These commencements, of which Madame de Stael spoke, [footnote:  He alludes to her saying:  En amour, il n’y a que des commencemens.] had already for a long time been exhausted between the Polish artist and the French poet.  They had only survived with the one by a violent effort of respect for the ideal which he had gilded with its fatal brilliancy; with the other by a false shame which sophisticated on the pretension to preserve constancy in fidelity.  The time came when this factitious existence, which succeeded no longer in galvanising fibres dried up under the eyes of the spiritualistic artist, seemed to him to surpass what honour permitted him not to perceive.  No one knew what was the cause or the pretext of the sudden rupture; one saw only that after a violent opposition to the marriage of the daughter of the house, Chopin abruptly left Nohant never to return again.

However unreliable Liszt’s facts may be, the philosophy of his account shows real insight.  Karasowski, on the other hand, has neither facts nor insight.  He speaks with a novelist’s confidence and freedom of characters whom he in no way knows, and about whom he has nothing to tell but the vaguest and most doubtful of second-hand hearsays:—­

The depressed invalid became now to her a burden.  At first her at times sombre mien and her shorter visits in the sick-room showed him that her sympathy for him was on the decrease; Chopin felt this painfully, but he said nothing...\The complaints of Madame Sand that the nursing of the invalid exhausted her strength, complaints which she often gave expression to in his presence, hurt him.  He entreated her to leave him alone, to take walks in the fresh air; he implored her not to give up for his sake her amusements, but to frequent the theatre, to give parties, &c.; he would be contented in quietness and solitude if he only knew that she was happy.  At last, when the invalid still failed to think of a separation from her, she chose a heroic means.

By this heroic means Karasowski understands the publication of George Sand’s novel Lucrezia Floriani (in 1847), concerning which he says the story goes that “out of refined cruelty the proof-sheets were handed to him [Chopin] with the request to correct the misprints.”  Karasowski also reports as a “fact” that

the children of Madame Sand [who, by the way, were a man of twenty-three and a woman of eighteen] said to him [Chopin], pointing to the novel:  “M.  Chopin, do you know that you are meant by the Prince Karol?"...In spite of all this the invalid, and therefore less passionate, artist bore with the most painful feeling the mortification caused him by the novel...At the beginning of the year 1847 George Sand brought about by a violent scene, the innocent cause of which was her daughter, a complete rupture.  To the unjust reproaches which she made to him, he merely replied:  “I shall immediately leave your house, and wish henceforth