“What blasphemy after these eight years of maternal devotion!  But the poor bruised heart was not conscious of its delirium.  I thought that some months passed at a distance and in silence would heal the wound, and make his friendship again calm and his memory equitable.  But the revolution of February came, and Paris became momentarily hateful to this mind incapable of yielding to any commotion in the social form.  Free to return to Poland, or certain to be tolerated there, he had preferred languishing ten (and some more) years far from his family, whom he adored, to the pain of seeing his country transformed and deformed (denature).  He had fled from tyranny, as now he fled from liberty.

“I saw him again for an instant in March, 1848.  I pressed his trembling and icy hand.  I wished to speak to him, he slipped away.  Now it was my turn to say that he no longer loved me.  I spared him this infliction, and entrusted all to the hands of Providence and the future.

“I was not to see him again.  There were bad hearts between us.  There were good ones, too, who were at a loss what to do.  There were frivolous ones who preferred not to meddle with such delicate matters.

“I have been told that he had asked for me, regretted me, and loved me filially up to the very end.  It was thought fit to conceal from him that I was ready to hasten to him.  It was thought fit to conceal this from me till then.”

This, then, is George Sand’s story, which has not been granted very much credence.

The cause of their—­“divorce,” one might call it—­is blurred by the usual discrepancies of gossip.  The most probable account seems to be that according to which Chopin mortally wounded Sand by receiving her daughter and her son-in-law when they were out of Sand’s favour.  All accounts agree that this was to her only a pretext for breaking shackles that had begun to be irksome.  All are agreed that it was Sand and not Chopin who ended the relationship, and that she, as Niecks bluntly puts it, “had recourse to the heroic means of kicking him, metaphorically speaking, out-of-doors.”

The woman seems easily to have forgotten the man who had proved, at best, of little joy to her, for, as she says, she could never go to him with her troubles, since he had always a plenty of his own.  It was a relief, then, to her, being a far busier woman than he a man, to find herself free.

But Chopin was robbed of his last support.  The strong woman he had leaned upon was gone, and he was alone with the consumption that was eating his life away.  He started forth upon a concert tour, but the chill climates of England and Scotland were not refuges from his haunting disease.  He died slowly and in poverty, though he was unconscious of want, thanks to the generosity of a Russian countess and a Scotch woman.  Dependent upon women to the last!  In his dying hours it is said that George Sand called at his house, but was not admitted to see him, though, as he wailed two days before his death, “She said I should die in no other arms than hers” (Que je ne mourrais que dans ses bras).