gave her a
severe lecture for receiving young men in his absence, and so
on. I addressed Pixis smilingly, and said to her that it was
somewhat imprudent to leave the room in so thin a silk dress.
At last the old man became calm--he took me by the arm and
led me into the drawing-room. He was in such a state of
excitement that he did not know what seat to offer me; for he
was afraid that, if he had offended me, I would make better
use of his absence another time. When I left he accompanied
me down stairs, and seeing me smile (for I could not help
doing so when I found I was thought capable of such a thing),
he went to the concierge and asked how long it was since I
had come. The concierge must have calmed his fears, for since
that time Pixis does not know how to praise my talent
sufficiently to all his acquaintances. What do you think of
this? I, a dangerous seducteur!

The letters which Chopin wrote to his parents from Paris passed, after
his mother's death, into the hands of his sister, who preserved them
till September 19, 1863. On that day the house in which she lived in
Warsaw--a shot having been fired and some bombs thrown from an upper
story of it when General Berg and his escort were passing--was sacked by
Russian soldiers, who burned or otherwise destroyed all they could lay
hands on, among the rest Chopin's letters, his portrait by Ary Scheffer,
the Buchholtz piano on which he had made his first studies, and other
relics. We have now also exhausted, at least very nearly exhausted,
Chopin's extant correspondence with his most intimate Polish friends,
Matuszynski and Woyciechowski, only two unimportant letters written in
1849 and addressed to the latter remaining yet to be mentioned. That the
confidential correspondence begins to fail us at this period (the last
letter is of December 25, 1831) is particularly inopportune; a series of
letters like those he wrote from Vienna would have furnished us with
the materials for a thoroughly trustworthy history of his settlement
in Paris, over which now hangs a mythical haze. Karasowski, who saw the
lost letters, says they were tinged with melancholy.

Besides the thought of his unhappy country, a thought constantly kept
alive by the Polish refugees with whom Paris was swarming, Chopin
had another more prosaic but not less potent cause of disquietude and
sadness. His pecuniary circumstances were by no means brilliant. Economy