being beloved by
Napoleon I. became the mother of Count Walewski, a minister of the
second French empire. Drifting to Zelazowa-Wola, Nicholas Chopin lived
in the house of the Countess Skarbek, acting as tutor to her son,
Frederic. There he made the acquaintance of Justina Krzyzanowska, born
of "poor but noble parents." He married her in 1806 and she bore him
four children: three girls, and the boy Frederic Francois.

With a refined, scholarly French father, Polish in political
sentiments, and an admirable Polish mother, patriotic to the extreme,
Frederic grew to be an intelligent, vivacious, home-loving lad. Never a
hearty boy but never very delicate, he seemed to escape most of the
disagreeable ills of childhood. The moonstruck, pale, sentimental calf
of many biographers, he never was. Strong evidence exists that he was
merry, pleasure-loving and fond of practical jokes. While his father
was never rich, the family after the removal to Warsaw lived at ease.
The country was prosperous and Chopin the elder became a professor in
the Warsaw Lyceum. His children were brought up in an atmosphere of
charming simplicity, love and refinement. The mother was an ideal
mother, and, as George Sand declared, Chopin's "only love." But, as we
shall discover later, Lelia was ever jealous--jealous even of Chopin's
past. His sisters were gifted, gentle and disposed to pet him. Niecks
has killed all the pretty fairy tales of his poverty and suffering.

Strong common sense ruled the actions of Chopin's parents, and when his
love for music revealed itself at an early age they engaged a teacher
named Adalbert Zwyny, a Bohemian who played the violin and taught
piano. Julius Fontana, one of the first friends of the boy--he
committed suicide in Paris, December 31, 1869,--says that at the age of
twelve Chopin knew so much that he was left to himself with the usual
good and ill results. He first played on February 24, 1818, a concerto
by Gyrowetz and was so pleased with his new collar that he naively told
his mother, "Everybody was looking at my collar." His musical
precocity, not as marked as Mozart's, but phenomenal withal, brought
him into intimacy with the Polish aristocracy and there his taste for
fashionable society developed. The Czartoryskis, Radziwills, Skarbeks,
Potockis, Lubeckis and the Grand Duke Constantine with his Princess
Lowicka made life pleasant for the talented boy. Then came his lessons
with Joseph Elsner in composition, le