A small circle of select auditors, whose real desire to hear him was beyond doubt, could alone determine him to approach the piano.  What emotions he would then call forth!  In what ardent and melancholy reveries he loved to pour out his soul!  It was usually towards midnight that he gave himself up with the greatest abandon, when the big butterflies of the salon had left, when the political questions of the day had been discussed at length, when all the scandal-mongers were at the end of their anecdotes, when all the snares were laid, all the perfidies consummated, when one was thoroughly tired of prose, then, obedient to the mute petition of some beautiful, intelligent eyes, he became a poet, and sang the Ossianic loves of the heroes of his dreams, their chivalrous joys, and the sorrows of the absent fatherland, his dear Poland always ready to conquer and always defeated.  But without these conditions—­the exacting of which for his playing all artists must thank him for—­it was useless to solicit him.  The curiosity excited by his fame seemed even to irritate him, and he shunned as far as possible the nonsympathetic world when chance had led him into it.  I remember a cutting saying which he let fly one evening at the master of a house where he had dined.  Scarcely had the company taken coffee when the host, approaching Chopin, told him that his fellow-guests who had never heard him hoped that he would be so good as to sit down at the piano and play them some little thing [quelque petite chose].  Chopin excused himself from the very first in a way which left not the slightest doubt as to his inclination.  But when the other insisted, in an almost offensive manner, like a man who knows the worth and the object of the dinner which he has given, the artist cut the conversation short by saying with a weak and broken voice and a fit of coughing:  “Ah! sir...I have...eaten so little!”

Chopin’s predilection for the fashionable salon society led him to neglect the society of artists.  That he carried the odi profanum vulgus, et arceo too far cannot for a moment be doubted.  For many of those who sought to have intercourse with him were men of no less nobility of sentiment and striving than himself.  Chopin offended even Ary Scheffer, the great painter, who admired him and loved him, by promising to spend an evening with him and again and again disappointing him.  Musicians, with a few exceptions.  Chopin seems always to have been careful to keep at a distance, at least after the first years of his arrival in Paris.  This is regrettable especially in the case of the young men who looked up to him with veneration and enthusiasm, and whose feelings were cruelly hurt by the polite but unsympathetic reception he gave them:—­