As long as his sickness lasted, Madame Sand never left the pillow of him who loved her even to death, with an attachment which in losing all its joys, did not lose its intensity, which remained faithful to her even after all its memories had turned to pain:  “for it seemed as if this fragile being was absorbed and consumed by the strength of his affection....Others seek happiness in their attachments; when they no longer find it, the attachment gently vanishes.  In this they resemble the rest of the world.  But he loved for the sake of loving.  No amount of suffering was sufficient to discourage him.  He could enter upon a new phase, that of woe; but the phase of coldness he could never arrive at.  It would have been indeed a phase of physical agony—­for his love was his life—­and delicious or bitter, he had not the power of withdrawing himself a single moment from its domination.” [Footnote:  LUCRESIA FLORIANA] Madame Sand never ceased to be for Chopin that being of magic spells who had snatched him from the valley of the shadow of death, whose power had changed his physical agony into the delicious languor of love.  To save him from death, to bring him back to life, she struggled courageously with his disease.  She surrounded him with those divining and instinctive cares which are a thousand times more efficacious than the material remedies known to science.  While engaged in nursing him, she felt no fatigue, no weariness, no discouragement.  Neither her strength, nor her patience, yielded before the task.  Like the mothers in robust health, who appear to communicate a part of their own strength to the sickly infant who, constantly requiring their care, have also their preference, she nursed the precious charge into new life.  The disease yielded:  “the funereal oppression which secretly undermined the spirit of Chopin, destroying and corroding all contentment, gradually vanished.  He permitted the amiable character, the cheerful serenity of his friend to chase sad thoughts and mournful presentiments away, and to breathe new force into his intellectual being.”

Happiness succeeded to gloomy fears, like the gradual progression of a beautiful day after a night full of obscurity and terror, when so dense and heavy is the vault of darkness which weighs upon us from above, that we are prepared for a sudden and fatal catastrophe, we do not even dare to dream of deliverance, when the despairing eye suddenly catches a bright spot where the mists clear, and the clouds open like flocks of heavy wool yielding, even while the edges thicken under the pressure of the hand which rends them.  At this moment, the first ray of hope penetrates the soul.  We breathe more freely like those who lost in the windings of a dark cavern at last think they see a light, though indeed its existence is still doubtful.  This faint light is the day dawn, though so colorless are its rays, that it is more like the extinction of the dying twilight,—­the fall of the night-shroud upon the earth.  But it is