[Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician by Frederick Niecks]@TWC D-Link bookFrederick Chopin as a Man and Musician CHAPTER IV 16/17
Some of the items of this evidence are very trivial, but taken collectively they have considerable force.
Of greater significance are the following additional items.
Chopin's sister Emilia was carried off at the age of fourteen by pulmonary disease, and his father, as a physician informed me, died of a heart and chest complaint. Stephen Heller, who saw Chopin in 1830 in Warsaw, told me that the latter was then in delicate health, thin and with sunken cheeks, and that the people of Warsaw said that he could not live long, but would, like so many geniuses, die young.
The real state of the matter seems to me to have been this.
Although Chopin in his youth was at no time troubled with any serious illness, he enjoyed but fragile health, and if his frame did not alreadv contain the seeds of the disease to which he later fell a prey, it was a favourable soil for their reception. How easily was an organisation so delicately framed over-excited and disarranged! Indeed, being vivacious, active, and hard-working, as he was, he lived on his capital.
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