and one of the saddest anecdotes related by De Lenz accuses her
of calling for a match to light her cigar: "Frederic, un
fidibus," she commanded, and Frederic obeyed. Mr. Philip Hale
mentions a letter from Balzac to his Countess Hanska, dated March
15, 1841, which concludes: "George Sand did not leave Paris last
year. She lives at Rue Pigalle, No. 16...Chopin is always there.
Elle ne fume que des cigarettes, et pas autre chose" Mr. Hale
states that the italics are in the letter. So much for De Lenz
and his fidibus!

I am impelled here to quote from Mr. Earnest Newman's "Study of
Wagner" because Chopin's exaltation of spirits, alternating with
irritability and intense depression, were duplicated in Wagner.
Mr. Newman writes of Wagner: "There have been few men in whom the
torch of life has burned so fiercely. In his early days he seems
to have had that gayety of temperament and that apparently
boundless energy which men in his case, as in that of Heine,
Nietzsche, Amiel and others, have wrongly assumed to be the
outcome of harmonious physical and mental health. There is a
pathetic exception in the outward lives of so many men of genius,
the bloom being, to the instructed eye, only the indication of
some subtle nervous derangement, only the forerunner of decay."
The overmastering cerebral agitation that obsessed Wagner's life,
was as with Chopin a symptom, not a sickness; but in the latter
it had not yet assumed a sinister turn.

Chopin's fourteen days in Berlin,--he went there under the
protection of his father's friend, Professor Jarocki, to attend
the great scientific congress--were full of joy unrestrained. The
pair left Warsaw September 9, 1828, and after five days travel in