and aristocrats, she asked him to come and call on her in the mornings at her hotel. At this time of day he would find her in her déshabille, and he soon became infatuated with her. ‘You cannot imagine how much pleasure I have had from a closer acquaintance – in her room, on the sofa – with this “envoy of heaven” as some of the local hotheads call her,’ he wrote to his friend, all thoughts of Konstancja temporarily banished from his head.26
Chopin had intended to give a concert himself during the Tsar’s visit, but for reasons which remain unclear no such event took place. While Miss Sontag sang to the various imperial majesties and Woerlitzer and Belleville played to them, people in Warsaw wondered why Chopin did not. It may be that his contacts with some of those identified by the authorities as subversive elements had something to do with it.
With the end of June, the parliament dissolved and people began to leave the city. At the beginning of July the Haslinger edition of the La ci darem la mano Variations arrived in the Warsaw shops, and Chopin agreed to play them at a concert given on 8 July by a singer who had taken part in his earlier appearances. The audience was small, the public wearied by all the activity of the previous weeks, and although the reviews were favourable, the event failed to make any great impact.
Chopin was wondering what to do next. Romuald Hube, one of his companions on the previous year’s trip to Vienna, with whom he had been intending to travel to Paris that summer, and then on to Italy, had departed, leaving him stranded in Warsaw. Since Tytus had not come to Warsaw as he had intended, and as Chopin had nothing better to do, he went to stay with him in the country, apparently intending to spend some time there. But after he had been there only two weeks, he read in the papers that Soliva had organised a concert in which Konstancja was to make her stage debut, and he rushed back to Warsaw, much to the annoyance of Tytus.
The event may have been emotionally rewarding for Chopin, but when it was over he was once more at a loose end, harking back to his stay with Tytus. ‘Your fields have left me with a dull longing,’ he wrote; ‘that birch tree before your windows will not leave my thoughts.’ In an attempt to dispel these he went to join the rest of his family who were staying with the Skarbeks at Żelazowa Wola.27 He spent a couple of weeks there, adding the finishing touches to his E minor Concerto. On the warm summer nights the piano would be wheeled out onto the terrace, and Chopin would play to the house party and to the local children who would creep into the park to listen.28
In the middle of August Chopin returned to Warsaw, and although he was restless and bored, he took no action to bring forward his departure. ‘Nothing draws me abroad,’ he wrote to Tytus. ‘Believe me that when I leave next week it will only be out of deference to my calling and common sense (which must be very small, since it cannot banish everything else from my mind).’29 But while plans for a departure ‘next week for certain’ were announced in one letter, this was followed by another a couple of weeks later in which he informed his friend that ‘I’m still here; I don’t have enough will to decide on the day…’30 The delays may have had something to do with the alarming situation in Europe: in July a revolution in Paris had swept the Bourbons from the throne and replaced them with a constitutional monarchy under Louis Philippe, another revolution had broken out in Belgium against Dutch rule, and there were rumblings of discontent in various other parts of the Continent. But they probably had as much to do with Chopin’s own state of mind.
By the end of the summer he had reached new heights of emotional turmoil, ostensibly on account of Konstancja. Having met her well over a year before and immediately recognised her as his ‘ideal’ (the very word is redolent of schoolboy ritual), he had still not declared himself to her. ‘I could go on hiding my pathetic and ungainly passions for another couple of years,’ he wrote to Tytus, at the same time stressing their depth and force.31 Strong his feelings may have been, but they were certainly not exclusive. The brief infatuations with the Radziwiłł girls and Henriette Sontag are only some of the manifestations of an acute susceptibility to women. From his letters we know that at one soirée in August he saw a girl (who of course reminded him of Konstancja) whom he could not take his eyes off, and who had set his heart on fire by the end of the evening. Another day, in church, he caught the eye of ‘a certain person’, as a result of which he staggered out in a state of sensuous inebriation and nearly got himself run over by a passing carriage.
These and similar stories are recounted to Tytus in tones of mawkish self-pity, alongside assurances that he, Tytus, is in fact the most important person in Chopin’s life. While reaffirming his constant and undying love for the girl, he would write to his friend that he thought constantly of him: ‘I do not forget you, I am with you, and it shall be so till death.’32 It was Tytus who would have a portrait of Chopin before Konstancja, and it was Tytus who was the recipient of what would have been love letters to Konstancja, had Chopin dared write to her. These letters, sometimes friendly, sometimes petulant, sometimes verging on the passionate, are freely strewn with declarations of love and affinity, and contain passages of extraordinary sensuality.
This has prompted some to conclude that the two young men were or had been lovers. On the face of it, the equivocal references to passions, secrets and torment combine with the extremely specific terms of endearment to make this appear plausible. Chopin signs off one letter to Tytus with the following jumble of childishness and coy eroticism:
I must go now and wash. So don’t embrace me now, as I haven’t washed myself yet. – You? If I anointed myself with fragrant oils from the East, – you wouldn’t embrace me, not unless I forced you to by magnetic means. But there are forces in Nature, and tonight you will dream that you are embracing me. – I have to pay you back for the nightmare you caused me last night! 33
Taken out of context, this may appear a little risqué, as might the endless kisses sent and demanded by Chopin. But these expressions were, and to some extent still are, common currency in Polish, and carry no greater implication than the ‘love’ people regularly sign off with today. And the traces of infantile eroticism in the letters are of little significance in themselves. The spirit of the times, pervaded by the Romantic movement in art and literature, favoured extreme expression of feeling and glorified transcendent friendship, and it is probably this that lies at the heart of these letters, written as they were at a period in Chopin’s life when he came nearest to living out the Romantic ideal.
While the possibility cannot be ruled out entirely, it is highly unlikely that the two were ever lovers. Had the slightly sentimental relationship between the older, stronger boy and his gentler, more emotional classmate really developed into a sexual rapport, it would almost certainly, knowing Chopin’s malleable and undecided nature, have become an exclusive and long-lasting passion. In such a case there would have been no reason for Chopin to sit about being bored in Warsaw while the bucolic seclusion of Tytus’s estate beckoned.
Tytus’s role in Chopin’s life was nevertheless an important one. ‘I swear that only you have power over me, you and…no one else!’ Chopin wrote, somewhat dramatically, to his friend, and he was hardly exaggerating.34 His upbringing had marked his character. The strong paternal authority to which he had been subjected had rendered him almost incapable of making a decision on his own. His loving mother and admiring sisters had led him to demand and expect boundless affection from people. The sheltered and regular life of the Chopin household only served to make the outside world and its cares seem more problematic and frightening. While his early exposure to a wide acquaintance had developed in him a gift for easy sociability, this was, apparently, accompanied by a certain fear of giving himself. All this made Chopin dependent, now that he was beginning to live outside his family, on the support of friends. Since he was finding it increasingly difficult to get close to people, he