The tendency, of course, is to take her praises of herself with a liberal sprinkling of salt, and to feel that Chopin was not the “detestable invalid” she painted him.  But need we withdraw charity from one, to give to the other?  Need we rob Pauline to pay Peter?  There should be easily a plenty of sympathy for both, for the woman infatuated with a strange, exotic genius, gathering him into her heart and home, only to find that she had taken upon herself the role of nurse as well as mistress; and to find her time and her vitality devoted to an invalid, while her own life-work as a famous writer was making demands on her as wild as those of a sick musician her junior in years as in fame.

After granting her this justice, there should still be no stint of sympathy for the poor Chopin, wrought to a frenzy with the revolutions he was so gorgeously effecting, not only in the music of the piano, but in all harmony; racked with pain and unmanned with the weakening effects of his disease; struggling vainly against the chill and clammy Wrestler who was to drag him to his grave before his life was half complete.

Our feeling, again, should not be wrath at George Sand because she did not eternally resist the centrifugal forces of such a life, but rather a deep sense of gratitude that she gave Chopin some sort of home and mental support for ten long years.

George Sand’s books are full of allusions to Chopin, and from the many that are quoteworthy, the following may be cited from her “Histoire de ma Vie,” as throwing a few flecks of light on the woman’s attitude in the affair: 

“He was the same in friendship (as in love), becoming enthusiastic at first sight, getting disgusted and correcting himself (se reprenant) incessantly, living on infatuations full of charm for those who were the object of them and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest affections.”

“Chopin accorded to me, I may say, honoured me with, a kind of friendship which was an exception in his life.  He was always the same to me.”

“The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness.  He had enough of his own ills to bear.”

“We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once, which, alas, was the first and the final time.”

“But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace, obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured the asperities of character towards those who were about me.  With them the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice versa.”

“Chopin when angry was alarming, and, as, with me, he always restrained himself, he seemed almost to choke and die.”

It is generally believed that in the character of Prince Karol in her novel, “Lucrezia Floriani,” published in 1847, Sand used that lethal weapon of revenge novelists possess, and portrayed or caricatured Chopin.  It is only fair to give her disclaimer, though Liszt repeated the charge in his “Life of Chopin,” and though Karasovski says that Sand’s own children told Chopin that he was pictured as Prince Karol.  None the less, hearken to the novelist’s own defence: