Frédéric and George

Not "Georges," by the way. She didn't like the S. I'm speaking of Frédéric Chopin and (the woman) George Sand, about whom I heard a group of French people talk last week. One of the ladies present was actually a descendent of George Sand, through the latter's son and his mistress.

George Sand's son, Maurice

George Sand's lover, Chopin

Although admittedly Chopin was 13 years older than her son, it seems clear from these pictures why "George" fell for Chopin. She wanted to mother him.

Chopin was the son of a Frenchman and a Polish woman (southern Polish, of romantic temperament). His sisters too were gifted (echoes of the Mozart family); the elder one taught him to play the piano. As a child Frédéric played the flute and liked to mimic people, a little comedian. Aged 11, he performed for the Tsar of Russia.

Chopin spent a decade of his adult life (1837-1847) with the proto-feminist, George Sand. She too was a precocious child (her real name was Aurore), the daughter of an aristocratic father and petit-bourgeois mother who had died young. At the age of 19 Aurore (i.e. George) got married, but her husband was a disappointment. She tried to teach him English and poetry when he was only interested in hunting. She developed une adoration folle, malsaine for her son, Maurice, but neglected her daughter Solange.

Oscar Wilde claimed that Sand had to have love affairs in order to be able to write about them; when she wasn't making jam, she wrote over sixty novels and more than twenty plays and had a series of liaisons dangereuses with young men, students, poets (such as Alfred de Musset), maybe with women too. The name George Sand was her invention inspired by an affair with Jules Sandeau, Maurice's private tutor, after which she took to wearing trousers, a dagger in her belt ("une femme doit se protéger"), and smoking cigars.

In comparison with "George," despite his sympathy with revolutionaries, Chopin was a conservative soul ("âme conservateur"); he also treated Sand's daughter with more affection than she did, which caused an eventual rupture. Chopin left France for a tour of Britain ("The English are kind people," he said, "but so weird!") and never returned to his mistress' house at Nohant. Chopin's death, probably from tuberculosis, soon followed.

A death mask was made and a cast of his left hand. Before the funeral, his heart was removed, preserved in alcohol to be returned to his homeland, as he had requested, his sister smuggling it to Warsaw, where it was later sealed within a pillar of the Holy Cross Church on Krakowskie Przedmieście. The rest of him was buried in the Madeleine in Paris. The funeral was attended by nearly three thousand people, George Sand not among them. The organist was Franz Liszt. Chopin had wanted Mozart's Requiem to be sung, but the Church of the Madeleine had forbidden female singers in its choir. In the end his wish was granted, with the ladies hidden away, singing from behind a black velvet curtain.