Sand was the former of the two to fall in love, and the earlier to fall out. After the first meeting, there was little delay in beginning that form of unchurched marriage so fashionable in the art world of that day. In 1838 they went to Majorca with Sand's two children, a son and daughter, who had been born to her husband. The weather was atrocious, the accommodations primitive, and Chopin's health wretched. He was beset by presentiments and fierce anxieties, and tormented by a hatred of the place and the clime. In June of the next year they went back to Nohant, her château. We owe to Sand herself the account of Chopin's manner of life, his petulance, his self-inflicted torments, and the agonies of his art and his disease. We owe to her, also, the picture of her devotion both to his health and to his music. The tendency, of course, is to take her praises of herself with a liberal sprinkling of salt, and to feel that Chopin was not the "detestable invalid" she painted him. But need we withdraw charity from one, to give to the other? Need we rob Pauline to pay Peter? There should be easily a plenty of sympathy for both, for the woman infatuated with a strange, exotic genius, gathering him into her heart and home, only to find that she had taken upon herself the rôle of nurse as well as mistress; and to find her time and her vitality devoted to an invalid, while her own life-work as a famous writer was making demands on her as wild as those of a sick musician her junior in years as in fame. After granting her this justice, there should still be no stint of sympathy for the poor Chopin, wrought to a frenzy with the revolutions he was so gorgeously effecting, not only in the music of the piano, but in all harmony; racked with pain and unmanned with the weakening effects of his disease; struggling vainly against the chill and clammy Wrestler who was to drag him to his grave before his life was half complete. Our feeling, again, should not be wrath at George Sand because she did not eternally resist the centrifugal forces of such a life, but rather a deep sense of gratitude that she gave Chopin some sort of home and mental support for ten long years. George Sand's books are full of allusions to Chopin, and from the many that are quoteworthy, the following may be cited from her "Histoire de ma Vie," as throwing a few flecks of light on the woman's attitude in the affair: "He was the same in friendship (as in love), becoming enthusiastic at first sight, getting disgusted and correcting himself (_se reprenant_) incessantly, living on infatuations full of charm for those who were the object of them and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest affections." "Chopin accorded to me, I may say, honoured me with, a kind of friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always the same to me." "The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness. He had enough of his own ills to bear."