of
the affair which has been dwelt upon ad nauseam by every twanger of the
romantic string. The idealists will always see a union of souls, the
realists--and there were plenty of them in Paris taking notes from 1837
to 1847--view the alliance as a matter for gossip. The truth lies
midway.

Chopin, a neurotic being, met the polyandrous Sand, a trampler on all
the social and ethical conventions, albeit a woman of great gifts;
repelled at first he gave way before the ardent passion she manifested
toward him. She was his elder, so could veil the situation with the
maternal mask, and she was the stronger intellect, more
celebrated--Chopin was but a pianist in the eyes of the many--and so
won by her magnetism the man she desired. Paris, artistic Paris, was
full of such situations. Liszt protected the Countess d'Agoult, who
bore him children, Cosima Von Bulow-Wagner among the rest.
Balzac--Balzac, that magnificent combination of Bonaparte and Byron,
pirate and poet--was apparently leading the life of a saint, but his
most careful student, Viscount Spelboerch de Lovenjoul--whose name is
veritably Balzac-ian--tells us some different stories; even Gustave
Flaubert, the ascetic giant of Rouen, had a romance with Madame Louise
Colet, a mediocre writer and imitator of Sand,--as was Countess
d'Agoult, the Frankfort Jewess better known as "Daniel Stern,"--that
lasted from 1846 to 1854, according to Emile Faguet. Here then was a
medium which was the other side of good and evil, a new transvaluation
of morals, as Nietzsche would say. Frederic deplored the union for he
was theoretically a Catholic. Did he not once resent the visit of Liszt
and a companion to his apartments when he was absent? Indeed he may be
fairly called a moralist. Carefully reared in the Roman Catholic
religion he died confessing that faith. With the exception of the Sand
episode, his life was not an irregular one, He abhorred the vulgar and
tried to conceal this infatuation from his parents.

This intimacy, however, did the pair no harm artistically,
notwithstanding the inevitable sorrow and heart burnings at the close.
Chopin had some one to look after him--he needed it--and in the society
of this brilliant Frenchwoman he throve amazingly: his best work may be
traced to Nohant and Majorca. She on her side profited also. After the
bitterness of her separation from Alfred de Musset about 1833 she had
been lonely, for the Pagello intermezzo was of short duration. Th