t satisfy yet, as we have neither fire
nor lodging. There is not an inn in Palma, no house to let
and no furniture to be bought. On arriving here people first
have to buy some ground, then build, and afterwards send for
furniture. After this, permission to live somewhere has to
be obtained from Government, and after five or six years one
can think about opening one's trunk and changing one's
chemise, whilst waiting for permission from the Customs to
have some shoes and handkerchiefs passed. For the last four
days then we have spent our time going from door to door, as
we do not want to sleep in the open air. We hope now to be
settled in about three days, as a miracle has taken place.
For the first time in the memory of man, there is a
furnished house to let in Mallorca, a charming country-house
in a delightful desert. . . ."

At that time Spain was the very last country in which to travel with a
consumptive patient. In a very fine lecture, the subject of which was
_The Fight with Tuberculosis_,(27) Dr. Landouzy proves to us that ever
since the sixteenth century, in the districts of the Mediterranean,
in Spain, in the Balearic Isles and throughout the kingdom of Naples,
tuberculosis was held to be contagious, whilst the rest of Europe was
ignorant of this contagion. Extremely severe rules had been laid down
with regard to the measures to be taken for avoiding the spread of
this disease. A consumptive patient was considered as a kind of
plague-stricken individual. Chateaubriand had experienced the
inconveniences of this scare during his stay in Rome with Madame de
Beaumont, who died there of consumption, at the beginning of the winter
of 1803. George Sand, in her turn, was to have a similar experience.
When Chopin was convicted of consumption, "which," as she writes, "was
equivalent to the plague, according to the Spanish doctors, with their
foregone conclusions about contagion," their landlord simply turned
them out of his house. They took refuge in the Chartreuse monastery of
Valdemosa, where they lived in a cell. The site was very beautiful. By a
wooded slope a terrace could be reached, from which there was a view of
the sea on two sides.

(27) L. Landouzy of the Academy of Medecine, _La Lutte
contre la tuberculose_, published by L. Maretheux.

"We are planted between heaven and earth," wrote George Sand. "The
clouds cross our garde