character of Chopin is described, are taken from Lucrezia Floriani,
a novel by Madame Sand, in which the leading characters are said to
be intended to represent Liszt, Chopin, and herself.--Note of the
Translator.]

"Gentle, sensitive, and very lovely, at fifteen years of age he united
the charms of adolescence with the gravity of a more mature age. He
was delicate both in body and in mind. Through the want of muscular
development he retained a peculiar beauty, an exceptional physiognomy,
which had, if we may venture so to speak, neither age nor sex. It was
not the bold and masculine air of a descendant of a race of Magnates,
who knew nothing but drinking, hunting and making war; neither was it
the effeminate loveliness of a cherub couleur de rose. It was more like
the ideal creations with which the poetry of the middle ages adorned the
Christian temples: a beautiful angel, with a form pure and slight as a
young god of Olympus, with a face like that of a majestic woman filled
with a divine sorrow, and as the crown of all, an expression at the same
time tender and severe, chaste and impassioned.

"This expression revealed the depths of his being. Nothing could be
purer, more exalted than his thoughts; nothing more tenacious, more
exclusive, more intensely devoted, than his affections.... But he could
only understand that which closely resembled himself.... Every thing
else only existed for him as a kind of annoying dream, which he tried
to shake off while living with the rest of the world. Always plunged in
reveries, realities displeased him. As a child he could never touch a
sharp instrument without injuring himself with it; as a man, he never
found himself face to face with a being different from himself without
being wounded by the living contradiction...

"He was preserved from constant antagonism by a voluntary and almost
inveterate habit of never seeing or hearing any thing which was
disagreeable to him, unless it touched upon his personal affections. The
beings who did not think as he did, were only phantoms in his eyes. As
his manners were polished and graceful, it was easy to mistake his cold
disdain on insurmountable aversion for benevolent courtesy...

"He never spent an hour in open-hearted expansiveness, without
compensating for it by a season of reserve. The moral causes which
induced such reserve were too slight, too subtle, to be discovered by
the naked eye. It was necessary to use the microscope t