He joined the national guard during the Kosciuszko revolution in 1794.  When business stagnated he was forced to teach in the family of the Leszynskis; Mary of that name, one of his pupils, being beloved by Napoleon I. became the mother of Count Walewski, a minister of the second French empire.  Drifting to Zelazowa-Wola, Nicholas Chopin lived in the house of the Countess Skarbek, acting as tutor to her son, Frederic.  There he made the acquaintance of Justina Krzyzanowska, born of “poor but noble parents.”  He married her in 1806 and she bore him four children:  three girls, and the boy Frederic Francois.

With a refined, scholarly French father, Polish in political sentiments, and an admirable Polish mother, patriotic to the extreme, Frederic grew to be an intelligent, vivacious, home-loving lad.  Never a hearty boy but never very delicate, he seemed to escape most of the disagreeable ills of childhood.  The moonstruck, pale, sentimental calf of many biographers, he never was.  Strong evidence exists that he was merry, pleasure-loving and fond of practical jokes.  While his father was never rich, the family after the removal to Warsaw lived at ease.  The country was prosperous and Chopin the elder became a professor in the Warsaw Lyceum.  His children were brought up in an atmosphere of charming simplicity, love and refinement.  The mother was an ideal mother, and, as George Sand declared, Chopin’s “only love.”  But, as we shall discover later, Lelia was ever jealous—­jealous even of Chopin’s past.  His sisters were gifted, gentle and disposed to pet him.  Niecks has killed all the pretty fairy tales of his poverty and suffering.

Strong common sense ruled the actions of Chopin’s parents, and when his love for music revealed itself at an early age they engaged a teacher named Adalbert Zwyny, a Bohemian who played the violin and taught piano.  Julius Fontana, one of the first friends of the boy—­he committed suicide in Paris, December 31, 1869,—­ says that at the age of twelve Chopin knew so much that he was left to himself with the usual good and ill results.  He first played on February 24, 1818, a concerto by Gyrowetz and was so pleased with his new collar that he naively told his mother, “Everybody was looking at my collar.”  His musical precocity, not as marked as Mozart’s, but phenomenal withal, brought him into intimacy with the Polish aristocracy and there his taste for fashionable society developed.  The Czartoryskis, Radziwills, Skarbeks, Potockis, Lubeckis and the Grand Duke Constantine with his Princess Lowicka made life pleasant for the talented boy.  Then came his lessons with Joseph Elsner in composition, lessons of great value.  Elsner saw the material he had to mould, and so deftly did he teach that his pupil’s individuality was never checked, never warped.  For Elsner Chopin entertained love and reverence; to him he wrote from Paris asking his advice in the matter of studying with Kalkbrenner, and this advice he took seriously.  “From Zwyny and Elsner even the greatest ass must learn something,” he is quoted as having said.