“He was externally so affectionate, his education had been so finished, and he possessed so much natural grace, that he had the gift of pleasing even where he was not personally known.  His exceeding loveliness was immediately prepossessing, the delicacy of his constitution rendered him interesting in the eyes of women, the full yet graceful cultivation of his mind, the sweet and captivating originality of his conversation, gained for him the attention of the most enlightened men.  Men less highly cultivated, liked him for his exquisite courtesy of manner.  They were so much the more pleased with this, because, in their simplicity, they never imagined it was the graceful fulfillment of a duty into which no real sympathy entered.

“Could such people have divined the secrets of his mystic character, they would have said he was more amiable than loving—­ and with respect to them, this would have been true.  But how could they have known that his real, though rare attachments, were so vivid, so profound, so undying?...

“Association with him in the details of life was delightful.  He filled all the forms of friendship with an unaccustomed charm, and when he expressed his gratitude, it was with that deep emotion which recompenses kindness with usury.  He willingly imagined that he felt himself every day dying; he accepted the cares of a friend, hiding from him, lest it should render him unhappy, the little time he expected to profit by them.  He possessed great physical courage, and if he did not accept with the heroic recklessness of youth the idea of approaching death, at least he cherished the expectation of it with a kind of bitter pleasure."...

The attachment which he felt for a young lady, who never ceased to feel a reverential homage for him, may be traced back to his early youth.  The tempest which in one of its sudden gusts tore Chopin from his native soil, like a bird dreamy and abstracted surprised by the storm upon the branches of a foreign tree, sundered the ties of this first love, and robbed the exile of a faithful and devoted wife, as well as disinherited him of a country.  He never found the realization of that happiness of which he had once dreamed with her, though he won the glory of which perhaps he had never thought.  Like the Madonnas of Luini whose looks are so full of earnest tenderness, this young girl was sweet and beautiful.  She lived on calm, but sad.  No doubt the sadness increased in that pure soul when she knew that no devotion tender as her own, ever came to sweeten the existence of one whom she had adored with that ingenuous submission, that exclusive devotion, that entire self-forgetfulness, naive and sublime, which transform the woman into the angel.