[To the Comtesse d’Agoult.] Nobody has permitted himself to breathe the air of your room since you left it.  Arrangements will be made to put up all those you may bring with you.  I count on the maestro, on Chopin, on the Rat, [footnote:  Liszt’s pupil, Hermann Cohen.] if he does not weary you too much, and all the others at your choice.

Chopin’s love for George Sand was not instantaneous like that of Romeo for Juliet.  Karasowski remembers having read in one of those letters of the composer which perished in 1863:  “Yesterday I met George Sand...; she made a very disagreeable impression upon me.”  Hiller in his Open Letter to Franz Liszt writes:—­

One evening you had assembled in your apartments the aristocracy of the French literary world—­George Sand was of course one of the company.  On the way home Chopin said to me “What a repellent [antipathische] woman the Sand is!  But is she really a woman?  I am inclined to doubt it.”

Liszt, in discussing this matter with me, spoke only of Chopin’s “reserve” towards George Sand, but said nothing of his “aversion” to her.  And according to this authority the novelist’s extraordinary mind and attractive conversation soon overcame the musician’s reserve.  Alfred de Musset’s experience had been of a similar nature.  George Sand did not particularly please him at first, but a few visits which he paid her sufficed to inflame his heart with a violent passion.  The liaisons of the poet and musician with the novelist offer other points of resemblance besides the one just mentioned:  both Musset and Chopin were younger than George Sand—­the one six, the other five years; and both, notwithstanding the dissimilarity of their characters, occupied the position of a weaker half.  In the case of Chopin I am reminded of a saying of Sydney Smith, who, in speaking of his friends the historian Grote and his wife, remarked:  “I do like them both so much, for he is so lady-like, and she is such a perfect gentleman.”  Indeed, Chopin was described to me by his pupil Gutmann as feminine in looks, gestures, and taste; as to George Sand, although many may be unwilling to admit her perfect gentlemanliness, no one can doubt her manliness:—­

Dark and olive-complexioned Lelia! [writes Liszt] thou hast walked in solitary places, sombre as Lara, distracted as Manfred, rebellious as Cain, but more fierce [farouche], more pitiless, more inconsolable than they, because thou hast found among the hearts of men none feminine enough to love thee as they have been loved, to pay to thy virile charms the tribute of a confiding and blind submission, of a silent and ardent devotion, to suffer his allegiance to be protected by thy Amazonian strength!

The enthusiasm with which the Poles of her acquaintance spoke of their countrywomen, and the amorous suavity, fulness of feeling, and spotless nobleness which she admired in the Polish composer’s inspirations,