Liszt has given a glowing description of an improvised soiree at Chopin’s lodgings in the Rue de la Chaussee d’Antin—­that is, in the years before the winter in Majorca.  At this soiree, we are told, were present Liszt himself, Heine, Meyerbeer, Nourrit, Hiller, Delacroix, Niemcewicz, Mickiewicz, George Sand, and the Comtesse d’Agoult.  Of course, this is a poetic licence:  these men and women cannot have been at one and the same time in Chopin’s salon.  Indeed, Hiller informed me that he knew nothing of this party, and that, moreover, as long as he was in Paris (up to 1836) there were hardly ever more numerous gatherings at his friend’s lodgings than of two or three.  Liszt’s group, however, brings vividly before us one section of Chopin’s social surroundings:  it shows us what a poetic atmosphere he was breathing, amidst what a galaxy of celebrities he was moving.  A glimpse of the real life our artist lived in the early Paris years this extravagant effort of a luxuriant imagination does not afford.  Such glimpses we got in his letters to Hiller and Franchomme, where we also met with many friends and acquaintances with less high-sounding names, some of whom Chopin subsequently lost by removal or death.  In addition to the friends who were then mentioned, I may name here the Polish poet Stephen Witwicki, the friend of his youth as well as of his manhood, to whom in 1842 he dedicated his Op. 41, three mazurkas, and several of whose poems he set to music; and the Polish painter Kwiatkowski, an acquaintance of a later time, who drew and painted many portraits of the composer, and more than one of whose pictures was inspired by compositions of his friend.  I have not been able to ascertain what Chopin’s sentiments were with regard to Kwiatkowski, but the latter must have been a frequent visitor, for after relating to me that the composer was fond of playing in the dusk, he remarked that he heard him play thus almost all his works immediately after they were composed.

As we have seen in the chapters treating of Chopin’s first years in Paris, there was then a goodly sprinkling of musicians among his associates—­I use the word “associates” advisedly, for many of them could not truly be called friends.  When he was once firmly settled, artistically and socially, not a few of these early acquaintances lapsed.  How much this was due to the force of circumstances, how much to the choice of Chopin, is difficult to determine.  But we may be sure that his distaste to the Bohemianism, the free and easy style that obtains among a considerable portion of the artistic tribe, had at least as much to do with the result as pressure of engagements.  Of the musicians of whom we heard so much in the first years after his coming to Paris, he remained in close connection only with one-namely, with Franchomme.  Osborne soon disappeared from his circle.  Chopin’s intercourse with Berlioz was in after years so rare that some of their common friends did not even know of its existence.  The