But to whatever extent, or whether to any extent at all, this or any similar soiree may have served Chopin as a favourable introduction to a wider circle of admirers and patrons, and as a stepping-stone to success, his indebtedness to his countrymen, who from the very first befriended and encouraged him, ought not to be forgotten or passed over in silence for the sake of giving point to a pretty anecdote.  The great majority of the Polish refugees then living in Paris would of course rather require than be able to afford help and furtherance, but there was also a not inconsiderable minority of persons of noble birth and great wealth whose patronage and influence could not but be of immense advantage to a struggling artist.  According to Liszt, Chopin was on intimate terms with the inmates of the Hotel Lambert, where old Prince Adam Czartoryski and his wife and daughter gathered around them “les debris de la Pologne que la derniere guerre avait jetes au loin.”  Of the family of Count Plater and other compatriots with whom the composer had friendly intercourse we shall speak farther on.  Chopin’s friends were not remiss in exerting themselves to procure him pupils and good fees at the same time.  They told all inquirers that he gave no lesson for less than twenty francs, although he had expressed his willingness to be at first satisfied with more modest terms.  Chopin had neither to wait in vain nor to wait long, for in about a year’s time he could boast of a goodly number of pupils.

The reader must have noticed with surprise the absence of any mention of the “Ideal” from Chopin’s letters to his friend Titus Woyciechowski, to whom the love-sick artist was wont to write so voluminously on this theme.  How is this strange silence to be accounted for?  Surely this passionate lover could not have forgotten her beneath whose feet he wished his ashes to be spread after his death?  But perhaps in the end of 1831 he had already learnt what was going to happen in the following year.  The sad fact has to be told:  inconstant Constantia Gladkowska married a merchant of the name of Joseph Grabowski, at Warsaw, in 1832; this at least is the information given in Sowinski’s biographical dictionary Les musiciens polonais et slaves.[Footnote:  According to Count Wodzinski she married a country gentleman, and subsequently became blind.] As the circumstances of the case and the motives of the parties are unknown to me, and as a biographer ought not to take the same liberties as a novelist, I shall neither expatiate on the fickleness and mercenariness of woman, nor attempt to describe the feelings of our unfortunate hero robbed of his ideal, but leave the reader to make his own reflections and draw his own moral.

On August 2, 1832, Chopin wrote a letter to Hiller, who had gone in the spring of the year to Germany.  What the young Pole thought of this German brother-artist may be gathered from some remarks of his in the letter to Titus Woyciechowski dated December 16, 1831:—­