Teofil Kwiatkowski, The Last Moments of Fryderyk Chopin. Warsaw, Fryderyk Chopin Institute. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Paris, Place Vendôme, the night of 16 to 17 October 1849. In the apartment at the Hôtel Baudard de Saint-James, where he moved only a few weeks ago, Fryderyk Chopin is thirty-nine years old and hardly breathing. After midnight the doctor leans over the bed and asks whether he is suffering greatly. “Plus,” he replies: no more. He dies a few minutes before two. Around him are his sister Ludwika, who has come from Warsaw to nurse him, the priest Aleksander Jełowicki, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, Solange, George Sand’s daughter, and his friend Thomas Albrecht. That same morning Solange’s husband, the sculptor Auguste Clésinger, takes his death mask and a cast of his left hand.
Among the dying man’s papers there is a slip of paper. Its first words reach us in two versions, because the handwriting of a man who is suffocating is what it is: some read “cette terre”, this earth, others “cette toux”, this cough. The rest leaves no doubt: “je vous conjure de faire ouvrir mon corps pour que je ne sois pas enterré vif”. I beg you to have my body opened, so that I may not be buried alive. It is the most widespread fear of the nineteenth century, the one that had bells fitted in coffins and vigils prolonged, and Chopin puts it in writing with the precision with which he wrote fingerings.
The request is carried out to the letter. The body is opened by Jean Cruveilhier, the most celebrated pathologist in Paris, who had been treating him. The heart is removed and sealed in a crystal jar full of alcohol, in all likelihood cognac. The rest of Chopin waits almost two weeks: the funeral is celebrated at the Madeleine only on 30 October, with Mozart’s Requiem and the organist Lefébure-Wély playing two of his Preludes. Admission is by invitation, and more than three thousand people, some of them come from London, Berlin and Vienna, stay outside. The burial is at Père-Lachaise.
The heart takes another road, and it is the road Chopin wanted. In the first months of 1850 Ludwika carries it to Poland: the jar sits inside an ebony casket, the casket inside a small oak chest, and the chest under her cloak. It passes the Austrian and Russian customs this way, because the Warsaw it returns to is a city of the tsar’s empire, and tsars do not love the relics of exiled patriots. For almost thirty years the heart is left without a permanent home. On 1 March 1879 it is walled into a pillar of the Church of the Holy Cross; the following year a marble epitaph is added.
From there it leaves only once. In 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, a German priest proposes to put it in safety; the urn passes through the hands of the SS general Heinz Reinefarth, then of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who hands it to Archbishop Antoni Szlagowski. It ends up in a presbytery at Milanówek, resting on a piano. It returns to the Church of the Holy Cross on 17 October 1945, the ninety-sixth anniversary of the death, after a stop at Żelazowa Wola, the village where Chopin was born.
The question the slip of paper left open remains: what did he die of? Tuberculosis, it has always been said; cystic fibrosis, some doctors have suggested in recent decades. On the night of 14 April 2014 a small group of scientists and priests led by the geneticist Michał Witt obtains permission to examine the jar, without opening it. Hundreds of photographs are taken. The heart still floats in the amber liquid, enlarged and flaccid, covered by a white fibrous coating and small lesions. In 2017 the American Journal of Medicine publishes the diagnosis: pericarditis, a complication of chronic tuberculosis. The jar is back in the pillar, sealed as Ludwika had carried it across the border.