Always gentle, he yet knew how to rebuke arrogance, and had sharp repartees for those who tried to force him into musical display. On one occasion, when he had just left the dining-room, an indiscreet host, who had had the simplicity to promise his guests some piece executed by him as a rare dessert, pointed him to an open piano. Chopin quietly refused, but on being pressed said, with a languid and sneering drawl:—“Ah, sir, I have just dined; your hospitality, I see, demands payment.”
IV.
Mdme. Sand, in her Lettres d’un Voyageur, depicts the painful lethargy which seizes the artist when, having incorporated the emotion which inspired him in his work, his imagination still remains under the dominance of the insatiate idea, without being able to find a new incarnation. She was suffering in this way when the character of Chopin excited her curiosity and suggested a healthful and happy relief. Chopin dreaded to meet this modern Sibyl. The superstitious awe he felt was a premonition whose meaning was hidden from him. They met, and Chopin lost his fear in one of those passions which feed on the whole being with a ceaseless hunger.
In the fall of 1837 Chopin yielded to a severe attack of the disease which was hereditary in his frame. In company with Mdme. Sand, who had become his constant companion, he went to the isle of Majorca, to find rest and medicine in the balmy breezes of the Mediterranean. All the happiness of Chopin’s life was gathered in the focus of this experience. He had a most loving and devoted nurse, who yielded to all his whims, soothed his fretfulness, and watched over him as a mother does over a child. The grounds of the villa where they lived were as perfect as Nature and art could make them, and exquisite scenes greeted the eye at every turn. Here they spent long golden days.
The feelings of Chopin for his gifted companion are best painted by herself in the pages of Lucrezia Floriani, where she is the “Floriani,” Liszt “Count Salvator Albani,” and Chopin “Prince Karol”—“It seemed as if this fragile being was absorbed and consumed by the strength of his affection.... But he loved for the sake of loving.... His love was his life, and, delicious or bitter, he had not the power of withdrawing himself a single moment from its domination.” Slowly she nursed him back into temporary health, and in the sunlight of her love his mind assumed a gaiety and cheerfulness it had never known before.
It had been the passionate hope of Chopin to marry Mdme. Sand, but wedlock was alien alike to her philosophy and preference. After a protracted intimacy, she wearied of his persistent entreaties, or perhaps her self-development had exhausted what it sought in the poet-musician. An absolute separation came, and his mistress buried the episode in her life with the epitaph—“Two natures, one rich in its exuberance, the other in its exclusiveness, could never really mingle, and a whole world separated them.” Chopin said—“All the cords that bind me to life are broken.” His sad summary of all was that his life had been an episode which began and ended in Paris. What a contrast to the being of a few years before, of whom it is written—“He was no longer on the earth; he was in an empyrean of golden clouds and perfumes; his imagination, so full of exquisite beauty, seemed engaged in a monologue with God himself!”[C]
Both Liszt and Mdme. Dudevant have painted Chopin somewhat as a sickly sentimentalist, living in an atmosphere of moonshine and unreality. Yet this was not precisely true. In spite of his delicacy of frame and romantic imagination, Chopin was never ill till within the last ten years of his life, when the seeds of hereditary consumption developed themselves. As a young man he was lively and joyous, always ready for frolic, and with a great fund of humour, especially in caricature. Students of human character know how consistent these traits are with a deep undercurrent of melancholy, which colours the whole life when the immediate impulse of joy subsides.
From the date of 1840 Chopin’s health declined; but through the seven years during which his connection with Mdme. Sand continued, he persevered actively in his work of composition. The final rupture with the woman he so madly loved seems to have been his death-blow. He spoke of Mdme. Sand without bitterness, but his soul pined in the bitter-sweet of memory. He recovered partially, and spent a short season of concert-giving in London, where he was fêted and caressed by the best society as he had been in Paris. Again he was sharply assailed by his fatal malady, and he returned to Paris to die. Let us describe one of his last earthly experiences, on Sunday, the 15th of October 1849.
Chopin had lain insensible from one of his swooning attacks for some time. His sister Louise was by his side, and the Countess Delphine Potocka, his beautiful countrywoman and a most devoted friend, watched him with streaming eyes. The dying musician became conscious, and faintly ordered a piano to be rolled in from the adjoining room. He turned to the countess, and whispered, feebly, “Sing.” She had a lovely voice, and, gathering herself for the effort, she sang that famous canticle to the Virgin which, tradition says, saved Stradella’s life from assassins. “How beautiful it is!” he exclaimed. “My God! how very beautiful!” Again she sang to him, and the dying musician passed into a trance, from which he never fully aroused till he expired, two days afterwards, in the arms of his pupil, M. Gutman.
Chopin’s obsequies took place at the Madeleine Church, and Lablache sang on this occasion the same passage, the “Tuba Mirum” of Mozart’s Requiem Mass, which he had sung at the funeral of Beethoven in 1827; while the other solos were given by Mdme. Viardot Garcia and Mdme. Castellan. He lies in Père Lachaise, beside Cherubini and Bellini.