We must give George Sand credit for looking after him with admirable devotion.  She certainly went on nursing her “invalid,” or her “dear skeleton,” as she called him, but her infatuation had been over for a long time.  The absolute contrast of two natures may be attractive at first, but the attraction does not last, and, when the first enthusiasm is over, the logical consequence is that they become disunited.  This was what Liszt said in rather an odd but energetic way.  He points out all that there was “intolerably incompatible, diametrically opposite and secretly antipathetic between two natures which seemed to have been mutually drawn to each other by a sudden and superficial attraction, for the sake of repulsing each other later on with all the force of inexpressible sorrow and boredom.”  Illness had embittered Chopin’s character.  George Sand used to say that “when he was angry he was terrifying.”  He was very intelligent, too, and delighted in quizzing people for whom he did not care.  Solange and Maurice were now older, and this made the situation somewhat delicate.  Chopin, too, had a mania for meddling with family matters.  He quarrelled one day with Maurice.  Another day George Sand was annoyed with her son-in-law Clesinger and with her daughter Solange, and Chopin took their side.  This was the cause of their quarrel; it was the last drop that made the cup of bitterness overflow.

The following is a fragment of a letter which George Sand sent to Grzymala, in 1847:  “For seven years I have lived with him as a virgin.  If any woman on earth could inspire him with absolute confidence, I am certainly that woman, but he has never understood.  I know, too, that many people accuse me of having worn him out with my violent sensuality, and others accuse me of having driven him to despair by my freaks.  I believe you know how much truth there is in all this.  He himself complains to me that I am killing him by the privations I insist upon, and I feel certain that I should kill him by acting otherwise."(29)

     (29) Communicated by M. Rocheblave.

It has been said that when Chopin was at Nohant he had a village girl there as his mistress.  We do not care to discuss the truth of this statement.

It is interesting to endeavour to characterize the nature of this episode in George Sand’s sentimental life.  She helps us herself in this.  As a romantic writer she neglected nothing which she could turn into literature.  She therefore made an analysis of her own case, worked out with the utmost care, and published it in one of her books which is little read now.  The year of the rupture was 1847, and before the rupture had really occurred, George Sand brought out a novel entitled Lucrezia Floriani.  In this book she traces the portrait of Chopin as Prince Karol.  She denied, of course, that it was a portrait, but contemporaries were not to be deceived, and Liszt gives several passages from Lucrezia Floriani in his biography of the musician.  The decisive proof was that Chopin recognized himself, and that he was greatly annoyed.