The sources from which one can gather an authentic documentation of the life of Chopin are extremely scarce. During his life, few people took the trouble to preserve his letters, although he wrote but few. Some, doubtless, attached but little value to them. Others caused them to disappear because they exposed too intimate a part of their lives.
An historic anecdote has it that Alexandre Dumas fils, in the course of a sentimental pilgrimage to Poland in the spring of 1851, fell by chance upon the complete file of letters written by George Sand to Chopin. Dumas brought the file back to France and, having restored it to the novelist, saw her re-read her letters and then throw them into the fire. Doubtless she thus thought to bury in eternal oblivion the sad remains of a love whose raptures and whose pains alike would not return to her. The burning, in 1863, of the Warsaw house of Mme. Barcinska, Chopin’s youngest sister, destroyed other precious relics.
So there remains to us but a very small number of the composer’s letters. Even these were altered at will by their first editor, Maurice Karasowski. Many biographers, however, have placidly copied them, without taking the trouble to collate them with the original texts, or even with the faithful and inexpurgated German translation which M. B. Scharlitt published at Leipzig in 1911. M. Henri Bidou has been the first to restore to us some of these letters in their libelled original form. Karasowski’s work is important, nevertheless, because the author, writing between 1860 and 1863, was intimately associated with Chopin’s sisters and niece, and he gathered from their lips the family traditions. Parts of this I have used particularly those concerned with the composer’s childish years and his death, being convinced that the pious legend is based on fact.
Other episodes, notably the journey to Berlin and his love for Constance Gladkowska, have been borrowed from the work of Count Wodzinski. I have also adopted certain picturesque details furnished by this same biographer, as well as some family information concerning his relation, Marie Wodzinska. Let me say this much once for all, in order not to load my text with references. The curious reader will find all these on a later page in the list of Works Consulted.
The first complete and soundly documented work on the life of Chopin was published by F. Niecks, in London, in 1888. Niecks too had known a number of friends and pupils of the master. His study has therefore an individual flavour which has not been superseded by later works. Elsewhere have been issued a whole series of works on the musician, particularly in Polish, German and English. I cite first of all the monumental Chopin of Ferdynand Hoesick. But if we exclude the imaginative and erroneous little books published in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century (and up to our own day) we must go to the work of M. E. Ganche to discover the first complete and serious study of the Polish musician that has been published in French. The recent volume of M. H. Bidou rectifies certain points in it and amplifies certain others. It is an indispensable work for those who wish to fathom Chopin’s music.
As I lately attempted with Liszt, I have sought here only to discover a face and to replace it in its frame. With this object, I have always allowed my characters to speak and act. I have scrupulously refrained from invention. On the other hand, I have not hesitated to interpret, believing, as I have said several times elsewhere, that every fact draws its enduring value from artistic interpretation. My effort has been only to group events in a certain order, to disentangle the lines of the heart and those of the spirit without trying to explain that which, in the soul of Chopin, has remained always inexplicable; not to lift, indeed, from my subject that shadow that gives him his inner meaning and his nebulous beauty.