of 1838-9 abroad with her family. Having heard the climate and
scenery of Majorca highly praised, she selected the island for their
resort; tempted herself by the prospect of a few months absolute quiet,
where, with neither letters to answer, nor newspapers to read, she would
enjoy some rare leisure, which she proposed to spend in studying history
and teaching French to her children.

Just at this time her friend and ardent admirer, Frederic Chopin, was
recovering from a chest attack, the first presage of the illness that
caused his early death. The eminent pianist and composer had also been
recommended to winter in the South, and greatly needed repose and change
of air to recruit him from the fatigues of the Parisian season. It was
arranged that the convalescent should make one of the expedition to
Majorca. He joined Madame Sand and her children at Perpignan, and they
embarked for Barcelona, whence the sea-voyage to the island was safely
accomplished, the party reaching Palma, the capital, in magnificent
November weather, and never suspecting how soon they would have cause to
repent their choice of a retreat.

But their practical information about the island proved lamentably
insufficient. With the scenery, indeed, they were enraptured. "We
found," says Madame Sand in her little volume, _Un Hiver a Majorque_,
published the following year, "a green Switzerland under a Calabrian
sky, with all the solemnity and stillness of the East." But though a
painter's Elysium, Majorca was wanting in the commonest comforts of
civilized life. Inns were non-existent, foreigners viewed and treated
with suspicion. The party thought themselves fortunate in securing a
villa some miles from Palma, furnished, though scantily. "The country,
nature, trees, sky, sea, and mountains surpass all my dreams," she
writes in the first days, "it is the promised land; and as we have
succeeded in housing ourselves pretty well, we are delighted."

The delight was of brief duration. That Madame Sand's manuscripts took a
month to reach the editor of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_; that the piano
ordered from Paris for Chopin took two months to get to Majorca, were
the least among their troubles. A rainy season of exceptional severity
set in, and the villa quickly became uninhabitable. It was not
weatherproof. Chopin fell alarmingly ill. Good food and medical
attendance were hardly to be procured for him; and finally, the villa
proprietor, having heard that h