Towards the Spring of 1847, as his health grew more precarious from day to day, he was attacked by an illness from which it was thought he could never recover.  He was saved for the last time; but this epoch was marked by an event so agonizing to his heart that he immediately called it mortal.  Indeed, he did not long survive the rupture of his friendship with Madame Sand, which took place at this date.  Madame de Stael, who, in spite of her generous and impassioned heart, her subtle and vivid intellect, fell sometimes into the fault of making her sentences heavy through a species of pedantry which robbed them of the grace of “abandon,”—­remarked on one of those occasions when the strength of her feelings made her forget the solemnity of her Genevese stiffness:  “In affection, there are only beginnings!”

This exclamation was based upon the bitter experience of the insufficiency of the human heart to accomplish the beautiful and blissful dreams of the imagination.  Ah! if some blessed examples of human devotion did not sometimes occur to contradict the melancholy words of Madame de Stael, which so many illustrious as well as obscure facts seem to prove, our suspicions might lead us to be guilty of much ingratitude and want of trust; we might be led to doubt the sincerity of the hearts which surround us, and see but the allegorical symbols of human affections in the antique train of the beautiful Canephoroe, who carried the fragile and perfumed flowers to adorn some hapless victim for the altar!

Chopin spoke frequently and almost by preference of Madame Sand, without bitterness or recrimination.  Tears always filled his eyes when he named her; but with a kind of bitter sweetness he gave himself up to the memories of past days, alas, now.  He stripped of their manifold significance!  In spite of the many subterfuges employed by his friends to entice him from dwelling upon remembrances which always brought dangerous excitement with them, he loved to return to them; as if through the same feelings which had once reanimated his life, he now wished to destroy it, sedulously stifling its powers through the vapor of this subtle poison.  His last pleasure seemed to be the memory of the blasting of his last hope; he treasured the bitter knowledge that under this fatal spell his life was ebbing fast away.  All attempts to fix his attention upon other objects were made in vain, he refused to be comforted and would constantly speak of the one engrossing subject.  Even if he had ceased to speak of it, would he not always have thought of it?  He seemed to inhale the poison rapidly and eagerly, that he might thus shorten the time in which he would be forced to breathe it!