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Personally, I prefer the mode of to-day, but with to-day's fashion we should not have had Chopin, such music as he drew from his familiar and dæmon, the piano, and such letters as he wrote about the Gladkovska to his friend Matuszynski: "God forbid that she should suffer in any way on my account. Set her mind at rest, and tell her that as long as my heart beats I shall not cease to adore her.
He had previously indulged in a mild flirtation with a pretty little pianist and composer, Leopoldine Blahetka, but in her case he seems less to have loved than to have graciously permitted himself to be loved. When he fell under the witchery of Gladkovska, however, he was genuinely pierced to the heart, and his letters are as full of vague morose yearning as his Préludes.
Chopin, only half-Polish, and finding his true home in Paris, had been loved by the tiny musicienne, hardly so big as her name, Leopoldine Blahetka, but his first true love was for the raving beauty, Constantia Gladkovska, whom he mourned for in prose as highly coloured as his nocturnes, wishing that after his death his ashes might be strewn under her feet. She married elsewhere.
It may best be summed up in the words of James Huneker, who is one of the few writers who has kept his sanity on the subject of Chopin: "He never saw his Gladkovska again, for he did not return to Warsaw. The lady was married in 1832 preferring a solid merchant to nebulous genius to Joseph Grabovski, a merchant at Warsaw.
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