h language at the Academy of the Roman Catholic Clergy.

It is more difficult, or rather it is impossible, to form anything like
a clear picture of his wife, Justina Chopin. None of those of her son's
letters that are preserved is addressed to her, and in those addressed
to the members of the family conjointly, or to friends, nothing occurs
that brings her nearer to us, or gives a clue to her character. George
Sand said that she was Chopin's only passion. Karasowski describes
her as "particularly tender-hearted and rich in all the truly womanly
virtues.....For her quietness and homeliness were the greatest
happiness." K. W. Wojcicki, in "Cmentarz Powazkowski" (Powazki
Cemetery), expresses, himself in the same strain. A Scotch lady, who had
seen Justina Chopin in her old age, and conversed with her in French,
told me that she was then "a neat, quiet, intelligent old lady, whose
activeness contrasted strongly with the languor of her son, who had
not a shadow of energy in him." With regard to the latter part of this
account, we must not overlook the fact that my informant knew Chopin
only in the last year of his life--i.e., when he was in a very suffering
state of mind and body. This is all the information I have been able to
collect regarding the character of Chopin's mother. Moreover, Karasowski
is not an altogether trustworthy informant; as a friend of the Chopin
family he sees in its members so many paragons of intellectual and moral
perfection. He proceeds on the de mortuis nil nisi bonum principle,
which I venture to suggest is a very bad principle. Let us apply this
loving tenderness to our living neighbours, and judge the dead according
to their merits. Thus the living will be doubly benefited, and no harm
be done to the dead. Still, the evidence before us--including that
exclamation about his "best of mothers" in one of Chopin's letters,
written from Vienna, soon after the outbreak of the Polish
insurrection in 1830: "How glad my mamma will be that I did not come
back!"--justifies us, I think, in inferring that Justina Chopin was a
woman of the most lovable type, one in whom the central principle of
existence was the maternal instinct, that bright ray of light which,
dispersed in its action, displays itself in the most varied and lovely
colours. That this principle, although often all-absorbing, is not
incompatible with the wider and higher social and intellectual interests
is a proposition that does not stand in n