, Madame Rubio, Liszt, &c. George Sand was tired of
Chopin, and as he did not leave her voluntarily, the separation had to
be forced upon him. Gutmann thought there was no rupture at all. George
Sand went to Nohant without Chopin, ceased to write to him, and thus
the connection came to an end. Of course, Chopin ought to have left
her before she had recourse to the "heroic means" of kicking him,
metaphorically speaking, out of doors. But the strength of his passion
for this woman made him weak. If a tithe of what is rumoured about
George Sand's amorous escapades is true, a lover who stayed with her for
eight years must have found his capacity of overlooking and forgiving
severely tested. We hear on all sides of the infidelities she permitted
herself. A Polish friend of Chopin's informed me that one day when he
was about to enter the composer's, room to pay him a visit, the married
Berrichon female servant of George Sand came out of it; and Chopin, who
was lying ill in bed, told him afterwards that she had been complaining
of her mistress and husband. Gutmann, who said that Chopin knew of
George Sand's occasional infidelities, pretended to have heard him say
when she had left him behind in Paris: "I would overlook all if only she
would allow me to stay with her at Nohant." I regard these and such like
stories, especially the last one, with suspicion (is it probable that
the reticent artist was communicative on so delicate a subject, and with
Gutmann, his pupil and a much younger man?), but they cannot be ignored,
as they are characteristic of how Chopin's friends viewed his position.
And yet, tormented as he must have been in the days of possession,
crushed as he was by the loss, tempted as he subsequently often felt to
curse her and her deceitfulness, he loved and missed George Sand to the
very end--even the day before his death he said to Franchomme that she
had told him he would die in no other arms but hers (que je ne mourrais
que dans ses bras).

If George Sand had represented her separation from Chopin as a matter of
convenience, she would have got more sympathy and been able to make out
a better case.

The friendship of Chopin [she writes in Ma Vie] has never been
for me a refuge in sadness. He had quite enough troubles of
his own to bear. Mine would have overwhelmed him; moreover, he
knew them only vaguely and did not understand them at all. He
would have appreciated them from a point of view very
di