Eight days after the second invitation I went to his house, and accidentally met his pet on the stairs.  She invited me to come in, assuring me it did not matter that Mr. Pixis was not at home; meanwhile I was to sit down, he would return soon, and so on.  A strange embarrassment seized both of us.  I made my excuses—­for I knew the old man was very jealous—­and said I would rather return another time.  While we were talking familiarly and innocently on the staircase, Pixis came up, looking over his spectacles in order to see who was speaking above to his bella.  He may not have recognised us at once, quickened his steps, stopped before us, and said to her harshly:  “Qu’est-ce que vous faites ici?” and gave her a severe lecture for receiving young men in his absence, and so on.  I addressed Pixis smilingly, and said to her that it was somewhat imprudent to leave the room in so thin a silk dress.  At last the old man became calm—­he took me by the arm and led me into the drawing-room.  He was in such a state of excitement that he did not know what seat to offer me; for he was afraid that, if he had offended me, I would make better use of his absence another time.  When I left he accompanied me down stairs, and seeing me smile (for I could not help doing so when I found I was thought capable of such a thing), he went to the concierge and asked how long it was since I had come.  The concierge must have calmed his fears, for since that time Pixis does not know how to praise my talent sufficiently to all his acquaintances.  What do you think of this?  I, a dangerous seducteur!

The letters which Chopin wrote to his parents from Paris passed, after his mother’s death, into the hands of his sister, who preserved them till September 19, 1863.  On that day the house in which she lived in Warsaw—­a shot having been fired and some bombs thrown from an upper story of it when General Berg and his escort were passing—­was sacked by Russian soldiers, who burned or otherwise destroyed all they could lay hands on, among the rest Chopin’s letters, his portrait by Ary Scheffer, the Buchholtz piano on which he had made his first studies, and other relics.  We have now also exhausted, at least very nearly exhausted, Chopin’s extant correspondence with his most intimate Polish friends, Matuszynski and Woyciechowski, only two unimportant letters written in 1849 and addressed to the latter remaining yet to be mentioned.  That the confidential correspondence begins to fail us at this period (the last letter is of December 25, 1831) is particularly inopportune; a series of letters like those he wrote from Vienna would have furnished us with the materials for a thoroughly trustworthy history of his settlement in Paris, over which now hangs a mythical haze.  Karasowski, who saw the lost letters, says they were tinged with melancholy.