devoted to him to the utmost bounds of self-abnegation, to
the sacrifice of her noblest impulses, to the degradation of her chaste
nature.

George Sand, looking back in later years on this period of her life,
thought that if she had put into execution her project of becoming the
teacher of her children, and of shutting herself up all the year round
at Nohant, she would have saved Chopin from the danger which, unknown
to her, threatened him--namely, the danger of attaching himself too
absolutely to her. At that time, she says, his love was not so great but
that absence would have diverted him from it. Nor did she consider his
affection exclusive. In fact, she had no doubt that the six months which
his profession obliged him to pass every year in Paris would, "after a
few days of malaise and tears," have given him back to "his habits of
elegance, exquisite success, and intellectual coquetry." The correctness
of the facts and the probability of the supposition may be doubted. At
any rate, the reasons which led her to assume the non-exclusiveness
of Chopin's affection are simply childish. That he spoke to her of a
romantic love-affair he had had in Poland, and of sweet attractions he
had afterwards experienced in Paris, proves nothing. What she says about
his mother having been his only passion is still less to the point. But
reasoning avails little, and the strength of Chopin's love was not put
to the test. He went, indeed, in the autumn of 1839 to Paris, but
not alone; George Sand, professedly for the sake of her children's
education, went there likewise. "We were driven by fate," she says,
"into the bonds of a long connection, and both of us entered into it
unawares." The words "driven by fate," and "entered into it unawares,"
sound strange, if we remember that they apply not to a young girl who,
inexperienced and confiding, had lost herself in the mazes of life,
but to a novelist skilled in the reading of human hearts, to a
constantly-reasoning and calculating woman, aged 35, who had better
reasons than poor Amelia in Schiller's play for saying "I have lived and
loved."

After all this reasoning, moralising, and sentimentalising, it is
pleasant to be once more face to face with facts, of which the following
letters, written by Chopin to Fontana during the months from June to
October, 1839, contain a goodly number. The rather monotonous publishing
transactions play here and there again a prominent part, but these
Noha