the curtain prepares to fall on the last dreary finale of Chopin's
life, a life not for a moment heroic, yet lived according to his lights
and free from the sordid and the soil of vulgarity. Jules Janin said:
"He lived ten miraculous years with a breath ready to fly away," and we
know that his servant Daniel had always to carry him to bed. For ten
years he had suffered from so much illness that a relapse was not
noticed by the world. His very death was at first received with
incredulity, for, as Stephen Heller said, he had been reported dead so
often that the real news was doubted. In 1847 his legs began to bother
him by swelling, and M. Mathias described him as "a painful spectacle,
the picture of exhaustion, the back bent, head bowed--but always
amiable and full of distinction." His purse was empty, and his lodgings
in the Rue Chaillot were represented to the proud man as being just
half their cost,--the balance being paid by the Countess Obreskoff, a
Russian lady. Like a romance is the sending, by Miss Stirling, of
twenty-five thousand francs, but it is nevertheless true. The
noble-hearted Scotchwoman heard of Chopin's needs through Madame Rubio,
a pupil, and the money was raised. That packet containing it was
mislaid or lost by the portress of Chopin's house, but found after the
woman had been taxed with keeping it.

Chopin, his future assured, moved to Place Vendome, No. 12. There he
died. His sister Louise was sent for, and came from Poland to Paris. In
the early days of October he could no longer sit upright without
support. Gutmann and the Countess Delphine Potocka, his sister, and M.
Gavard, were constantly with him. It was Turgenev who spoke of the half
hundred countesses in Europe who claimed to have held the dying Chopin
in their arms. In reality he died in Gutmann's, raising that pupil's
hand to his mouth and murmuring "cher ami" as he expired. Solange Sand
was there, but not her mother, who called and was not admitted--so they
say. Gutmann denies having refused her admittance. On the other hand,
if she had called, Chopin's friends would have kept her away from him,
from the man who told Franchomme two days before his death, "She said
to me that I would die in no arms but hers." Surely--unless she was
monstrous in her egotism, and she was not--George Sand did not hear
this sad speech without tears and boundless regrets. Alas! all things
come too late for those who wait.

Tarnowski relates that Chopin gave