Others again are of a mournful sadness, and, while charming the ear, rend the heart.  There is one of them which occurred to him on a dismal rainy evening which produces a terrible mental depression.  We had left him well that day, Maurice and I, and had gone to Palma to buy things we required for our encampment.  The rain had come on, the torrents had overflowed, we had travelled three leagues in six hours to return in the midst of the inundation, and we arrived in the dead of night, without boots, abandoned by our driver, having passed through unheard-of dangers.  We made haste, anticipating the anxiety of our invalid.  It had been indeed great, but it had become as it were congealed into a kind of calm despair, and he played his wonderful prelude weeping.  On seeing us enter he rose, uttering a great cry, then he said to us, with a wild look and in a strange tone:  “Ah!  I knew well that you were dead!”

When he had come to himself again, and saw the state in which we were, he was ill at the retrospective spectacle of our dangers; but he confessed to me afterwards that while waiting for our return he had seen all this in a dream and that, no longer distinguishing this dream from reality, he had grown calm and been almost lulled to sleep while playing the piano, believing that he was dead himself.  He saw himself drowned in a lake; heavy and ice-cold drops of water fell at regular intervals upon his breast, and when I drew his attention to those drops of water which were actually falling at regular intervals upon the roof, he denied having heard them.  He was even vexed at what I translated by the term imitative harmony.  He protested with all his might, and he was right, against the puerility of these imitations for the ear.  His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature, translated by sublime equivalents into his musical thought, and not by a servile repetition of external sounds.  His composition of this evening was indeed full of the drops of rain which resounded on the sonorous tiles of the monastery, but they were transformed in his imagination and his music into tears falling from heaven on his heart.

Although George Sand cannot be acquitted of the charge of exaggerating the weak points in her lover’s character, what she says about his being a detestable patient seems to have a good foundation in fact.  Gutmann, who nursed him often, told me that his master was very irritable and difficult to manage in sickness.  On the other hand, Gutmann contradicted George Sand’s remarks about the Preludes, saying that Chopin composed them before starting on his journey.  When I mentioned to him that Fontana had made a statement irreconcilable with his, and suggested that Chopin might have composed some of the Preludes in Majorca, Gutmann maintained firmly that every one of them was composed previously,