ame. In company with Mme. Sand, who had
become his constant companion, he went to the isle of Majorca, to find
rest and medicine in the balmy breezes of the Mediterranean. All the
happiness of Chopin's life was gathered in the focus of this experience.
He had a most loving and devoted nurse, who yielded to all his whims,
soothed his fretfulness, and watched over him as a mother does over
a child. The grounds of the villa where they lived were as perfect as
Nature and art could make them, and exquisite scenes greeted the eye at
every turn. Here they spent long golden days.

The feelings of Chopin for his gifted companion are best painted
by herself in the pages of "Lucrezia Floriani," where she is the
"Floriani," Liszt "Count Salvator Albani," and Chopin "Prince Karol:"
"It seemed as if this fragile being was absorbed and consumed by the
strength of his affection.... But he loved for the sake of loving....
His love was his life, and, delicious or bitter, he had not the power
of withdrawing himself a single moment from its domination." Slowly she
nursed him back into temporary health, and in the sunlight of her love
his mind assumed a gayety and cheerfulness it had never known before.

It had been the passionate hope of Chopin to marry Mme. Sand, but
wedlock was alien alike to her philosophy and preference. After a
protracted intimacy, she wearied of his persistent entreaties, or
perhaps her self-development had exhausted what it sought in the
poet-musician. An absolute separation came, and his mistress buried
the episode in her life with the epitaph: "Two natures, one rich in its
exuberance, the other in its exclusiveness, could never really mingle,
and a whole world separated them." Chopin said: "All the cords that bind
me to life are broken." His sad summary of all was that his life had
been an episode which began and ended in Paris. What a contrast to the
being of a few years before, of whom it is written: "He was no longer
on the earth; he was in an empyrean of golden clouds and perfumes; his
imagination, so full of exquisite beauty, seemed engaged in a monologue
with God himself!"*

* "Lucrezia Floriani."

Both Liszt and Mme. Dudevant have painted Chopin somewhat as a sickly
sentimentalist, living in an atmosphere of moonshine and unreality.
Yet this was not precisely true. In spite of his delicacy of frame and
romantic imagination, Chopin was never ill till within the last ten
years of his life, when the s