(28) George Sand to Madame Buloz.  Postscript to the letter
     already quoted: 

“I am leaving for the country where I have a furnished house with a garden, magnificently situated for 50 francs a month.  I have also taken a cell, that is three rooms and a garden for 35 francs a year in the Chartreuse of Valdemosa, a magnificent, immense monastery quite lonely in the midst of mountains.  Our garden is full of oranges and lemons.  The trees break under them.  We have hedges of cactus twenty to thirty feet high, the sea is about a mile and a half away.  We have a donkey to take us to the town, roads inaccessible to visitors, immense cloisters and the most beautiful architecture, a charming church, a cemetery with a palm-tree and a stone cross like the one in the third act of Robert le Diable.  Then, too, there are beds of shrubs cut in form.  All this we have to ourselves with an old woman to wait on us, and the sacristan who is warder, steward, majordomo and Jack-of-all-trades.  I hope we shall have ghosts.  The door of my cell leads into an enormous cloister, and when the wind slams the door it is like a cannon going off through all the monastery.  I am delighted with everything, and fancy I shall be more often in the cell than in the country-house, which is about six miles away.  You see that I have plenty of poetry and solitude, so that if I do not work I shall be a stupid thing.”

The only drawback was that it was most difficult to live there.  There was no way of getting warm.  The stove was a kind of iron furnace which gave out a terrible odour, and did not prevent the rooms from being so damp that clothes mildewed while they were being worn.  There was no way of getting proper food either.  They had to eat the most indigestible things.  There were five sorts of meat certainly, but these were pig, pork, bacon, ham and pickled pork.  This was all cooked in dripping, pork-dripping, of course, or in rancid oil.  Still more than this, the natives refused, not only to serve the unfortunate travellers, but to sell them the actual necessaries of life.  The fact was, they had scandalized the Majorcan people.  All Majorca was indignant because Solange, who at that time was nine years old, roamed about the mountains disguised as a man.  Added to this, when the horn sounded which called people to their devotions in the churches, these strange inhabitants of the old Valdemosa monastery never took any more notice than pagans.  People kept clear of them.  Chopin suffered with the cold, the cooking made him sick, and he used to have fits of terror in the cloisters.  They had to leave hastily.  The only steamboat from the island was used to transport the pigs which are the pride and wealth of Majorca.  People were only taken as an extra.  It was, therefore, in the company of these squealing, ill-smelling creatures that the invalid crossed the water.  When he arrived at Barcelona, he looked like a spectre and was spitting blood.  George Sand was quite right in saying that this journey was an “awful fiasco.”