, moreover, reported on it
in Le Siecle. The memory of the event was brought back to him when
on looking over autographs in the possession of Auguste Wolff, the
successor of Camille Pleyel, he found a ticket for the above described
concert. As the concert so was also the ticket unlike that of any other
artist. "Les lettres d'ecriture anglaise etaient gravees au burin et
imprimees en taille-douce sur de beau papier mi-carton glace, d'un carre
long elegant et distingue." It bore the following words and figures:--

SOIREE DE M. CHOPIN,
DANS L'UN DES SALONS DE MM. PLEYEL ET CIE.,
20, Rue Rochechouart,
Le mercredi 16 fevrier 1848 a 8 heures 1/2.
Rang....Prix 20 francs....Place reservee.

M. Comettant, in contradiction to what has been said by others about
Chopin's physical condition, states that when the latter came on the
platform, he walked upright and without feebleness; his face, though
pale, did not seem greatly altered; and he played as he had always
played. But M. Comettant was told that Chopin, having spent at the
concert all his moral and physical energy, afterwards nearly fainted in
the artists' room.

In March Chopin and George Sand saw each other once more. We will rest
satisfied with the latter's laconic account of the meeting already
quoted: "Je serrai sa main tremblante et glacee. Je voulu lui parler,
il s'echappa." Karasowski's account of this last meeting is in the
feuilleton style and a worthy pendant to that of the first meeting:--

A month before his departure [he writes], in the last days of
March, Chopin was invited by a lady to whose hospitable house
he had in former times often gone. Some moments he hesitated
whether he should accept this invitation, for he had of late
years less frequented the salons; at last--as if impelled by
an inner voice--he accepted. An hour before he entered the
house of Madame H...

And then follow wonderful conversations, sighs, blushes, tears, a lady
hiding behind an ivy screen, and afterwards advancing with a gliding
step, and whispering with a look full of repentance: "Frederick!" Alas,
this was not the way George Sand met her dismissed lovers. Moreover,
let it be remembered she was at this time not a girl in her teens, but a
woman of nearly forty-four.

The outbreak of the revolution on February 22, 1848, upset the
arrangements for the second concert, which was to take place on th