no longer to be regarded by you as living.”  These words were very welcome to her; she made no objections, and the very same day the artist left for ever the house of Madame Sand.  But the excitement and the mental distress connected with it threw him once more on the sick- bed, and for a long time people seriously feared that he would soon exchange it for a coffin.

George Sand’s view of the Lucrezia Floriani incident must be given in full.  In Ma Vie she writes as follows:—­

It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his [Chopin’s] character with a great exactness of analysis.  People were mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and, proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in a Life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in good faith.  I have traced in Prince Karol the character of a man determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his exigencies.

Chopin was not such.  Nature does not design like art, however realistic it may be.  She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious.  Art only rectifies these inconsequences because it is too limited to reproduce them.

Chopin was a resume of these magnificent inconsequences which God alone can allow Himself to create, and which have their particular logic.  He was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full of a legitimate pride which was unconscious of itself.  Hence sufferings which he did not reason and which did not fix themselves on a determined object.

Moreover, Prince Karol is not an artist.  He is a dreamer, and nothing more; having no genius, he has not the rights of genius.  He is, therefore, a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the manuscript every day on my writing- desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself, he who, nevertheless, was so suspicious.

And yet afterwards, by reaction, he imagined, I am told, that this was the case.  Enemies (I had such about him who call themselves his friends; as if embittering a suffering heart was not murder, enemies made him believe that this romance was a revelation of his character.  At that time his memory was, no doubt, enfeebled:  he had forgotten the book, why did he not reread it!

This history is so little ours!  It was the very reverse of it There were between us neither the same raptures [enivrements] nor the same sufferings.  Our history had nothing of a romance; its foundation was too simple and too serious for us ever to have had occasion for a quarrel with each other, a propos of each other.

The arguments advanced by George Sand are anything