Espérez-vous maintenant en cette cure que vous avez entreprise avec tant de courage? Ecrivez-moi donc que vous êtes mieux; cela nous consolerait de nʼêtre pas bien. Eh quand nous revenez-vous? Nous nʼirons pas de bonne heure à la campagne, si le printemps est aussi laid que lʼhiver. Jʼespère donc que nous vous reverrons ici, et si vous tardez, nous voulons vous voir à Nohant. Vous devez nous dédommager dʼy être restés si peu lʼautre fois. Mes enfants vous remercient de votre bon souvenir et font aussi des voeux pour vous.
A vous de coeur, toujours et bien sincèrement, vous le savez.
GEORGE SAND.
The letters of George Sand show that Chopinʼs condition was already regarded as hopeless. Soon after the death of his father, the poor invalid, who so much needed comforting and cheering, had to bear another grief in the loss of his dearest friend in Paris, Johann Matuszynski. As his physical sufferings increased, he grew melancholy and was haunted by the most dismal imaginations. George Sand speaks of this in writing to a friend who knew him well:
“The Catholic faith, by teaching the doctrine of a purgatorial fire, represents death in a terrible light. Far from picturing the soul of a beloved one in a better world, Chopin often had dreadful visions, and I was obliged to spend the night near his sleeping apartment, to dispel the spectres of his dreaming and waking hours. He dwells a great deal on the superstitions of Polish tradition. The spirits harass and entangle him in their magic circle, and instead of seeing his father and friend smiling at him from the abodes of the glorified, as the Lutheran doctrine teaches, he imagines that their lifeless forms are at his bedside, or that he is tearing himself from their cold embrace.”
INCREASING ILLNESS. Month by month the disease made rapid strides, and his strength perceptibly diminished. The cough grew more obstinate, and very often he was so weak and suffered so from want of breath, that when he went to see his friends he was obliged to be carried upstairs.
The following are the compositions written between 1843 and 1847: Polonaise, op. 53; Berceuse, op. 57; Sonata in B minor, op. 58; Mazurkas, op. 59 and 63; Barcarole, op. 60; Polonaise-Fantasia, op. 61, and Sonata in G minor for piano and violincello, op. 65. These pieces are throughout beautiful, and poetical, but the melancholy and peculiar agitation displayed, especially in the two last, reveal the morbid mind of the composer. The musical thoughts have not the pleasing clearness of his earlier works and not infrequently border on eccentricity. But how full of sorrow and suffering had these years been to the delicately wrought spirit of the artist with its natural inclination to melancholy.
Chopin who, in spite of his self-absorption, noticed everything that went on around him—his innate sensitiveness of feeling supplying the place of observation—could no longer conceal from himself, that the woman who had attracted him by the intensity of her love, and won the devotion of his deeply poetical nature, that she, whose steadfastness had seemed firm as a rock, was daily wavering in her affection. His pride whispered, “leave her, she regards you as a burden;” but the moral feeling fostered by his education, and his parentsʼ noble example of wedded faithfulness and constancy, exhorted him to stay.
There were times during his youth when Chopin felt some scruples about his illegitimate connection with Aurora Dudevant-Sand, when he sincerely wished that he could lead her to the altar, and cursed the fate which hindered him. Afterwards he consoled himself with the thought that the firmness of the bond on both sides made it sacred, and unquestionably nothing on earth would have moved him to separate from her.
George Sand thought otherwise. This fanciful woman, with her keen susceptibilities for the beautiful, had loved the young, interesting, and celebrated composer; but the dejected invalid was an incumbrance. Her change of feeling was first manifested by occasional sullen looks and by the increasing shortness of her visits to the sick room. Chopin felt much pained, but was silent, for according to his ideas it would have been dishonourable on his part to cause a breach. His strength of will was impaired by broken health, and he submitted patiently to innumerable little mortifications which, however, wounded him deeply; his moral sense told him that he ought to atone for the wrong he had done in taking this woman unlawfully to himself.
He was grieved at the complaints she often made in his presence of the fatigue of nursing him; he begged her to leave him alone and go out into the open air; he entreated her not to give up her amusements for his sake, but to go to the theatre and give parties, &c.; he should be quiet and contented if he knew that she were happy. At last, before the sick man had dreamed of a separation, an heroic expedient, as Count Stanisla Tarnowski says, was resorted to. “LUCREZIA FLORIANI.” George Sand had written a romance, entitled, “Lucrezia Floriani,” of which the following is a brief summary.