She [Madame Marliani] had fine apartments between the two we [George Sand and Chopin] occupied.  We had only a large planted and sanded and always clean court to cross in order to meet, sometimes, in her rooms, sometimes in mine, sometimes in Chopin’s when he was inclined to give us some music.  We dined with her at common expense.  It was a very good association, economical like all associations, and enabled one to see society at Madame Marliani’s, my friends more privately in my apartments, and to take up my work at the hour when it suited me to withdraw.  Chopin rejoiced also at having a fine, isolated salon where he could go to compose or to dream.  But he loved society, and made little use of his sanctuary except to give lessons in it.

Although George Sand speaks only of a salon, Chopin’s official residence, as we may call it, consisted of several rooms.  They were elegantly furnished and always adorned with flowers—­for he loved le luxe and had the coquetterie des appartements.

[Footnote:  When I visited in 1880 M. Kwiatkowski in Paris, he showed me some Chopin relics:  1, a pastel drawing by Jules Coignet (representing Les Pyramides d’Egypte), which hung always above the composer’s piano; 2, a little causeuse which Chopin bought with his first Parisian savings; 3, an embroidered easy-chair worked and presented to him by the Princess Czartoiyska; and 4, an embroidered cushion worked and presented to him by Madame de Rothschild.  If we keep in mind Chopin’s remarks about his furniture and the papering of his rooms, and add to the above-mentioned articles those which Karasowski mentions as having been bought by Miss Stirling after the composer’s death, left by her to his mother, and destroyed by the Russians along with his letters in 1861 when in possession of his sister Isabella Barcinska—­his portrait by Ary Scheffer, some Sevres porcelain with the inscription “Offert par Louis Philippe a Frederic Chopin,” a fine inlaid box, a present from one of the Rothschild family, carpets, table-cloths, easy-chairs, &c., worked by his pupils—­we can form some sort of idea of the internal arrangements of the pianist-composer’s rooms.]

Nevertheless, they exhibited none of the splendour which was to be found in the houses of many of the celebrities then living in Paris.  “He observed,” remarks Liszt, “on this point as well as in the then so fashionable elegancies of walking-sticks, pins, studs, and jewels, the instinctive line of the comme il faut between the too much and the too little.”  But Chopin’s letters written from Nohant in 1839 to Fontana have afforded the reader sufficient opportunities to make himself acquainted with the master’s fastidiousness and good taste in matters of furniture and room decoration, above all, his horror of vulgar gaudiness.