was made into a bedroom for the illustrious guest, an adjoining bedroom being prepared for his servant Daniel, an Irish-Frenchman.  Unless the above refers to Chopin’s return to Scotland in September, after his visit to Manchester, Mrs. Lyschinski confuses her reminiscences a little, for, as the last-quoted letter proves, he tarried, on his first arrival, only one day in Edinburgh.  But the facts, even if not exactly grouped, are, no doubt, otherwise correctly remembered.  Chopin rose very late in the day, and in the morning had soup in his room.  His hair was curled daily by the servant, and his shirts, boots, and other things were of the neatest—­in fact, he was a petit-maitre, more vain in dress than any woman.  The maid-servants found themselves strictly excluded from his room, however indispensable their presence might seem to them in the interests of neatness and cleanliness.  Chopin was so weak that Dr. Lyschinski had always to carry him upstairs.  After dinner he sat before the fire, often shivering with cold.  Then all on a sudden he would cross the room, seat himself at the piano, and play himself warm.  He could bear neither dictation nor contradiction:  if you told him to go to the fire, he would go to the other end of the room where the piano stood.  Indeed, he was imperious.  He once asked Mrs. Lyschinski to sing.  She declined.  At this he was astonished and quite angry.  “Doctor, would you take it amiss if I were to force your wife to do it?” The idea of a woman refusing him anything seemed to him preposterous.  Mrs. Lyschinski says that Chopin was gallant to all ladies alike, but thinks that he had no heart.  She used to tease him about women, saying, for instance, that Miss Stirling was a particular friend of his.  He replied that he had no particular friends among the ladies, that he gave to all an equal share of his attention.  “Not even George Sand then,” she asked, “is a particular friend?” “Not even George Sand,” was the reply.  Had Mrs. Lyschinski known the real state of matters between Chopin and George Sand, she certainly would not have asked that question.  He, however, by no means always avoided the mention of his faithless love.  Speaking one day of his thinness he remarked that she used to call him mon cher cadavre.  Miss Stirling was much about Chopin.  I may mention by the way that Mrs. Lyschinski told me that Miss Stirling was much older than Chopin, and her love for him, although passionate, purely Platonic.  Princess Czartoryska arrived some time after Chopin, and accompanied him, my informant says, wherever he went.  But, as we see from one of his letters, her stay in Scotland was short.  The composer was always on the move.  Indeed, Dr. Lyschinski’s was hardly more than a pied-a-terre for him:  he never stayed long, and generally came unexpectedly.  A number of places where Chopin was a guest are mentioned in his letters.  Mrs. Lyschinski thinks that he also visited the Duke of Hamilton.

At the end of August and at the end of September and beginning of October, this idling was interrupted by serious work, and a kind of work which, at no time to his liking, was particularly irksome in the then state of his health.