiration, and of hope for his great fame; the father constantly pleading with the son to lay up his sous against a rainy day,—­advice which met the usual fate of good advice.

Karlovicz says, with some exaggeration:  “In his letters to his family, Chopin, as if he wished to avoid pronouncing the name of George Sand, always calls her ‘My hostess,’ sometimes even employing, strange to say, the plural, for instance, ‘Elles si cheres, elles rirent pour tous,’ or, ‘Here the vigil is sad, because les malades do not wish a doctor.’”