mer, though Liszt repeated
the charge in his "Life of Chopin," and though Karasovski says that
Sand's own children told Chopin that he was pictured as Prince Karol.
None the less, hearken to the novelist's own defence:

"It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his
(Chopin's) character with a great exactness of analysis. People were
mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and,
proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in
a life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless
full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in
good faith. I have traced in _Prince Karol_ the character of a man
determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his
exigencies. Chopin was not such. Nature does not design like art,
however realistic it may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably
not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences,
because it is too limited to reproduce them.

"Chopin was a resume of these magnificent inconsequences which God alone
can allow himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He
was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by
instinct and full of unlegitimate pride, which was unconscious of
itself. Hence sufferings which he did not reason out and which did not
fix themselves on a determined object.

"However, _Prince Karol_ is not an artist. He is a dreamer and nothing
more; having no genius, he has not the right of genius. He is therefore
a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that
of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the manuscript every day on my
desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself,--he who,
nevertheless, was so suspicious.

"And yet, afterwards, by reaction, he imagined, I am told, than this was
the case. Enemies (he had such about him who call themselves his
friends; as if embittering a suffering heart was not murder), enemies
made him believe that this romance was a revelation of his character. At
that time his memory was no doubt enfeebled; he had forgotten the book,
why did he not re-read it?

"This history is so little ours--It was the very reverse of it. There
were between us neither the same raptures _(envirements)_, nor the same
sufferings. Our history had nothing of a romance; its foundation was too
simple and too serious for us ever to have had