Two years earlier, an opportunity had presented itself to Nicolas to visit his family in Marainville, as someone had to go there in connection with Pac’s estate. But he did not avail himself of this, and indeed appears never to have sought to make contact with them again. He was also probably discouraged from going by the possibility of being trapped in revolutionary France and even drafted into the army. This did not shield him from war, which came in 1792, when Russian armies invaded Poland. After a brief campaign, the country lost a large part of its territory to Russia and a smaller one to Prussia, and was occupied by Russian troops. In 1794 a national insurrection broke out in an attempt to liberate the country from Russian control. Nicolas Chopin enlisted in the Warsaw militia, and was wounded in the Russian assault on the city, which effectively put an end to the insurrection.3
Later that year or at the beginning of the next, he moved to the country estate of Kiernozia, to act as father-figure as well as tutor to the newly orphaned children of Maciej Łączyński (one of whom, Maria, was to become famous after her marriage to Anastazy Walewski as Napoleon’s mistress). Nicolas remained there until 1802, when he moved to a similar job in the household of Count Skarbek on the estate of Żelazowa Wola, where he looked after the Count’s four children. In 1806 the thirty-five-year-old Nicolas Chopin married Tekla Justyna Krzyżanowska, the reputedly beautiful and sweet-natured twenty-four-year-old daughter of an impoverished nobleman who had worked for Skarbek as an estate manager.
The following year the Chopins had a daughter, Ludwika, and moved into one of the outbuildings of the manor, a spacious single-storey house with a thatched roof, in which they occupied a couple of rooms. It was in one of these whitewashed rooms with its clay floor that their son was born in 1810. He was christened Fryderyk Franciszek in honour of his godfather, the young Count Fryderyk Skarbek, and Nicolas Chopin’s own father, François. The baptismal register of the parish church of Brochów, near Żelazowa Wola, states that the child was born on 22 February, but the Chopin family and the composer himself always gave the date of his birth as 1 March. To complicate matters further, his age was consistently increased by a year whenever he was mentioned in the press or appeared in public as a child, giving rise to the impression, held by some of his friends, that he had been born in 1809. The parish register is not a record of birth, and the date mentioned would have been supplied by Nicolas Chopin or his wife. There is therefore no reason to favour either date, and one can only be thankful that the year, 1810, is certainly accurate.4
The Chopins moved to Warsaw only six months after the birth of their son. The city and its surrounding area had been liberated from foreign rule following Napoleon’s victory at Jena in 1806, and in 1807 reconstituted as a new state, the Duchy of Warsaw. Politically a satellite of France, the Duchy was modelled on the French pattern, and the French language became more of a necessity than a luxury, which favoured Nicolas Chopin. He obtained a post teaching French at the Warsaw high school, the Lycée (Liceum), starting in October 1810, and later another at one of the military training schools.
Warsaw was an unusual metropolis, whose aspect reflected its chequered past. There was a medieval walled city jostling for space on the escarpment overlooking the Vistula with the Royal Castle, by then sadly dilapidated. To the south of this stretched a few elegant eighteenth-century streets and, beyond that, a curiously rural city of palaces and villas, many with extensive grounds, interspersed with humbler dwellings and wooden hovels. One traveller likened it to a drawing room full of furniture, some of it very fine, which had never been properly arranged. Many of the palaces had become public buildings, while others had been divided up into apartments.
The Lycée was housed in a redundant palace built by the Saxon kings of Poland, a grandiose eighteenth-century building with white stucco façades. As there was no accommodation provided for pupils from the country, teachers were encouraged to take apartments in one of the wings of the palace if they were prepared to take in paying boarders. The thrifty Nicolas Chopin seized on this opportunity to increase his income, and moved into the Saxon Palace with his family. He took in six boys, who slept in two rooms and took all their meals with the family.
Nicolas identified himself entirely with his adopted country, and considered himself a Pole. In this he was not being eccentric. Most of his colleagues at the Lycée, from the Rector Samuel Bogumil Linde down, were of foreign origin, and sported names such as Kolberg, Ciampi and Vogel, but had become enthusiastically Polish in outlook. Nicolas Chopin always insisted on speaking Polish, and would not tolerate any other language in his home, even though he spoke it badly and had to resort to French when writing letters.
He was a competent teacher, stern and literal, and was described by one of his pupils as ‘a rather ceremoniously grave personage with a certain elegance of manner’.5 He was not religious, and felt no reverence for the institutions of monarchy and aristocracy, but he was no revolutionary; he believed firmly in acknowledging the ruling power and accepting the limits imposed by the society he lived in. His attitude to art and music was prosaic, although he played the flute a little, until his baby son broke it, and later took up the violin.
The only artistic influence in the household was provided by Justyna, who could play the piano well and sing quite respectably. In contrast to her husband, she was very religious. She was gentle and quiet, but although her role in the family was confined to that of mother and housekeeper, she stood out by her dignified bearing and social graces. Her presence was a considerable comfort to her son, providing as it did a counterbalance to his severe, scrupulous and pedantic father. The eldest daughter, Ludwika, was intelligent and gifted, and also played the piano well from an early age. Izabela, born a couple of years after Fryderyk, was a spirited girl with no intellectual or artistic pretensions, but the youngest, Emilia, was exceptionally gifted, writing poetry by the age of eight.
The little Chopin was of delicate health. Slightly built and chronically underweight, he was prone to all the ailments of childhood. Such staples as smallpox threatened, and it was impossible to avoid contact with the ubiquitous tuberculosis, which would carry away one of his siblings, at least one of his teachers, several of his father’s boarders and eventually his father too. He needed a well-ordered childhood and healthy conditions if he was to survive for long, and the Chopin household provided this.
In 1817 the Lycée was moved to a less grandiose but more appropriate site. This was the Kazimierzowski Palace, a much-reconstructed seventeenth-century former royal residence, a large building with a colonnaded portico flanked by two detached wings. The Chopins occupied an apartment in one of the wings, and now took in ten boarders. The palace was pleasantly situated in what had once been a botanical garden, which sloped away towards the Vistula behind the main building, and the Chopin children, along with those of other teachers and the boarders, made this territory their own.
The various stories which have been dredged up in order to illustrate Chopin’s extraordinary sensitivity as a baby – that he would burst into tears if someone played the piano badly, or, alternatively, sit for hours under the instrument listening in spellbound rapture – can be disregarded. They are the sort of detail that someone ‘remembers’ fifty years later, and even if true are largely meaningless, for there can be few babies who will not either bawl their heads off or else listen in fascination if a musical instrument is played in their presence. One cannot ascribe this to artistic sensitivity at the nappy stage, any more than one can believe a story coined after the composer’s death to the effect that one night he crawled out of his cot, hoisted himself onto the piano stool and began to improvise Polonaises, to the astonishment of his family, drawn from their beds by the sound of music.
Chopin was introduced to the piano by his mother when he was four, and by the age of six he was noted for his ability to play relatively difficult pieces as well as for his gift for playing around with a few notes or a motif and producing simple melodic