It may best be summed up in the words of James
Huneker, who is one of the few writers who has kept his sanity on the
subject of Chopin:

"He never saw his Gladkovska again, for he did not return to Warsaw. The
lady was married in 1832--preferring a solid merchant to nebulous
genius--to Joseph Grabovski, a merchant at Warsaw. Her husband, so saith
a romantic biographer, Count Wodzinski, became blind; perhaps even a
blind country gentleman was preferable to a lachrymose pianist. Chopin
must have heard of the attachment in 1831. Her name almost disappears
from his correspondence. Time as well as other nails drove from his
memory her image. If she was fickle, he was inconstant, and so let us
waste no pity on this episode, over which lakes of tears have been shed
and rivers of ink have been spilt."

This same year, 1831, brought Chopin to Paris, thenceforward his
residence and home. His great elegance of manner, as well as of music,
brought him into the most aristocratic dove-cotes, or salons, as they
called them, and it is small wonder that he found himself unable to
avoid accepting and buttonholing for a while some of the countless
hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. Even George Sand was
amazed at his dexterity in juggling with hearts, and, in this matter,
praise or blame from George Sand was praise from Lady Hubert. It seems
that he could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as
gracefully as from one key to its remotest neighbour. She says he could
manage three flirtations of an evening, and begin a new series the very
next day. Apparently even distance was no barrier, for George Sand
declares that he was at the same moment trying to marry a girl in Poland
and another in Paris. The Parisienne he cancelled from his list because,
says Sand, when he called on her with another man, she offered the other
man a chair before she asked Chopin to be seated. Chopin conducted
himself in Paris very much _en prince_, according to Von Lenz, and such
a sacrilege to the laws of precedence naturally was unpardonable.

The Polish woman whom Sand refers to may have been the one woman with
whom Chopin is definitely known to have planned marriage. This was Maria
Wodzinska. Her two brothers had boarded years before at the pension
which Chopin's father kept at Warsaw. The acquaintance with the brothers
was renewed in Paris, and when, in 1835, Chopin visited Dresden after a
long journey to see his parents, he met