VISITS TO NOHANT IN 1837 AND 1838.--HIS ILL HEALTH.--HE DECIDES
TO GO WITH MADAME SAND AND HER CHILDREN TO MAJORCA.--MADAME SAND'S
ACCOUNT OF THIS MATTER AND WHAT OTHERS THOUGHT ABOUT IT.--CHOPIN AND HIS
FELLOW--TRAVELLERS MEET AT PERPIGNAN IN THE BEGINNING OF NOVEMBER, 1838,
AND PROCEED BY PORT-VENDRES AND BARCELONA TO PALMA.--THEIR LIFE AND
EXPERIENCES IN THE TOWN, AT THE VILLA SON-VENT, AND AT THE MONASTERY OF
VALDEMOSA, AS DESCRIBED IN CHOPIN'S AND GEORGE SAND'S LETTERS, AND THE
LATTER'S "MA VIE" AND "UN HIVER A MAJORQUE."--THE PRELUDES.--RETURN TO
FRANCE BY BARCELONA AND MARSEILLES IN THE END OF FEBRUARY, 1839.

In a letter written in 1837, and quoted on p. 313 of Vol. I., Chopin
said: "I may perhaps go for a few days to George Sand's." How heartily
she invited him through their common friends Liszt and the Comtesse
d'Agoult, we saw in the preceding chapter. We may safely assume, I
think, that Chopin went to Nohant in the summer of 1837, and may be sure
that he did so in the summer of 1838, although with regard to neither
visit reliable information of any kind is discoverable. Karasowski, it
is true, quotes four letters of Chopin to Fontana as written from Nohant
in 1838, but internal evidence shows that they must have been written
three years later.

We know from Mendelssohn's and Moscheles' allusions to Chopin's visit
to London that he was at that time ailing. He himself wrote in the same
year (1837) to Anthony Wodzinski that during the winter he had been
again ill with influenza, and that the doctors had wanted to send him
to Ems. As time went on the state of his health seems to have got worse,
and this led to his going to Majorca in the winter of 1838-1839. The
circumstance that he had the company of Madame Sand on this occasion has
given rise to much discussion. According to Liszt, Chopin was forced by
the alarming state of his health to go to the south in order to avoid
the severities of the Paris winter; and Madame Sand, who always watched
sympathetically over her friends, would not let him depart alone, but
resolved to accompany him. Karasowski, on the other hand, maintains that
it was not Madame Sand who was induced to accompany Chopin, but that
Madame Sand induced Chopin to accompany her. Neither of these statements
tallies with Madame Sand's own account. She tells us that when in
1838 her son Maurice, who had been in the custody of his father, was
definitively entrusted to her care, she resolved to t