e Sand to Madame Marliani; Marseilles, April 28, 1839:--

The day before yesterday I saw Madame Nourrit with her six
children, and the seventh coming shortly...Poor unfortunate
woman! what a return to France! accompanying this corpse, and
she herself super-intending the packing, transporting, and
unpacking [charger, voiturer, deballer] of it like a parcel!

They held here a very meagre service for the poor deceased,
the bishop being ill-disposed. This was in the little church
of Notre-Dame-du-Mont. I do not know if the singers did so
intentionally, but I never heard such false singing. Chopin
devoted himself to playing the organ at the Elevation, what an
organ! A false, screaming instrument, which had no wind except
for the purpose of being out of tune. Nevertheless, YOUR
LITTLE ONE [votre petit] made the most of it. He took the
least shrill stops, and played Les Astres, not in a proud and
enthusiastic style as Nourrit used to sing it, but in a
plaintive and soft style, like the far-off echo from another
world. Two, at the most three, were there who deeply felt
this, and our eyes filled with tears.

The rest of the audience, who had gone there en masse, and had
been led by curiosity to pay as much as fifty centimes for a
chair (an unheard-of price for Marseilles), were very much
disappointed; for it was expected that he would make a
tremendous noise and break at least two or three stops. They
expected also to see me, in full dress, in the very middle of
the choir; what not? They did not see me at all; I was hidden
in the organ-loft, and through the balustrade I descried the
coffin of poor Nourrit.

Thanks to the revivifying influences of spring and Dr. Cauviere's
attention and happy treatment, Chopin was able to accompany George Sand
on a trip to Genoa, that vaga gemma del mar, fior delta terra. It gave
George Sand much pleasure to see again, now with her son Maurice by her
side, the beautiful edifices and pictures of the city which six years
before she had visited with Musset. Chopin was probably not strong
enough to join his friends in all their sight-seeing, but if he saw
Genoa as it presents itself on being approached from the sea, passed
along the Via Nuova between the double row of magnificent palaces, and
viewed from the cupola of S. Maria in Carignano the city, its port, the
sea beyond, and the stretches of the Riviera di Levante and Riviera di
Ponente,