At the Elevation of the Host were heard the melancholy tones of the organ.  It was M. Chopin, the celebrated pianist, who came to place a souvenir on the coffin of Nourrit; and what a souvenir! a simple melody of Schubert, but the same which had so filled us with enthusiasm when Nourrit revealed it to us at Marseilles—­the melody of Les Astres. [Footnote:  Die gestirne is the original German title of this song.]

A less colourless account, one full of interesting facts and free from conventional newspaper sentiment and enthusiasm, we find in a letter of Chopin’s companion.

Madame Sand to Madame Marliani; Marseilles, April 28, 1839:—­

The day before yesterday I saw Madame Nourrit with her six children, and the seventh coming shortly...Poor unfortunate woman! what a return to France! accompanying this corpse, and she herself super-intending the packing, transporting, and unpacking [charger, voiturer, deballer] of it like a parcel!

They held here a very meagre service for the poor deceased, the bishop being ill-disposed.  This was in the little church of Notre-Dame-du-Mont.  I do not know if the singers did so intentionally, but I never heard such false singing.  Chopin devoted himself to playing the organ at the Elevation, what an organ!  A false, screaming instrument, which had no wind except for the purpose of being out of tune.  Nevertheless, your little one [votre petit] made the most of it.  He took the least shrill stops, and played Les Astres, not in a proud and enthusiastic style as Nourrit used to sing it, but in a plaintive and soft style, like the far-off echo from another world.  Two, at the most three, were there who deeply felt this, and our eyes filled with tears.

The rest of the audience, who had gone there en masse, and had been led by curiosity to pay as much as fifty centimes for a chair (an unheard-of price for Marseilles), were very much disappointed; for it was expected that he would make a tremendous noise and break at least two or three stops.  They expected also to see me, in full dress, in the very middle of the choir; what not?  They did not see me at all; I was hidden in the organ-loft, and through the balustrade I descried the coffin of poor Nourrit.

Thanks to the revivifying influences of spring and Dr. Cauviere’s attention and happy treatment, Chopin was able to accompany George Sand on a trip to Genoa, that vaga gemma del mar, fior delta terra.  It gave George Sand much pleasure to see again, now with her son Maurice by her side, the beautiful edifices and pictures of the city which six years before she had visited with Musset.  Chopin was probably not strong enough to join his friends in all their sight-seeing, but if he saw Genoa as it presents itself on being approached from the sea, passed along the Via Nuova between the double row of magnificent palaces, and viewed from the cupola of S. Maria in Carignano the city, its port, the sea beyond, and the stretches of the Riviera di Levante and Riviera di Ponente, he did not travel to Italy in vain.  Thus Chopin got at last a glimpse of the land where nine years before he had contemplated taking up his abode for some time.