I shall write to Leroux from the monastery at leisure.  If you knew what I have to do!  I have almost to cook.  Here, another amenity, one cannot get served.  The domestic is a brute:  bigoted, lazy, and gluttonous; a veritable son of a monk (I think that all are that).  It requires ten to do the work which your brave Mary does.  Happily, the maid whom I have brought with me from Paris is very devoted, and resigns herself to do heavy work; but she is not strong, and I must help her.  Besides, everything is dear, and proper nourishment is difficult to get when the stomach cannot stand either rancid oil or pig’s grease.  I begin to get accustomed to it; but Chopin is ill every time that we do not prepare his food ourselves.  In short, our expedition here is, in many respects, a frightful fiasco.

On December 15, 1838, then, the Sand party took possession of their quarters in the monastery of Valdemosa, and thence the next letters are dated.

Chopin to Fontana; “Palma, December 28, 1838, or rather Valdemosa, a few miles distant from Palma":—­

Between rocks and the sea, in a great abandoned Carthusian monastery, in one of the cells with doors bigger than the gates in Paris, you may imagine me with my hair uncurled, without white gloves, pale as usual.  The cell is in the shape of a coffin, high, and full of dust on the vault.  The window small, before the window orange, palm, and cypress trees.  Opposite the window, under a Moorish filigree rosette, stands my bed.  By its side an old square thing like a table for writing, scarcely serviceable; on it a leaden candlestick (a great luxury) with a little tallow-candle, Works of Bach, my jottings, and old scrawls that are not mine, this is all I possess.  Quietness...one may shout and nobody will hear...in short, I am writing to you from a strange place.

Your letter of the 9th of December I received the day before yesterday; as on account of the holidays the express mail does not leave till next week, I write to you in no great hurry.  It will be a Russian month before you get the bill of exchange which I send you.

Sublime nature is a fine thing, but one should have nothing to do with men—­nor with roads and posts.  Many a time I came here from Palma, always with the same driver and always by another road.  Streams of water make roads, violent rains destroy them; to-day it is impossible to pass, for what was a road is ploughed; next day only mules can pass where you were driving yesterday.  And what carriages here!  That is the reason, Julius, why you do not see a single Englishman, not even an English consul.

Leo is a Jew, a rogue!  I was at his house the day before my departure, and I told him not to send me anything here.  I cannot send you the Preludes, they are not yet finished.  At present I am better and shall push on the work.  I shall write and thank him in a way that will make