more significant, more impressive, more awful, than this throwing-off in death of the marks of care, hardship, vice, and disease—­the corruption of earthly life; than this return to the innocence, serenity, and loveliness of a first and better nature; than this foreshadowing of a higher and more perfect existence.  Chopin’s love of flowers was not forgotten by those who had cherished and admired him now when his soul and body were parted.  “The bed on which he lay,” relates Liszt, “the whole room, disappeared under their varied colours; he seemed to repose in a garden.”  It was a Polish custom, which is not quite obsolete even now, for the dying to choose for themselves the garments in which they wished to be dressed before being laid in the coffin (indeed, some people had their last habiliments prepared long before the approach of their end); and the pious, more especially of the female sex, affected conventual vestments, men generally preferring their official attire.  That Chopin chose for his grave-clothes his dress-suit, his official attire, in which he presented himself to his audiences in concert-hall and salon, cannot but be regarded as characteristic of the man, and is perhaps more significant than appears at first sight.  But I ought to have said, it would be if it were true that Chopin really expressed the wish.  M. Kwiatkowski informed me that this was not so.

For some weeks after, from the 18th October onwards, the French press occupied itself a good deal with the deceased musician.  There was not, I think, a single Paris paper of note which did not bring one or more long articles or short notes regretting the loss, describing the end, and estimating the man and artist.  But the phenomenal ignorance, exuberance of imagination, and audacity of statement, manifested by almost every one of the writers of these articles and notes are sufficient to destroy one’s faith in journalism completely and for ever.  Among the offenders were men of great celebrity, chief among them Theophile Gautier (Feuilleton de la Presse, November 5, 1849) and Jules Janin (Feuilleton du Journal des Debuts, October 22, 1849), the latter’s performance being absolutely appalling.  Indeed, if we must adjudge to French journalists the palm for gracefulness and sprightliness, we cannot withhold it from them for unconscientiousness.  Some of the inventions of journalism, I suspect, were subsequently accepted as facts, in some cases perhaps even assimilated as items of their experience, by the friends of the deceased, and finally found their way into authentic biography.  One of these myths is that Chopin expressed the wish that Mozart’s Requiem should be performed at his funeral.  Berlioz, one of the many journalists who wrote at the time to this effect, adds (Feuilleton du Journal des Debuts, October 27, 1849) that “His [Chopin’s] worthy pupil received this wish with his last sigh.”  Unfortunately for Berlioz and this pretty story, Gutmann told me that Chopin