It would be interesting to know which were the compositions that Chopin produced at Valdemosa.  As to the Prelude particularly referred to by George Sand, it is generally and reasonably believed to be No. 6 (in B minor). [Footnote:  Liszt, who tells the story differently, brings in the F sharp minor Prelude. (See Liszt’s Chopin, new edition, pp. 273 and 274.)] The only compositions besides the Preludes which Chopin mentions in his letters from Majorca are the Ballade, Op, 38, the Scherzo, Op. 39, and the two Polonaises, Op. 40.  The peevish, fretful, and fiercely-scornful Scherzo and the despairingly-melancholy second Polonaise (in C minor) are quite in keeping with the moods one imagines the composer to have been in at the time.  Nor is there anything discrepant in the Ballade.  But if the sadly-ailing composer really created, and not merely elaborated and finished, in Majorca the superlatively-healthy, vigorously-martial, brilliantly-chivalrous Polonaise in A major, we have here a remarkable instance of the mind’s ascendency over the body, of its independence of it.  This piece, however, may have been conceived under happier circumstances, just as the gloomy Sonata, Op. 35 (the one in B flat minor, with the funeral march), and the two Nocturnes, Op. 37—­the one (in G minor) plaintive, longing, and prayerful; the other (in G major) sunny and perfume-laden—­ may have had their origin in the days of Chopin’s sojourn in the Balearic island.  A letter of Chopin’s, written from Nohant in the summer of 1839, leaves, as regards the Nocturnes, scarcely room for such a conjecture.  On the other hand, we learn from the same letter that he composed at Palma the sad, yearning Mazurka in E minor (No. 2 of Op. 41).

As soon as fair weather set in and the steamer resumed its. weekly courses to Barcelona, George Sand and her party hastened to leave the island.  The delightful prospects of spring could not detain them.

Our invalid (she says) did not seem to be in a state to stand the passage, but he seemed equally incapable of enduring another week in Majorca.  The situation was frightful; there were days when I lost hope and courage.  To console us, Maria Antonia and her village gossips repeated to us in chorus the most edifying discourses on the future life.  “This consumptive person,” they said, “is going to hell, first because he is consumptive, secondly, because he does not confess.  If he is in this condition when he dies, we shall not bury him in consecrated ground, and as nobody will be willing to give him a grave, his friends will have to manage matters as well as they can.  It remains to be seen how they will get out of the difficulty; as for me, I will have Inothing to do with it,—­ Nor I—­Nor I:  and Amen!”

In fact, Valdemosa, which at first was enchanting to them, lost afterwards much of its poesy in their eyes.  George Sand, as we have seen, said that their sojourn was I in many respects a frightful fiasco; it was so certainly as far as Chopin was concerned, for he arrived with a cough and left the place spitting blood.