With a refined, scholarly French father, Polish in political
sentiments, and an admirable Polish mother, patriotic to the
extreme, Frederic grew to be an intelligent, vivacious, home-
loving lad. Never a hearty boy but never very delicate, he seemed
to escape most of the disagreeable ills of childhood. The
moonstruck, pale, sentimental calf of many biographers, he never
was. Strong evidence exists that he was merry, pleasure-loving
and fond of practical jokes. While his father was never rich, the
family after the removal to Warsaw lived at ease. The country was
prosperous and Chopin the elder became a professor in the Warsaw
Lyceum. His children were brought up in an atmosphere of charming
simplicity, love and refinement. The mother was an ideal mother,
and, as George Sand declared, Chopin's "only love." But, as we
shall discover later, Lelia was ever jealous--jealous even of
Chopin's past. His sisters were gifted, gentle and disposed to
pet him. Niecks has killed all the pretty fairy tales of his
poverty and suffering.

Strong common sense ruled the actions of Chopin's parents, and
when his love for music revealed itself at an early age they
engaged a teacher named Adalbert Zwyny, a Bohemian who played the
violin and taught piano. Julius Fontana, one of the first friends
of the boy--he committed suicide in Paris, December 31, 1869,--
says that at the age of twelve Chopin knew so much that he was
left to himself with the usual good and ill results. He first
played on February 24, 1818, a concerto by Gyrowetz and was so
pleased with his new collar that he naively told his mother,
"Everybody was looking at my collar." His musical precocity, not
as marked as Mozart's, but phenomenal withal, brought him into
intimacy with the Polish aristocracy and there his taste for