Madame Zimmermann and her daughters did the honours to a great number of artists. Charades were acted; the forfeits that were given, and the rebuses that were not guessed, had to be redeemed by penances varying according to the nature of the guilty ones. Gautier, Dumas, and Musset were condemned to recite their last poem. Liszt or Chopin had to improvise on a given theme, Mesdames Viardot, Falcon, and Euggnie Garcia had also to discharge their melodic debts, and I myself remember having paid many a forfeit.
The preceding chapter and the foregoing part of this chapter set forth the most important facts of Chopin's social and artistic life in his early Paris days. The following extract from a letter of his to Titus Woyciechowski, dated December 25, 1831, reveals to us something of his inward life, the gloom of which contrasts violently with the outward brightness:—
Ah, how I should like to have you beside me!…You cannot imagine how sad it is to have nobody to whom I can open my troubled heart. You know how easily I make acquaintances, how I love human society—such acquaintances I make in great numbers—but with no one, no one can I sigh. My heart beats as it were always "in syncopes," therefore I torment myself and seek for a rest—for solitude, so that the whole day nobody may look at me and speak to me. It is too annoying to me when there is a pull at the bell, and a tedious visit is announced while I am writing to you. At the moment when I was going to describe to you the ball, at which a divine being with a rose in her black hair enchanted me, arrives your letter. All the romances of my brain disappear? my thoughts carry me to you, I take your hand and weep…When shall we see each other again?…Perhaps never, because, seriously, my health is very bad. I appear indeed merry, especially when I am among my fellow-countrymen; but inwardly something torments me—a gloomy presentiment, unrest, bad dreams, sleeplessness, yearning, indifference to everything, to the desire to live and the desire to die. It seems to me often as if my mind were benumbed, I feel a heavenly repose in my heart, in my thoughts I see images from which I cannot tear myself away, and this tortures me beyond all measure. In short, it is a combination of feelings that are difficult to describe…Pardon me, dear Titus, for telling you of all this; but now I have said enough…I will dress now and go, or rather drive, to the dinner which our countrymen give to- day to Ramorino and Langermann…Your letter contained much that was news to me; you have written me four pages and thirty-seven lines—in all my life you have never been so liberal to me, and I stood in need of something of the kind, I stood indeed very much in need of it.
What you write about my artistic career is very true, and I myself am convinced of it.
I drive in my own equipage, only the coachman is hired.
I shall close, because otherwise I should be too late for the post, for I am everything in one person, master and servant. Take pity on me and write as often as possible!—Yours unto death,
FREDERICK.
In the postscript of this letter Chopin's light fancy gets the better of his heavy heart; in it all is fun and gaiety. First he tells his friend of a pretty neighbour whose husband is out all day and who often invites him to visit and comfort her. But the blandishments of the fair one were of no avail; he had no taste for adventures, and, moreover, was afraid to be caught and beaten by the said husband. A second love-story is told at greater length. The dramatis personae are Chopin, John Peter Pixis, and Francilla Pixis, a beautiful girl of sixteen, a German orphan whom the pianist-composer, then a man of about forty-three, had adopted, and who afterwards became known as a much-admired singer. Chopin made their acquaintance in Stuttgart, and remarks that Pixis said that he intended to marry her. On his return to Paris Pixis invited Chopin to visit him; the latter, who had by this time forgotten pretty Francilla, was in no hurry to call. What follows must be given in Chopin's own words:—
Eight days after the second invitation I went to his house, and accidentally met his pet on the stairs. She invited me to come in, assuring me it did not matter that Mr. Pixis was not at home; meanwhile I was to sit down, he would return soon, and so on. A strange embarrassment seized both of us. I made my excuses—for I knew the old man was very jealous—and said I would rather return another time. While we were talking familiarly and innocently on the staircase, Pixis came up, looking over his spectacles in order to see who was speaking above to his bella. He may not have recognised us at once, quickened his steps, stopped before us, and said to her harshly: "Qu'est-ce que vous faites ici?" and gave her a severe lecture for receiving young men in his absence, and so on. I addressed Pixis smilingly, and said to her that it was somewhat imprudent to leave the room in so thin a silk dress. At last the old man became calm—he took me by the arm and led me into the drawing-room. He was in such a state of excitement that he did not know what seat to offer me; for he was afraid that, if he had offended me, I would make better use of his absence another time. When I left he accompanied me down stairs, and seeing me smile (for I could not help doing so when I found I was thought capable of such a thing), he went to the concierge and asked how long it was since I had come. The concierge must have calmed his fears, for since that time Pixis does not know how to praise my talent sufficiently to all his acquaintances. What do you think of this? I, a dangerous seducteur!
The letters which Chopin wrote to his parents from Paris passed, after his mother's death, into the hands of his sister, who preserved them till September 19, 1863. On that day the house in which she lived in Warsaw—a shot having been fired and some bombs thrown from an upper story of it when General Berg and his escort were passing—was sacked by Russian soldiers, who burned or otherwise destroyed all they could lay hands on, among the rest Chopin's letters, his portrait by Ary Scheffer, the Buchholtz piano on which he had made his first studies, and other relics. We have now also exhausted, at least very nearly exhausted, Chopin's extant correspondence with his most intimate Polish friends, Matuszynski and Woyciechowski, only two unimportant letters written in 1849 and addressed to the latter remaining yet to be mentioned. That the confidential correspondence begins to fail us at this period (the last letter is of December 25, 1831) is particularly inopportune; a series of letters like those he wrote from Vienna would have furnished us with the materials for a thoroughly trustworthy history of his settlement in Paris, over which now hangs a mythical haze. Karasowski, who saw the lost letters, says they were tinged with melancholy.