The ruins of the noblest man

This only known photograph* of Chopin (1810-49) at age 39 taken by Bisson in 1849 clearly reveals the ravages of the degenerative stages of tuberculosis which took his life only a few months later. Despite the carefully posed positioning, it is quite apparent his face is bloated from the inflammatory effects of his illness, and his whole countenance is rather pathetic and tragically sad. It used to be thought that this celebrated daguerreotype was taken in the summer of 1849, in the  Paris offices of Chopin’s publisher Maurice Schlesinger, and that date appears in many of the major iconographies of Chopin. We now know it to have been taken by Bisson in his atelier at 65 rue Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois toward the end of 1847, not long after Chopin’s break with George Sand. During Chopin’s lifetime it belonged to Schlesinger’s private collection and subsequently to the firm of Breitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig. It was later acquired by the Chopin National Institute in Warsaw. The original daguerreotype was destroyed during World War II. What we have today is a photograph of that daguerreotype made sometime before 1939.

Pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870), a music contemporary, provided a precise description of him in better days:

"He was of slim frame, middle height [apparently 100lbs/5'7"]; fragile but wonderfully flexible limbs, delicately formed hands, very small feet, an oval, softly outlined head, a pale transparent complexion, long silken hair of a light chestnut color, parted on one side, tender brown eyes, intelligent rather than dreamy, a finely-curved aquiline nose, a sweet subtle smile, graceful and varied gestures."  

Curiously, the death mask below, inflammation clearly vitiated in mortal suspension, ironically provides perhaps a more realistic semblance of what the man must have looked like in Paris high society at the pinnacle of his fame as a strange, wonderful composer and musician for the piano, capturing a delicacy and a certain sublime aristocratic bearing that people of his day certainly witnessed, an essence of which pervades his works for which he is very much exalted today as indeed he was in his own time.

"Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of time".

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHjHzX79sdc&feature=related

*NOTE: Apparently this is a 2nd Chopin photograph (c.1847), sourced at the Fryderyk Chopin Society, Warsaw. I cannot vouch for its verity.

Chopin's lover

There’s an old adage (attributed to Herodotus) that says “a man calumniated is doubly injured—first by him who utters the calumny, and then by him who believes it". Certainly George Sand (1804-76) could be counted amongst those whose reputation has suffered such calumny both for her work and probably more for her relationship with Chopin. In her own time, she was lionized for her writings which have since fallen far short of being considered classics today even though her main subject was love (“All novels are love stories” she remarked), and her persistent theme the legal inequities for women in marriage. She wrote numerous novels (among them Indiana, Lelia, and Consuelo) as well as numerous plays, autobiography, political essays (Bakunin urged Marx to read her), travel books, journals and copious brilliant letters, the most celebrated to Flaubert, with whom she corresponded for years. Her admirers included Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte. The last three thought her the greatest French stylist of her time.

Sand’s affair with Chopin, a younger man, was as unconventional at the time as it was illicit in which as a woman she brazenly approximated to equality with men, in social dignity and in public responsibility. Edouard Grenier (1819-1901), a contemporary French poet observed of her [pictured here in 1864 at age 60, some 15 years after Chopin's death]:

"She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention, the eyes especially. They were wonderful eyes, a little too close together, it may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, very black, but by no means lustrous; they reminded me of unpolished marble, or rather of velvet, and this gave a strange, dull, even cold expression to her countenance. Her fine eyebrows and these great placid eyes gave her an air of strength and dignity which was not borne out by the lower part of her face. Her nose was rather thick and not over shapely. Her mouth was also rather course and her chin small. She spoke with great simplicity, and her manners were very quiet".

A not so flattering assessment was proffered by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), another remarkable French poet of the time who started the symbolist movement:

"She is stupid, heavy and garrulous. Her ideas on morals have the same depth of judgment and delicacy of feeling as those of janitresses and kept women.... The fact that there are men who could become enamoured of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation."