(25) As regards Chopin, I have consulted a biography by Liszt, a study by M. Camille Bellaigue and the volume by M. Elie Poiree in the Collection des musiciens celebres, published by H. Laurens.

He confessed to Liszt that a crowd intimidated him, that he felt suffocated by all the quick breathing and paralyzed by the inquisitive eyes turned on him.  “You were intended for all this,” he adds, “as, if you do not win over your public, you can at least overwhelm it.”

Chopin was made much of then in society.  He was fragile and delicate, and had always been watched over and cared for.  He had grown up in a peaceful, united family, in one of those simple homes in which all the details of everyday life become less prosaic, thanks to an innate distinction of sentiment and to religious habits.  Prince Radziwill had watched over Chopin’s education.  He had been received when quite young in the most aristocratic circles, and “the most celebrated beauties had smiled on him as a youth.”  Social life, then, and feminine influence had thus helped to make him ultra refined.  It was very evident to every one who met him that he was a well-bred man, and this is quickly observed, even with pianists.  On arriving he made a good impression, he was well dressed, his white gloves were immaculate.  He was reserved and somewhat languid.  Every one knew that he was delicate, and there was a rumour of an unhappy love affair.  It was said that he had been in love with a girl, and that her family had refused to consent to her marriage with him.  People said he was like his own music, the dreamy, melancholy themes seemed to accord so well with the pale young face of the composer.  The fascination of the languor which seemed to emanate from the man and from his work worked its way, in a subtle manner, into the hearts of his hearers.  Chopin did not care to know Lelia.  He did not like women writers, and he was rather alarmed at this one.  It was Liszt who introduced them.  In his biography of Chopin, he tells us that the extremely sensitive artist, who was so easily alarmed, dreaded “this woman above all women, as, like a priestess of Delphi, she said so many things that the others could not have said.  He avoided her and postponed the introduction.  Madame Sand had no idea that she was feared as a sylph. . . .”  She made the first advances.  It is easy to see what charmed her in him.  In the first place, he appealed to her as he did to all women, and then, too, there was the absolute contrast of their two opposite natures.  She was all force, of an expansive, exuberant nature.  He was very discreet, reserved and mysterious.  It seems that the Polish characteristic is to lend oneself, but never to give oneself away, and one of Chopin’s friends said of him that he was “more Polish than Poland itself.”  Such a contrast may prove a strong attraction, and then, too, George Sand was very sensitive to the charm of music.  But what she saw above all in Chopin was the typical artist, just as she understood the artist, a dreamer, lost in the clouds, incapable of any activity that was practical, a “lover of the impossible.”  And then, too, he was ill.  When Musset left Venice, after all the atrocious nights she had spent at his bedside, she wrote:  “Whom shall I have now to look after and tend?” In Chopin she found some one to tend.