and later she married a gentleman by the name of Orpiszewski.  Count Wodzinski wrote “Les Trois Romans de Frederic Chopin,” in which he asserts that his sister rejected Chopin at Marienbad in 1836.  But Chopin survived the shock.  He went back to Paris, and in July 1837, accompanied by Camille Pleyel and Stanislas Kozmian, visited England for the first time.  His stay was short, only eleven days, and his chest trouble dates from this time.  He played at the house of James Broadwood, the piano manufacturer, being introduced by Pleyel as M. Fritz; but his performance betrayed his identity.  His music was already admired by amateurs but the critics with a few exceptions were unfavorable to him.

Now sounds for the first time the sinister motif of the George Sand affair.  In deference to Mr. Hadow I shall not call it a liaison.  It was not, in the vulgar sense.  Chopin might have been petty—­a common failing of artistic men—­but he was never vulgar in word or deed.  He disliked “the woman with the sombre eye” before he had met her.  Her reputation was not good, no matter if George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others believed her an injured saint.  Mr. Hadow indignantly repudiates anything that savors of irregularity in the relations of Chopin and Aurore Dudevant.  If he honestly believes that their contemporaries flagrantly lied and that the woman’s words are to be credited, why by all means let us leave the critic in his Utopia.  Mary, Queen of Scots, has her Meline; why should not Sand boast of at least one apologist for her life—­besides herself?  I do not say this with cynical intent.  Nor do I propose to discuss the details of the affair which has been dwelt upon ad nauseam by every twanger of the romantic string.  The idealists will always see a union of souls, the realists—­and there were plenty of them in Paris taking notes from 1837 to 1847—­view the alliance as a matter for gossip.  The truth lies midway.

Chopin, a neurotic being, met the polyandrous Sand, a trampler on all the social and ethical conventions, albeit a woman of great gifts; repelled at first he gave way before the ardent passion she manifested toward him.  She was his elder, so could veil the situation with the maternal mask, and she was the stronger intellect, more celebrated—­Chopin was but a pianist in the eyes of the many—­and so won by her magnetism the man she desired.  Paris, artistic Paris, was full of such situations.  Liszt protected the Countess d’Agoult, who bore him children, Cosima Von Bulow-Wagner among the rest.  Balzac—­Balzac, that magnificent combination of Bonaparte and Byron, pirate and poet—­was apparently leading the life of a saint, but his most careful student, Viscount Spelboerch de Lovenjoul—­whose name is veritably Balzac-ian—­tells us some different stories; even Gustave Flaubert, the ascetic giant of Rouen, had a romance with Madame Louise Colet, a mediocre writer and imitator of Sand,—­as was Countess d’Agoult, the Frankfort Jewess better