sition was complete. Then, how I
would toil, toil, prune and expand his feeble ideas! Mon Dieu! Frederic
was no reformer by nature, no pathbreaker in art; he was a sickly
fellow, always coughing, always scolding, but he played charmingly. He
had such fingers! and he knew all our national dances. The mazurek, the
mazourk, the polonaise and the krakowiak. Ah! but then he had no blood,
no fire, no muscle, no vitality. He was not a revolutionist. He did not
discover new forms; all he cared for was to mock the Jews with their
majufes, and play sugar-water nocturnes.

"I was the artistic mate to this little Pole who allowed that old
man-woman to deceive him--George Sand, of course. Ah! the old rascal,
how she hated me. She forbade me to enter their hotel in the Cour
d'Orleans, but I did--Chopin would have died without me, the delicate
little vampire! I was his nurse, his mother, his big brother. I fought
his fight with the publishers, with the creditors. I wrote his
polonaises, all--all I tell you--except those sickly things in the keys
of C sharp minor, F minor and B flat minor. Pouf! don't tell me anything
about Chopin. He write a polonaise? He write the scherzi, the ballades,
the etudes?--you make me enraged. I, I made them all and he will get the
credit for all time, and I am glad of it, for I loved him as a father."

The voice of Minkiewicz became strident as he repeated his old story.
Some of the clients of The Fallen Angels stopped talking for a moment;
it was only that crazy Pole again with his thrice-told tale.

Minkiewicz drank another absinthe.

"And were you then a poet as well as a composer?" timidly asked young
Louis.

"I was the greatest poet Poland ever had. Ask of Chopin's friends, or of
his living pupils. Go ask Georges Mathias, the old professor of the
Conservatoire, if Minkiewicz did not inspire Chopin. Who gave him the
theme for his Revolutionary etude--the one in C minor?" Minkiewicz ran
his left hand with velocity across the table. His disciples followed
those marvellously agile fingers with the eyes of the hypnotic....

"I was with Frederic at Stuttgart. I first heard the news of the capture
of Warsaw. Pale and with beating heart I ran to the hotel and told him
all. He had an attack of hysteria; then I rushed to the piano and by
chance struck out a phrase. It was in C sharp minor, and was almost
identical with the theme of the C minor study. At once Chopin ceased his
moaning and weeping and came