As a matter of fact, there was nothing disagreeable about this portrait.  The following fragments are taken from it:  “Gentle, sensitive, exquisite in all things, at the age of fifteen he had all the charms of youth, together with the gravity of a riper age.  He remained delicate in body ind mind.  The lack of muscular development caused him to preserve his fascinating beauty. . . .  He was something like one of those ideal creatures which mediaeval poetry used for the ornamentation of Christian temples.  Nothing could have been purer and at the same time more enthusiastic than his ideas. . . .  He was always lost in his dreams, and had no sense of reality. . . .”  His exquisite politeness was then described, and the ultra acuteness and nervosity which resulted in that power of divination which he possessed.  For a portrait to be living, it must have some faults as well as qualities.  His delineator does not forget to mention the attitude of mystery in which the Prince took refuge whenever his feelings were hurt.  She speaks also of his intense susceptibility.  “His wit was very brilliant,” she says; “it consisted of a kind of subtle mocking shrewdness, not really playful, but a sort of delicate, bantering gaiety.”  It may have been to the glory of Prince Karol to resemble Chopin, but it was also quite creditable to Chopin to have been the model from which this distinguished neurasthenic individual was taken.

Prince Karol meets a certain Lucrezia Floriani, a rich actress and courtesan.  She is six years older than he is, somewhat past her prime, and now leading a quiet life.  She has done with love and love affairs, or, at least, she thinks so.  “The fifteen years of passion and torture, which she had gone through, seemed to her now so cruel that she was hoping to have them counted double by the supreme Dispenser of our trials.”  It was, of course, natural that she should acknowledge God’s share in the matter.  We are told that “implacable destiny was not satisfied,” so that when Karol makes his first declaration, Lucrezia yields to him, but at the same time she puts a suitable colouring on her fall.  There are many ways of loving, and it is surely noble and disinterested in a woman to love a man as his mother.  “I shall love him,” she says, kissing the young Prince’s pale face ardently, “but it will be as his mother loved him, just as fervently and just as faithfully.  This maternal affection, etc. . . .”  Lucrezia Floriani had a way of introducing the maternal instinct everywhere.  She undertook to encircle her children and Prince Karol with the same affection, and her notions of therapeutics were certainly somewhat strange and venturesome, for she fetched her children to the Prince’s bedside.  “Karol breathed more freely,” we are told, “when the children were there.  Their pure breath mingling with their mother’s made the air milder and more gentle for his feverish lungs.”  This we shall not attempt to dispute.  It is the study of the situation, though, that forms the subject of Lucrezia Floriani.  George Sand gives evidence of wonderful clear-sightedness and penetration in the art of knowing herself.