ion, he was well
dressed, his white gloves were immaculate. He was reserved and somewhat
languid. Every one knew that he was delicate, and there was a rumour
of an unhappy love affair. It was said that he had been in love with a
girl, and that her family had refused to consent to her marriage with
him. People said he was like his own music, the dreamy, melancholy
themes seemed to accord so well with the pale young face of the
composer. The fascination of the languor which seemed to emanate from
the man and from his work worked its way, in a subtle manner, into the
hearts of his hearers. Chopin did not care to know Lelia. He did not
like women writers, and he was rather alarmed at this one. It was Liszt
who introduced them. In his biography of Chopin, he tells us that the
extremely sensitive artist, who was so easily alarmed, dreaded "this
woman above all women, as, like a priestess of Delphi, she said so many
things that the others could not have said. He avoided her and postponed
the introduction. Madame Sand had no idea that she was feared as a
sylph. . . ." She made the first advances. It is easy to see what
charmed her in him. In the first place, he appealed to her as he did to
all women, and then, too, there was the absolute contrast of their two
opposite natures. She was all force, of an expansive, exuberant nature.
He was very discreet, reserved and mysterious. It seems that the Polish
characteristic is to lend oneself, but never to give oneself away, and
one of Chopin's friends said of him that he was "more Polish than Poland
itself." Such a contrast may prove a strong attraction, and then, too,
George Sand was very sensitive to the charm of music. But what she saw
above all in Chopin was the typical artist, just as she understood the
artist, a dreamer, lost in the clouds, incapable of any activity that
was practical, a "lover of the impossible." And then, too, he was ill.
When Musset left Venice, after all the atrocious nights she had spent at
his bedside, she wrote: "Whom shall I have now to look after and tend?"
In Chopin she found some one to tend.

About this time, she was anxious about the health of her son Maurice,
and she thought she would take her family to Majorca. This was a
lamentable excursion, but it seemed satisfactory at first. They
travelled by way of Lyons, Avignon, Vaucluse and Nimes. At Perpignan,
Chopin arrived, "as fresh as a rose." "Our journey," wrote George Sand,
"seems to be under the m