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During the eight years of successful literary activity, lying between Madame Sand's return from Majorca and the Revolution of February, 1848, the profits of her work had, after the first, enabled her freely to spend the greater part of the year at Nohant, and to provide a substantial dowry for her daughter. But the amassing of wealth suited neither her taste nor her principles.
As the moon did not rise until towards morning, we were under the necessity of waiting until then, otherwise we might get benighted in the bush. We tried to find a bed in the hotel, but in vain. All the beds and sofas in Avoca were occupied. Even the billiard tables were engaged for the night. We set out on our return journey to Majorca just as the moon was rising.
Over at the other side of the creek, in amongst the ranges, there is still plenty of fair yielding quartz, which is being got out of mother earth; and the miners consider that they have very fair prospects before them. Indeed, Majorca has subsided into a comparatively quiet country place, containing about 800 inhabitants. It is supported in a great measure by the adjoining farming population.
We were one day somewhat alarmed at Majorca by a letter received from our manager at Maryborough, informing us that a great many bad characters were known to be abroad and at work and cautioning us to be particularly upon our guard. We were directed to discharge our firearms frequently and keep them in good order, so that in case of need they should not miss fire.
Although the neighbouring towns look down on "little Majorca" say it is the last place made and tell of the riotous doings at its first settlement, Majorca is quoted by Brough Smyth, whose book on the gold-fields is the best authority on the subject, as having been a comparatively orderly place, even in the earliest days of the rush.
During the first winter I spent at Majorca, very little rain fell during two months, and the country was getting parched, cracked, and brown. Then everybody prayed for rain, for the sake of the flocks and herds, and the growing crops. At last the rain came, and it came with a vengeance.
The delight was of brief duration. That Madame Sand's manuscripts took a month to reach the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes; that the piano ordered from Paris for Chopin took two months to get to Majorca, were the least among their troubles. A rainy season of exceptional severity set in, and the villa quickly became uninhabitable. It was not weatherproof. Chopin fell alarmingly ill.
Among those who had sold it were some men from the Islands of Majorca, and he took from them all that they had. This the Cid knew, and he would not accept his gifts.
The very first Sunday I spent in Majorca I "dined out." I had no letters of introduction, and therefore did not owe my dinner to influence, but to mere free-and-easy hospitality. Nor did the party with which I dined belong to the first circles, where letters of introduction are of any use; for they were only a party of diggers. I will explain how it happened.
Beneath the Casa Perucca, on the northern slope of the shoulder, the ground falls away rapidly in a series of stony chutes, and to the south and west there are evidences of the land having once been laid out in terraces in the distant days when Corsicans were content to till the most fertile soil in Europe always excepting the Island of Majorca but now in the wane of the third empire, when every Corsican of any worth had found employment in France, there were none to grow vines or cultivate the olive.
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