Frederick Chopin, as a Man and Musician Part 29

There are rains here of which one has elsewhere no idea: it is a frightful deluge! The air is on account of it so relaxing, so soft, that one cannot drag one's self along; one is really ill. Happily, Maurice is in admirable health; his const.i.tution is only afraid of frost, a thing unknown here. But the little Chopin [FOOTNOTE: Madame Marliani seems to have been in the habit of calling Chopin "le pet.i.t." In another letter to her (April 28, 1839) George Sand writes of Chopin as votre pet.i.t.

This reminds one of Mendelssohn's Chopinetto.] is very depressed and always coughs much. For his sake I await with impatience the return of fine weather, which will not be long in coming. His piano has at last arrived at Palma; but it is in the clutches of the custom-house officers, who demand from five to six hundred francs duty, and show themselves intractable.

...I am plunged with Maurice in Thucydides and company; with Solange in the indirect object and the agreement of the participle. Chopin plays on a poor Majorcan piano which reminds me of that of Bouffe in "Pauvre Jacques." I pa.s.s my nights generally in scrawling. When I raise my nose, it is to see through the sky-light of my cell the moon which shines in the midst of the rain on the orange trees, and I think no more of it than she.

Madame Sand to M. A. M. Duteil; Valdemosa, January 20, 1839:--

...This [the slowness and irregularity of the post] is not the only inconvenience of the country. There are innumerable ones, and yet this is the most beautiful country. The climate is delicious. At the time I am writing, Maurice is gardening in his shirt-sleeves, and Solange, seated under an orange tree loaded with fruit, studies her lesson with a grave air. We have bushes covered with roses, and spring is coming in. Our winter lasted six weeks, not cold, but rainy to a degree to frighten us. It is a deluge! The rain uproots the mountains; all the waters of the mountain rush into the plain; the roads become torrents. We found ourselves caught in them, Maurice and I. We had been at Palma in superb weather. When we returned in the evening, there were no fields, no roads, but only trees to indicate approximately the way which we had to go. I was really very frightened, especially as the horse refused to proceed, and we were obliged to traverse the mountain on foot in the night, with torrents across our legs.

Madame Sand to Madame Marliani; Valdemosa, February 22, 1839:--

...You see me at my Carthusian monastery, still sedentary, and occupied during the day with my children, at night with my work.

In the midst of all this, the warbling of Chopin, who goes his usual pretty way, and whom the walls of the cell are much astonished to hear.

The only remarkable event since my last letter is the arrival of the so much-expected piano. After a fortnight of applications and waiting we have been able to get it out of the custom-house by paying three hundred francs of duty.

Pretty country this! After all, it has been disembarked without accident, and the vaults of the monastery are delighted with it. And all this is not profaned by the admiration of fools-we do not see a cat.

Our retreat in the mountains, three leagues from the town, has freed us from the politeness of idlers.

Nevertheless, we have had one visitor, and a visitor from Paris!--namely, M. Dembowski, an Italian Pole whom Chopin knew, and who calls himself a cousin of Marliani--I don't know in what degree.

...The fact is, that we are very much pleased with the freedom which this gives us, because we have work to do; but we understand very well that these poetic intervals which one introduces into one's life are only times of transition and rest allowed to the mind before it resumes the exercise of the emotions. I mean this in the purely intellectual sense; for, as regards the life of the heart, it cannot cease for a moment...

This brings us to the end of the known letters written by Chopin and Madame Sand from Majorca. And now let us see what we can find in George Sand's books to complete the picture of the life of her and her party at Valdemosa, of which the letters give only more or less disconnected indications. I shall use the materials at my disposal freely and cautiously, quoting some pa.s.sages in full, regrouping and summing-up others, and keeping always in mind--which the reader should likewise do--the auth.o.r.ess's tendency to emphasise, colour, and embellish, for the sake of literary and moral effect.

Not to extend this chapter too much, I refer the curious to George Sand's "Un Hiver a Majorque" for a description of the "admirable, grandiose, and wild nature" in the midst of which the "poetic abode" of her and her party was situated--of the grandly and beautifully-varied surface of the earth, the luxuriant southern vegetation, and the marvellous phenomena of light and air; of the sea stretching out on two sides and meeting the horizon; of the surrounding formidable peaks, and the more distant round-swelling hills; of the eagles descending in the pursuit of their prey down to the orange trees of the monastery gardens; of the avenue of cypresses serpentining from the top of the mountain to the bottom of the gorge; of the torrents covered with myrtles; in short, of the immense ensemble, the infinite details, which overwhelm the imagination and outvie the poet's and painter's dreams. Here it will be advisable to confine ourselves to the investigation of a more limited sphere, to inspect rather narrow interiors than vast landscapes.

As the reader has gathered from the preceding letters, there was no longer a monastic community at Valdemosa. The monks had been dispersed some time before, and the monastery had become the property of the state. During the hot summer months it was in great part occupied by small burghers from Palma who came in quest of fresh air. The only permanent inhabitants of the monastery, and the only fellow-tenants of George Sand's party, were two men and one woman, called by the novelist respectively the Apothecary, the Sacristan, and Maria Antonia.

The first, a remnant of the dispersed community, sold mallows and couch-gra.s.s, the only specifics he had; the second was the person in whose keeping were the keys of the monastery; and the third was a kind of housekeeper who, for the love of G.o.d and out of neighbourly friendship, offered her help to new-comers, and, if it was accepted, did not fail to levy heavy contributions.

The monastery was a complex of strongly-constructed, buildings without any architectural beauty, and such was, its circ.u.mference and ma.s.s of stones that it would have been easy to house an army corps. Besides the dwelling of the superior, the cells of the lay-brothers, the lodgings for visitors, the stables, and other structures, there were three cloisters, each consisting of twelve cells and twelve chapels. The most ancient of these cloisters, which is also the smallest, dates from the 15th century.

It presents a charming coup d'oeil. The court which it encloses with its broken-down walls is the ancient cemetery of the monks. No inscription distinguishes these tombs...The graves are scarcely indicated by the swellings of the turf.

In the cells were stored up the remains of all sorts of fine old furniture and sculpture, but these could only be seen through the c.h.i.n.ks, for the cells were carefully locked, and the sacristan would not open them to anyone. The second cloister, although of more recent date, was likewise in a dilapidated state, which, however, gave it character.

In stormy weather it was not at all safe to pa.s.s through it on account of the falling fragments of walls and vaults.

I never heard the wind sound so like mournful voices and utter such despairing howls as in these empty and sonorous galleries. The noise of the torrents, the swift motion of the clouds, the grand, monotonous sound of the sea, interrupted by the whistling of the storm and the plaintive cries of sea- birds which pa.s.sed, quite terrified and bewildered, in the squalls; then thick fogs which fell suddenly like a shroud and which, penetrating into the cloisters through the broken arcades, rendered us invisible, and made the little lamp we carried to guide us appear like a will-o'-the-wisp wandering under the galleries; and a thousand other details of this monastic life which crowd all at once into my memory: all combined made indeed this monastery the most romantic abode in the world.

I was not sorry to see for once fully and in reality what I had seen only in a dream, or in the fashionable ballads, and in the nuns' scene in Robert le Diable at the Opera. Even fantastic apparitions were not wanting to us. [FOOTNOTE: "Un Hiver a Majorque," pp. 116 and 117.]

In the same book from which the above pa.s.sage is extracted we find also a minute description of the new cloister; the chapels, variously ornamented, covered with gilding, decorated with rude paintings and horrible statues of saints in coloured wood, paved in the Arabic style with enamelled faience laid out in various mosaic designs, and provided with a fountain or marble conch; the pretty church, unfortunately without an organ, but with wainscot, confessionals, and doors of most excellent workmanship, a floor of finely-painted faience, and a remarkable statue in painted wood of St. Bruno; the little meadow in the centre of the cloister, symmetrically planted with box-trees, &c., &c.

George Sand's party occupied one of the s.p.a.cious, well-ventilated, and well-lighted cells in this part of the monastery. I shall let her describe it herself.

The three rooms of which it was composed were s.p.a.cious, elegantly vaulted, and ventilated at the back by open rosettes, all different and very prettily designed. These three rooms were separated from the cloister by a dark pa.s.sage at the end of which was a strong door of oak. The wall was three feet thick. The middle room was destined for reading, prayer, and meditation; all its furniture consisted of a large chair with a praying-desk and a back, from six to eight feet high, let into and fixed in the wall. The room to the right of this was the friar's bed-room; at the farther end of it was situated the alcove, very low, and paved above with flags like a tomb. The room to the left was the workshop, the refectory, the store-room of the recluse. A press at the far end of the room had a wooden compartment with a window opening on the cloister, through which his provisions were pa.s.sed in. His kitchen consisted of two little stoves placed outside, but not, as was the strict rule, in the open air; a vault, opening on the garden, protected the culinary labours of the monk from the rain, and allowed him to give himself up to this occupation a little more than the founder would have wished.

Moreover, a fire-place introduced into this third room indicated many other relaxations, although the science of the architect had not gone so far as to make this fire-place serviceable.

Running along the back of the rooms, on a level with the rosettes, was a long channel, narrow and dark, intended for the ventilation of the cell, and above was a loft in which the maize, onions, beans, and other simple winter provisions were kept. On the south the three rooms opened on a flower garden, exactly the size of the cell itself, which was separated from the neighbouring gardens by walls ten feet high, and was supported by a strongly-built terrace above a little orange grove which occupied this ledge of the mountain. The lower ledge was covered with a beautiful arbour of vines, the third with almond and palm trees, and so on to the bottom of the little valley, which, as I have said, was an immense garden.

The flower garden of each cell had all along its right side a reservoir, made of freestone, from three to four feet in width and the same in depth, receiving through conduits placed in the bal.u.s.trade of the terrace the waters of the mountain, and distributing them in the flower garden by means of a stone cross, which divided it into four equal squares.

As to this flower garden, planted with pomegranate, lemon, and orange trees, surrounded by raised walks made of bricks which, like the reservoir, were shaded by perfumed arbours, it was like a pretty salon of flowers and verdure, where the monk could walk dry-footed on wet days.

Even without being told, we should have known that the artists who had now become inmates of the monastery were charmed with their surroundings. Moreover, George Sand did her utmost to make life within doors comfortable. When the furniture bought from the Spanish refugee had been supplemented by further purchases, they were, considering the circ.u.mstances, not at all badly off in this respect. The tables and straw-bottomed chairs were indeed no better than those one finds in the cottages of peasants; the sofa of white wood with cushions of mattress cloth stuffed with wool could only ironically be called "voluptuous"; and the large yellow leather trunks, whatever their ornamental properties might be, must have made but poor subst.i.tutes for wardrobes.

The folding-beds, on the other hand, proved irreproachable; the mattresses, though not very soft, were new and clean, and the padded and quilted chintz coverlets left nothing to be desired. Nor does this enumeration exhaust the comforts and adornments of which the establishment could boast. Feathers, a rare article in Majorca, had been got from a French lady to make pillows for Chopin; Valenciennes matting and long-fleeced sheep skins covered the dusty floor; a large tartan shawl did duty as an alcove curtain; a stove of somewhat eccentric habits, and consisting simply of an iron cylinder with a pipe that pa.s.sed through the window, had been manufactured for them at Palma; a charming clay vase surrounded with a garland of ivy displayed its beauty on the top of the stove; a beautiful large Gothic carved oak chair with a small chest convenient as a book-case had, with the consent of the sacristan, been brought from the monks' chapel; and last, but not least, there was, as we have already read in the letters, a piano, in the first weeks only a miserable Majorcan instrument, which, however, in the second half of January, after much waiting, was replaced by one of Pleyel's excellent cottage pianos.

[FOOTNOTE: By the way, among the many important and unimportant doubtful points which Chopin's and George Sand's letters settle, is also that of the amount of duty paid for the piano. The sum originally asked by the Palma custom-house officers seems to have been from 500 to 600 francs, and this demand was after a fortnight's negotiations reduced to 300 francs. That the imaginative novelist did not long remember the exact particulars of this transaction need not surprise us. In Un Hiver a Majorque she states tha the original demand was 700 francs, and the sum ultimately paid about 400 francs.]

These various items collectively and in conjunction with the rooms in which they were gathered together form a tout-ensemble picturesque and homely withal. As regards the supply of provisions, the situation of our Carthusians was decidedly less brilliant. Indeed, the water and the juicy raisins, Malaga potatoes, fried Valencia pumpkins, &c., which they had for dessert, were the only things that gave them unmixed satisfaction. With anything but pleasure they made the discovery that the chief ingredient of Majorcan cookery, an ingredient appearing in all imaginable and unimaginable guises and disguises, was pork. Fowl was all skin and bones, fish dry and tasteless, sugar of so bad a quality that it made them sick, and b.u.t.ter could not be procured at all. Indeed, they found it difficult to get anything of any kind. On account of their non-attendance at church they were disliked by the villagers of Valdemosa, who sold their produce to such heretics only at twice or thrice the usual price. Still, thanks to the good offices of the French consul's cook, they might have done fairly well had not wet weather been against them. But, alas, their eagerly-awaited provisions often arrived spoiled with rain, oftener still they did not arrive at all. Many a time they had to eat bread as hard as ship-biscuits, and content themselves with real Carthusian dinners. The wine was good and cheap, but, unfortunately, it had the objectionable quality of being heady.

These discomforts and wants were not painfully felt by George Sand and her children, nay, they gave, for a time at least, a new zest to life.

It was otherwise with Chopin. "With his feeling for details and the wants of a refined well-being, he naturally took an intense dislike to Majorca after a few days of illness." We have already seen what a bad effect the wet weather and the damp of Son-Vent had on Chopin's health.

But, according to George Sand, [FOOTNOTE: "Un Hiver a Marjorque," pp.

161-168. I suspect that she mixes up matters in a very unhistorical manner; I have, however, no means of checking her statements, her and her companion's letters being insufficient for the purpose. Chopin certainly was not likely to tell his friend the worst about his health.]

it was not till later, although still in the early days of their sojourn in Majorca, that his disease declared itself in a really alarming manner. The cause of this change for the worse was over-fatigue incurred on an excursion which he made with his friends to a hermitage three miles [FOOTNOTE: George Sand does not say what kind of miles] distant from Valdemosa; the length and badness of the road alone would have been more than enough to exhaust his fund of strength, but in addition to these hardships they had, on returning, to encounter a violent wind which threw them down repeatedly. Bronchitis, from which he had previously suffered, was now followed by a nervous excitement that produced several symptoms of laryngeal phthisis. [FOOTNOTE: In the Histoire de ma Vie George Sand Bays: "From the beginning of winter, which set in all at once with a diluvian rain, Chopin showed, suddenly also, all the symptoms of pulmonary affection."] The physician, judging of the disease by the symptoms that presented themselves at the time of his visits, mistook its real nature, and prescribed bleeding, milk diet, &c. Chopin felt instinctively that all this would be injurious to him, that bleeding would even be fatal. George Sand, who was an experienced nurse, and whose opportunities for observing were less limited than those of the physician, had the same presentiment. After a long and anxious struggle she decided to disregard the strongly-urged advice of the physician and to obey the voice that said to her, even in her sleep: "Bleeding will kill him; but if you save him from it, he will not die,"

She was persuaded that this voice was the voice of Providence, and that by obeying it she saved her friend's life. What Chopin stood most in need of in his weakness and languor was a strengthening diet, and that, unfortunately, was impossible to procure:--

What would I not have given to have had some beef-tea and a gla.s.s of Bordeaux wine to offer to our invalid every day! The Majorcan food, and especially the manner in which it was prepared when we were not there with eye and hand, caused him an invincible disgust. Shall I tell you how well founded this disgust was? One day when a lean chicken was put on the table we saw jumping on its steaming back enormous Mattres Floh, [FOOTNOTE: Anglice "fleas."] of which Hoffmann would have made as many evil spirits, but which he certainly would not have eaten in gravy. My children laughed so heartily that they nearly fell under the table.

Chopin's most ardent wish was to get away from Majorca and back to France. But for some time he was too weak to travel, and when he had got a little stronger, contrary winds prevented the steamer from leaving the port. The following words of George Sand depict vividly our poor Carthusian friends' situation in all its gloom:--

As the winter advanced, sadness more and more paralysed my efforts at gaiety and cheerfulness. The state of our invalid grew always worse; the wind wailed in the ravines, the rain beat against our windows, the voice of the thunder penetrated through our thick walls and mingled its mournful sounds with the laughter and sports of the children. The eagles and vultures, emboldened by the fog, came to devour our poor sparrows, even on the pomegranate tree which shaded my window.

The raging sea kept the ships in the harbours; we felt ourselves prisoners, far from all enlightened help and from all efficacious sympathy. Death seemed to hover over our heads to seize one of us, and we were alone in contending with him for his prey.

If George Sand's serenity and gaiety succ.u.mbed to these influences, we may easily imagine how much more they oppressed Chopin, of whom she tells us that--

The mournful cry of the famished eagle and the gloomy desolation of the yew trees covered with snow saddened him much longer and more keenly than the perfume of the orange trees, the gracefulness of the vines, and the Moorish song of the labourers gladdened him.

The above-quoted letters have already given us some hints of how the prisoners of Valdemosa pa.s.sed their time. In the morning there were first the day's provisions to be procured and the rooms to be tidied--which latter business could not be entrusted to Maria Antonia without the sacrifice of their night's rest. [FOOTNOTE: George Sand's share of the household work was not so great as she wished to make the readers of Un Hiver a Majorque believe, for it consisted, as we gather from her letters, only in giving a helping hand to her maid, who had undertaken to cook and clean up, but found that her strength fell short of the requirements.] Then George Sand would teach her children for some hours. These lessons over, the young ones ran about and amused themselves for the rest of the day, while their mother sat down to her literary studies and labours. In the evening they either strolled together through the moonlit cloisters or read in their cell, half of the night being generally devoted by the novelist to writing. George Sand says in the "Histoire de ma Vie" that she wrote a good deal and read beautiful philosophical and historical works when she was not nursing her friend. The latter, however, took up much of her time, and prevented her from getting out much, for he did not like to be left alone, nor, indeed, could he safely be left long alone. Sometimes she and her children would set out on an expedition of discovery, and satisfy their curiosity and pleasantly while away an hour or two in examining the various parts of the vast aggregation of buildings; or the whole party would sit round the stove and laugh over the rehearsal of the morning's transactions with the villagers. Once they witnessed even a ball in this sanctuary. It was on Shrove-Tuesday, after dark, that their attention was roused by a strange, crackling noise. On going to the door of their cell they could see nothing, but they heard the noise approaching. After a little there appeared at the opposite end of the cloister a faint glimmer of white light, then the red glare of torches, and at last a crew the sight of which made their flesh creep and their hair stand on end--he-devils with birds' heads, horses' tails, and tinsel of all colours; she-devils or abducted shepherdesses in white and pink dresses; and at the head of them Lucifer himself, horned and, except the blood-red face, all black. The strange noise, however, turned out to be the rattling of castanets, and the terrible-looking figures a merry company of rich farmers and well-to-do villagers who were going to have a dance in Maria Antonia's cell. The orchestra, which consisted of a large and a small guitar, a kind of high-pitched violin, and from three to four pairs of castanets, began to play indigenous jotas and fandangos which, George Sand tells us, resemble those of Spain, but have an even bolder form and more original rhythm. The critical spectators thought that the dancing of the Majorcans was not any gayer than their singing, which was not gay at all, and that their boleros had "la gravite des ancetres, et point de ces graces profanes qu'on admire en Andalousie." Much of the music of these islanders was rather interesting than pleasing to their visitors. The clicking of the castanets with which they accompany their festal processions, and which, unlike the broken and measured rhythm of the Spaniards, consists of a continuous roll like that of a drum "battant aux champs," is from time to time suddenly interrupted in order to sing in unison a coplita on a phrase which always recommences but never finishes. George Sand shares the opinion of M. Tastu that the princ.i.p.al Majorcan rhythms and favourite fioriture are Arabic in type and origin.

Of quite another nature was the music that might be heard in those winter months in one of the cells of the monastery of Valdemosa. "With what poesy did his music fill this sanctuary, even in the midst of his most grievous troubles!" exclaims George Sand. I like to picture to myself the vaulted cell, in which Pleyel's piano sounded so magnificently, illumined by a lamp, the rich traceries of the Gothic chair shadowed on the wall, George Sand absorbed in her studies, her children at play, and Chopin pouring out his soul in music.

It would be a mistake to think that those months which the friends spent in Majorca were for them a time of unintermittent or even largely-predominating wretchedness. Indeed, George Sand herself admits that, in spite of the wildness of the country and the pilfering habits of the people, their existence might have been an agreeable one in this romantic solitude had it not been for the sad spectacle of her companion's sufferings and certain days of serious anxiety about his life. And now I must quote a. long but very important pa.s.sage from the "Histoire de ma Vie":--

The poor great artist was a detestable patient. What I had feared, but unfortunately not enough, happened. He became completely demoralised. Bearing pain courageously enough, he could not overcome the disquietude of his imagination. The monastery was for him full of terrors and phantoms, even when he was well. He did not say so, and I had to guess it. On returning from my nocturnal explorations in the ruins with my children, I found him at ten o'clock at night before his piano, his face pale, his eyes wild, and his hair almost standing on end. It was some moments before he could recognise us.

He then made an attempt to laugh, and played to us sublime things he had just composed, or rather, to be more accurate, terrible or heartrending ideas which had taken possession of him, as it were without his knowledge, in that hour of solitude, sadness, and terror.

It was there that he composed the most beautiful of those short pages he modestly ent.i.tled "Preludes." They are masterpieces. Several present to the mind visions of deceased monks and the sounds of the funeral chants which beset his imagination; others are melancholy and sweet--they occurred to him in the hours of sunshine and of health, with the noise of the children's laughter under the window, the distant sound of guitars, the warbling of the birds among the humid foliage, and the sight of the pale little full-blown roses on the snow.

Others again are of a mournful sadness, and, while charming the ear, rend the heart. There is one of them which occurred to him on a dismal rainy evening which produces a terrible mental depression. We had left him well that day, Maurice and I, and had gone to Palma to buy things we required for our encampment. The rain had come on, the torrents had overflowed, we had travelled three leagues in six hours to return in the midst of the inundation, and we arrived in the dead of night, without boots, abandoned by our driver, having pa.s.sed through unheard-of dangers. We made haste, antic.i.p.ating the anxiety of our invalid. It had been indeed great, but it had become as it were congealed into a kind of calm despair, and he played his wonderful prelude weeping. On seeing us enter he rose, uttering a great cry, then he said to us, with a wild look and in a strange tone: "Ah! I knew well that you were dead!"

When he had come to himself again, and saw the state in which we were, he was ill at the retrospective spectacle of our dangers; but he confessed to me afterwards that while waiting for our return he had seen all this in a dream and that, no longer distinguishing this dream from reality, he had grown calm and been almost lulled to sleep while playing the piano, believing that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake; heavy and ice-cold drops of water fell at regular intervals upon his breast, and when I drew his attention to those drops of water which were actually falling at regular intervals upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by the term imitative harmony. He protested with all his might, and he was right, against the puerility of these imitations for the ear. His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature, translated by sublime equivalents into his musical thought, and not by a servile repet.i.tion of external sounds. His composition of this evening was indeed full of the drops of rain which resounded on the sonorous tiles of the monastery, but they were transformed in his imagination and his music into tears falling from heaven on his heart.

Although George Sand cannot be acquitted of the charge of exaggerating the weak points in her lover's character, what she says about his being a detestable patient seems to have a good foundation in fact. Gutmann, who nursed him often, told me that his master was very irritable and difficult to manage in sickness. On the other hand, Gutmann contradicted George Sand's remarks about the Preludes, saying that Chopin composed them before starting on his journey. When I mentioned to him that Fontana had made a statement irreconcilable with his, and suggested that Chopin might have composed some of the Preludes in Majorca, Gutmann maintained firmly that every one of them was composed previously, and that he himself had copied them. Now with Chopin's letters to Fontana before us we must come to the conclusion that Gutmann was either under a false impression or confirmed a rash statement by a bold a.s.sertion, unless we prefer to a.s.sume that Chopin's labours on the Preludes in Majorca were confined to selecting, [FOOTNOTE: Internal evidence suggests that the Preludes consist (to a great extent at least) of pickings from the composer's portfolios, of pieces, sketches, and memoranda written at various times and kept to be utilised when occasion might offer.] filing, and polishing. My opinion--which not only has probability but also the low opus number (28) and the letters in its favour--is that most of the Preludes, if not all, were finished or sketched before Chopin went to the south, and that a few, if any, were composed and the whole revised at Palma and Valdemosa. Chopin cannot have composed many in Majorca, because a few days after his arrival there he wrote: from Palma (Nov. 15, 1838) to Fontana that he would send the Preludes soon; and it was only his illness that prevented him from doing so. There is one statement in George Sand's above-quoted narrative which it is difficult to reconcile with other statements in "Un Hiver a Majorque" and in her and Chopin's letters. In the just-mentioned book (p. 177) she says that the journey in question was made for the purpose of rescuing the piano from the hands of the custom-house officers; and in a letter of January 15, 1839, to her friend Madame Marliani (quoted on p. 31), which does not contain a word about adventures on a stormy night, [They are first mentioned in the letter of January 20, 1839, quoted on p. 32.] she writes that the piano is still in the clutches of the custom-house officers. From this, I think, we may conclude that it must have taken place after January 15. But, then, how could Chopin have composed on that occasion a Prelude included in a work the ma.n.u.script of which he sent away on the lath? Still, this does not quite settle the question. Is it not possible that Chopin may have afterwards subst.i.tuted the new Prelude for one of those already forwarded to France? To this our answer must be that it is possible, but that the letters do not give any support to such an a.s.sumption. Another and stronger objection would be the uncertainty as to the correctness of the date of the letter.

Seeing that so many of Chopin's letters have been published with wrong dates, why not also that of January 12? Unfortunately, we cannot in this case prove or disprove the point by internal evidence. There is, however, one factor we must be especially careful not to forget in our calculations--namely, George Sand's habitual unconscientious inaccuracy; but the nature of her narrative will indeed be a sufficient warning to the reader, for n.o.body can read it without at once perceiving that it is not a plain, unvarnished recital of facts.