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Updated: June 26, 2025
During the two years preceding the coup d'état of December, 1851, life at Nohant had resumed its wonted cheerfulness of aspect.
Chopin went with the party in November and full accounts of the Mediterranean trip, Chopin's illness, the bad weather, discomforts and all the rest may be found in the "Histoire de Ma Vie" by Sand. It was a time of torment. "Chopin is a detestable invalid," said Sand, and so they returned to Nohant in June 1839.
Through the medium of the press, notably of the journal La Vraie République, she continued to give plain expression to her sentiments, regardless of the political enmities she might excite, and of the personal mortification to which she was exposed, even at Nohant, which with its inmates had recently become the mark for petty hostile "demonstrations." Alluding to these, she writes:
Then he adds, "Chopin has been playing Beethoven to me divinely well. That is worth all æstheticism." Little theatrical entertainments of an original kind, presided over by Madame Sand, and carried out by herself, her children, and their young friends, became in time a prominent feature of life at Nohant. She thus describes their nature and commencements:
George Sand in her fields at Nohant not "above" but a little aside from the conflict turns instinctively to her peasant doggedly, placidly, sticking at his plow; turns to her peasant with a kind of intuition that he is a symbol of faith, that he holds the keys to a consolation, which the rest of us blindly grope for: "He is imbecile, people say; no, he is a child in prosperity, a man in disaster, more of a man than we who complain; he says nothing, and while people are killing, he is sowing, repairing continually on one side what they are destroying on the other."
Even before she left her husband, she was credited with having four lovers; but all she said, when the report was brought to her, was this: "Four lovers are none too many for one with such lively passions as mine." This very frankness makes it likely that she enjoyed shocking her prim neighbors at Nohant.
Before we peep into Chopin's room and watch him at work, let us see what the chateau of Nohant and life there were like. Matthew Arnold in an account of a visit paid by him to George Sand: From Vierzon to Chateauroux one travelled by an ordinary diligence, from Chateauroux to La Chatre by a humbler diligence, from La Chatre to Broussac by the humblest diligence cf. all.
Love, esteem, and friendship claim you at Nohant. Marie told me that there was some hope of Chopin. Tell Chopin that I beg of him to accompany you; that Marie cannot live without him, and that I adore him. I shall write to Grzymala personally in order to induce him also, if I can, to come and see us.
We all took wonderful sea baths, Plauchut, too. We often talked of you with Madame Pasca who was our neighbor at table, and had the room next us. We have returned in splendid health, and we are glad to see our old Nohant again, after having been glad to leave it for a little change of air. I have resumed my usual work, and I continue my river baths, but no one will accompany me, it is too cold.
The heat of the summer in Berry had been tremendous, and Madame Sand describes the havoc as unprecedented in her experience the flowers and grass killed, the leaves scorched and yellowed, the baked earth under foot literally cracking in many places; no water, no hay, no harvest, but destructive cattle-plague, forest-fires driving scared wolves to seek refuge in the courtyard of Nohant itself the remnant of corn spared by the sun, ruined by hail-storms.
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