Mr. Niedzwiecki told me that he travelled with Chopin, who was accompanied by his servant, from London to Paris.
[FOOTNOTE: Leonard Niedzwiecki, born in the Kingdom of Poland in 1807, joined the National Army in 1830, distinguished himself on several battlefields, came in 1832 as a refugee to England, made there a livelihood by literary work and acted as honorary librarian of the Literary Association of the friends of Poland, left about 1845 London for Paris and became Private Secretary, first to General Count Ladislas Zamoyski, and after the Count's death to the widowed Countess. M. Niedzwiecki, who is also librarian of the Polish Library at Paris, now devotes all his time to historical and philological research.]
The three had a compartment to themselves. During the journey the invalid suffered greatly from frequent attacks of breathlessness. Chopin was delighted when he saw Boulogne. How hateful England and the English were to him is shown by the following anecdote. When they had left Boulogne and Chopin had been for some time looking at the landscape through which they were passing, he said to Mr. Niedzwiecki: "Do you see the cattle in this meadow? Ca a plus d'intelligence que les Anglais." Let us not be wroth at poor Chopin: he was then irritated by his troubles, and always anything but a cosmopolitan.
CHAPTER XXXII.
DETERIORATION OF CHOPIN'S STATE OF HEALTH.—TWO LETTERS.—REMOVES FROM THE SQUARE D'ORLEANS TO THE RUE CHAILLOT.—PECUNIARY CIRCUMSTANCES.—A CURIOUS STORY.—REMINISCENCES AND LETTERS CONNECTED WITH CHOPIN'S STAY IN THE RUE CHAILLOT.—REMOVES TO NO. 12, PLACE VENDOME.—LAST DAYS, AND DEATH.—FUNERAL.—LAST RESTING-PLACE.—MONUMENT AND COMMEMORATION IN 1850.
The physical condition in which we saw Chopin in the preceding chapter was not the outcome of a newly-contracted disease, but only an acuter phase of that old disease from which he had been suffering more or less for at least twelve years, and which in all probability he inherited from his father, who like himself died of a chest and heart complaint. [FOOTNOTE: My authority for this statement is Dr. Lyschinski, who must have got his information either from Chopin himself or his mother. That Chopin's youngest sister, Emilia, died of consumption in early life cannot but be regarded as a significant fact.] Long before Chopin went in search of health to Majorca, ominous symptoms showed themselves; and when he returned from the south, he was only partly restored, not cured.
My attachment [writes George Sand in "Ma Vie">[ could work this
miracle of making him a little calm and happy, only because
God had approved of it by preserving a little of his health.
He declined, however, visibly, and I knew no longer what
remedies to employ in order to combat the growing irritation
of his nerves. The death of his friend Dr. Matuszynski, then
that of his own father, [FOOTNOTE: Nicholas Chopin died on May
3, 1844. About Matuszynski's death see page 158.] were to him
two terrible blows. The Catholic dogma throws on death
horrible terrors. Chopin, instead of dreaming for these pure
souls a better world, had only dreadful visions, and I was
obliged to pass very many nights in a room adjoining his,
always ready to rise a hundred times from my work in order to
drive away the spectres of his sleep and wakefulness. The idea
of his own death appeared to him accompanied with all the
superstitious imaginings of Slavonic poetry. As a Pole he
lived under the nightmare of legends. The phantoms called him,
clasped him, and, instead of seeing his father and his friend
smile at him in the ray of faith, he repelled their fleshless
faces from his own and struggled under the grasp of their icy
hands.
But a far more terrible blow than the deaths of his friend and his father was his desertion by George Sand, and we may be sure that it aggravated his disease a hundredfold. To be convinced of this we have only to remember his curse on Lucrezia (see the letter to Grzymala of November 17-18, 1848).
Jules Janin, in an obituary notice, says of Chopin that "he lived ten years, ten miraculous years, with a breath ready to fly away" (il a vecu dix ans, dix ans de miracle, d'un souffle pret a s'envoler). Another writer remarks: "In seeing him [Chopin] so puny, thin, and pale, one thought for a. long time that he was dying, and then one got accustomed to the idea that he could live always so." Stephen Heller in chatting to me about Chopin expressed the same idea in different words: "Chopin was often reported to have died, so often, indeed, that people would not believe the news when he was really dead." There was in Chopin for many years, especially since 1837, a constant flux and reflux of life. To repeat another remark of Heller's: "Now he was ill, and then again one saw him walking on the boulevards in a thin coat." A married sister of Gutmann's remembers that Chopin had already, in 1843-4, to be carried upstairs, when he visited her mother, who in that year was staying with her children in Paris; to walk upstairs, even with assistance, would have been impossible to him.