“It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his (Chopin’s) character with a great exactness of analysis.  People were mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and, proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in a life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in good faith.  I have traced in Prince Karol the character of a man determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his exigencies.  Chopin was not such.  Nature does not design like art, however realistic it may be.  She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious.  Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is too limited to reproduce them.

“Chopin was a resume of these magnificent inconsequences which God alone can allow himself to create, and which have their particular logic.  He was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full of unlegitimate pride, which was unconscious of itself.  Hence sufferings which he did not reason out and which did not fix themselves on a determined object.

“However, Prince Karol is not an artist.  He is a dreamer and nothing more; having no genius, he has not the right of genius.  He is therefore a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the manuscript every day on my desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself,—­he who, nevertheless, was so suspicious.

“And yet, afterwards, by reaction, he imagined, I am told, than this was the case.  Enemies (he had such about him who call themselves his friends; as if embittering a suffering heart was not murder), enemies made him believe that this romance was a revelation of his character.  At that time his memory was no doubt enfeebled; he had forgotten the book, why did he not re-read it?

“This history is so little ours—­It was the very reverse of it.  There were between us neither the same raptures (envirements), nor the same sufferings.  Our history had nothing of a romance; its foundation was too simple and too serious for us ever to have had occasion for a quarrel with each other a propos of each other.”

As to the final separation, following my principle of letting the people tell their own stories so far as possible, I may turn again to George Sand’s own version: 

“After the last relapse of the invalid, his mind had become extremely gloomy, and Maurice [her son], who had hitherto tenderly loved him, was suddenly wounded by him in an unexpected manner about a trifling subject.  They embraced each other the next moment, but the grain of sand had fallen into the tranquil lake, and little by little the pebbles fell there, one after another—­all this was borne; but at last, one day, Maurice, tired of the pin-pricks, spoke of giving up the game.  That could not be, and should not be.  Chopin would not stand my legitimate and necessary intervention.  He bowed his head and said that I no longer loved him.