eet. She married elsewhere. The Polish Maria Wodzinska was his
next flame, and he wished to marry her, but he, who had the salons of
Paris at his princely behest, could not hold this nineteen-year-old
girl. Then he fell into the embrace of George Sand, that mysterious
sphinx who clasped him to her commodious heart, and held him as with
claws, though little he cared to escape; and yet, her claws drew blood,
and at length it was the sphinx herself who struggled for release from
the embrace of the fretful genius, whom consumption was claiming with
her own clammy arms. Every one knows all there is to know about the
Chopin-Sand affair, all and a great deal more, but who could draw from
it any inference as to the effect of music?

Sand was attracted to Chopin by his art. With her as nurse, his genius
accomplished much of its greatest, and it held her enthralled for a
time. To Chopin, music was both a medicine and a disease, torment and
solace. But that he would have lived his life differently in any way
had he been a painter, a poet, an architect, a man of affairs, or an
idler, with the same effeminate nature, the same elegance of manner,
the same disease, the same women about him, I can find no reason to
believe. Is it not the man and the environment rather than the music
that makes such a life what it is?

There is another brilliant consumptive, Carl Maria von Weber, a member
of a long line of musicians. At seventeen he had formed "a tender
connection with a lady of position," whom he lost sight of later and
forgot in the race with fast young noblemen, whose dissipation he
rivalled. A mad entanglement with a singer ruined him in purse, and
almost in career. His frivolities ended in an arrest and punishment
which sobered him with the abruptness of a plunge into a stream of ice.
But his gaiety was as irrepressible as Chopin's melancholy, and he gave
Germany some of its most cheerful music. His heart was restless, and
still at the age of twenty-seven he was writhing in an infatuation for
a worthless ballet-girl. Then his affection for a singer and soubrette,
Caroline Brandt, steadied him. After a long period of effort to
establish a firm position they married, and the soubrette became a
"Haus-frau." He was thirty-one, however, before this point was reached,
and the honeymoon consisted of a concert tour.

The glory of his later life fought against the gloom of his disease,
but the ferocious rake had made, as the proverb has i