George Sand's desertion was Chopin's deathblow. He never rallied from it. He tried to mask his heartbreak by going about as before and appearing often in public. But even this was soon denied to him--not only by collapsed health, but from the danger of meeting his former divinity at the houses he chanced to visit or on the streets. One such lesson was enough for him. It was in a friend's crowded drawing-room. A historian describes the encounter: Thinking herself unobserved, George Sand walked up to Chopin and held out her hand. "Frederic!" she murmured, in a voice audible to him alone. He saw her familiar form standing before him. She was repentant, subdued, and seeking reconciliation. His handsome face grew deadly pale, and without a word he left the room. The end came soon afterward. Chopin's mortal illness struck him down. Dying, he sent for his lost love. Perhaps the message never reached her; perhaps she thought it a trick--she had tried something of the sort on de Musset; perhaps she did not realize that the time was so short. At all events, she paid no heed to the frantic appeal that she come at once to the dying composer. Hour after hour, Chopin waited for her, his ears strained for the sound of her heavy tread. At last he grew to realize that she would not obey the summons, that he would never again see her. As hope fled, Chopin broke down and cried piteously. "She promised I should die in no arms but hers!" he sobbed over and over. And that night he died--no less than seven different women claiming later to have taken his recreant sweetheart's place at his deathbed. George Sand was conscience-stricken. She wrote and proclaimed long and more or less plausible reasons to account for her failure to go to Chopin. But no one who really knew her was convinced of her excuses' truth. And so ended one more of her heart stories. De Musset, by the way refused to admit her to his rooms when he himself lay dying--a grisly joke that Paris appreciated. Back to her work, as once before, George Sand fled for forgetfulness. And her fame grew. She was the most prolific woman writer, by the way, in literature's history; writing, in all, twenty plays and more than one hundred novels. An Englishman (name buried) courted her at about this time. Still miserable over Chopin's death--and far more so over the way people were talking about her treatment of him--she was decidedly waspish to the trans-Channel admirer. Seeking to win her interest, in a literary discussion, he opened one conversation by inquiring: "Madame Dudevant, what is your favorite novel?" "'Olympia,'" she answered, without a second of hesitance. "'Olympia?'" the Englishman repeated, vainly ransacking his memory. "I don't think I recall any book of that name." "Of course you don't," she snapped. "I haven't written it yet." And perhaps--or perhaps not--his British brain some day unraveled the meaning of cryptic retort.