George Sand's desertion was Chopin's deathblow. He never rallied from it. He tried to mask his heartbreak by going about as before and appearing often in public. But even this was soon denied to him—not only by collapsed health, but from the danger of meeting his former divinity at the houses he chanced to visit or on the streets. One such lesson was enough for him. It was in a friend's crowded drawing-room. A historian describes the encounter:
Thinking herself unobserved, George Sand walked up to Chopin and held out her hand.
"Frederic!" she murmured, in a voice audible to him alone.
He saw her familiar form standing before him. She was repentant, subdued, and seeking reconciliation. His handsome face grew deadly pale, and without a word he left the room.
The end came soon afterward. Chopin's mortal illness struck him down. Dying, he sent for his lost love. Perhaps the message never reached her; perhaps she thought it a trick—she had tried something of the sort on de Musset; perhaps she did not realize that the time was so short.
At all events, she paid no heed to the frantic appeal that she come at once to the dying composer.
Hour after hour, Chopin waited for her, his ears strained for the sound of her heavy tread. At last he grew to realize that she would not obey the summons, that he would never again see her.
As hope fled, Chopin broke down and cried piteously.
"She promised I should die in no arms but hers!" he sobbed over and over.
And that night he died—no less than seven different women claiming later to have taken his recreant sweetheart's place at his deathbed.