‘U Brzezińskiej’

Mrs Katarzyna Brzezińska, the wife of Antoni Brzeziński, battalion chief and vice-commandant of the National Guard and chairman of the Department of Administration at the Warsaw Charitable Society, opened a café on ul. Kozia, near ul. Trębacka, around 1818. Artists and intellectuals drank coffee and argued in the snug three rooms of ‘U Brzezińskiej’ [Chez Brzezińska]. Maurycy Mochnacki, Seweryn Goszczyński, Ludwik Nabielak and especially the young Fryderyk Chopin loved to come here. ‘It was a real literary hangout in those days’, was how Kazimierz Wóycicki described Brzezińska’s in the mid nineteenth century. ‘The young and the aged of academia assembled here en masse. Every periodical was available, and the excellent coffee and punch lured people to this quiet spot, even if pipe smoking was not allowed’.‘These were the favourite salons of students from the University, the German College and other academic institutions, and young writers, even really serious ones’, claims Wojciech Herbaczyński in his book on Warsaw patisseries of the past. ‘Here, you were waited on by young girls whom the childless owner would then dower and marry off’. Chopin presumably loved visiting these girls so much that he even dropped in to Brzezińska’s for a brief farewell visit on the day of his final departure from Warsaw (and Poland).