Nothing could exceed the misery of all classes.  The army was not paid, the officers were in rags, the best houses were in ruins, the greatest lords were compelled to leave Warsaw from want of money to provide for their tables.  No pleasures, no society, no invitations as in Paris and in London.  I even saw princesses quit Warsaw from the most extreme distress.  The Princess Radziwill had brought two women from England and France, she wished to send them back, but had to keep them because she was unable to pay their salaries and travelling expenses.  I saw in Warsaw two French physicians who informed me that they could not procure their fees even from the greatest lords.

But whatever straits the parents may have been put to, the weak, helpless infant would lack none of the necessaries of life, and enjoy all the reasonable comforts of his age.

When in 1815 peace was restored and a period of quiet followed, the family must have lived in easy circumstances; for besides holding appointments as professor at some public schools (under the Russian government he became also one of the staff of teachers at the Military Preparatory School), Nicholas Chopin kept for a number of years a boarding-school, which was patronised by the best families of the country.  The supposed poverty of Chopin’s parents has given rise to all sorts of misconceptions and misstatements.  A writer in Larousse’s “Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siecle” even builds on it a theory explanatory of the character of Chopin and his music:  “Sa famille d’origine francaise,” he writes, “jouissait d’une mediocre fortune; de la, peut-etre, certains froissements dans l’organisation nerveuse et la vive sensibilite de l’enfant, sentiments qui devaient plus tard se refleter dans ses oeuvres, empreintes generalement d’une profonde melancolie.”  If the writer of the article in question had gone a little farther back, he might have found a sounder basis for his theory in the extremely delicate physical organisation of the man, whose sensitiveness was so acute that in early infancy he could not hear music without crying, and resisted almost all attempts at appeasing him.

The last-mentioned fact, curious and really noteworthy in itself, acquires a certain preciousness by its being the only one transmitted to us of that period of Chopin’s existence.  But this scantiness of information need not cause us much regret.  During the first years of a man’s life biography is chiefly concerned with his surroundings, with the agencies that train his faculties and mould his character.  A man’s acts and opinions are interesting in proportion to the degree of consolidation attained by his individuality.  Fortunately our material is abundant enough to enable us to reconstruct in some measure the milieu into which Chopin was born and in which he grew up.  We will begin with that first circle which surrounds the child—­his family.  The negative advantages which our Frederick