"So I am said to be a saint! If this is intended to convey what I conceive to be the meaning of the word, and what your expressions lead me to think you also understand by it, then I can only say that, alas! I am not so, though every day of my life I strive with greater earnestness, according to my ability, more and more to resemble this character. I know indeed that I can never hope to be altogether a saint, but if I ever approach to one, it will be well. If people, however, understand by the word 'saint' a Pietist, one of those who lay their hands on their laps and expect that Providence will do their work for them, and who, instead of striving in their vocation to press on towards perfection, talk of a heavenly calling being incompatible with an earthly one, and are incapable of loving with their whole hearts any human being, or anything on earth,--then God be praised! such a one I am not, and hope never to become, so long as I live; and though I am sincerely desirous to live piously, and really to be so, I hope this does not necessarily entail the other character. It is singular that people should select precisely _this_ time to say such a thing, when I am in the enjoyment of so much happiness, both through my inner and outer life, and my new domestic ties, as well as my busy work, that I really know not how sufficiently to show my thankfulness. And, as you wish me to follow the path which leads to rest and peace, believe me, I never expected to live in the rest and peace which have now fallen to my lot." CHAPTER XVII. THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN He wrote to his parents: "I have made the acquaintance of an important celebrity, Mme. Dudevant, well known as George Sand; but I do not like her face; there is something in it that repels me." And then, of course, he fell in love with her, for she leaned on his piano and improvised flatteries across the strings to him and turned full on him the luminous midnight of her ox-eyed beauty. A punster would say that he was oxidised, at once. The two lovers were strangely unlike--of course. She was masculine, self-poised, and self-satisfied; she had taken excellent care of herself at a time when the independent woman had less encouragement than now. So more than masculinely coarse she was in some ways, indeed, that Henry James once insinuated that, while she may have been to all intents and purposes a man, she was certainly no gentleman. Heine raved over her beauty, but, judging from her portrait, she later had a face as homely as that of George Eliot, who, as Carlyle said, looked like a horse. The poet De Musset, one of Sand's later lovers, said her dark complexion gave reflections like bronze; therefore De Musset found her very beautiful. Chopin was--well, some say he was not effeminate; and he could break chairs when he was angry at a pupil. But they also speak of his frail, fairylike, ethereal manner, and those qualities I, for one, have never known in any non-effeminate man--outside of books.