In the spring of 1838 Chopin was often to be seen at the soirées of Countess Charlotte Marliani, whom he had met a couple of years before. She was an undistinguished but affable Frenchwoman who had married the Spanish consul in Paris. He was an exiled Italian revolutionary, and since there was mutual sympathy between the Polish and Italian exiles, his wife’s salon was a meeting place for members of both groups. The regular guests included Grzymała, Mickiewicz and the Czartoryskis, as well as notable Italian expatriates such as Princess Belgiojoso.
Although she was no intellectual, Countess Marliani had also opened her doors to some of the debris of Marie d’Agoult’s ‘humanitarian’ salon of the previous year. As a result, her apartment in the rue de la Grange Batelière was cosmopolitan and artistic in atmosphere, and it was here that George Sand decided to stay when she came to Paris on business for two weeks in the middle of April. Liszt had some time before written to her from Italy, urging her to ‘see Chopin a little’, but he need not have bothered, for the two inevitably met once again.1
They had both changed a great deal during the fifteen months since they had last seen each other. In the autumn of 1836, the happy, carefree Chopin who was hoping to marry Maria Wodzińska had turned his nose up at the Hôtel de France set, rarely played the piano, and usually clowned about or par odied Liszt when he did. George Sand was put off by his apparent frivolity and snobbishness, and was herself in an intellectually assertive mood. Now Chopin was sad and more serious; George Sand was weary and reflective. The surroundings in which they saw each other were more conducive to a reappraisal of each other’s qualities. In the homely atmosphere of the Marliani apartment Chopin played often and played at his best. At Custine’s, where they both had dinner on 8 May, George Sand could see him in his element. The guests, who included the duchesse d’Abrantès, the comtesse Merlin, the Victor Hugos, Jules Janin, Sophie Gay and the poets Charles Nodier and Lamartine, listened to Duprez singing Gluck arias, Franchomme playing his cello, and finally to Chopin. It was a warm evening and the scent of the garden wafted in through the open french windows of the dining room where they sat. Chopin improvised for hours in the semi-darkness, with only a ‘magic glow’ lighting up the large painting covering the wall behind him.2
George Sand fell in love with Chopin. ‘I must say that I was confused and amazed at the effect this little creature wrought on me,’ she wrote some two weeks later. ‘I have still not recovered from my astonishment, and if I were a proud person I should be feeling humiliated at having been carried away by my emotions at a moment in my life when I had thought that I had settled down for good.’3
She was only thirty-three years old, less than six years older than Chopin, but she had lived with such intensity and packed so much experience into those years that she felt played out. This had not affected her physically, as Balzac noted. ‘She hasn’t a single grey hair, in spite of the terrible experiences she has been through. Her swarthy complexion has not altered; her lovely eyes are as lustrous as ever. She always looks stupid when sunk in thought, for, as I told her after studying her a while, all her expression is concentrated in the eyes.’4
Those eyes were now devouring Chopin, who soon found himself gazing back into them and realising that the cavalier, cigar-smoking image George Sand projected in public was a mask behind which she hid her vulnerability. Those sphinx-like eyes exercised an immense power of silent attraction, and it was not long before Chopin was irresistibly drawn towards her. He was bewildered and anxious, and called on Grzymała for support. ‘My dearest, I must see you urgently today, even at night, at 12 or 1,’ he wrote to him. ‘Don’t fear any embarrassment for yourself, my dearest, you know I have always valued your good heart. It’s a question of advice for me.’5
Having spent the last two years dreaming of a love affair in which every move forward, every step in intimacy was drawn out over a period of months, Chopin was knocked off balance by this new development and the rapidity with which it was taking place. After only a couple of weeks he was on the brink of sexual consummation, and at this point he hesitated. George Sand had to return to Nohant as her son Maurice had fallen ill, and on her last evening in Paris, 14 May, she was at Grzymała’s with Delacroix, listening to Chopin playing into the small hours. At the moment of parting, Chopin grew embarrassed, as he sensed that it was incumbent on him to make a physical advance. He shied away, with a remark about ‘not spoiling the memory’ of the past three weeks. This suddenly revealed to her that he still thought of love-making as somehow shameful, an attitude that could not fail to jar with her, who had slept with almost every man she had ever loved.
She returned to Nohant perplexed and worried. ‘We allowed ourselves to be swept along by a passing wind,’ she reasoned, but found that reasoning got her nowhere.6 While she was wondering what to do next, Chopin was doing the same in Paris. The image of Maria suddenly loomed, presumably as a sort of counterbalance of respectable purity to the frighteningly real sexual possibilities of the situation in hand. His chronic ir resolution played its part too, and he went running to ‘Uncle Albert’ Grzymała. The upshot of this was that Grzymała wrote to George Sand (it is unclear whether Chopin knew of this or not) discussing the matter at some length and apparently warning her not to trifle with Chopin. He also told her that Chopin still cherished the memory of someone else, at the same time expressing mis givings as to whether he could ever be happy in marriage.
George Sand replied with a very long letter, in which she laid bare her thoughts and begged Grzymała to form a judgement, by which she swore to abide. The two had become intimate in the last couple of years, and admired each other greatly (it is possible that Grzymała briefly enjoyed her favours as a lover). So she laid before him the main issues as she saw them with remarkable candour. ‘This person, whom he wants to or feels himself bound to love, will she make him happy?’ she speculated. ‘Or will she increase his sufferings and his sadness? I don’t ask whether he loves, whether he is loved by her, whether it is more or less intense than with me. I know more or less what is happening inside me, and what must be happening inside him. I want to know which of us two he must forget or abandon for his own peace of mind, for his own happiness, for his life even, which seems to me too fragile and unstable to be able to resist unhappiness.’
Having said this, and having stressed that she did not wish to play the part of a wicked angel and sniff ‘the incense intended for another altar’, she rambled on incoherently. She pointed out that ‘there is a being, excellent, perfect from the point of view of his heart and his honour, whom I shall never leave’, by which she meant her children’s tutor, the playwright Félicien Mallefille. But a page or so further on she admitted that Mallefille’s caresses had become a good deal less welcome since she had fallen in love with Chopin. She declared that Mallefille was as malleable as wax, and that he would not stand in the way of any decision she made. She had been horrified at Chopin’s deficient or unhappy sexual experience, and appeared to see it as her duty to sort him out. Recoiling from this, however, she put forward another solution, which appealed to her image of herself as a reasonable, grown-up person in control of her destiny. ‘I think that our love can only last in the conditions in which it was born,’ she wrote, ‘that is to say only from time to time, when a good wind brings us together, when we can take a trip to the stars, after which we can part in order to walk on earth.’
Stripped to essentials, this meant that she would keep Mallefille as her lover, that Chopin could adore as many Polish ladies as he wished, and that she would ‘chastely press him in my arms when the celestial wind deigns to snatch and waft us up into the heavens’. (It is one of the failings of Sand’s prose style that when she hits upon a convenient metaphor she labours it to death.) The letter rambled on in quest of a solution. ‘If he is happy or will be happy through her, let him be,’ she summed up. ‘If he will be unhappy, stop him. If I can make him happy without spoiling his happiness with her, I can arrange my life accordingly. If he can only be happy with me by ruining his chances of happiness through her, we must avoid each other and he must forget me. There is no avoiding these four points.’7
But there was a fifth ‘point’: she was in love with Chopin and no longer wanted Mallefille. George Sand was a curious mixture of eighteenth-century rationalism and Romantic impulse, and, having reasoned everything out on paper, she proceeded to act in complete contradiction to her conclusions. It is not known whether Grzymała ever replied to her letter, or what he wrote if he did, but having laid the whole matter in his lap, she now took it firmly back into her own hands, and dashed off a note to him saying:
My affairs are calling me back. I shall be in Paris on Thursday. Come to see me and try to keep it a secret from the Little One. We shall give him a surprise. Yours, dearest, G.S. – I shall, as usual, be staying with Mme Marliani.8
Grzymała promptly warned Chopin of the surprise that lay in store for him, and received the following answer:
My dearest! I cannot be surprised, because yesterday I saw Marliani, who told me she was coming. I shall be at home till five, giving lessons, rottenly (I’m just finishing my second). What will come of all this, God only knows. I feel really awful. I’ve been calling on you every day to give you a hug. Let’s have dinner together somewhere.9
When George Sand arrived in Paris on 6 June, reason and scruples quickly gave way before natural instinct, and the two became lovers. The affair was only slightly complicated by the arrival in Paris of Mallefille, who still considered himself to be the official lover and accompanied George Sand much of the time. She took a little garret room not far from the Marlianis’, ostensibly so that she could get on with her work, and thereby guaranteed herself some freedom. Evenings were usually spent at the Marlianis’, where the deception was possible as the group of friends who gathered there, Delacroix, Grzymała and Mickiewicz, were in on the secret. Like the others, Mallefille was entranced by Chopin’s playing. ‘Hidden in the darkest corner of the room, I wept while following in my mind the desolate images you conjured up,’ he wrote, little realising that he had more urgent cause for tears.10 While he sat down and wrote a poem exalting Chopin and his country, Chopin was sitting in Delacroix’s studio on the Left Bank with George Sand, posing for a joint portrait. A Pleyel piano had been moved into the studio in June, and Delacroix painted Chopin playing it, with George Sand sitting just behind in an ecstatic pose.
In August she sent Mallefille off with her son on a trip around Normandy, and was at last able to see Chopin whenever she wanted. A month of bliss followed. George Sand wrote to Delacroix of ‘the delicious exhaustion of a fulfilled love’, and in September she was ‘still in the state of intoxication in which you last saw me’. ‘There has not been the slightest cloud in our clear sky, not a grain of sand in our lake. I am beginning to think that there are angels disguised as men.’11 Being George Sand, she had to explain to herself and others that her love was ‘neither a preconceived decision, nor a substitute, nor an illusion born of boredom and solitude, nor a caprice, nor any of those things with which one deceives oneself by deceiving others’.
She began by refuting all that she had written and decided in the past year, bombarding the unfortunate Delacroix with her arguments and conclusions. ‘Love above all, don’t you agree?’ she wrote to him. ‘Love above all when one’s star is in the ascendant, art above all when the star is in decline!’12 The ponderous philosophical novel she was halfway through was put aside, and she embarked on a musical-philosophical drama entitled Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre, in which the Spirit of the Lyre, a symbolic Chopin, exclaims: ‘Listen to the voice that sings love and not to the voice that explains it.’13
At the beginning of September, however, the ‘celestial wind’ theory came into sharp conflict with reality, for Chopin was getting possessive, and George Sand could not face carrying on with Mallefille, who was back in Paris. As a result, the man she would ‘never leave’ was unceremoniously dismissed. He proved to be a good deal less malleable than she had thought, and when he realised what lay behind his dismissal, he grew violent.
There are two versions of what happened. One is that Mallefille posted himself outside Chopin’s apartment in the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin and tried to seize George Sand as she emerged, she taking advantage of a heavy goods wagon which rolled between them to leap into a passing cab. The other version is that, after nearly breaking down Chopin’s door one night, he attempted to strangle the composer and was only stopped by the timely intervention of Grzymała. Whichever is closer to the truth, Mallefille was certainly wandering around Paris uttering wild threats, and the two lovers had to be careful throughout September, during which they did not go out much together.
George Sand had for some time been planning to spend that autumn and winter in Italy on account of the delicate health of her fifteen-year-old son Maurice, and Mallefille’s threats made such a plan still more expedient. For some reason, Italy was dropped in favour of Majorca, which was presumably suggested by some of the Spaniards who frequented the Marlianis. One of these, the Marquess of Valldemosa, though a Majorcan himself, seems to have known the place but vaguely, and threw out a few optimistic remarks about the beneficial climate. Without further ado, or a thought for the fact that Spain was in the throes of civil war, George Sand made up her mind and started to make preparations.
She assumed that Chopin would go with her, but he hesitated as he always did before a decision. Grzymała expressed misgivings about the advisability of his accompanying her on the journey, and the prospect of leaving Paris for some six months for an unknown destination did not fill Chopin with enthusiasm. On the other hand he could not resign himself to letting this woman who meant so much to him go off and leave him alone, so he borrowed money, pre-sold the almost completed set of Preludes, and arranged for Pleyel to have a piano shipped out.
On 18 October, George Sand left with her two children and a maid, travelling by easy stages. Chopin was to meet them en route, and began to say his farewells in Paris. On 20 October he went to Saint-Gratien for the day, and made a painful impression on Custine, who wrote:
He is leaving for Valencia in Spain, that is to say for the other world. You simply cannot imagine what Madame Sand has managed to do with him in the space of one summer! Consumption has taken possession of that face, making it a soul without a body. He played to us a farewell, with the expression that you know. First a Polonaise, which he had just written, magnificent by its force and verve. It is a joyous riot. Then he played the Polish prayer. Then, at the end, a funeral march, which made me burst into tears in spite of myself. It was the procession taking him to his last resting place; and when I reflected that perhaps I would never see him again on this earth, my heart bled. The unfortunate creature cannot see that the woman has the love of a vampire! He is following her to Spain, whither she is preceding him. He will never leave that country. He did not dare tell me he was going; he only spoke of his need for a good climate and for rest! Rest! – with a Ghoul as travelling companion!14
Chopin left Paris on 25 October, in the company of the brother of the Spanish minister Mendizabal, travelling night and day in order to catch up with George Sand at Perpignan. They arrived there on 30 October, Chopin ‘fresh as a rose and pink as a turnip, looking well and having borne heroically the four nights in the mail coach’.15 The next day they took ship from Port-Vendres and reached Barcelona on 2 November. They had to spend five days there, awaiting the departure of the weekly packet to Palma, during which they made the acquaintance of the French consul, dined aboard a French navy brig anchored in the roads, and even went on a long excursion into the surrounding countryside. In spite of the civil war, of which they were continually reminded by bursts of distant gunfire, the city was thronged with people pretending that nothing out of the ordinary was going on, and the warm evenings were dominated by the sound of guitars and merry-making.
On the evening of 7 November the party embarked on the Mallorquin, the steamer which plied between Majorca and Barcelona, and after a warm and perfectly calm night crossing, sailed into Palma harbour in the late morning under a blazing sun. While Chopin and the children remained on the quayside being stared at by the locals, George Sand set off in search of a hotel, only to return a few hours later having discovered that there were none in Palma, and that such rented accommodation as there was had been taken by refugees from the mainland.
She eventually found a couple of squalid rooms in a noisy and poor area of the city, where they camped for the night, and on the next day went in search of better lodgings, trusting in the introductions she had brought to people in Palma. She had letters to the Canut family, the foremost bankers in the town, to that of the Marquess of Valldemosa, and to various other members of Palma society, but while some of them were pleasant enough, most were guarded in their behaviour, and none offered any help.
As Madame de Canut points out in her memoirs, the Majorcans were taken aback by the arrival on the scene of an unattached woman who wrote books and smoked cigars, accompanied by two long-haired boys and a little girl who wore boys’ clothes, none of whom went to church, and whose manner exuded a strong odour of immorality.16 This of course excited the local rakes, and on the one evening that she went to the opera with the Canuts, George Sand was stared out of existence with either disapproving or lecherous looks. She therefore left Majorcan society to itself, and turned for help to the more congenial French consul in Palma, Monsieur Flury.
With his help, she tracked down a Mr Gomez who was prepared to rent her his little villa at Establiments, a couple of miles from Palma. They moved in on 15 November, and were delighted with the primitively furnished but picturesque house called ‘S’on Vent’. ‘My dearest, I am at Palma, surrounded by palms, cedars, cactuses, olives, oranges, lemons, aloes, figs, pomegranates, etc.; everything the Jardin des Plantes has in its hothouses,’ Chopin wrote to Fontana the very same day. ‘The sky is like turquoise, the sea like lapis lazuli, the hills like emeralds, the air like in heaven. During the daytime it is sunny and hot, and everyone walks about in summer clothes; at night you hear guitars and singing for hours. Huge balconies overhung with vines; moorish battlements. Everything looks out towards Africa, like the town itself. In a word, this is the most wonderful life.’17
George Sand too was delighted with the place, which she described as ‘a green Switzerland under a Calabrian sky, with the solemnity and the silence of the Orient’, and declared to a friend in Paris that she would ‘never leave Majorca’.18 Both Chopin and Maurice went for long walks, and their health improved. But after one longer expedition, during which the weather changed suddenly, Chopin had an attack of bronchitis. This would not have been serious had the weather remained fine, but it deteriorated dramatically. Torrential rain and a drop in temperature quickly turned the charming villa with its paneless windows, thin walls and chimneyless braziers into a ‘cold, damp, smoky hole’. Chopin’s bronchitis grew worse, and by the end of November he was racked by fits of coughing. George Sand was so alarmed that she called in a doctor, who brought a couple of colleagues, each of whom examined Chopin. ‘The first sniffed at what I had coughed up, the second tapped at the place I had coughed it up from, the third poked about and listened while I coughed,’ Chopin wrote to Fontana. ‘The first said that I was dead, the second that I was dying, the third that I was about to die.’19
The doctors departed and Chopin’s condition improved independently of them. This was largely thanks to the way George Sand looked after him, cooking special meals for him and at last managing to get an artisan to build her a stove, which meant the room could be heated without attendant fumigation. Although she was irritated by the fact that ‘instead of making literature, I am making the food’, as she wrote to Grzymała, she kept her spirits up and continued to write enthusiastic letters to her friends in Paris.20 Chopin, who had been ‘dreaming of music, but could not make any’ since the Pleyel had not arrived yet, managed to rent a piano locally and get down to work on the remaining Preludes, and even wrote a new Mazurka (no.1 of op.41).21
Just as things were beginning to look up a little, the weather deteriorated further, the walls of the house swelled with moisture like a sponge, and Chopin’s health took another plunge. In mid-December he wrote to Fontana that ‘my manuscripts lie dormant, while I cannot sleep – I can only cough and, covered in poultices, lie here waiting for the spring, or something else…’22
The doctors who had caused such amusement had in fact diagnosed tuberculosis, and they had done what was demanded by Spanish law in such cases: reported it to the authorities. As soon as he heard of this, Mr Gomez told the party to decamp forthwith and to pay for the whitewashing of the house and for new furniture, as by law all effects touched by a tuberculotic had to be burnt.
George Sand had been thinking of moving anyway. On a sightseeing excursion at the beginning of their stay they had visited the former Carthusian monastery of Valldemosa, which she thought ‘the most romantic spot on earth’.23 After its dissolution, the monastery had been taken over by the government, which rented out the monks’ cells to anyone who wished to stay there. She had immediately taken one, with the notion of going there to write. When they were overcome by the dampness of Palma, she began to consider moving to the higher ground of Valldemosa, but was put off by the difficulty of furnishing the cell. However, just as Mr Gomez told her to vacate his house, a family which was moving out of Valldemosa offered to sell her theirs. So, on 15 December, the little party loaded up the rented piano, the stove and all the effects they could take, and set off up the mountain side. This was no easy undertaking, for there was no proper road up to the monastery. ‘Many times I have travelled from Palma to this place, always with the same carter, always by a different route,’ Chopin later wrote to Fontana. ‘The roads are created by streams, repaired by avalanches; today you cannot get through here because it has been ploughed up, tomorrow only a mule can get through – and you should see the local carts!!!’24
The monastery nestled in the mountains and enjoyed a magnificent view over the surrounding countryside and the sea, ‘one of those views which overcome one, because they leave nothing to be desired, nothing to be imagined’, as George Sand put it. ‘Everything the poet and the painter might have dreamt up has been created in this place by nature.’25 The cell which they moved into consisted of three large chambers reached from a communal passage. The furniture consisted of camp beds, rickety tables, rush chairs and a white-wood settee. The clay floor was covered with rush matting and white sheepskins. Chopin described their new home thus:
Valldemosa, between the mountains and the sea, a huge abandoned Carthusian monastery, where, in a cell with doors larger than any pair of gates in Paris, you can imagine me, my hair uncurled, without white gloves, pale as ever. The cell is in the shape of a tall coffin, with a great dusty vault, a small window, and, outside, oranges, palms, cypresses. Opposite the window, my bed of straps, under a Moorish filigree rose. Next to my bed there is a hopeless square desk I can hardly write on, on it a leaden candlestick (a luxury here) with a candle in it, my Bach, my own scrawls, someone else’s papers…silence…you can yell…silence still. In a word, it is a strange place I am writing from.26
Amongst the other inhabitants of the monastery were a local apothecary; the guardian of the place; an old former servant of the monks; and a woman from the mainland who offered to help George Sand with the cooking and domestic work. The sense of isolation felt by the little party, which was heightened by the fact that they had still not received a single letter from Paris, was not unpleasant to them at first.
Although he had recovered slightly from the crisis of the first weeks of December, Chopin was still ‘very weak and feeble’ at the end of the month, and every time the weather took a turn for the worse his health did too. The combination of illness and surroundings even induced a hallucinatory state, which alarmed George Sand. It was only after spending a couple of weeks at Valldemosa that she discovered why the whole of Palma did not retire to the mountains during the winter. ‘There are rainstorms here that you can have no idea of anywhere else,’ she reported to Charlotte Marliani. ‘It is a terrifying deluge. The air is so damp that one feels utterly exhausted. I am a mass of rheumatic pains.’27
Whenever he was not actually laid out by illness, Chopin worked on the Preludes, writing, as he put it to Fontana, ‘in the cell of an old monk, who may have had more fire in his soul than I, but stifled it, stifled and doused it, for he had it in vain’.28 While there were a thousand irritations and problems to complain about, he felt that ‘it all pales into insignificance next to this sky, the poetry with which everything here breathes, next to the colour of these beautiful places still unfathomed by any human eye’.29 The only thing that did afflict him seriously, as he explained to Grzymała, was to see George Sand ‘continually anxious, nursing me (Lord preserve us from the local doctors), making my bed, sweeping my room, brewing infusions, denying herself everything for my sake, with children needing her constant attention…’30 A decade later she wrote that ‘the poor great artist was a detestable patient’ and claimed he was ‘completely demoralised’,31 but at the time she wrote to Charlotte Marliani from the monastery: ‘If you knew him as I have got to know him, you would love him even more, my dear,’ and called him ‘an angel of patience, gentleness and goodness’.32
George Sand had taken on great responsibilities. She had to spend part of each day looking to the education of her children, and she had to go on churning out quantities of prose for her expectant editor, as well as catering to all the practical needs of the little group. The maid she had brought with her seems to have been of little use, while the woman who had offered her services, and who had subsequently been joined in this by another local woman and a little girl, turned out to be taking her due (having refused any payment) by scrounging shamelessly, which was particularly galling in view of the difficulty of obtaining victuals.
If the ladies of Palma had decided that the Chopin-Sand party was a little unorthodox, the peasants of Valldemosa found it deeply immoral. As the local alcalde, or magistrate, told a Polish traveller who happened to drop in on Valldemosa in January 1839, the foreigners never talked to anyone and never went to church, the young boy went about sketching all day long and the little girl was dressed as a boy. The locals had heard that George Sand herself slept much of the day and spent the nights writing, drinking endless cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes. All this added up to godlessness in their eyes, and her manner was not calculated to breach their prejudice.
Combining financial considerations with those of principle, they began to charge her more for food. She made the mistake of thinking that she could bargain and play one off against the other. Their solidarity proved equal to the test, and they raised their prices to ridiculous levels, refusing to do business except on their own terms. George Sand would never forgive them for the humiliation. In the end she had to buy her own goat in order to have a supply of milk, and dispatched frantic messages to Flury in Palma, who would send his cook out with provisions.
Apart from the irritation, she must have been deeply anxious at finding herself saddled with responsibility for a sick man and two children in an increasingly hostile place, particularly as her financial reserves were dwindling rapidly. Nothing had been cheap on this holiday; even the doctors called in to see Chopin had charged more than the best in Paris. George Sand had soon spent all the money she had brought, and was drawing ever more heavily on her credit at the Canut bank. Chopin’s cash too had been whittled away, and to cap it all, the Majorcan customs demanded a duty equivalent to half its value when the Pleyel piano finally arrived in Palma harbour on 21 December. It took three weeks to strike a bargain with the customs, who finally let it go for half the amount.
The arrival of the piano in mid-January coincided with the sudden appearance of spring, and spirits rose all round. George Sand and her children again went for long walks, while Chopin could sit out in the garden and breathe more easily. Above all he could now get down to work seriously. All but four of the twenty-four Preludes had been more or less finished before his arrival in Palma, and he had somehow managed to write those four (nos 2, 4, 10, 21) using the locally-bought piano, but he could not polish up or revise any of them until he heard them on the Pleyel. A few days after this arrived he was able to send the completed manuscripts off to Fontana. He then finished the Mazurka he had started at S’on Vent, wrote two new Polonaises (op.40) and the F major Ballade, op.38, all of which he sent off before two weeks had elapsed, and started on a new Scherzo (C sharp minor, op.39). Such activity, unusual in Chopin at the best of times, is eloquent evidence of his good spirits.
Just as they were beginning to enjoy life again, and soon after George Sand had written to Charlotte Marliani saying that they had no particular urge or plans to leave, they suddenly made up their minds to go, and go as soon as possible. The reason for this sudden and unwise move remains obscure, as later accounts by George Sand are conflicting.33 On 11 February 1839, after fifty-six days at the monastery of Valldemosa, they left for Palma, but even on this first lap of the journey its inadvisability became obvious. George Sand had tried to borrow a sprung carriage for the journey down the mountainside, but nobody wished to have to burn theirs after its use by a tuberculotic, with the result that they had to make the nine-mile journey in great heat on a rough cart. On arrival at the lodgings of Flury, who had offered them accommodation while they waited for the Mallorquin to sail, Chopin was convulsed with coughing and was spitting blood. After a good night’s rest he seemed better, and waited patiently for the next stage of the journey.
George Sand now discovered that the Pleyel piano was liable to draconian export duty, and decided to sell it in Palma. This was no easy matter, for nobody wished to touch an infected piano. Finally the French-born Madame de Canut sold her own and took in Chopin’s. Having settled that, they could finally leave, and on 13 February they boarded the Mallorquin, only to have another unpleasant surprise. On the passage from Barcelona they had been able to wander about the deck in happy ignorance of the fact that this was reserved, on the return journeys, for the island’s principal export – live pigs. Now the party was taken to their cabin and told to remain below deck throughout the voyage. It was a warm night and the airless cabin in which Chopin gasped for breath was filled with the stench of the pigs. There was no question of sleep as the animals had a tendency to seasickness if allowed to remain still, and were therefore periodically chased about the deck.
By the time they sailed into Barcelona, Chopin was haemorrhaging and coughing up ‘bowlfuls of blood’. George Sand wanted to take him ashore immediately, but the captain refused to give her one of the boats, which were needed to unload the precious porcine cargo. In despair she tossed a coin and a note to a passing fisherman, begging him to row over to the French brig the Méléagre, which was still at anchor in the bay. The captain of the Méléagre himself came over in his launch and took the party off the Mallorquin to his own ship, whose doctor staunched Chopin’s haemorrhaging and sedated him. Before they were put ashore, the doctor examined him thoroughly and diagnosed no disease and no perceptible damage to the lungs, merely stressing that Chopin had a delicate chest which should never be put under undue strain.
In Barcelona, they stayed at a hotel, and it was again necessary to go through the rigmarole of paying in advance for bedding and effects which would have to be destroyed, notwithstanding the French doctor’s clean bill of health. Chopin’s condition improved markedly during the week they spent there, and on 21 February the whole party was able to board a French ship bound for Marseille. George Sand and her children shouted ‘Vive la France!’ as they climbed aboard.34
It was not merely the expression of a happy homecoming; a few days before, George Sand had written to Charlotte Marliani that ‘one would have to write ten volumes if one wanted to give some idea of the baseness, the bad faith, the egotism, the stupidity and the wickedness of this dumb, thieving and bigoted race’.35 Even taking into account the possibility that she and Chopin had been trying to keep up their morale while in Majorca, the letters they both wrote from the island tell a very different story from the ones she began writing now. ‘Another month in Spain and we should have perished there, Chopin and I; he of melancholy and disgust, I of fury and indignation,’ she wrote to Charlotte Marliani. The last week, during which the problems of getting away had culminated in Chopin’s seeming brush with death, had made her cup overflow. ‘They wounded me in the most sensitive spot in my heart, under my very eyes they pierced a suffering person with pinpricks. I shall never forgive them, and if I ever write about them it shall be with venom.’36 She was as good as her word. The accounts of the holiday she included in two different books are vitriolic in their description of the Majorcans and wildly exaggerate the conditions on the island.37
On 24 February, after a calm passage, their ship docked at Marseille. Chopin was deposited in the competent hands of Dr Cauvière, a friend of the Marlianis’, a doctor whose skill and wisdom were further enhanced in George Sand’s eyes by the fact that he was an ardent republican. He began with a thorough examination of the sick man, but could find no ‘lesions’, no ‘cavities’ and no serious illness of any kind. ‘He is nursing him like his own child,’ George Sand wrote, ‘visits him every morning and every evening, takes him for walks, panders to him and is full of little attentions.’38
Chopin’s health improved rapidly, but Cauvière made George Sand abandon her original intention, which had been to move out of Marseille and take a house in the country, and later to go to Italy for a couple of months. The doctor insisted that what Chopin needed was a long rest, as his constitution had been weakened by the continuous travelling. So they settled into a hotel close to Cauvière’s house, and now George Sand herself found that she was not well at all, for the strain of the last months was beginning to tell. As a result she was quite happy to sit quietly with her ‘little Chop’.
After two weeks, Chopin was writing to Grzymała that his health was better: ‘vesicatories, diet, pills, baths and the incomparable care of my Angel are slowly putting me back on my feet’.39 ‘I’m much better,’ he wrote to Fontana a couple of weeks later. ‘I’m starting to play, eat, walk and talk like everyone else.’40 While George Sand began work on a new novel, Chopin got back to the C sharp minor Scherzo, and to sorting out his finances, which were in a terrible mess. The resulting correspondence affords an insight into the petulant and frequently childish way in which he conducted his financial affairs, and the racial stereotyping to which he was prone.
Before leaving Paris, Chopin had pre-sold the Preludes to Pleyel for 2,000 francs, of which he was advanced five hundred. The agreement included the shipping out of the piano, worth between 1,200 and 1,400 francs. He had also borrowed a thousand francs from Auguste Léo, and another thousand from an unidentified person. The loan from Léo was only supposed to be a short-term one, repayable from the remaining 1,500 to be delivered by Pleyel on receipt of the completed Preludes, which should have reached him long before Christmas. But the delays in finding suitable lodgings and the late arrival of the piano, not to mention Chopin’s illness, had wrought havoc with these plans. Léo started clamouring for his money, which elicited the following reaction from Chopin in his letter to Fontana at the end of December:
Leo’s a Jew! I cannot send you the Preludes, as they’re not ready; but I’m better now and will hurry up, and I’ll write the Jew a nice letter thanking him, so he feels awful (he can feel what he likes as far as I’m concerned). The crook! And to think that I called on him specially on the eve of my departure…Schlesinger is an even worse dog, to include my Waltzes in an album! and to sell them to Probst [for Germany] when out of kindness I had let him have [the German rights] for his own father in Berlin – but all these lice don’t worry me now. Let Leo rage!41*
By the end of January, Chopin had sent Fontana the completed Preludes, for which Fontana was to collect, after copying them neatly, the remaining 1,500 francs from Pleyel. With this money Fontana was to repay the anonymous creditor and the landlord at the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. He was then to sell the German rights to Probst for a thousand francs, with which he was to repay Léo. Unfortunately, Pleyel seems to have felt that the 1,500 was in some measure surety for the piano, for which Canut had not yet forwarded the money, and he refused to pay up. This news reached Chopin in Marseille. ‘I had not expected such Jewish behaviour from Pleyel,’ he wrote to Fontana, and urged him to try to sell the French and English rights to the new Ballade to Pleyel for a thousand francs, and the universal rights to the two Polonaises he had just finished for 1,500 francs. If this could not be done, Fontana was to take the two works to Schlesinger, and not Probst, as Chopin explained:
If we must deal with Jews, let’s at least stick to the Orthodox ones. Probst could play some filthy German trick on me – there’s no holding him. Schlesinger has always been slippery, but he’s made enough money out of me, so he won’t refuse to make more; but be polite with him, because the Jew likes to cut a good figure. So, if Pleyel starts making the slightest difficulties, go to Schlesinger and tell him I’ll give him the Ballade for France and England for 800, and the Polonaises for France, England and Germany for 1500 (and if he balks at that, let him have them for 1400, 1300, or even 1200). If he mentions the Preludes (I’m sure Probst will have told him about those), tell him that I promised them to Pleyel a long time ago, as he wanted to publish them and begged me before my departure, which was indeed the case. You see, my dearest; I could afford to break with Pleyel for Schlesinger’s sake, but not for Probst’s…42
Chopin was upset by the behaviour of Pleyel, who he sensed, rightly, had heard rumours of his illness and wondered whether he would ever return to Paris. ‘I’ll come back all right, and both he and Leo will get their thanks!’ he wrote to Fontana.43 In the meantime he pinned his hopes on Schlesinger, his usual publisher, a little optimistically as it happened. In a letter to Fontana at the end of March, when everything should have been sorted out, he wrote:
My dearest, since they’re such a band of Jews – hold everything, till my return. The Preludes are sold to Pleyel (so far I’ve received only 500 Frs), so he can wipe the other end of his stomach with them if he chooses, but as for the Ballade and the Polonaises, don’t sell them to Schlesinger or Probst.44
What Schlesinger had done is not known, but the fact is that the next eight major works by Chopin to appear in Paris (with the exception of the Preludes) were published not by Schlesinger, but by a new publisher called Troupenas, and it was two more years before Schlesinger once again became Chopin’s publisher. In the meantime, Chopin had to borrow money from Grzymała and to allow his apartment in the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin to be re-let, and all he could do was rage at people who owed him money, mostly Poles such as Antoni Wodziński.
These were, however, only minor irritations, and they did not manage to cloud the happiness of the months spent in Marseille. The tribulations George Sand and Chopin had been through had served to bring them closer together. Chopin was all admiration for his ‘angel’, and wrote to Grzymała: ‘You would love her even more if you knew her as I now know her.’45 She, for her part, might easily have grown dissatisfied with the situation, for she was not used to spending so much time with one man. She was also a very physical person who could not have had much satisfaction from Chopin since they had left Paris in the autumn: both his illness and the continual presence of the children would have made intimacy difficult. Yet she found, for the first time in years, that she could still be in love once the initial passion had subsided, and she remained fascinated by this creature, so different from herself.
‘Chopin is an angel,’ she wrote to Charlotte Marliani. ‘His goodness, his tenderness and his patience sometimes make me anxious; I feel that he is too fine, too exquisite, too perfect to live long in this crude and heavy earthly world. In Majorca, when he was mortally ill, he made music which smelt of paradise. But I have grown so used to seeing him in heaven that I do not think life or death means anything to him. He does not really know himself which planet he is on. He has no idea of life as we think of it and as we feel it.’46 At the same time she sketched out the plan for a new novel, Gabriel, whose subject-matter is suggestive – it is about a Renaissance princess brought up as a man, who is in some sphere of the imagination an angel as well as a man and a woman.
It was almost certainly something to do with their relationship that made Chopin write, in a letter to Fontana on 7 March: ‘I told you that in my desk, in the first drawer on the side of the door, there was a little note which you, or Jaś, or Grz could open; I now ask you to take it and burn it without breaking the seal or reading it – I beg you on our friendship to do this – the note is now unnecessary.’47 The fact that the next thought in the characteristically rambling and chaotic letter concerns Antoni Wodziński suggests that the note had something to do with his sister, or at least a subject linked with the thought of her. It looks very much as though Chopin were now definitely burying the past and settling for a life with his new companion.
It was a quiet life, since Chopin was still being kept in by Dr Cauvière and was anyway not tempted by Marseille, which he found ugly. He had to admit to Grzymała that he was a little bored. Another reason for staying at home was the fact that their arrival was something of an event in the life of the city, and they were besieged by ‘enthusiasts of literature and music’. Apart from a few of George Sand’s friends and a Polish poet who lived nearby, they admitted nobody, but, in the words of George Sand, ‘luckily Chop, with his piano, dispels the boredom and brings poetry back into our lodgings’.48
While they were still in Marseille, news reached them that Adolphe Nourrit, who had gone to try his luck in Naples after falling from grace with the Paris public, had committed suicide there. This afflicted Chopin deeply, as apart from his friendship for Nourrit, he always responded badly to news of deaths. George Sand tried to make him believe it was just a rumour, but when, a few days later, Madame Nourrit turned up in Marseille with her husband’s body, her six children and a seventh in her womb, reality could not be avoided. While she was arranging the funeral service to be held in the cathedral, she asked Chopin if he would play the organ. When this became known, many people turned up in the hope, as George Sand put it, of seeing herself sitting astride the coffin smoking a cigar and of hearing Chopin make the organ explode. They were disappointed, for not only was the organ in poor condition, but Chopin restricted his contribution to one of the Schubert lieder the singer had done so much to popularise, ‘not with the exalted and glorious tone Nourrit used to lend it, but in a plaintive, soft tone, like the distant echo from another world’.49
By the beginning of May Chopin was quite recovered, and as he was getting restless, Cauvière decided that an excursion to Italy was now practicable. The party consequently set off for Genoa, where they spent a couple of weeks sightseeing. Chopin felt well and energetic throughout, and even weathered ‘with valour’ the storm that caught their ship on the return journey.
After a couple of days at Marseille they set off for George Sand’s country house at Nohant, travelling by ferryboat up the Rhône as far as Arles, and thence by easy stages in a carriage. They arrived on 2 June, and Chopin received his first impression of this place which was to play such a large part in his life over the next years. ‘We arrived safely,’ he wrote to Grzymała, ‘lovely countryside, nightingales, larks…’50 ‘I hope that a few months of Nohant will have good results,’ wrote George Sand, ‘and he seems to want to stay here as long as possible. But I shall take him at his word only as long as I see that this place is truly beneficial to him.’51
*Chopin’s expletives are typical of the unguarded way he wrote to his close friends, and should certainly not be taken, as they might be today, to denote anti-Semitism: the ‘Jew’ Léo remained one of his closest friends to the end, as did other Jews such as Thomas Albrecht, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Moscheles and so on.