The disorder of the letters is indeed very striking; it is great in the foregoing extracts, and of course ten times greater with the interspersed descriptions, bits of news, and criticisms on music and musicians.  I preferred separating the fundamental and always-recurring thoughts, the all-absorbing and predominating feelings, from the more superficial and passing fancies and affections, and all those matters which were to him, if not of total indifference, at least of comparatively little moment; because such a separation enables us to gain a clearer and fuller view of the inner man and to judge henceforth his actions and works with some degree of certainty, even where his own accounts and comments and those of trustworthy witnesses fail us.  The psychological student need not be told to take note of the disorder in these two letters and of their length (written to the same person within less than a week, they fill nearly twelve printed pages in Karasowski’s book), he will not be found neglecting such important indications of the temporary mood and the character of which it is a manifestation.  And now let us take a glance at Chopin’s outward life in Vienna.

I have already stated that Chopin and Woyciechowski lived together.  Their lodgings, for which they had to pay their landlady, a baroness, fifty florins, were on the third story of a house in the Kohlmarkt, and consisted of three elegant rooms.  When his friend left, Chopin thought the rent too high for his purse, and as an English family was willing to pay as much as eighty florins, he sublet the rooms and removed to the fourth story, where he found in the Baroness von Lachmanowicz an agreeable young landlady, and had equally roomy apartments which cost him only twenty florins and pleased him quite well.  The house was favourably situated, Mechetti being on the right, Artaria on the left, and the opera behind; and as people were not deterred by the high stairs from visiting him, not even old Count Hussarzewski, and a good profit would accrue to him from those eighty florins, he could afford to laugh at theprobable dismay of his friends picturing him as “a poor devil living in a garret,” and could do so the more heartily as there was in reality another story between him and the roof.  He gives his people a very pretty description of his lodgings and mode of life:—­

I live on the fourth story, in a fine street, but I have to strain my eyes in looking out of the window when I wish to see what is going on beneath.  You will find my room in my new album when I am at home again.  Young Hummel [a son of the composer] is so kind as to draw it for me.  It is large and has five windows; the bed is opposite to them.  My wonderful piano stands on the right, the sofa on the left; between the windows there is a mirror, in the middle of the room a fine, large, round mahogany table; the floor is polished.  Hush!  “The gentleman does not receive visitors in the afternoon”—­ hence