was no friend of long excursions on foot, and preferred to lie
down and dream under beautiful trees; in another place, that his
parents sent him to Reinerz and some years afterwards to Vienna,
because they thought his studies had affected his health, and
that rest and change of air and scene would restore his strength.
Further, we are told that his mother and sisters never tired of
recommending him to wrap up carefully in cold and wet weather,
and that, like a good son and brother, he followed their advice.
Lastly, he objected to smoking. Some of the items of this
evidence are very trivial, but taken collectively they have
considerable force. Of greater significance are the following
additional items. Chopin's sister Emilia was carried off at the
age of fourteen by pulmonary disease, and his father, as a
physician informed me, died of a heart and chest complaint.
Stephen Heller, who saw Chopin in 1830 in Warsaw, told me that
the latter was then in delicate health, thin and with sunken
cheeks, and that the people of Warsaw said that he could not live
long, but would, like so many geniuses, die young. The real state
of the matter seems to me to have been this. Although Chopin in
his youth was at no time troubled with any serious illness, he
enjoyed but fragile health, and if his frame did not alreadv
contain the seeds of the disease to which he later fell a prey,
it was a favourable soil for their reception. How easily was an
organisation so delicately framed over-excited and disarranged!
Indeed, being vivacious, active, and hard-working, as he was, he
lived on his capital. The fire of youth overcame much, not,
however, without a dangerous waste of strength, the lamentable
results of which we shall see before we have gone much farther.
This statement of the case we find, I think, confirmed by
Chopin's correspondence--the letter written at Reinerz is in this