The breach which had been very perceptibly widening became hopeless in 1847, when Sand and Chopin parted forever.  A literature has grown up on the subject.  Chopin never had much to say but Sand did; so did Chopin’s pupils, who were quite virulent in their assertions that she killed their master.  The break had to come.  It was the inevitable end of such a friendship.  The dynamics of free-love have yet to be formulated.  This much we know:  two such natures could never entirely cohere.  When the novelty wore off the stronger of the two—­the one least in love—­ took the initial step.  It was George Sand who took it with Chopin.  He would never have had the courage nor the will.

The final causes are not very interesting.  Niecks has sifted all the evidence before the court and jury of scandal-mongers.  The main quarrel was about the marriage of Solange Sand with Clesinger the sculptor.  Her mother did not oppose the match, but later she resented Clesinger’s actions.  He was coarse and violent, she said, with the true mother-in-law spirit—­and when Chopin received the young woman and her husband after a terrible scene at Nohant, she broke with him.  It was a good excuse.  He had ennuied her for several years, and as he had completed his artistic work on this planet and there was nothing more to be studied,—­the psychological portrait was supposedly painted—­ Madame George got rid of him.  The dark stories of maternal jealousy, of Chopin’s preference for Solange, the visit to Chopin of the concierge’s wife to complain of her mistress’ behavior with her husband, all these rakings I leave to others.  It was a triste affair and I do not doubt in the least that it undermined Chopin’s feeble health.  Why not!  Animals die of broken hearts, and this emotional product of Poland, deprived of affection, home and careful attention, may well, as De Lenz swears, have died of heart-break.  Recent gossip declares that Sand was jealous of Chopin’s friendships—­this is silly.

Mr. A. B. Walkley, the English dramatic critic, after declaring that he would rather have lived during the Balzac epoch in Paris, continues in this entertaining vein: 

And then one might have had a chance of seeing George Sand in the thick of her amorisms.  For my part I would certainly rather have met her than Pontius Pilate.  The people who saw her in her old age—­Flaubert, Gautier, the Goncourts—­have left us copious records of her odd appearance, her perpetual cigarette smoking, and her whimsical life at Nohant.  But then she was only an “extinct volcano;” she must have been much more interesting in full eruption.  Of her earlier career—­the period of Musset and Pagello—­she herself told us something in “Elle et Lui,” and correspondence published a year or so ago in the “Revue de Paris” told us more.  But, to my mind, the most fascinating chapter in this part of her history is the Chopin chapter, covering the next decade, or, roughly speaking,