Chopin, only half-Polish, and finding his true home in Paris, had been loved by the tiny musicienne, hardly so big as her name, Leopoldine Blahetka, but his first true love was for the raving beauty, Constantia Gladkovska, whom he mourned for in prose as highly coloured as his nocturnes, wishing that after his death his ashes might be strewn under her feet.  She married elsewhere.  The Polish Maria Wodzinska was his next flame, and he wished to marry her, but he, who had the salons of Paris at his princely behest, could not hold this nineteen-year-old girl.  Then he fell into the embrace of George Sand, that mysterious sphinx who clasped him to her commodious heart, and held him as with claws, though little he cared to escape; and yet, her claws drew blood, and at length it was the sphinx herself who struggled for release from the embrace of the fretful genius, whom consumption was claiming with her own clammy arms.  Every one knows all there is to know about the Chopin-Sand affair, all and a great deal more, but who could draw from it any inference as to the effect of music?

Sand was attracted to Chopin by his art.  With her as nurse, his genius accomplished much of its greatest, and it held her enthralled for a time.  To Chopin, music was both a medicine and a disease, torment and solace.  But that he would have lived his life differently in any way had he been a painter, a poet, an architect, a man of affairs, or an idler, with the same effeminate nature, the same elegance of manner, the same disease, the same women about him, I can find no reason to believe.  Is it not the man and the environment rather than the music that makes such a life what it is?

There is another brilliant consumptive, Carl Maria von Weber, a member of a long line of musicians.  At seventeen he had formed “a tender connection with a lady of position,” whom he lost sight of later and forgot in the race with fast young noblemen, whose dissipation he rivalled.  A mad entanglement with a singer ruined him in purse, and almost in career.  His frivolities ended in an arrest and punishment which sobered him with the abruptness of a plunge into a stream of ice.  But his gaiety was as irrepressible as Chopin’s melancholy, and he gave Germany some of its most cheerful music.  His heart was restless, and still at the age of twenty-seven he was writhing in an infatuation for a worthless ballet-girl.  Then his affection for a singer and soubrette, Caroline Brandt, steadied him.  After a long period of effort to establish a firm position they married, and the soubrette became a “Haus-frau.”  He was thirty-one, however, before this point was reached, and the honeymoon consisted of a concert tour.

The glory of his later life fought against the gloom of his disease, but the ferocious rake had made, as the proverb has it, an ideal husband and father.  His letters to his wife are full of ardour.  It was a tour through England that exhausted Chopin’s last strength, and it was Weber’s fate to die alone in London in the midst of eager preparations and vast hunger to reach his home.  He was not quite forty when he died, and his life had been two lives, one of unchecked libertinism, and the other all integrity of purpose.  But it was in the latter half that he wrote his best music.