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 repetition 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 assertion,
unless we prefer to a