lack, 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.

Such as she was, she attached herself to Chopin for eight years. At
first they traveled together very quietly to Majorca; and there, just
as Musset had fallen ill at Venice, Chopin became feverish and an
invalid. "Chopin coughs most gracefully," George Sand wrote of him, and
again:

Chopin is the most inconstant of men. There is nothing permanent about
him but his cough.

It is not surprising if her nerves sometimes gave way. Acting as sick
nurse, writing herself with rheumatic fingers, robbed by every one
about her, and viewed with suspicion by the peasants because she did
not go to church, she may be perhaps excused for her sharp words when,
in fact, her deeds were kind.

Afterward, with Chopin, she returned to Paris, and the two lived openly
together for seven years longer. An immense literature has grown around
the subject of their relations. To this literature George Sand herself
contributed very largely. Chopin never wrote a word; but what he failed
to do, his friends and pupils did unsparingly.

Probably the truth is somewhat as one might expect. During the first
period of fascination, George Sand was to Chopin what she had been to
Sandeau and to Musset; and with her strange and subtle ways, she had
undermined his health. But afterward that sort of love died out, and
was succeeded by something like friendship. At any rate, this woman
showed, as she had shown to others, a vast maternal kindness. She
writes to him finally as "your old woman," and she does wonders in the
way of nursing and care.

But in 1847 came a break between the two. Whatever the mystery of it
may be, it turns upon what Chopin said of Sand:

"I have never cursed any one, but now I am so weary of life that I am
near cursing her. Yet she suffers, too, and more, because she grows
older as she grows more wicked."

In 1848, Chopin gave his last concert in Paris, and in 1849 he died.
According to some, he was the victim of a Messalina. According to
others, it was