one feels especially as regards her affair with Chopin. With
Musset she had to reckon a writer like herself; and against
her "Elle et Lui" we can set his "Confession d'un enfant du
siecle." But poor Chopin, being a musician, was not good at
"copy." The emotions she gave him he had to pour out in music,
which, delightful as sound, is unfortunately vague as a
literary "document." How one longs to have his full, true, and
particular account of the six months he spent with George Sand
in Majorca! M. Pierre Mille, who has just published in the
"Revue Bleue" some letters of Chopin (first printed, it seems,
in a Warsaw newspaper), would have us believe that the lady
was really the masculine partner. We are to understand that it
was Chopin who did the weeping, and pouting, and "scene"-making
while George Sand did the consoling, the pooh-poohing,
and the protecting. Liszt had already given us a
characteristic anecdote of this Majorca period. We see George
Sand, in sheer exuberance of health and animal spirits,
wandering out into the storm, while Chopin stays at home, to
have an attack of "nerves," to give vent to his anxiety (oh,
"artistic temperament"!) by composing a prelude, and to fall
fainting at the lady's feet when she returns safe and sound.
There is no doubt that the lady had enough of the masculine
temper in her to be the first to get tired. And as poor Chopin
was coughing and swooning most of the time, this is scarcely
surprising. But she did not leave him forthwith. She kept up
the pretence of loving him, in a maternal, protecting sort of
way, out of pity, as it were, for a sick child.

So much the published letters clearly show. Many of them are
dated from Nohant. But in themselves the letters are dull
enough. Chopin composed with the keyboard of a piano; with ink
and paper he could do little. Probably his love letters were
wooden productions, and George Sand, we know, was a fastidious
critic in that matter. She had received and written so many!
But any rate, Chopin did not write whining recriminations like
Mussel. His real view of her we shall never know--and, if you
like, you may say it is no business of ours. She once uttered
a truth about that (though not apropos of Chopin), "There are
so many things between two lovers of which they alone can be
the judges."

Chopin gave his last concert in Paris, February 16, 1848, at Pleyel's.
H