ime and her vitality devoted to an
invalid, while her own life-work as a famous writer was making demands
on her as wild as those of a sick musician her junior in years as in
fame.

After granting her this justice, there should still be no stint of
sympathy for the poor Chopin, wrought to a frenzy with the revolutions
he was so gorgeously effecting, not only in the music of the piano, but
in all harmony; racked with pain and unmanned with the weakening effects
of his disease; struggling vainly against the chill and clammy Wrestler
who was to drag him to his grave before his life was half complete.

Our feeling, again, should not be wrath at George Sand because she did
not eternally resist the centrifugal forces of such a life, but rather a
deep sense of gratitude that she gave Chopin some sort of home and
mental support for ten long years.

George Sand's books are full of allusions to Chopin, and from the many
that are quoteworthy, the following may be cited from her "Histoire de
ma Vie," as throwing a few flecks of light on the woman's attitude in
the affair:

"He was the same in friendship (as in love), becoming enthusiastic at
first sight, getting disgusted and correcting himself (_se reprenant_)
incessantly, living on infatuations full of charm for those who were the
object of them and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest
affections."

"Chopin accorded to me, I may say, honoured me with, a kind of
friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always the same to
me."

"The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness. He had
enough of his own ills to bear."

"We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once, which, alas,
was the first and the final time."

"But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace,
obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured
the asperities of character towards those who were about me. With them
the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself
full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice
versa."

"Chopin when angry was alarming, and, as, with me, he always restrained
himself, he seemed almost to choke and die."

It is generally believed that in the character of _Prince Karol_ in her
novel, "Lucrezia Floriani," published in 1847, Sand used that lethal
weapon of revenge novelists possess, and portrayed or caricatured
Chopin. It is only fair to give her disclai