What she says about his mother having been his only passion is still less to the point.  But reasoning avails little, and the strength of Chopin’s love was not put to the test.  He went, indeed, in the autumn of 1839 to Paris, but not alone; George Sand, professedly for the sake of her children’s education, went there likewise.  “We were driven by fate,” she says, “into the bonds of a long connection, and both of us entered into it unawares.”  The words “driven by fate,” and “entered into it unawares,” sound strange, if we remember that they apply not to a young girl who, inexperienced and confiding, had lost herself in the mazes of life, but to a novelist skilled in the reading of human hearts, to a constantly-reasoning and calculating woman, aged 35, who had better reasons than poor Amelia in Schiller’s play for saying “I have lived and loved.”

After all this reasoning, moralising, and sentimentalising, it is pleasant to be once more face to face with facts, of which the following letters, written by Chopin to Fontana during the months from June to October, 1839, contain a goodly number.  The rather monotonous publishing transactions play here and there again a prominent part, but these Nohant letters are on the whole more interesting than the Majorca letters, and decidedly more varied as regards contents than those he wrote from Marseilles—­they tell us much more of the writer’s tastes and requirements, and even reveal something of his relationship to George Sand.  Chopin, it appears to me, did not take exactly the same view of this relationship as the novelist.  What will be read with most interest are Chopin’s directions as to the decoration and furnishing of his rooms, the engagement of a valet, the ordering of clothes and a hat, the taking of a house for George Sand, and certain remarks made en passant on composers and other less-known people.

  [I.]

...The best part of your letter is your address, which I had already forgotten, and without which I do not know if I would have answered you so soon; but the worst is the death of Albrecht. [Footnote:  See p.27 foot-note 7.]

  You wish to know when I shall be back.  When the misty and
  rainy weather begins, for I must breathe fresh air.

Johnnie has left.  I don’t know if he asked you to forward to me the letters from my parents should any arrive during his absence and be sent to his usual address.  Perhaps he thought of it, perhaps not.  I should be very sorry if any of them miscarried.  It is not long since I had a letter from home, they will not write soon, and by this time he, who is so kind and good, will be in good health and return.

I am composing here a Sonata in B flat minor, in which will be the Funeral March which you have already.  There is an allegro, then a “Scherzo” in E flat minor, the “March,” and a short “Finale” of about three pages.  The left hand unisono with the right