of the Conservatoire, nay, even private pupils of Moscheles, Herz, and Kalkbrenner (consequently clever artists), still take lessons from me, and regard me as the equal of Field.  Really, if I were somewhat more silly than I am, I might imagine myself already a finished artist; nevertheless, I feel daily how much I have still to learn, and become the more conscious of it through my intercourse with the first artists here, and my perception of what every one, even of them, is lacking in.  But I am quite ashamed of myself for what I have written just now, having praised myself like a child.  I would erase it, but I have no time to write another letter.  Moreover, you will remember my character as it formerly was; indeed, I have remained quite the same, only with this one difference, that I have now whiskers on one side—­unfortunately they won’t grow at all on the other side.  To-day I have to give five lessons; you will imagine that I must soon have made a fortune, but the cabriolet and the white gloves eat the earnings almost up, and without these things people would deny my bon ton.  I love the Carlists, hate the Philippists, and am myself a revolutionist; therefore I don’t care for money, but only for friendship, for the preservation of which I earnestly entreat you.

This letter, and still more the letters which I shall presently transcribe, afford irrefragable evidence of the baselessness of the often-heard statement that Chopin’s intercourse was in the first years of his settlement in Paris confined to the Polish salons.  The simple unexaggerated truth is that Chopin had always a predilection for, and felt more at home among, his compatriots.

In the winter 1832-1833 Chopin was heard frequently in public.  At a concert of Killer’s (December 15, 1832) he performed with Liszt and the concert-giver a movement of Bach’s Concerto for three pianos, the three artists rendering the piece “avec une intelligence de son caractere et une delicatesse parfaite.”  Soon after Chopin and Liszt played between the acts of a dramatic performance got up for the benefit of Miss Smithson, the English actress and bankrupt manager, Berlioz’s flame, heroine of his “Episode de la vie d’un artiste,” and before long his wife.  On April 3, 1833, Chopin assisted at a concert given by the brothers Herz, taking part along with them and Liszt in a quartet for eight hands on two pianos.  M. Marmontel, in his silhouette of the pianist and critic Amedee de Mereaux, mentions that in 1832 this artist twice played with Chopin a duo of his own on “Le Pre aux Clercs,” but leaves us in uncertainty as to whether they performed it at public concerts or private parties.  M. Franchomme told me that he remembered something about a concert given by Chopin in 1833 at the house of one of his aristocratic friends, perhaps at Madame la Marechale de Lannes’s!  In summing up, as it were, Chopin’s activity as a virtuoso, I may make use of the words of the Paris correspondent of the “Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung,” who reports in April, 1833, that “Chopin and Osborne, as well as the other celebrated masters, delight the public frequently.”  In short, Chopin was becoming more and more of a favourite, not, however, of the democracy of large concert-halls, but of the aristocracy of select salons.