The bluntness of taste and the intense concentration on self, which were shown most disagreeably in _Elle et Lui_, appear on a different side in another book which is not a novel at all--not even a novel as far as masque and domino are concerned,--though indirectly it touches another of George Sand's curious personal experiences--that with Chopin. _Un Hiver a Majorque_ is perhaps the most ill-tempered book of travel, except Smollett's too famous production, ever written by a novelist of talent or genius. The Majorcans certainly did not ask George Sand to visit them. They did not advertise the advantages of Majorca, as is the fashion with "health resorts" nowadays. She went there of her own accord; she found magnificent scenery; she flouted the sentiments of what she herself describes as the most priest-ridden country in Europe by never going to church, though and while she actually lived in a disestablished and disendowed monastery. To punish them for which (the _non sequitur_ is intentional) she does little but talk of dirt, discomfort, bad food, extortion, foul-smelling oil and garlic, varying the talk only to foul-smelling oil and garlic, extortion, bad food, discomfort, or dirt. The book no doubt yields some of her finest passages of descriptive prose, both as regards landscape, and in the famous record of Chopin's playing; but otherwise it is hardly worth reading. [177] She survived into the next decade and worked till the last with no distinct declension, but she did not complete it, dying in 1876. Her famous direction about her grave, _Laissez la verdure_, is characteristic of her odd mixture if theatricality and true nature. But if any one wishes to come to her work with a comfortable preoccupation in favor of herself, he should begin with her _Letters_. Those of her old age especially are charming. [178] Cf. Mr. Alfred Lammle on his unpoetical justice to Mr. Fledgeby in _Our Mutual Friend_. [179] Valentine has an elder sister who has a son, irregularily existent, but is as much in love with Benedict as if she were a girl and he were a gentleman; and this son marries the much older Athenais, a lovely peasant girl who has been the unwilling _fiancee_ and wife of the ingenious pitchforker. You have seldom to go far in George Sand for an unmarried lady with a child for chastity, and a widow who marries a boy for maternal affection. [180] There is also an Irish priest called Magnus, who, like everybody else, is deeply and (in the proper sense of _sans espoir_) desperately in love with Lelia. He is, on the whole, quite the maddest--and perhaps the most despicable--of the lot. [181] If any one says, "So, then, there are several 'most intolerables,'" let me point out that intolerableness is a more than "twy-peaked" hill or range. Julien Sorel and Marius were not designed to be gentlemen.