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:--

We have had always a profound admiration for Chopin's talent
[writes M. Marmontel], and, let us add, a lively sympathy for
his person. No artist, the intimate disciples not excepted,
has more studied his compositions, and more caused them to be
played, and yet our relations with this great musician have
only been rare and transient. Chopin was surrounded, fawned
upon, closely watched by a small cenacle of enthusiastic
friends, who guarded him against importunate visitors and