Chopin met Sand at a musical matinee in 1837.  Niecks throttles every romantic yarn about the pair that has been spoken or printed.  He got his facts viva voce from Franchomme.  Sand was antipathetic to Chopin but her technique for overcoming masculine coyness was as remarkable in its particular fashion as Chopin’s proficiency at the keyboard.  They were soon seen together, and everywhere.  She was not musical, not a trained musician, but her appreciation for all art forms was highly sympathetic.  Not a beautiful woman, being swarthy and rather heavy-set in figure, this is what she was, as seen by Edouard Grenier:—­

She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention, the eyes especially.  They were wonderful eyes, a little too close together, it may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, 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.

But she attracted with imperious power all that she met.  Liszt felt this attraction at one time—­and it is whispered that Chopin was jealous of him.  Pouf! the woman who could conquer Franz Liszt in his youth must have been a sorceress.  He, too, was versatile.

In 1838, Sand’s boy Maurice being ill, she proposed a visit to Majorca.  Chopin went with the party in November and full accounts of the Mediterranean trip, Chopin’s illness, the bad weather, discomforts and all the rest may be found in the “Histoire de Ma Vie” by Sand.  It was a time of torment.  “Chopin is a detestable invalid,” said Sand, and so they returned to Nohant in June 1839.  They saw Genoa for a few days in May, but that is as far as Chopin ever penetrated into the promised land—­Italy, at one time a passion with him.  Sand enjoyed the subtle and truly feminine pleasure of again entering the city which six years before she had visited in company with another man, the former lover of Rachel.

Chopin’s health in 1839 was a source of alarm to himself and his friends.  He had been dangerously ill at Majorca and Marseilles.  Fever and severe coughing proved to be the dread forerunners of the disease that killed him ten years later.  He was forced to be very careful in his habits, resting more, giving fewer lessons, playing but little in private or public, and becoming frugal of his emotions.  Now Sand began to cool, though her lively imagination never ceased making graceful, touching pictures of herself in the roles of sister of mercy, mother, and discreet friend, all merged into one sentimental composite.  Her invalid was her one thought, and for an active