Embrace Johnnie. [FOOTNOTE: The Johnnie so frequently mentioned in the letters to Fontana is John Matuszynski.] How soon he would recover here!
Tell Schlesinger that before long he will receive MS. To acquaintances speak little of me. Should anybody ask, say that I shall be back in spring. The mail goes once a week; I write through the French Consulate here.
Send the enclosed letter as it is to my parents; leave it at the postoffice yourself.
Yours,
CHOPIN.
George Sand relates in "Un Hiver a Majorque" that the first days which her party passed at the Son-Vent (House of the Wind)—this was the name of the villa they had rented—were pretty well taken up with promenading and pleasant lounging, to which the delicious climate and novel scenery invited. But this paradisaic condition was suddenly changed as if by magic when at the end of two or three weeks the wet season began and the Son-Vent became uninhabitable.
The walls of it were so thin that the lime with which our rooms were plastered swelled like a sponge. For my part I never suffered so much from cold, although it was in reality not very cold; but for us, who are accustomed to warm ourselves in winter, this house without a chimney was like a mantle of ice on our shoulders, and I felt paralysed. Chopin, delicate as he was and subject to violent irritation of the larynx, soon felt the effects of the damp.
We could not accustom ourselves to the stifling odour of the brasiers, and our invalid began to ail and to cough.
From this moment we became an object of dread and horror to the population. We were accused and convicted of pulmonary phthisis, which is equivalent to the plague in the prejudices regarding contagion entertained by Spanish physicians. A rich doctor, who for the moderate remuneration of forty-five francs deigned to come and pay us a visit, declared, nevertheless, that there was nothing the matter, and prescribed nothing.
Another physician came obligingly to our assistance; but the pharmacy at Palma was in such a miserable state that we could only procure detestable drugs. Moreover, the illness was to be aggravated by causes which no science and no devotion could efficiently battle against.