not insane,
husband, who at once loved and maltreated the Poles, gained her the
title of "guardian angel of Poland." In her salon Frederick came of
course also in contact with the dreaded Grand Duke, the Napoleon of
Belvedere (thus he was nicknamed by Niemcewicz, from the palace where
he resided in Warsaw), who on one occasion when the boy was improvising
with his eyes turned to the ceiling, as was his wont, asked him why he
looked in that direction, if he saw notes up there. With the exalted
occupants of Belvedere Frederick had a good deal of intercourse, for
little Paul, a boy of his own age, a son or adopted son of the Grand
Duke, enjoyed his company, and sometimes came with his tutor, Count de
Moriolles, to his house to take him for a drive. On these occasions
the neighbours of the Chopin family wondered not a little what business
brought the Grand Duke's carriage, drawn by four splendid horses, yoked
in the Russian fashion--i.e., all abreast--to their quarter.

Chopin's early introduction into aristocratic society and constant
intercourse with the aristocracy is an item of his education which must
not be considered as of subordinate importance. More than almost any
other of his early disciplines, it formed his tastes, or at least
strongly assisted in developing certain inborn traits of his nature, and
in doing this influenced his entire moral and artistic character. In the
proem I mentioned an English traveller's encomiums on the elegance in
the houses, and the exquisite refinement in the entertainments, of the
wealthy nobles in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. We may be
sure that in these respects the present century was not eclipsed by
its predecessors, at least not in the third decade, when the salons of
Warsaw shone at their brightest. The influence of French thought and
manners, for the importation and spreading of which King Stanislas
Leszczinski was so solicitous that he sent at his own expense many young
gentlemen to Paris for their education, was subsequently strengthened by
literary taste, national sympathies, and the political connection during
the first Empire. But although foreign notions and customs caused
much of the old barbarous extravagance and also much of the old
homely simplicity to disappear, they did not annihilate the national
distinctiveness of the class that was affected by them. Suffused with
the Slavonic spirit and its tincture of Orientalism, the importation
assumed a charact