It has rightly been laid down as a principle that where nature is beautiful and generous, men are bad and avaricious. We had all the trouble in the world to procure the commonest articles of food, such as the island produces in abundance; thanks to the signal dishonesty, the plundering spirit of the peasants, who made us pay for everything three times what it was worth, so that we were at their mercy under the penalty of dying of hunger. We could get no one to serve us, because we were not _Christians_ [the travellers passed for being "sold to the Devil" because they did not go to Mass], and, besides, nobody would attend on a consumptive invalid. However, for better for worse, we were established.... The place was incomparably poetical; we did not see a living soul, nothing disturbed our work; after waiting two months, and paying three hundred francs extra, Chopin had at last received his piano, and delighted the vaults of his cell with his melodies. Health and strength were visibly returning to Maurice; as for me, I worked as tutor seven hours a day: I sat up working on my own account half the night; Chopin composed masterpieces, and we hoped to put up with the remainder of our discomforts by the aid of these compensations. It was in the cells of Valdemosa that Madame Sand completed her novel of Monastic life, _Spiridion_, then publishing in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. "For heaven's sake not so much mysticism!" prayed the editor of her, now and then; and assuredly those readers for whom George Sand was simply a purveyor of passionate romances, those critics who set her down in their minds as exclusively a glorifier of mutinous emotion and the apologist of lawless love, must have been taken aback by these pages, in which she had devoted her most fervent energies to tracing the spiritual history, _peu recreatif_, as she dryly observes, of a monk who, in the days of the decadence of the monastic orders, retained earnestness and sincerity; whose mind, revolted by the hypocrisy and worldliness around him, passes through the successive stages of heresy and philosophic doubt, and to whom is finally revealed an eternal gospel, which lies at the core of his old religion, but which later growths have stifled, and which outlasts all shocks and changes, and is to generate the religion of the future.