technique for overcoming masculine coyness was as remarkable in
its particular fashion as Chopin's proficiency at the keyboard. They
were soon seen together, and everywhere. She was not musical, not a
trained musician, but her appreciation for all art forms was highly
sympathetic. Not a beautiful woman, being swarthy and rather heavy-set
in figure, this is what she was, as seen by Edouard Grenier:--

She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my
attention, the eyes especially. They were wonderful eyes, a
little too close together, it may be, large, with full
eyelids, and black, very black, but by no means lustrous; they
reminded me of unpolished marble, or rather of velvet, and
this gave a strange, dull, even cold expression to her
countenance. Her fine eyebrows and these great placid eyes
gave her an air of strength and dignity which was not borne
out by the lower part of her face. Her nose was rather thick
and not over shapely. Her mouth was also rather coarse and her
chin small. She spoke with great simplicity, and her manners
were very quiet.

But she attracted with imperious power all that she met. Liszt felt
this attraction at one time--and it is whispered that Chopin was
jealous of him. Pouf! the woman who could conquer Franz Liszt in his
youth must have been a sorceress. He, too, was versatile.

In 1838, Sand's boy Maurice being ill, she proposed a visit to Majorca.
Chopin went with the party in November and full accounts of the
Mediterranean trip, Chopin's illness, the bad weather, discomforts and
all the rest may be found in the "Histoire de Ma Vie" by Sand. It was a
time of torment. "Chopin is a detestable invalid," said Sand, and so
they returned to Nohant in June 1839. They saw Genoa for a few days in
May, but that is as far as Chopin ever penetrated into the promised
land--Italy, at one time a passion with him. Sand enjoyed the subtle
and truly feminine pleasure of again entering the city which six years
before she had visited in company with another man, the former lover of
Rachel.

Chopin's health in 1839 was a source of alarm to himself and his
friends. He had been dangerously ill at Majorca and Marseilles. Fever
and severe coughing proved to be the dread forerunners of the disease
that killed him ten years later. He was forced to be very careful in
his habits, resting more, giving fewer lessons, playing but little in
private or public, and becoming frugal of his e