During their brief separations, she avalanched him with letters; some furious, some imploring, some wildly affectionate, some drearily commonplace. Here is an extract from one, displaying a fair sample of her warmer moods: It is nothing to you to have tamed the pride of such a woman as I, and to have stretched me a suppliant at your feet? It is nothing to you that I am dying of love?--torment of my life that you are! He found himself unable to avoid accepting some of the numberless hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. He could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as gracefully as from one key to its remote neighbor. Here, too, is the account given by a later chronicler of the composer's meeting with George Sand: One evening, as he was entering a house where a literary reception was in progress, Chopin fancied he was pursued by a violet-scented phantom. In superstitious fear, he would have left the house at once, but friends who were with him laughed away his dread and described the phenomenon as the fancy of a sick man's brain. He entered the crowded salon and was forthwith presented to the guest of honor, a swarthy and strange-looking woman--the premiere novelist, Madame Dudevant--George Sand. In his diary that same night Chopin wrote of his new acquaintance: I do not like her face. There is something in it that repels me. Yet within a day or so he was her adorer. For a time all went as well as any love story could with such a heroine. She gloried in her power to build up for the moment her lover's waning strength. Her friends' praise of the feat was as music to her. But she was not the type of woman who can forever wait patiently upon a fretful convalescent's whims. Her self-sacrifice was a flash, not a steady flame. And in time she girded at the restraints of playing nurse and vitality giver. Then, instead of boasting as before, she waxed complaining. She told the world at large how exacting and cross and tiresome Chopin was. She once referred to him publicly as "that detestable invalid." She announced that she was his ever-patient comrade and nurse. There is no authority but hers to bear out the claim of patience. And so the once-beautiful relationship dragged out its weary length until George Sand could endure the strain no longer. She deserted Chopin. Not content with this final blow to the invalid who had loved her for years, she continued to vilify him. Among her complaints was one that has since passed, in slightly altered form, into a good old reliable vaudeville wheeze. She wrote: We never addressed a single reproach to each other except once. And that was from the first to the last time we met.