ack in spring. The mail goes once a week; I write
through the French Consulate here.

Send the enclosed letter as it is to my parents; leave it at
the postoffice yourself.

Yours,

CHOPIN.

George Sand relates in "Un Hiver a Majorque" that the first days which
her party passed at the Son-Vent (House of the Wind)--this was the name
of the villa they had rented--were pretty well taken up with promenading
and pleasant lounging, to which the delicious climate and novel scenery
invited. But this paradisaic condition was suddenly changed as if by
magic when at the end of two or three weeks the wet season began and the
Son-Vent became uninhabitable.

The walls of it were so thin that the lime with which our
rooms were plastered swelled like a sponge. For my part I
never suffered so much from cold, although it was in reality
not very cold; but for us, who are accustomed to warm
ourselves in winter, this house without a chimney was like a
mantle of ice on our shoulders, and I felt paralysed. Chopin,
delicate as he was and subject to violent irritation of the
larynx, soon felt the effects of the damp.

We could not accustom ourselves to the stifling odour of the
brasiers, and our invalid began to ail and to cough.

From this moment we became an object of dread and horror to
the population. We were accused and convicted of pulmonary
phthisis, which is equivalent to the plague in the prejudices
regarding contagion entertained by Spanish physicians. A rich
doctor, who for the moderate remuneration of forty-five francs
deigned to come and pay us a visit, declared, nevertheless,
that there was nothing the matter, and prescribed nothing.

Another physician came obligingly to our assistance; but the
pharmacy at Palma was in such a miserable state that we could
only procure detestable drugs. Moreover, the illness was to be
aggravated by causes which no science and no devotion could
efficiently battle against.

One morning, when we were given up to serious fears on account
of the duration of these rains and these sufferings which were
bound up together, we received a letter from the fierce Gomez
[the landlord], who declared, in the Spanish style, that we
held a person who held a disease which carried contagion into
his house, and threatened prematurely the life of his family;
in consequence of which he requested us to leave his palace
with the shor