Of Chopin it must be admitted that he remained true to his attachment, true despite indubitable proof of the other's infidelity; true even till the shutting of the door wherewith eventually she barred her heart forever from his own; true even then he remained, nursing in secret the sorrows of a bruised and broken life, while, from this episode in her own career, but the finale in that of her lover, the woman, like Faust and Wilhelm Meister, emerged into other and varied experiences. But, to repeat our former question, what was the effect of George Sand on the ten years of productive effort which measured the beginning and the end of this affaire du cœur? We hold that effect the most important of everything extraneous on the body of our composer's works during that rich decade. Nevertheless that effect is not local; the finger cannot be placed upon it, nor is it determinable as a fixed quantity. Rather it is nourishment assimilated, chemically changed to blood and bloom and beauty by a process whereof genius alone has the secret. Of the work of these memorable years it may well be said that, beneath their various dedications, the name of George Sand was written in the warm and ruddy life of the heart of Frederic Chopin. Had the novelist been another Clara Schumann rendering for the composer those great fortissimos, and those loud and brilliant passages to which his delicate physique was unequal, or even had Chopin himself been, like Liszt, a man of literary tastes and capabilities, how much happier the outcome! How that mutual happiness, triumphing over the depressing power of a dread disease--as afterwards in the case of Heinrich Heine--would have infused a more luminous color into the prevailing sombreness of his tone poetry! But, thankful for our rich heritage, we grieve not over what might have been. V