the sister, Maria, then nineteen
years old, and fell deeply and seriously in love with her. According to
her brother, who wrote a biographical romance on "Chopin's Three Love
Affairs," Maria, while not classically a beauty, had an indefinable
charm.

"Her black eyes were full of sweetness, reverie, and restrained fire; a
smile of ineffable voluptuousness played around her lips, and her
magnificent hair was as dark as ebony and long enough to serve her as a
mantle."

They flirted at the piano and behind a fan, and he dedicated her a
little waltz, and she drew his portrait. As usual, the different
biographers tell different stories, but from them the chief biographer
of all, Frederick Neicks, decides that Chopin proposed and Maria
deposed. And here endeth the second of Chopin's three romances. So this
brings us back to Paris and George Sand, and the year 1837, when Chopin
was twenty-eight and George Sand thirty-three.

Thus far we have followed the standard authorities, but the year 1903
has done much in the way of unveiling Chopin's life. His letters to his
family, and their letters to him, were believed to have perished. They
were in the possession of his sister Isabella Barcinska, and she was
living in the palace of Count Zamoyski at Warsaw, in 1863, when a bomb
was thrown from a window as the Russian lieutenant-general was passing.
In revenge the soldiers sacked the palace, and burned what they did not
carry off. Chopin's portrait by Ary Scheffer, his piano, and his Paris
furniture perished, and his papers were believed to be among the lost.

But all the while the family was keeping their very existence secret
until, after forty years, it was thought proper to give them to the
public.

M. Karlovicz was entrusted with this honour, and _La Revue Musicale_ of
Paris chosen as the medium. The letters are said to make a large bulk,
but I have been able to see only the first three instalments, of which
two are family letters to him. They are exuberant with tenderness,
admiration, and of hope for his great fame; the father constantly
pleading with the son to lay up his sous against a rainy day,--advice
which met the usual fate of good advice.

Karlovicz says, with some exaggeration: "In his letters to his family,
Chopin, as if he wished to avoid pronouncing the name of George Sand,
always calls her 'My hostess,' sometimes even employing, strange to say,
the plural, for instance, 'Elles si cheres, elles rirent pour tous