the meeting came about in this way.  George Sand, whose curiosity had been excited both by the Polish musician’s compositions and by the accounts she had heard of him, expressed to Liszt the wish to make the acquaintance of his friend.  Liszt thereupon spoke about her to Chopin, but the latter was averse to having any intercourse with her.  He said he did not like literary women, and was not made for their society; it was different with his friend, who there found himself in his element.  George Sand, however, did not cease to remind Liszt of his promise to introduce her to Chopin.  One morning in the early part of 1837 Liszt called on his friend and brother-artist, and found him in high spirits on account of some compositions he had lately finished.  As Chopin was anxious to play them to his friends, it was arranged to have in the evening a little party at his rooms.

This seemed to Liszt an excellent opportunity to redeem the promise which he had given George Sand when she asked for an introduction; and, without telling Chopin what he was going to do, he brought her with him along with the Comtesse d’Agoult.  The success of the soiree was such that it was soon followed by a second and many more.

In the foregoing accounts the reader will find contradictions enough to exercise his ingenuity upon.  But the involuntary tricks of memory and the voluntary ones of imagination make always such terrible havoc of facts that truth, be it ever so much sought and cared for, appears in history and biography only in a more or less disfigured condition.  George Sand’s own allusion to the commencement of the acquaintance agrees best with Liszt’s account.  After passing in the latter part of 1836 some months in Switzerland with Liszt and the Comtesse d’Agoult, she meets them again at Paris in the December of the same year:—­

At the Hotel de France, where Madame d’Agoult had persuaded me to take quarters near her, the conditions of existence were charming for a few days.  She received many litterateurs, artists, and some clever men of fashion.  It was at Madame d’Agoult’s, or through her, that I made the acquaintance of Eugene Sue, Baron d’Eckstein, Chopin, Mickiewicz, Nourrit, Victor Schoelcher, &c.  My friends became also hers.  Through me she got acquainted with M. Lamennais, Pierre-Leroux, Henri Heine, &c.  Her salon, improvised in an inn, was therefore a reunion d’elite over which she presided with exquisite grace, and where she found herself the equal of all the eminent specialists by reason of the extent of her mind and the variety of her faculties, which were at once poetic and serious.  Admirable music was performed there, and in the intervals one could instruct one’s self by listening to the conversation.

To reconcile Liszt’s account with George Sand’s remark that Chopin was one of those whose acquaintance she made at Madame d’Agoult’s or through her, we have only to remember the intimate relation in which Liszt stood to this lady (subsequently known in literature under the nom de plume of Daniel Stern), who had left her husband, the Comte d’Agoult, in 1835.