"We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once, which, alas, was the first and the final time." "But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace, obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured the asperities of character towards those who were about me. With them the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice versa." "Chopin when angry was alarming, and, as, with me, he always restrained himself, he seemed almost to choke and die." It is generally believed that in the character of _Prince Karol_ in her novel, "Lucrezia Floriani," published in 1847, Sand used that lethal weapon of revenge novelists possess, and portrayed or caricatured Chopin. It is only fair to give her disclaimer, though Liszt repeated the charge in his "Life of Chopin," and though Karasovski says that Sand's own children told Chopin that he was pictured as Prince Karol. None the less, hearken to the novelist's own defence: "It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his (Chopin's) character with a great exactness of analysis. People were mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and, proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in a life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in good faith. I have traced in _Prince Karol_ the character of a man determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his exigencies. Chopin was not such. Nature does not design like art, however realistic it may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is too limited to reproduce them. "Chopin was a résumé of these magnificent inconsequences which God alone can allow himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full of unlegitimate pride, which was unconscious of itself. Hence sufferings which he did not reason out and which did not fix themselves on a determined object. "However, _Prince Karol_ is not an artist. He is a dreamer and nothing more; having no genius, he has not the right of genius. He is therefore a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the manuscript every day on my desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself,--he who, nevertheless, was so suspicious.