Majorca today is one of Europe's premier resort destinations. Millions of tourists visit this Spanish island in the Mediterranean each year, drawn by white sandy beaches, the shade of orange trees, and the picturesque ruins of ancient monasteries. It was here that Frédéric Chopin and George Sand spent the winter of 1838–1839. The official reason was convalescence — both for Chopin's chronic respiratory troubles and for Sand's son Maurice — but the deeper motive was simpler: two lovers who wanted to stay together needed a plausible excuse. The reality of what awaited them was far harsher than either had imagined. --- ## Who Was George Sand? George Sand (1804–1876) was a French novelist who wrote under a male pen name, best known for works such as *La Mare au diable* and *La Petite Fadette*. She was one of the most prominent literary figures in Paris at the time, and she challenged conservative society openly — through cross-dressing, smoking, and a series of publicized relationships with men. Sand met Chopin around 1836 or 1837, and by 1838 they were in a romantic relationship. She was four years his senior. Their affair lasted until 1847, when it ended in complicated circumstances; by the final years of his life, Chopin had effectively cut all ties with her. Sand traveled to Majorca with her two children: her seventeen-year-old son Maurice and her fourteen-year-old daughter Solange. After the trip, Sand published an account of their stay: *A Winter in Majorca* (*Un hiver à Majorque*, 1842). This article draws primarily on that work, alongside the collected correspondence (*Lettres de Chopin et de George Sand, 1836–1839*) and Frederick Niecks's biographical study of Chopin (1902). --- ## Departing for Paradise The motivations for the journey were layered. Sand had long spoken of the need to take Maurice to a warmer climate — this became the public justification. Beyond that, the two lovers wanted to spend the winter together without arousing undue comment among Chopin's Parisian students and acquaintances. His chronic respiratory problems made a southern climate seem genuinely advantageous. The destination was settled on the advice of the Spanish consul Manoël Marliani and an acquaintance who was a singer. Before leaving, Sand had read several accounts of the island — travel writings by Grasset de Saint-Sauveur (1807) and Vargas (1787), which described the Majorcan people as "very kind." Spanish friends who recommended the trip said much the same. Sand later wrote that she had arrived "with great illusions." For Parisian travelers of the time, Majorca was almost entirely unknown territory; their party was among the earliest recorded international visitors to the island. Shortly after arriving, Chopin wrote to his friend Fontana on November 15, 1838: > "I am among palms, cedars, cacti, olives, oranges, lemons, aloes, figs, pomegranates. The sky is turquoise, the sea lapis lazuli, the mountains emerald, the air is like heaven. Sunshine all day. At night, guitars and singing for hours. Enormous wild flowers everywhere. I shall shortly send you the Preludes. I think I shall be living in a wonderful monastery, the most beautiful place in the world." Coming straight from Paris in November, his excitement was understandable. Sand wrote similarly of their arrival: "We reached Palma in November 1838 in weather that matched a Paris June." A few days later, on November 21, Chopin wrote to his piano maker Camille Pleyel with a note of frustration: "I dream of music but I cannot make any — there are no pianos here. In this respect the country is barbarous." The first stumbling block was accommodation. Palma in 1838 had no real tourist infrastructure, and what the party managed to secure amounted to "two small, rather bare rooms" (Sand). A piano had been ordered from France, but its arrival was weeks away. --- ## The Deterioration By mid-to-late November, Chopin's condition worsened rapidly. The house they had rented — Son Vent, "House of the Wind" — had thin walls and no fireplace. When the rainy season began, the walls absorbed moisture like a sponge. Charcoal braziers lit indoors filled the unventilated rooms with smoke, making the cough worse. In a letter to Fontana dated December 3, Chopin recorded his encounters with the local doctors: > "I have been sick as a dog for the last fortnight. I caught cold in spite of 18 degrees of heat, roses, orange trees, palms and figs. Three doctors — the most celebrated in the island — have examined me. One sniffed at what I spat up, the second tapped where I spat from, the third poked about and listened how I spat. The first said I was going to die, the second that I was dying, and the third that I was already dead." All three agreed he had tuberculosis. Chopin was unconvinced, writing that he had "barely escaped bloodletting, blistering, and poultices." In the same letter he complained that his Paris physician had "never told me what to do in cases of acute bronchitis." Sand, too, had no faith in the local doctors' judgment — a distrust that would soon create serious problems. --- ## Eviction, or: Treated as a Plague Carrier In Majorca at that time, tuberculosis was treated as an acutely contagious disease. This fear ran especially deep on the island. As news of the diagnosis spread, the party's situation changed overnight. A letter arrived from their landlord, Gómez. Sand summarized its contents: he claimed they were harboring a person with a contagious disease, one that endangered his family. They were turned out. There was nowhere else in Palma to go. "Had the French consul not miraculously taken us all under his roof," Sand wrote, "we should have had to camp in a cave like real Bohemians." --- ## The Coffin-Shaped Room in the Ruined Monastery After a brief stay under the French consul's protection, the party secured new lodgings: a cell in the abandoned Carthusian monastery of La Cartuja de Valldemossa, a village in the mountains near Palma. A Spanish exile couple who were abruptly leaving the island had passed along their rooms and furnishings at a low price. "This mysterious couple, suddenly compelled to leave the island, let us have their cell and furniture cheaply," Sand wrote. They would stay there from December 15 to February 11 — nearly two months. Shortly after moving in, on December 28, Chopin described his room to Fontana: > "Picture to yourself a huge, old, deserted monastery, between rocks and sea, where I live in a cell with doors larger than any carriage-gate in Paris. Without white gloves, as pallid as always. My cell has the shape of a tall coffin, with an enormous dusty vaulting and a small window overlooking orange trees, palms and cypresses. Opposite the window, among Moorish tracery, is a rose window. On the floor near my bed stands an old square thing that I can hardly write on — with a leaden candlestick (a great luxury here) and one tallow candle. Bach, my scrawls, and other people's papers are on top. Silence... if you cry out... still silence." The monastery had dungeons. One day Chopin descended into them, and the thought of the suffering once endured there triggered a panic. Sand wrote that "the icy vault seemed to press down upon his soul, his body began to shake, the air disappeared from his chest, and he felt he might faint." He reportedly said afterward: "If I had stayed one moment longer, I should have gone mad or been seized by a fit of passion." At night, an old man who had once served the monastery wandered the cloisters drunk, striking his cane against the walls and crying out (Sand, *A Winter in Majorca*). He repeatedly disturbed what little rest the sick man could get. The villagers' attitude was equally unwelcoming. "They called us heathens, Moslems, Jews," Sand wrote. "They united to sell us fish, eggs and vegetables only at extortionate prices." The hostility went beyond fear of contagion: the party never attended church, and Solange's manner of dress clashed with village custom — both adding fuel to the charge of impiety. One villager was recorded as saying: "That consumptive will go to hell — he won't confess. We won't bury him in holy ground when he dies." Beyond religious antagonism there was simple hostility toward foreigners. Chopin wrote that "nature here is beautiful, but the people are thieves. Oranges cost next to nothing, but a trouser button costs a fortune." Children threw stones at them in the streets (Sand). A letter Sand wrote to Marliani on January 15 captures the weather tersely: "It rains here to an incredible degree — dreadful flooding. The air is slack and heavy, and it takes all one's strength just to drag oneself along. One really does fall ill here." --- ## The Battle Over the Piano The Pleyel piano Chopin had ordered from France arrived at the port of Palma in late December — and was immediately held by customs. The Pleyel firm, then directed by Camille Pleyel (1788–1855), son of the founder, was Paris's foremost piano maker of the era, and had a close personal relationship with Chopin, having hosted his Paris debut at their salon. On December 28, Chopin wrote bitterly: "My piano has been waiting for eight days in the port for the customs decision. They are demanding a ransom for this piece of junk." The customs demand was 700 francs — roughly equivalent to the value of the piano itself (Sand). "After fifteen days of negotiations," Sand wrote, "we got it out through a different gate for 400 francs." The freed piano was then carried up the mountain road to Valldemossa. On January 22, Chopin wrote to Camille Pleyel: "I am sending you the Preludes at last — finished on your piano, which arrived in the best possible condition despite the sea and the bad weather and the customs of Palma." Sand recalled: "The Pleyel pianino, wrested from the customs officers after three weeks of negotiations and 400 francs, filled the high stone vaulting of the cell with a magnificent sound." --- ## The Question of the "Raindrop" One evening in late January, Sand and her son Maurice had gone down to Palma. On the way back, they were caught in a storm. "The rain washed away the mountains, the roads became torrents. We had to walk at night through the floods over the mountains up to our ankles in water," Sand wrote (letter to Duteil, January 30). At the monastery, Chopin had been waiting. In her autobiography *Story of My Life* (*Histoire de ma vie*), Sand later described that night: > "We found him at the piano, weeping. When he saw us enter he rose with a great cry, and said to us, with a wild look and in a strange tone: 'Ah, I knew very well that you were dead!' His anxiety had been intense, but it had congealed into a kind of calm despair. The composition he had been writing that night was full of the drops of rain falling on the roof tiles of the monastery, but in his imagination they had become tears falling from heaven upon his heart." This is the source of the "Raindrop" legend. The piece is generally identified as Prelude No. 15 in D-flat major from Op. 28, though Niecks believed Sand was referring specifically to No. 6 in B minor. The testimony of Sand's son Maurice, passed down through his daughter Aurore Lauth-Sand, supports No. 15. When Sand later told Chopin what she had observed that night, he disclosed that he had been in a kind of waking dream. According to Niecks, Chopin said that he "had seen himself drowned in a lake; heavy drops of icy water fell at regular intervals upon his breast." When Sand pointed out that the sound was actually rain dripping from the roof, Chopin denied he had heard it at all. More than that: he rejected outright the very idea that the music had been inspired by the sound of rain. Niecks writes that Chopin "protested with all his energy against the childishness of such aural imitations." For Chopin, the music of that night was not a transcription of rain on tiles; it was something that had been transformed from within. The matter is further complicated by the testimony of Chopin's student Adolf Gutmann, who told Niecks that all the Preludes had been composed before the departure for Majorca, and that he himself had copied them out. Niecks largely accepted this view. The current scholarly consensus holds that the work in Majorca was largely revision and refinement, and that the fundamental creative work had been done in Paris — though the gap between Chopin's November letter promising to "send the Preludes soon" and his actual dispatch of them on January 22 suggests that considerable work remained to be done at the monastery. --- ## The Works of This Period The Preludes were not the only music Chopin worked on during his time in Majorca. In letters from the monastery to Fontana, he listed several pieces he expected to send within weeks: - Ballade No. 2 in F major, Op. 38 - Two Polonaises, Op. 40 ("Military" and "Sad") - Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp minor, Op. 39 Niecks commented on these as follows. The "moody and fierce character" of the Scherzo (Op. 39) and the "despairing melancholy" of the Polonaise in C minor (Op. 40 No. 2) are entirely consistent with Chopin's circumstances. The Ballade (Op. 38) raises no contradictions. But the "Military" Polonaise in A major (Op. 40 No. 1) is another matter — Niecks wrote that if it was indeed created in Majorca, it was "a remarkable instance of the spirit triumphing over the body." That so healthy, vigorous, and chivalric a piece could have emerged from such conditions is, as he put it, astonishing. Niecks also noted that the Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 — which contains the Funeral March — may have been conceived during the Balearic stay, though this remains speculative. The Funeral March movement is thought by some to predate even the arrival in Majorca. --- ## Leaving the Island By February, Chopin's condition had not improved. "The climate of Majorca had become more and more injurious to Chopin, and we had to hurry away," Sand wrote. Even the departure was attended by harassment. For the three-league mountain road from Valldemossa to Palma, Sand asked ten local acquaintances with horses or mules to lend them a vehicle. Not one agreed. They were forced to hire a springless carriage, and "Chopin arrived at Palma spitting blood in a frightful manner" (Sand). On the boat, they shared passage with a hundred pigs. "The smell of them did not contribute to Chopin's recovery," Sand noted with characteristic dryness. At a hotel in Barcelona, the landlord demanded payment on the grounds that the bed Chopin had slept in had been contaminated and would have to be burned. As for the Pleyel pianino left behind at the monastery, Sand tried to sell it on the island rather than bear the expense of shipping it back. "As no one wanted a piano that a consumptive had played, this was a great deal of trouble" (editorial note in the collected correspondence). It was eventually sold to a man named Canut for 1,200 francs. Back in France, in the dry air of Provence, Chopin recovered quickly. Sand wrote: "He is scarcely coughing at all and is as merry as a little sparrow." --- ## Sand's Gaze Sand's *A Winter in Majorca* returns repeatedly to harsh judgment of the island's inhabitants. In a letter to Duteil she wrote: "The nature of the people here is a model of distrust, inhospitality, rudeness and selfishness. They are also liars, thieves and pious as in the Middle Ages." After returning to France she added: "I hate Spain! I left it like the ancients — that is, walking backwards and uttering every possible curse." To read this fairly requires some context. Spain in 1838 was in the midst of the First Carlist War (1833–1840), a conflict over the succession of Queen Isabella II. Majorca was not a direct theater of war, but the tensions of a country at war would have reached the island nonetheless. The broader backdrop is the nineteenth-century decline of Spanish power relative to France. Spain's days as a dominant European force had ended by the early seventeenth century; by the 1830s the country was better known for internal political chaos than for international strength. France, by contrast, had stabilized under Louis-Philippe after the July Revolution of 1830 and was in a period of cultural and economic expansion. In this light, Sand's contempt for the Majorcans was not purely personal. It was also an expression of the civilizational condescension that French intellectuals of the era routinely directed at southern Europe and peripheral regions. For Sand — who flouted convention through her dress, her smoking, and her public love affairs, and who moved at the center of Parisian avant-garde life — the island's conservative piety would have seemed especially alien. Her pen, when describing a poor, devout, medically backward population, tips frequently toward disdain rather than sympathy. Yet this same gaze produced what is now virtually the only detailed primary source we have for this journey. As the editorial notes to the correspondence observe, Sand later wrote that Chopin's health had been "already severely compromised before Majorca" — a remark judged to be an exaggeration aimed at "diminishing her responsibility in the eyes of their friends." How far Sand's account can be trusted is a question that must always be kept in view. At the same time, Chopin's own letters, written in the moment, align closely with her account; the harshness of the journey itself is beyond reasonable doubt. The convalescence failed utterly. They were rejected, driven out, and forced to share a ship home with livestock. Back in Marseille, Sand wrote to a friend: > "He was dying in Majorca, and making music that smelled of paradise. He has no idea what planet he is on. He has no consciousness of life as we understand and feel it." Under conditions that would have silenced almost anyone, Chopin kept writing. Sand recorded this with a tone somewhere between admiration and bewilderment. --- ## Sources - George Sand, *A Winter in Majorca* (*Un hiver à Majorque*, 1842) - George Sand, *Story of My Life* (*Histoire de ma vie*, 1854–55) - *Lettres de Chopin et de George Sand, 1836–1839* (collected correspondence) - Frederick Niecks, *Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician* (1902) - Bożena Schmid-Adamczyk, Chopin chronology of the Majorca stay (chopin.pl)