son, Paul, whose instructor was a Count Moriolles.  It was his daughter, the Comtesse Alexandra, in whose eyes Chopin found inspiration; he improvised never so beautifully as when she sat next to him at the piano.  His adoration was no secret.  He was often teased on account of the beautiful “Mariolka,” as he called her.  In his letters to his friends, we find many allusions that prove that the young comtesse loved him in turn.  But both knew that this love was hopeless, and therefore Chopin’s musical expressions of his dreams for her are melancholy.  One remembrance of this attachment is the Rondo a la Mazur, Op. 5, which he dedicated to the Comtesse de Moriolles.

In 1830 Chopin toured the continent.  As in his later relation to George Sand, the passion of a poet, Alfred Musset, rivalled his, so at this time he found a rival in the Polish poet, Julius Slovaki.  The pretty, vivacious, and perhaps somewhat flirtatious girl, Comtesse Maria Wodzinska, was the bone of contention, or, rather, the “rag and the bone and the hank of hair” of contention.

It chanced that Chopin and Slovaki, whose works showed most startling similarity, were also much alike in looks, in slenderness, dreaminess of feature, and even in expression of countenance.  Their very fates were like:  both left their country never to return.  In their wandering through Europe, they stopped in the same capitals; both at last took up their residence in Paris, where both died of consumption.  It was these twins of fate whom fate put in love with the same teasing girl.

The “black-eyed demoiselle,” as she was called by the poet and the musician, managed so well, that her two admirers never met at the same time.  She travelled through Europe with her mother and brothers, and found an opportunity to meet Chopin in one, and Slovaki in another town, and to pass several weeks with each.

It was Slovaki’s turn to meet her in Geneva.  Here she inspired him to much verse, especially his “In der Schweiz.”  But all this while the little vixen corresponded with Chopin.  He improvised in Paris on themes she composed, and then she repeated his inspirations to keep Slovaki hovering at her piano.

When Chopin met the Wodzinskis in Dresden, he composed for Maria his F-minor Etude which he called “the soul-portrait” of the comtesse.  A year later he passed a month with the family at Marienbad, where he proposed for her hand and was accepted.  In his bridegroom mood he composed the graceful F-minor Waltz, and later the C-sharp minor Nocturne.

In the meantime, Slovaki travelled on in blissful ignorance, glorifying Chopin’s fiancee in poetic songs full of passionate admiration.  The distant Slovaki finally learned that Chopin had won his muse, and he wrote to his mother: 

“They say that Chopin and ‘my Maria’ are to be a pair.  How sentimental to marry a person who is the image of one’s first love.  Swedenborg says that in a case of this kind, after death, not out of two of the souls but out of all three only one angel can be created.”