music from the desk and breaking chairs,
as Karasowski says, I do not know and have not heard confirmed by
any pupil. Madame Rubio, however, informed me that Chopin was very
irritable, and when teaching amateurs used to have always a packet of
pencils about him which, to vent his anger, he silently broke into bits.
Gutmann told me that in the early stages of his discipleship Chopin
sometimes got very angry, and stormed and raged dreadfully; but
immediately was kind and tried to soothe his pupil when he saw him
distressed and weeping.

To be sure [writes Mikuli], Chopin made great demands on the
talent and diligence of the pupil. Consequently, there were
often des lecons orageuses, as it was called in the school
idiom, and many a beautiful eye left the high altar of the
Cite d'Orleans, Rue St. Lazare, bedewed with tears, without,
on that account, ever bearing the dearly-beloved master the
least grudge. For was not the severity which was not easily
satisfied with anything, the feverish vehemence with which the
master wished to raise his disciples to his own stand-point,
the ceaseless repetition of a passage till it was understood,
a guarantee that he had at heart the progress of the pupil? A
holy artistic zeal burnt in him then, every word from his lips
was incentive and inspiring. Single lessons often lasted
literally for hours at a stretch, till exhaustion overcame
master and pupil.

Indeed, the pupils were so far from bearing their master the least
grudge that, to use M. Marmontel's words, they had more for him than
admiration: a veritable idolatry. But it is time that after this
excursion--which hardly calls for an excuse--we return to the more
important part of our subject, the master's method of teaching.

What concerned Chopin most at the commencement of his
instruction [writes Mikuli] was to free the pupil from every
stiffness and convulsive, cramped movement of the hand, and to
give him thus the first condition of a beautiful style of
playing, souplesse (suppleness), and with it independence of
the fingers. He taught indefatigably that the exercises in
question were no mere mechanical ones, but called for the
intelligence and the whole will of the pupil, on which account
twenty and even forty thoughtless repetitions (up to this time
the arcanum of so many schools) do no good at all, still less
the practising during which, according to Kalkbrenner's
advic