s family,
whom he adored, to the pain of seeing his country transformed
and deformed [denature]. He had fled from tyranny, as now he
fled from liberty.

I saw him again for an instant in March, 1848. I pressed his
trembling and icy hand. I wished to speak to him, he slipped
away. Now it was my turn to say that he no longer loved me. I
spared him this infliction, and entrusted all to the hands of
Providence and the future.

I was not to see him again. There were bad hearts between us.
There were good ones too who were at a loss what to do. There
were frivolous ones who preferred not to meddle with such
delicate matters; Gutmann was not there.

I have been told that he had asked for me, regretted me, and
loved me filially up to the very end. It was thought fit to
conceal this from me till then. It was also thought fit to
conceal from him that I was ready to hasten to him.

Liszt's account is noteworthy because it gives us the opinion of a man
who knew the two principal actors in the drama intimately, and had
good opportunities to learn what contemporary society thought about it.
Direct knowledge of the facts, however, Liszt had not, for he was no
longer a friend either of the one or the other of the two parties:--

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