Miss Stirling directed, in her will, that when she died these relics were to be sent to Chopinʼs mother, to whose house in Warsaw they were accordingly conveyed in 1858. After the death of Madame Chopin, in 1861, they passed into the hands of her daughter, Isabella Barcinska. This lady occupied the second floor of one of two houses standing exactly on the boundary between the “New World,” and the “Cracow Suburbs,” and belonging to Count Andreas Zamoyski.
At the commencement of the political disturbances, which preceded the insurrection of January, 1863, a band of excited young men, inflamed by opinions which were far from being shared by the public, conspired to murder all the deputies. Although the miserable schemes of these fanatical patriots completely failed, they continued to contrive fresh ones, till, at length, exasperated beyond endurance by the bloody conflict which raged through the whole country, they laid a plot to take the life of Count von Berg, who, on the recall of Prince Constantine, had become supreme governor of Poland. Count Berg was returning in his carriage, on the 19th September, 1863, at six in the evening, with an escort of Circassians, from the Belvedère to the Palace. When the carriage came to the spot where the “New World” and “Cracow Suburb” adjoin, a shot, followed by some Orsini bomb-shells, was fired from a window on the fourth floor of Count Zamoyskʼs house. The street was immediately in an uproar, but no one was killed, and only a horse or two belonging to the escort wounded. A detachment of the military, who were at that time always kept in marching order on the Saxon Square, came up in a few minutes. The soldiers surrounded both houses, rudely dragged out the women, and left them in the road, while the men were sent, under a military convoy, to the citadel.
As lava pouring forth from a volcano uproots and annihilates, with its fiery heat, all objects in its pathway, so rushed the angry soldiery from room to room, ruthlessly destroying all that was within their reach. Furniture, pianos, books, manuscripts; in short, everything in the house was flung out of the windows, while wardrobes and other articles too heavy to move were first cut up with hatchets, and the legs of pianos sawn off. These two houses were in the best quarter of the town, and occupied only by well-to do people. An idea may be formed of the quantity of furniture they contained from the fact, that there were from fifteen to twenty pianos.