His room, taken by surprise, is all in darkness except the luminous ring thrown off by the candles on the piano, and the flashes flickering from the fireplace.  The guests gather around informally as the piano sighs, moans, murmurs, or dreams under the fingers of the player.  Hein-rich Heine, the most poetic of humorists, leans on the instrument, and asks, as he listens to the music and watches the firelight, “if the roses always glowed with a flame so triumphant? if the trees at moonlight sang always so harmoniously?” Meyerbeer, one of the musical giants, sits near at hand lost in reverie; for he forgets his own great harmonies, forged with hammer of Cyclops, listening to the dreamy passion and poetry woven into such quaint fabrics of sound.

Adolphe Nourrit, passionate and ascetic, with the spirit of some mediaeval monastic painter, an enthusiastic servant of art in its purest, severest form, a combination of poet and anchorite, is also there; for he loves the gentle musician, who seems to be a visitor from the world of spirits.  Eugene Delacroix, one of the greatest of modern painters, his keen eyes half closed in meditation, absorbs the vague mystery of color which imagination translates from the harmony, and attains new insight and inspiration through the bright links of suggestion by which one art lends itself to another.  The two great Polish poets, Nierncewicz and Mickiewicz (the latter the Dante of the Slavic race), exiles from their unhappy land, feed their sombre sorrow, and find in the wild, Oriental rhythms of the player only melancholy memories of the past.  Perhaps Victor Hugo, Balzac, Lamartine, or the aged Chateaubriand, also drop in by-and-by, to recognize, in the music, echoes of the daring romanticism which they opposed to the classic and formal pedantry of the time.

Buried in a fauteuil, with her arms resting upon a table, sits Mme. George Sand (that name so tragically mixed with Chopin’s life), “curiously attentive, gracefully subdued.”  With the second sight of genius, which pierces through the mask, she saw the sweetness, the passion, the delicate emotional sensibility of Chopin; and her insatiate nature must unravel and assimilate this new study in human enjoyment and suffering.  She had then just finished “Lelia,” that strange and powerful creation, in which she embodied all her hatred of the forms and tyrannies of society, her craving for an impossible social ideal, her tempestuous hopes and desires, in such startling types.  Exhausted by the struggle, she panted for the rest and luxury of a companionship in which both brain and heart could find sympathy.  She met Chopin, and she recognized in the poetry of his temperament and the fire of his genius what she desired.  Her personality, electric, energetic, and imperious, exercised the power of a magnet on the frail organization of Chopin, and he loved once and forever, with a passion that consumed him; for in Mme. Sand he found the blessing and curse of his life.  This many-sided woman, at this point of her development, found in the fragile Chopin one phase of her nature which had never been expressed, and he was sacrificed to the demands of an insatiable originality, which tried all things in turn, to be contented with nothing but an ideal which could never be attained.