In deference to Mr. Hadow I shall not call it a
liaison. It was not, in the vulgar sense. Chopin might have been
petty--a common failing of artistic men--but he was never vulgar
in word or deed. He disliked "the woman with the sombre eye"
before he had met her. Her reputation was not good, no matter if
George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and
others believed her an injured saint. Mr. Hadow indignantly
repudiates anything that savors of irregularity in the relations
of Chopin and Aurore Dudevant. If he honestly believes that their
contemporaries flagrantly lied and that the woman's words are to
be credited, why by all means let us leave the critic in his
Utopia. Mary, Queen of Scots, has her Meline; why should not Sand
boast of at least one apologist for her life--besides herself? I
do not say this with cynical intent. Nor do I propose to discuss
the details of the affair which has been dwelt upon ad nauseam by
every twanger of the romantic string. The idealists will always
see a union of souls, the realists--and there were plenty of them
in Paris taking notes from 1837 to 1847--view the alliance as a
matter for gossip.
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