she was unable to pay their salaries and travelling
expenses. I saw in Warsaw two French physicians who informed
me that they could not procure their fees even from the
greatest lords.

But whatever straits the parents may have been put to, the weak,
helpless infant would lack none of the necessaries of life, and enjoy
all the reasonable comforts of his age.

When in 1815 peace was restored and a period of quiet followed, the
family must have lived in easy circumstances; for besides holding
appointments as professor at some public schools (under the Russian
government he became also one of the staff of teachers at the Military
Preparatory School), Nicholas Chopin kept for a number of years a
boarding-school, which was patronised by the best families of the
country. The supposed poverty of Chopin's parents has given rise to all
sorts of misconceptions and misstatements. A writer in Larousse's
"Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siecle" even builds on it a
theory explanatory of the character of Chopin and his music: "Sa famille
d'origine francaise," he writes, "jouissait d'une mediocre fortune; de
la, peut-etre, certains froissements dans l'organisation nerveuse et
la vive sensibilite de l'enfant, sentiments qui devaient plus tard
se refleter dans ses oeuvres, empreintes generalement d'une profonde
melancolie." If the writer of the article in question had gone a little
farther back, he might have found a sounder basis for his theory in the
extremely delicate physical organisation of the man, whose sensitiveness
was so acute that in early infancy he could not hear music without
crying, and resisted almost all attempts at appeasing him.

The last-mentioned fact, curious and really noteworthy in itself,
acquires a certain preciousness by its being the only one transmitted
to us of that period of Chopin's existence. But this scantiness of
information need not cause us much regret. During the first years of a
man's life biography is chiefly concerned with his surroundings, with
the agencies that train his faculties and mould his character. A
man's acts and opinions are interesting in proportion to the degree of
consolidation attained by his individuality. Fortunately our material is
abundant enough to enable us to reconstruct in some measure the milieu
into which Chopin was born and in which he grew up. We will begin with
that first circle which surrounds the child--his family. The negative
advantages which our F