Hiller embraces you, Maurice, and everybody.  I have delivered
   your note to his brother, whom I did not find at home.

Paer, whom I saw a few days ago, spoke to me of your return.  Come back to us stout and in good health like me.  Again a thousand messages to the estimable Forest family.  I have neither words nor powers to express all I feel for them.  Excuse me.  Shake hands with me—­I pat you on the shoulder—­I hug you—­I embrace you.  My friend—­au revoir.

   Hoffmann, the stout Hoffmann, and the slim Smitkowski also,
   embrace you.

[Footnote:  The orthography of the French original is very careless.  Thus one finds frequent omissions and misplacements of accents and numerous misspellings, such as trouvais instead of trouve, engresse instead of engraisse, plonge instead of plonger.  Of course, these mistakes have to be ascribed to negligence not to ignorance.  I must mention yet another point which the English translation does not bring out—­namely, that in addressing Franchomme Chopin makes use of the familiar form of the second person singular.]

The last-quoted letter adds a few more touches to the portraiture of Chopin which has been in progress in the preceding pages.  The insinuating affectionateness and winning playfulness had hitherto not been brought out so distinctly.  There was then, and there remained to the end of his life, something of a woman and of a boy in this man.  The sentimental element is almost wholly absent from Chopin’s letters to his non-Polish friends.  Even to Franchomme, the most intimate among these, he shows not only less of his inmost feelings and thoughts than to Titus Woyciechowski and John Matuszyriski, the friends of his youth, but also less than to others of his countrymen whose acquaintance he made later in life, and of whom Grzymala may be instanced.  Ready to give everything, says Liszt, Chopin did not give himself—­

his most intimate acquaintances did not penetrate into the sacred recess where, apart from the rest of his life, dwelt the secret spring of his soul:  a recess so well concealed that one hardly suspected its existence.

Indeed, you could as little get hold of Chopin as, to use L. Enault’s expression, of the scaly back of a siren.  Only after reading his letters to the few confidants to whom he freely gave his whole self do we know how little of himself he gave to the generality of his friends, whom he pays off with affectionateness and playfulness, and who, perhaps, never suspected, or only suspected, what lay beneath that smooth surface.  This kind of reserve is a feature of the Slavonic character, which in Chopin’s individuality was unusually developed.

The Slavonians [says Enault pithily] lend themselves, they do not give themselves; and, as if Chopin had wished to make his country-men pardon him the French origin of his family, he showed himself more Polish than Poland.

Liszt makes some very interesting remarks on this point, and as they throw much light on the character of the race, and on that of the individual with whom we are especially concerned in this book, I shall quote them:—­