The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness. 
  He had enough of his own ills to bear.

  We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once,
  which, alas! was the first and the last time.

But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace, obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured the asperities of his character towards those who were about me.  With them the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice versa.

  Chopin when angry was alarming, and as, with me, he always
  restrained himself, he seemed almost to choke and die.

The following extracts from Liszt’s book partly corroborate, partly supplement, the foregoing evidence:—­

His imagination was ardent, his feelings rose to violence,—­ his physical organisation was feeble and sickly!  Who can sound the sufferings proceeding from this contrast?  They must have been poignant, but he never let them be seen.

  The delicacy of his constitution and of his heart, in imposing
  upon him the feminine martyrdom of for ever unavowed tortures,
  gave to his destiny some of the traits of feminine destinies.

He did not exercise a decisive influence on any existence.  His passion never encroached upon any of his desires; he neither pressed close nor bore down [n’a etreint ni masse] any mind by the domination of his own.

However rarely, there were nevertheless instances when we surprised him profoundly moved.  We have seen him turn pale [palir et blemir] to such a degree as to assume green and cadaverous tints.  But in his intensest emotions he remained concentrated.  He was then, as usually, chary of words about what he felt; a minute’s reflection [recueillement] always hid the secret of his first impression...This constant control over the violence of his character reminded one of the melancholy superiority of certain women who seek their strength in reticence and isolation, knowing the uselessness of the explosions of their anger, and having a too jealous care of the mystery of their passion to betray it gratuitously.

Chopin, however, did not always control his temper.  Heller remembers seeing him more than once in a passion, and hearing him speak very harshly to Nowakowski.  The following story, which Lenz relates in “Die grossen Pianoforte-Virtuosen unserer Zeit,” is also to the point.

On one occasion Meyerbeer, whom I had not yet seen, entered Chopin’s room when I was getting a lesson.  Meyerbeer was not announced, he was king.  I was playing the Mazurka in C (Op. 33), printed on one page which contains so many hundreds—­I called it the epitaph of the idea [Grabschrift des Begriffs], so full of distress and sadness is the composition, the wearied flight of an eagle.

  Meyerbeer had taken a seat, Chopin made me go on.