It had been the passionate hope of Chopin to marry Mme. Sand, but wedlock was alien alike to her philosophy and preference.  After a protracted intimacy, she wearied of his persistent entreaties, or perhaps her self-development had exhausted what it sought in the poet-musician.  An absolute separation came, and his mistress buried the episode in her life with the epitaph:  “Two natures, one rich in its exuberance, the other in its exclusiveness, could never really mingle, and a whole world separated them.”  Chopin said:  “All the cords that bind me to life are broken.”  His sad summary of all was that his life had been an episode which began and ended in Paris.  What a contrast to the being of a few years before, of whom it is written:  “He was no longer on the earth; he was in an empyrean of golden clouds and perfumes; his imagination, so full of exquisite beauty, seemed engaged in a monologue with God himself!"*

     * “Lucrezia Floriani.”

Both Liszt and Mme. Dudevant have painted Chopin somewhat as a sickly sentimentalist, living in an atmosphere of moonshine and unreality.  Yet this was not precisely true.  In spite of his delicacy of frame and romantic imagination, Chopin was never ill till within the last ten years of his life, when the seeds of hereditary consumption developed themselves.  As a young man he was lively and joyous, always ready for frolic, and with a great fund of humor, especially in caricature.  Students of human character know how consistent these traits are with a deep undercurrent of melancholy, which colors the whole life when the immediate impulse of joy subsides.

From the date of 1840 Chopin’s health declined; but through the seven years during which his connection with Mme. Sand continued, he persevered actively in his work of composition.  The final rupture with the woman he so madly loved seems to have been his death-blow.  He spoke of Mme. Sand without bitterness, but his soul pined in the bitter-sweet of memory.  He recovered partially, and spent a short season of concert-giving in London, where he was feted and caressed by the best society as he had been in Paris.  Again he was sharply assailed by his fatal malady, and he returned to Paris to die.  Let us describe one of his last earthly experiences, on Sunday, the 15th of October, 1849.

Chopin had lain insensible from one of his swooning attacks for some time.  His sister Louise was by his side, and the Countess Delphine Potocka, his beautiful countrywoman and a most devoted friend, watched him with streaming eyes.  The dying musician became conscious, and faintly ordered a piano to be rolled in from the adjoining room.  He turned to the countess, and whispered, feebly, “Sing.”  She had a lovely voice, and, gathering herself for the effort, she sang that famous canticle to the Virgin which, tradition says, saved Stradella’s life from assassins.  “How beautiful it is!” he exclaimed.  “My God! how very beautiful!” Again she sang to him, and the dying musician passed into a trance, from which he never fully aroused till he expired, two days afterward, in the arms of his pupil, M. Gutman.