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On December 15, 1838, then, the Sand party took possession of their quarters in the monastery of Valdemosa, and thence the next letters are dated. Chopin to Fontana; "Palma, December 28, 1838, or rather Valdemosa, a few miles distant from Palma":
Chopin to Fontana; Valdemosa, January 12, 1839: You will give the transcript to Probst, but my manuscript to Pleyel. When you get the money from Probst, for whom I enclose a receipt, you will take it at once to Leo. I do not write and thank him just now, for I have no time.
In fact, Valdemosa, which at first was enchanting to them, lost afterwards much of its poesy in their eyes. George Sand, as we have seen, said that their sojourn was I in many respects a frightful fiasco; it was so certainly as far as Chopin was concerned, for he arrived with a cough and left the place spitting blood.
How greatly the interiors of George Sand's pavilions in the Rue Pigalle differed from those of Senor Gomez's villa and the cells in the monastery of Valdemosa, may be gathered from Gutmann's description of two of the apartments. Regarding the small salon, he gives only the general information that it was quaintly fitted up with antique furniture.
As it was getting dusk, Felipe Fortis mounted his horse and rode on to his home in the valley far down the Valdemosa road. And Tomaso, with his handkerchief bound round his hand, walked thoughtfully up to his solitary home. The great problem which he had thought out so carefully and brought to so grim and certain a conclusion had suddenly been reopened.
Here it will be advisable to confine ourselves to the investigation of a more limited sphere, to inspect rather narrow interiors than vast landscapes. As the reader has gathered from the preceding letters, there was no longer a monastic community at Valdemosa. The monks had been dispersed some time before, and the monastery had become the property of the state.
Another miracle came to pass, and we found an asylum for the winter. At the Carthusian monastery of Valdemosa there was a Spanish refugee, who had hidden himself there for I don't know what political reason. Visiting the monastery, we were struck with the gentility of his manners, the melancholy beauty of his wife, and the rustic and yet comfortable furniture of their cell.
A third letter, supposed by Karasowski to be written at Valdemosa in February, I hold to be written at Marseilles in April. My dear friend, I am at Palma, among palms, cedars, cactuses, aloes, and olive, orange, lemon, fig, and pomegranate trees, &c., which the Jardin des Plantes possesses only thanks to its stoves.
And Felipe Fortis spread himself out on the trellis-bordered bench of the little Venta that stands at the junction of the Valdemosa Road and the new road from Miramar to Palma in the island of Majorca. Felipe was, of course, known to be a young man of present position and future prospects, or he would not have said such a thing.
Besides, two leagues from there I have a cell, that is to say, three rooms and a garden full of oranges and lemons, for thirty-five francs PER YEAR, in the large monastery of Valdemosa.
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