The Spoiled Honeymoon

Novelist and poet who has thrown fresh light upon the legends and personalities of classical antiquity , ROBERT GRAVES makes his home on the island of Maiarca. Here he has also encountered a modern myth,the love story of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand,a reality which caused no little consternation among the Majorcans when the lovers, with George Sand’s children in attendance, took over a monastery for their honeymoon.

by ROBERT GRAVES

1

THE illicit winter honeymoon which George Sand and Frédéric Chopin spent in Majorca over a century ago was the subject of a recent luridly sentimental film, and has contributed more than any other event to the immense profits that this island makes from tourists. Some ninety thousand sentimental pilgrims go annually in fleets of buses to the former Carthusian monastery at Valldemosa where the lovers rented a cell for three months. Yet Winter in Majorca, George Sand’s account of their stay, which proved miserable from start to finish, is so hysterical in its hatred of the Majorcans and so inaccurate in all matters of fact that the Spanish government has banned its publication. I find it equally paradoxical that nobody — and I include André Maurois, George Sand’s most recent biographer — has ever troubled to check up on the story and discover why this unusually generous and kindhearted woman made such an exhibition of herself.

The village of Deyá, my home since 1929, lies only a few kilometers along the coast road from Valldemosa, through which one goes on to Palma, the capital; and when I first settled here, peasant life had changed less than probably anywhere else in Western Europe during the past century. The three disturbing elements of war, industry, and tourism had been successfully kept out. So I have found it fairly easy to reconstruct the honeymoon episode in the light of my own experience and of the relevant documents.

“George Sand,” in private life the Haroness Aurore de Dudevant, had secured a legal separation and the custody of her two children from her husband, a long-nosed, rather brutish country squire. The children, who also visited Majorca, were Maurice, aged fifteen, and Solange, a girl of eight. Not only was George one of the first women to claim sexual equality with men as regards forming as many irregular unions as she pleased in the name of love and reason, but she was also one of the first women to support herself by writing, and she enjoyed an enormous vogue as a romantic novelist. Chopin, a promising young composer, had recently turned to her for solace after breaking off his engagement with a Polish compatriot, Marie Wodzinska; but George was keeping the liaison secret from her Parisian friends, because Chopin, being extremely conventional, would have died of shame if his family had heard of it.

George wanted to carry him off to some idyllic spot where they could live openly as man and wife, avoiding censorious eyes and freed from all the distractions of city life which interfered with his music and her writing. It was difficult, however, to wean him away from his piano and his settled routine, although he adored her. George had not yet given her current lover his congé. He was Maurice’s tutor, the playwright Félieien Mallefille, who now realized that Chopin had formed the habit of receiving George’s nocturnal visits, and who loudly threatened to kill him. At this point, Chopin developed a troublesome cough which he persisted in describing as bronchitis; his friends, suborned by George, made it an excuse for persuading him to winter in the South. At the same time, the doctors told George that Maurice, who had been ill with rheumatic fever, needed country air.

Among George’s friends were Mendizábal, the great Spanish Liberal leader who had been responsible, three years previously, for the suppression of the monasteries and sequestration of church lands, and Manoel Marliani, the pleasure-loving Spanish consul in Paris. Both of these assured her that the most idyllic climate, the most peaceful life, and the most hospitable people in Europe were provided by Majorca. Chopin was easily induced to accept this view. The only difficulty would be his piano, but arrangements were made for shipping it over to Palma. So George, the two children, and a French maid went ahead by slow stages, and were overtaken at Perpignan by Chopin, who appeared to be in very good health and spirits. They crossed the Spanish frontier under the escort of Mendizabal, with whom Chopin had traveled from Paris. After spending a night or two in Barcelona, they were taken to Palma in a steamship, El Mallorquin, which accepted a few passengers but which was mainly used for the export of Majorcan hogs.

2

THE Carlist Wars were still in progress. Palma overflowed with refugees. Normally, one needed only to present a letter of introduction to a member of any prominent noble family, and a suite was at once put at one’s disposal; but hospitality was now strained to breaking point. Even so, if George had appeared alone, or with her children, something might have been arranged, because the small literary avant-garde of Palma Liberals who had read her novels felt greatly excited by the visit. But Majorcan society was, and still is, extremely proper: George’s arrival from Paris with children, children’s nurse, and an acknowledged lover made it impossible for any respectable family, however Liberal, to offer her accommodation.

The avant-garde had also read the French papers and must have known about her recent Italian honeymoon with Alfred de Musset, whom she was publicly accused of having seduced, betrayed, and abandoned; and about her other open affairs with Charles Didier, Prosper Mérimée, and others. They doubtless saw another prospective victim in Chopin. The rest of the nobility, being Francophobes and staunch churchmen with a severely Catholic education, knew little of this immoral creature and wished to know nothing further. It sufficed that she was a friend of Mendizábal, whom they regarded as their personal enemy. This attitude must have been galling to her, because she had become easily the most celebrated woman in France, where she could carry things off with a high hand.

Palma boasted four good inns, but here again overcrowding seems to have been the excuse, not the reason, of the family’s rejection. For the first few days they had to be content with lodgings above a cooper’s shop, close to the port, where the beds were wretched, the food was coarse, and the noise of hammering made work impossible. They hoped to rent a house, but could find only an unfurnished apartment without doors or windows — which the hard-worked local carpenters would not undertake to supply; nor was any furniture on sale in the shops. George had almost decided to go home, beaten, when she heard of a country house for rent, in the village of Establiments, a few kilometers inland from Palma.

A problem which I have not been able to solve is: What happened to the French maid, Amélie? She certainly came over on the boat, because her name appears in the passenger list. Whether she gave notice and sailed straight back, or took anot her job in Palma, or got married, nobody seems to know. In any case, she disappeared and left George to take on all the family chores.

According to Winter in Majorca, written while the events were fresh in George’s mind, they spent a delightful three weeks in Establiments before the winter rains suddenly began, in December. Then the house, which bad no fireplace and was called Son Vent (“Windy House”), became uninhabitable. The fumes of the charcoal braziers made their heads swim, the walls swelled with damp, the windows and doors let in a thousand drafts. They shivered with cold, and Chopin’s cough returned. Ignorant Palma doctors then diagnosed laryngeal consumption. After two or three days’ stay with the French consul at Palma, they were lucky enough to rent a cell in the Valldemosa monastery, then occupied by a Spanish refugee, and buy his furniture, which was good and fairly cheap.

George’s account, however, does not square with Chopin’s contemporary letters. On November 15, shortly after reaching Son, Vent, he had written to his friend Jules Fontana at Paris:—

Here I am in the midst of palms and cedars and cactuses and olives and Lemons and aloes and figs and pomegranates. The sky is turquoise blue, the sea is azure, the mountains are emerald green; the air is as pure as that of Paradise. All day long the sun shines, ami it is warm, and everybody wears summer clothes. At night one hears guitars and serenades.

But he wrote again on December 3: —

MY DEAR FRIEND: —
I have not been able to send you the manuscripts, since they are not ready. For the past three weeks I have been as sick as a dog, despite a heat of 18 degrees [Centigrade, equal to 64 Fahrenheit], despite the roses, orange-trees, palms and flowering fig-trees. I caught a bad cold. The three most celebrated doctors of the island met for a consultation. One peered at what I had expectorated, the second sounded the organs of expectoration, the third listened while I expectorated again. The first said that I would die, the second that I was dying, the third that I was already dead. And yet I live as I used to live in the past. I cannot pardon .Jeannot for failing to give me any advice for the treatment of the acute bronchitis from which he must have been perfectly aware that I suffered. I had great difficulty in escaping from the leeches, cuppings, and similar operations. Thank God I am now myself again. But my illness interfered with my Preludes, which you will receive God knows when.
After a few days I shall be living in the loveliest spot on earth: sea, mountains . . . all one could wish. We are going to live in an old, ruined, abandoned Carthusian monastery, from which Mendizábal seems to have expelled the monks expressly for my sake. It is quite near Palma and nothing could be more charming: cells, a most poetic cemetery ... in fact, I am convinced that I shall feel well there. The one thing I still lack is my piano. I have written to Pleyel. . . .
Tell nobody that I have been ill; it would only cause gossip.
YOUR CHOPIN

It seems, then, that Chopin’s illness was not caused by the sudden onset of winter, but by a cold caught in Palma during a spell of unusual heat which lasted until December 3; and that by then the decision to move to Valldemosa had already been taken. My guess is that a heavy storm toward the end of November made George realize that Son Vent, having been built only for the summer, would become impossibly cold and drafly by Christ mas. So, having already come to an agreement with the tenant of the Valldemosa cell, she left before the new month began and temporarily planted the family on the French consul at Palma. There Chopin consulted three doctors, who, though George persisted in denying that they were right, diagnosed consumption. Naturally Gomez, the cruel and avaricious owner of Son Vent, to whom she had promised a lease lor the whole winter, felt aggrieved when she relumed him the key. One of the doctors must then have talked indiscreetly about Chopin’s symptoms; Gomez’s vexation turned to alarm and he considered himself entitled to damages. Majorcans still burn the betiding on which a consumptive has lain, fumigate the house, and rub the betlstead with vinegar. He made her buy the sheets and blankets.

The Carthusian monastery, built at the top of a mountain pass, was large and solid. The family moved in with a sigh of relief. George installed an iron stove in their commodious cell, and soon they were comfortable enough. All the Carthusian Fathers had been expelled except one the apothecary, who lived a hole-and-corner existence in one of the smaller cells and wore ordinary clothes. The atmosphere was gloomily romantic.

3

ACCORDING to Winter in Majorca and the relevant chapter in George’s Story of My Life, Maurice’s health now improved miraculously, but Chopin grew worse and proved a “detestable invalid.”He petulantly rejected the local food (with its taste of rancid oil), and she had not only to cook for him with her own hands but buy most of her supplies from Palma, seventeen kilometers away by cart track. (They had bad luck here; 1888 was one of the rare years when the olives are attacked by weevils, fall before they ripen, and yield a really horrible oil.) George adds that the villagers, headed by the mayor, formed an organized conspiracy to cheat her, and that the only servants she could hire were the local witch and a vicious little nina, both of whom robbed the larder without shame assisted by the hypocritical Maria Antonia, a refugee who occupied the next cell. They were also greatly l rou bled with fleas — two of which once appeared on a roast chicken brought straight in from the kitchen, and put Chopin completely off his food. The village children, George declares, regularly drank half the milk they brought for Chopin, then watered it to disguise the theft. Kain fell without cease, roads were washed away. Snow followed.

The villagers were deeply offended that the family did not attend Mass, and threw stones at them when they went out for walks; they announced that George was very wicked in exposing her children to consumption, and that God would punish her by letting it carry them off. Furthermore, it was openly said that Chopin would die horribly and go to hell, and that where his body was buried would be nobody’s business. But Maurice and Solange, George writes, pul those superstitious wretches to shame by gladly doing all they could for their sick friend.

Heavy seas prevented all boats from leaving the shelter of their coves; we felt ourselves prisoners, far from all enlightened help or effectual sympathy. We could almost see Death hovering over our heads, waiting to seize the sufferer, whom we were singlehanded in our struggle to keep alive. I here was not one human being within reach who would not willingly have hastened him towards the grave, so as to be the more speedily rid of the alleged danger of his proximity. This thought was horribly depressing, though we felt strong enough in ourselves to make up to one another, by solicitude and affection, for the help and sympathy which were denied us.

Chopin, we are told, was just able to sit at his piano—which had at last arrived after a great struggle with the customs — and compose his glorious Preludes.

There is one, especially, which came to him on an evening of lugubrious rain and depresses the heart to a frightening degree. We had left him well enough, that morning, Maurice and I, and gone to Palma to buy necessities for our encampment. It took us six hours to travel three leagues, through torrents swollen by ceaseless rain, and reach the place where the Hoods were deepest. It was pitchdark and we were shoeless and abandoned by our driver. We hurried back, braving unheard dangers, because our invalid would be anxious tor us; as, indeed, he was; but his anxiety had turned into a sort of quiet despair. We found him sobbing as he played his wonderful prelude. When he saw us enter, he rose, uttered a loud cry, and said confusedly in a strange tone: “Ah, I knew that, you were dead!” After recovering his spirits and becoming aware of our plight, his retrospective view of our dangers made him ill. Then he declared that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and not distinguishing dream from reality, had calmed and as it were lulled himself by playing the piano, persuaded that he too was dead. He saw himself drowned in a lake, with heavy drops of cold water falling rhythmically on his breast.

And again: —

He grew completely demoralized. Though supporting his sufferings with considerable courage, he could not assuage the terrors of his imagination. The monastery had been full of phantoms for him even when he felt well. But he never complained; I had to guess what was wrong with him. Once, when I returned with my children from our nocturnal prowlings among the ruins, I found him, at ten o’clock, sitting at his piano pale as death, with haggard eyes and hair almost standing on end. It took him quite half a minute to recognize us. Then he immediately made an effort at laughter and played us the sublime things that he had just composed — or revealed to us the terrible, nerveracking ideas that had forced themselves on him in his hour of loneliness, grief, and terror.

They all relurned to France as soon as Chopin was well enough to face the journey. According to George, the Majorcans treated them hatefully to the last.

It is clear that the intensely conservative and religious Valldemosans saw in her only a domineering, cigarette-smoking, ill-dressed, irascible woman, living in open sin with a foppish piano-player six years her junior, and teaching her children to be as bad Catholics as herself. News travels fast in Majorca; a great deal of scandal must have reached Valldemosa even before she arrived there. This was the first French family to settle among them, and for the past fifty years the Spanish parish priests had been denouncing the French for their godlessness, immorality, and military aggression. Nevertheless, the villagers, being generous and law-abiding, tried at first to be neighborly, as is proved by the torchlight visit which a troup of masqueraders — headed by the mayor — paid to their cell. If George had made the trifling concession of sending her children to Mass on Sunday morning, all would have been well; but she had brought them up in the “noble religion of philosophy” and taught them to despise the Church, which made her occupation of the cell particularly odious. It had been previously occupied by a certain well-beloved Father Nicolas, one of the monks whom, as Chopin joked, Mendizabal seemed to have ejected as a personal favor for himself.

Chopin was an aristocrat who never disguised his contempt for the common people; the villagers will have described him among themselves proverbially as “a man who expects you to doff your hat from three leagues away,” and her as a “shameless one who leaps out in anger like a stone from a crushed cherry.” Toward children and youths the Majorcans show the greatest indulgence; but Maurice hotly championed his mother, and his precocious sketches made the Valldemosans uneasy, especially the “Monastic Orgy,” which George mentions that he pinned up in the cell. Moreover, Solange offended their sense of propriety by wearing trousers and playing the tomboy, instead of busying herself with the needle, the catechism, and other useful tasks.

For the Majorcans George was no grand esprit, but an evil woman, perhaps a witch, without shame or maternal responsibility. The moral rule in Majorcan mountain villages is strict and simple: a girl must not only be a virgin at marriage, she must have the reputation of being so. Any scandal that cannot be disproved prejudices her marriage. If she has once gone astray, three courses are open to her: emigration, penitent celibacy, or to become the village harlot—shunned by all good women and despised by the men who visit her under cover of night. Her presence is tolerated only if her role is discreetly passive and if she attends confession regularly. Since divorce is impossible, married couples behave as if sincerely attached to each other, even though they are not, for the sake of good manners.

4

SOLANGE does not figure prominently in Winter in Majorca, which was written soon after their return to France and before she had fully revealed the infamy of her character. Yet she seems to have played an extremely important part in the drama.

Until then she had been known only as rebellious, arrogant, and lazy, a domestic child-tyrant who relied on violent displays of temper for getting her own way. George spoiled and idolized Solange, perhaps because of having paid such a heavy price to win custody of the children; but she was repaid with the cruelty, deceit, and greed that Solange had inherited from her father.

Even today, when a foreign family settles in an isolat ed Majorcan village, the difficulties of religion, social behavior, and diet are increased by that of language. It is safe to say that apart from the mayor, the notary, and two or three others, nobody in Valldemosa could speak Spanish, a language of which George Sand had only a smattering, and nobody at all could speak French, Majorcan being in use everywhere. Majorcan is an ancient language, the basic elements of which no adult Frenchman or Frenchwoman, except a Provencal, can hope to pick up in less than six months of study. However, a French child can become fluent in Majorcan after a few weeks’ residence. Maurice was too old to learn; not so Solange. Of the whole family, therefore, Solange alone will have known what was being said in the kitchen, and therefore must have acted as intermediary and interpreter between Chopin, her mother, and Maurice on the one hand, and the Valldemosans on the other. This explains why sixty years later Sebastian Nadal, a Valldemosan who took part in the masquerade procession, had a clear recollection of Solange but none of Maurice. He remembered George only because she used to “write books under a tree in the monks’ cemetery and had a companion, the musician Chopin, who passed as her husband.”Solange, in fact, held the key to the situation.

Now, it was Solange who, seven years later, engineered the fatal breach between her mother and Chopin by representing herself as his only true friend and making him believe a series of revolting and scandalous lies. When she eloped with a scoundrelly sculptor named Clésinger, she visited Chopin in Paris and told him tearfully that George, after encouraging Maurice to seduce his own adoptive sister, Augustine, had taken a secret lover — Borie, a journalist — and then told Maurice to shoot Clésinger. She herself, Solange said, had been cruelly turned out of the house at Nohant to make room for Borie.

A girl who lies like this at fifteen can hardly have behaved much better at eight. Personally, I cannot accept George’s picture of Solange as a ministering angel. Solange will have been bitterly jealous of Chopin, once he became the most import ant person in the household— the invalid who must be cosseted and humored at all costs; and angry that because of him the village viewed the family not only as moral, but as physical, lepers. And she will certainly have reported what the women were saying; that it was disgraceful for Chopin to live with a married woman in a cell which had been for centuries occupied by holy monks; that he was a consumptive and would soon die — good riddance to him—and that, unless he repented of his evil ways, he would burn forever in hell. Long acquaintance with Majorcans has taught me that they would not have spoken directly to her mother or to Chopin on lhese subjects, even if they could have made themselves understood; but that they would have fell it their duty to enlighten Solange on the seriousness of her position. If, therefore, she passed on all the gossip to Chopin and her mother, this clears up several historic obscurities.

It must be remembered that, the affection between George Sand and Chopin had been one of opposites; she was a Radical freethinker, lie a devout Conservative. Me loved her, but knew that; his family would be scandalized if they heard that he shared a bed with a married woman, whose children slept under the same roof; and that she neit her believed in a literal hell nor allowed them to believe in one. Did be perhaps feel that the villagers’ moral censure was deserved, and that the very monks were rising from their graves to warn him of his impending death and damnation — unless he repented? Did he thereupon seek out a priest and make his penitent confession in Latin? If so, the priest would be bound to answer that Chopin’s only hope of salvation, if he could not do without George, was to live like a brother with her for the rest of his lifeémeanwhile trying to save her soul and those of her children. That would square with all the known facts, including Maurice’s later resentment against Chopin for playing the virtuous part of paterfamilias at Nohant; and with Chopin’s boast to his friends that he provided a wholesome background for the children, who would otherwise have grown up as wild libertines. It would also account for Chopin’s improved health in the middle of February, remarked on by George, his sickness having been to some extent psychological.

Chopin never ceased to love George, but a misplaced trust in Solange — his acceptance of whom as his one true friend suggests gratitude for his reconversion — eventually persuaded him that George was unworthy of trust; and an obstinate mother-love prevented George from telling him the ugly truth about Solange. The breach between them remained unhealed. When George heard three years later that he was dangerously ill, and wrote to his sister for news of him, the letter was suppressed. He died in the conviction that his deep and Christian love had been betrayed; and two days before the end he whispered reproachfully to his friend Franchomme: “She promised me that I should not die except in her arms.”

Long afterwards Liszt, in whom Chopin confided, wrote that “all the long-scattered rays of happiness were concentrated within this phase of his life. . . . The memories of the days passed in the lovely island of Majorca, like that of an entrancing ecstasy, which fate grants but once in a lifetime even to her most favored children, remained perpetually dear to Chopin’s heart. He always spoke of this period with deep emotion, profound gratitude, as if its joys had sufficed for a lifetime, and without hoping that he could ever again find such felicity — in which the flight of time was marked only by the tenderness of a woman’s love and the brilliant Hashes of true genius.”