mother of four children, three daughters and one son, the latter being no other than Frederick Chopin, the subject of this biography.  The position of Nicholas Chopin in the house of the Countess must have been a pleasant one, for ever after there seems to have existed a friendly relation between the two families.  His pupil, Count Frederick Skarbek, who prosecuted his studies at Warsaw and Paris, distinguished himself subsequently as a poet, man of science, professor at the University of Warsaw, state official, philanthropist, and many-sided author—­more especially as a politico—­economical writer.  When in his Memoirs the Count looks back on his youth, he remembers gratefully and with respect his tutor, speaking of him in highly appreciative terms.  In teaching, Nicholas Chopin’s chief aim was to form his pupils into useful, patriotic citizens; nothing was farther from his mind than the desire or unconscious tendency to turn them into Frenchmen.  And now approaches the time when the principal personage makes his appearance on the stage.

Frederick Chopin, the only son and the third of the four children of Nicholas and Justina Chopin, was born on February 22, 1810,

[Footnote:  See Preface, p. xii.  In the earlier editions the date given was March 1,1809, as in the biography by Karasowski, with whom agree the earlier J. Fontana (Preface to Chopin’s posthumous works.—­1855), C. Sowinski (Les musiciens polonais et slaves.—­ 1857), and the writer of the Chopin article in Mendel’s Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon (1872).  According to M. A. Szulc (Fryderyk Chopin.—­1873) and the inscription on the memorial (erected in 1880) in the Holy Cross Church at Warsaw, the composer was born on March 2, 1809.  The monument in Pere Lachaise, at Paris, bears the date of Chopin’s death, but not that of his birth.  Felis, in his Biographie universelle des musiciens, differs widely from these authorities.  The first edition (1835—­1844) has only the year—­1810; the second edition (1861—­1865) adds month and day—­February 8.]

in a mean little house at Zelazowa Wola, a village about twenty-eight English miles from Warsaw belonging to the Countess Skarbek.

[Footnote:  Count Wodzinski, after indicating the general features of Polish villages—­the dwor (manor-house) surrounded by a “bouquet of trees”; the barns and stables forming a square with a well in the centre; the roads planted with poplars and bordered with thatched huts; the rye, wheat, rape, and clover fields, &c.—­ describes the birthplace of Frederick Chopin as follows:  “I have seen there the same dwor embosomed in trees, the same outhouses, the same huts, the same plains where here and there a wild pear-tree throws its shadow.  Some steps from the mansion I stopped before a little cot with a slated roof, flanked by a little wooden perron.  Nothing has been changed for nearly a hundred years.  A dark passage traverses it.  On the left, in a room illuminated by the