asm of Robert Schumann. In 1831 he
left Vienna with the intention of visiting London; but on his way to
England he reached Paris and settled there for the rest of his life.
Here again he soon became the favourite and musical hero of society. His
connexion with Madame Dudevant, better known by her literary pseudonym
of George Sand (q.v.), is an important feature of Chopin's life. When in
1839 his health began to fail, George Sand went with him to Majorca, and
it was mainly owing to her tender care that the composer recovered his
health for a time. Chopin declared that the destruction of his relations
with Madame Dudevant in 1847 broke up his life. The association of these
two artists has provoked a whole literature on the nature of their
relations, of which the novelist's _Un Hiver a Majorque_ was the
beginning. The last ten years of Chopin's life were a continual struggle
with the pulmonary disease to which he succumbed in Paris on the 17th of
October 1849. The year before his death he visited England, where he was
received with enthusiasm by his numerous admirers. Chopin died in the
arms of his sister, who hastened from Poland to his death-bed. He was
buried in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise. A small monument was erected to
the memory of the composer at Wasswan in 1880. Portraits and medallions
of Chopin were executed by Ary Scheffer and Eugene Delacroix, and by the
sculptors Bary and Clesinger.

A distinguished English amateur thus records his impressions of Chopin's
style of pianoforte-playing compared with those of other masters. "His
technical characteristics may be broadly indicated as negation of
_bravura_, absolute perfection of finger-play, and of the _legatissimo_
touch, on which no other pianist has ever so entirely leant, to the
exclusion of that high relief and point which the modern German school,
after the examples of Liszt and Thalberg, has so effectively developed.
It is in these feature that we must recognize that _Grundverschiedenheit_
(fundamental difference) which according to Mendelssohn distinguished
Chopin's playing from that of these masters, and in no less degree from
the example and teaching of Moscheles.... Imagine a delicate man of
extreme refinement of mien and manner, sitting at the piano and playing
with no sway of the body and scarcely any movement of the arms, depending
entirely upon his narrow feminine hands and slender fingers. The wide
arpeggios in the left hand, maintained in a contin