I don't usually have the occasion to think of Frederic Chopin's heart. It comes up once in awhile, if I'm reading George Sand or sitting in a drawing room while listening to a valse in D-flat major, but usually it hovers elsewhere, far away from whatever else is on my mind. On Tuesday, however, Chopin's cardiac hub was at the forefront of my thoughts and in the "Arts, Briefly" section of the New York Times online.

Because I so rarely consider the Polish-born Romantic composer's involuntary muscles, I decided it was the perfect reason to call my father, a man who's lived through a number of revolutions (though not, unfortunately, the Polish November Uprising that forced Chopin into expatriation).

I asked him if he'd ever thought about Chopin's heart.

"You know, I don't think I have."

He paused for a minute, and then continued.

"Where is it anyway? In that big Parisian box you have to pay 30 bucks to see?"

My father was referring to Les Invalides, a complex we went to investigate on a fateful afternoon in France some years back. One of the employees there informed us that the entrance cost was around 20 euros. I assumed this meant we would get to see Napoleon's Lenin-esque embalmed corpse, but I was wrong; we'd only get to view his sarcophagus. And then my father made his now-famous exclamation, "30 dollars? To see a box?" I think we ended up wandering around the embassies for the rest of the day.

At any rate, there are a lot of famous people and entities interred in Les Invalides, but Chopin's heart is not one of them. Though given that Chopin spent most of his life in Paris (and that San Francisco's city hall design is purportedly based on Les Invalides), my father's guess wasn't bad.

I tell him that it's in a church in Poland-Warsaw specifically-nestled in a pillar.

"You've got to be kidding."

But I wasn't. And even if I had been, I still wasn't at the punchline, which is this: A bunch of scientists wanted to perform tests on Chopin's long-past-beating heart to see whether or not he had died from tuberculosis or cystic fibrosis. Luckily for Chopin, but unluckily for whichever geneticist had planned to stake his career on the findings, the Polish government announced that it would refuse to allow access to Chopin's heart, saying on Tuesday that "it would not shed any meaningful light on Chopin or his work," according to the Associated Press and the New York Times.

What would shed meaningful light on Chopin is figuring out how his heart had gotten separated from the rest of his body in the first place. Because my father has seen more than his fair share of Old World relics, I then asked him if cutting out Chopin's heart was at all unusual.

"Well," he told me, "They've got Einstein's brain somewhere, too."

This is a fair point, but if one is going to remove something from a deceased luminary, the brain seems like a logical choice. Removing the heart seems posthumously malicious.

But then I researched a bit, and discovered that Chopin had requested his heart be removed because he was afraid of being buried alive. It was then I realized that people must have been more interesting in the 1800s. We now live in an age that demands certainty, explanation, rationality, an age that must know exactly which pulmonary ailment took a composer's life. But Chopin probably didn't care what killed him in 1849. He just wanted to be certain he was dead.

Tags: THINGS OF IMPORT