George Sand's Ma Vie throws a good deal of light on Chopin's character; let us collect a few rays from it:—
He [Chopin] was modest on principle and gentle [doux] by habit, but he was imperious by instinct, and full of a legitimate pride that did not know itself.
He was certainly not made to live long in this world, this extreme type of an artist. He was devoured by the dream of an ideal which no practical philosophic or compassionate tolerance combated. He would never compound with human nature. He accepted nothing of reality. This was his vice and his virtue, his grandeur and his misery. Implacable to the least blemish, he had an immense enthusiasm for the least light, his excited imagination doing its utmost to see in it a sun.
He was the same in friendship [as in love], becoming enthusiastic at first sight, getting disgusted, and correcting himself [se reprenant] incessantly, living on infatuations full of charms for those who were the object of them, and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest affections.
Chopin accorded to me, I may say honoured me with, a kind of friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always the same to me.
The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness.
He had enough of his own ills to bear.
We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once,
which, alas! was the first and the last time.
But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace, obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured the asperities of his character towards those who were about me. With them the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice versa.
Chopin when angry was alarming, and as, with me, he always
restrained himself, he seemed almost to choke and die.
The following extracts from Liszt's book partly corroborate, partly supplement, the foregoing evidence:—