If this is a sincere confession, we can only wonder at the height of self-deception attainable by the human mind; if, however, it is meant as a justification, we cannot but be surprised at the want of skill displayed by the generally so clever advocate. In fact, George Sand has in no instance been less happy in defending her conduct and in setting forth her immaculate virtuousness. The great words "chastity" and "maternity" are of course not absent. George Sand could as little leave off using them as some people can leave off using oaths. In either case the words imply much more than is intended by those from whose mouths or pens they come. A chaste woman speculating on "real love" and "passing diversions," as George Sand does here, seems to me a strange phenomenon. And how charmingly naive is the remark she makes regarding her relations with Chopin as a "PRESERVATIVE against emotions which she no longer wished to know"! I am afraid the concluding sentence, which in its unction is worthy of Pecksniff, and where she exhibits herself as an ascetic and martyr in all the radiance of saintliness, will not have the desired effect, but will make the reader laugh as loud as Musset is said to have done when she upbraided him with his ungratefulness to her, who had been devoted to him to the utmost bounds of self-abnegation, to the sacrifice of her noblest impulses, to the degradation of her chaste nature.
George Sand, looking back in later years on this period of her life, thought that if she had put into execution her project of becoming the teacher of her children, and of shutting herself up all the year round at Nohant, she would have saved Chopin from the danger which, unknown to her, threatened him—namely, the danger of attaching himself too absolutely to her. At that time, she says, his love was not so great but that absence would have diverted him from it. Nor did she consider his affection exclusive. In fact, she had no doubt that the six months which his profession obliged him to pass every year in Paris would, "after a few days of malaise and tears," have given him back to "his habits of elegance, exquisite success, and intellectual coquetry." The correctness of the facts and the probability of the supposition may be doubted. At any rate, the reasons which led her to assume the non-exclusiveness of Chopin's affection are simply childish. That he spoke to her of a romantic love-affair he had had in Poland, and of sweet attractions he had afterwards experienced in Paris, proves nothing. What she says about his mother having been his only passion is still less to the point. But reasoning avails little, and the strength of Chopin's love was not put to the test. He went, indeed, in the autumn of 1839 to Paris, but not alone; George Sand, professedly for the sake of her children's education, went there likewise. "We were driven by fate," she says, "into the bonds of a long connection, and both of us entered into it unawares." The words "driven by fate," and "entered into it unawares," sound strange, if we remember that they apply not to a young girl who, inexperienced and confiding, had lost herself in the mazes of life, but to a novelist skilled in the reading of human hearts, to a constantly-reasoning and calculating woman, aged 35, who had better reasons than poor Amelia in Schiller's play for saying "I have lived and loved."
After all this reasoning, moralising, and sentimentalising, it is pleasant to be once more face to face with facts, of which the following letters, written by Chopin to Fontana during the months from June to October, 1839, contain a goodly number. The rather monotonous publishing transactions play here and there again a prominent part, but these Nohant letters are on the whole more interesting than the Majorca letters, and decidedly more varied as regards contents than those he wrote from Marseilles—they tell us much more of the writer's tastes and requirements, and even reveal something of his relationship to George Sand. Chopin, it appears to me, did not take exactly the same view of this relationship as the novelist. What will be read with most interest are Chopin's directions as to the decoration and furnishing of his rooms, the engagement of a valet, the ordering of clothes and a hat, the taking of a house for George Sand, and certain remarks made en passant on composers and other less-known people.
[I.]
…The best part of your letter is your address, which I had already forgotten, and without which I do not know if I would have answered you so soon; but the worst is the death of Albrecht. [FOOTNOTE: See p.27 foot-note 7.]
You wish to know when I shall be back. When the misty and rainy weather begins, for I must breathe fresh air.
Johnnie has left. I don't know if he asked you to forward to me the letters from my parents should any arrive during his absence and be sent to his usual address. Perhaps he thought of it, perhaps not. I should be very sorry if any of them miscarried. It is not long since I had a letter from home, they will not write soon, and by this time he, who is so kind and good, will be in good health and return.
I am composing here a Sonata in B flat minor, in which will be the Funeral March which you have already. There is an allegro, then a "Scherzo" in E flat minor, the "March," and a short "Finale" of about three pages. The left hand unisono with the right hand are gossiping [FOOTNOTE: "Lewa reka unisono z prawa, ogaduja po Marszu.">[ after the March. I have a new "Nocturne" in G major, which will go along with the Nocturne in G minor, [FOOTNOTE: "Deux Nocturnes," Op.37.] if you remember such a one.
You know that I have four new mazurkas: one from Palma in E minor, three from here in B major, A flat major, and C sharp minor. [FOOTNOTE: Quatre mazurkas, Op. 41.] They seem to me pretty, as the youngest children usually do when the parents grow old.
Otherwise I do nothing; I correct for myself the Parisian edition of Bach; not only the stroke-makers' [FOOTNOTE: In Polish strycharz, the usual meaning of which is "brickmaker." Chopin may have played upon the word. A mistake, however, is likewise possible, as the Polish for engraver is sztycharz.] (engravers') errors, but, I think, the harmonic errors committed by those who pretend to understand Bach. I do not do it with the pretension that I understand him better than they, but from a conviction that I sometimes guess how it ought to be.