CHAPTER I
“An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman”
“An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman...” This portrait of Chopin, penned by a hand he loved, should stand as the frontispiece of this study. Naïve painters in the Middle Ages—who also came to pray for pardon—hung their expiatory offerings in the shadows of the cathedrals. This once caressing woman’s hand, now dead, surely yielded, while writing these words, to the inner necessity of knowing absolution. It added: “There was never anything more pure and at the same time more exalted than his thoughts...”
And perhaps with faint trembling: “... but this being only understood that which was inherent within himself. One would have needed a microscope to peer into his soul, where so little light of the living ever penetrated.”
A microscope has never helped to reveal a soul. No optical instruments are necessary in order to follow the teaching of Liszt: let us try to see with our hearts.
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At the head of these pages must stand a name; because that name breathes life into the whole being of whom we write: Poland. Ever since 1795 that unhappy country had been completely dismembered, until Napoleon, that great poet of geography, after his first campaign in Prussia, created the Duchy of Warsaw (1807). This was to last until the fall of the Emperor, that is, barely eight years. Yet these eight years were sufficient to endow the Poles with a singularly youthful hero worship for France.
Now in 1806, a certain M. Nicolas Chopin, professor of French, entrusted with the education of the son of the Countess Skarbek, married in the village of Zelazowa Wola, six leagues from Warsaw, a Mlle. Justine Krzyzanowska. He was of French origin, a native of Marainville, a small village near the Hill of Sion, in the heart of Lorraine, the history of which is so curiously interwoven with that of Poland. The fiancée of this one-time clerk who had become a teacher was a girl of twenty-four, of an impoverished noble family. In the household of the Countess she held, as did others of rank, the position of attendant and lady-in-waiting, according to the tradition of such proud, poor seigneurs.
Close to the seigneurial dwelling, which was screened by a group of trees, stood a small house flanked by an outside staircase. Right through it ran a passage, at the end of which could be seen the court, the stables, and, at a distance, the fields of alfalfa and of colza. Here the young couple settled down. At the right of the entrance were three low rooms where one could touch the ceiling. After a time a girl was born, and was named Louise. This obscure event was rapidly succeeded by the French campaign in Prussia—Tilsit, Austerlitz, Jéna, Wagram, and the Polish eagles flying in the train of the Imperial eagles. Haydn died while the cannon of Napoleon were thundering for the second time under the walls of Vienna. When four shells had fallen close to him, the old composer said to his terrified servants, “Why this panic? Remember that wherever Haydn is no accident can happen.” Stendhal, a commissioner in the army, was present at his obsequies. He afterwards made the following note: “Why is it that all Frenchmen who are really great in literature—La Fontaine, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Bossuet—should have met together about 1660? Why should all the great painters have appeared about 1510? Why, since these two happy periods, has nature been so sparing? Will music have the same fate?”
Yet Beethoven at that date was writing the _Quatuor serioso_ and the sonata in E flat major, which is called _The Farewells_. He had already composed six of his symphonies, the _Kreutzer Sonata_, the _Appassionata_, and _Fidélio_. Liszt, Schumann and Wagner were approaching. Goethe was flourishing; Byron was publishing his first verses. Shelley and Keats were outlining theirs. Balzac, Hugo, Berlioz were warming the school benches. And on the 22nd of February, 1810, at six o’clock in the evening, in the little house in Zelazowa Wola, was born Frederick François Chopin.
He came into a world of music. For exactly at that moment, under the windows of his mother, rustic violins were giving a serenade for a village wedding.