The writer George Sand was having a terrible time the winter of 1838 on the Spanish island of Mallorca. She had arrived in November, finding the island heat ‘comparable to that of a French June’. Such pleasantness had not lasted long. Nor had the charm of the island. She soon complained that the people who recommended the island to her ‘had been labouring under a great delusion’. 

Sand had gone there with her two children and lover, the composer Frédéric Chopin, in tow. In doing so, she scandalised the entire island, with her chain-smoking, trouser-wearing, adultery-partaking ways. Given that Mallorca was still very rural, conservative, and extremely Catholic, it was perhaps fated to be a mismatch of epic proportions.

The first villa they rented was in a windy area and, although still warm outside, the lime used on its walls created a damp that ‘settled like a cloak of ice over our shoulders’, and exacerbated Chopin’s poor health. Doctors were consulted and, as Chopin wrote to a friend, ‘the first said that I would die, the second that I was dying, and the third that I was already dead’. 

News spread like microbes that these foreigners had brought  disease with them, quite possibly the dreaded consumption. (Ultimately, Chopin would be diagnosed with tuberculosis, which no doubt contributed to his death in 1849, at the age of 39.)

Now, in addition to all her other transgressions, Sand had put the islanders at risk by bringing her ill lover with her, further reducing whatever slim hospitality they had received. They soon found themselves in a set of three rooms that also had a terrace and a small garden in a  Carthusian monastery in the town of Valldemossa, which further scandalised the locals. It was not exactly the villa they might have envisioned, but it had its charms. Chopin declared it the ‘loveliest spot on earth’ and even Sand was moved to describe it as ‘picturesque’. 

Today those rooms are a museum devoted to the couple’s time there and the preservation of Chopin’s Pleyel piano. The piano comprised another plot point of their epic. Chopin had requested his piano to be sent from Paris to the island, but it arrived with a huge import duty tax. It took three weeks of negotiation to obtain its release and move it to Valldemossa, where it finally ‘filled the lofty, echoing vault of the cell with a glorious sound’.

Despite these improvements, they eventually gave up. Chopin had bronchitis. The winter and its rains dragged on. There were some occasional bright spots and Sand even admitted that she ‘finally saw the sea of my dreams, clear and blue like the sky’ and that ‘never had the sight of natural beauty made a greater impact on me.’ But it was mostly a miserable time and once the steamer to Barcelona resumed its regular service after winter’s end, they fled to France in February. They were so eager to go, they left the piano, selling it to a family on the island.

A couple of years later, when she had recovered from the experience, Sand wrote about it, publishing Winter in Majorca (Un hiver á Majorique), in 1842. It opens with an author’s note that sets the tone, asking:  ‘why travel, unless you must?’ Time had only sharpened her memories, and she recounted — often in great detail — the travails of the trip. It is clear throughout that the entire enterprise was the unhappy marriage of a terrible idea to even worse execution, all of which unfortunately came from a place of good intentions. The book is an uneven work, moving between her observations of the island and those of earlier travellers, interspersed with her litany of complaints, and the occasional compliment, usually about the island’s beauty. 

The writer Robert Graves — perhaps most famous for I, Claudius — published an English translation in the 1950s, which is worth reading for his droll footnotes alone. Graves also brings a very particular context: he left England for Mallorca in the 1920s, and had a home in the village of Deià (today a museum), and so found himself ‘naturally interested in the historic problem of what provoked her insensate rage against the islanders.’ Despite this rage — and her many slurs and insults against Mallorcans — the book was translated into Spanish and remains on sale across the island. 

I read Winter while on a recent holiday in Mallorca, where I had the opposite experience to Sand: the sun shone (rather a lot), we lazed by the pool, no one was scandalised, and I had a perfectly nice time. On my final day I stopped in Valldemossa for a few hours. It remains a charming town of cobbled streets, though now seemingly turned over in its entirety to tourism. The monastery welcomes visitors to cell No 4, where they can see artefacts from the Sand-Chopin visit. 

The Pleyel stands proudly on a red riser, roped off to keep any eager fingers from reaching for its keys. Far more effecting for me, however,  was the left-behind sheet music framed and displayed on the walls. I’m not familiar with music composition, so it was fascinating to see Chopin’s drafts, with sections that are completely scribbled out, perhaps in frustration. I have seen many book manuscripts where writers have crossed over words and written in the margins, but never so on a music manuscript. It’s reassuring, somehow, to find such commonalities in the creative process. 

Many years later, after Chopin’s death, Sand elaborated about his work in those rooms in her History of my Life (Histoire de ma vie), writing: 

Once, when my children and I returned from our nocturnal prowlings among the ruins we found him, at ten o’clock, sitting at his piano pale as death, with haggard eyes and hair standing almost on end. It took him quite half a minute to recognise us. Then immediately he made an effort at laughter and played us the sublime things that he had just composed—and at the same time revealed to us the terrible, nerve-wracking ideas that had forced themselves on him in his hour of loneliness, grief and terror. In such circumstances he composed the finest of his short pieces which he modestly called Preludes. They are the works of a master-hand. Many of them suggest a vision of deceased monks and the sound of funereal chants accompanying them to the cemetery. Others are melancholy and tender.

But what of her time there? What did Valldemossa leave her with, besides the obvious copy for a book in which she comes across as both caring and curmudgeonly? It certainly gave her pause about travel. Sand observed early on in Winter, that she originally wanted to get away from everything, asking: 

‘Who has not indulged in this selfish dream of disappearing one fine morning, of abandoning his affairs, his habits, his acquaintances and even his friends, to settle in some enchanted island and live without worries, without commitments and, finally, without newspapers?’

Well, indeed. 

However, after three wet, cold, maddening months, she concluded at the end of the work that there is no escaping the very core of the human condition: that we must tolerate our fellow humans. This is the true lesson of her time on the island. The Mallorcan peasants she could certainly be happy to never see again, but that didn’t meant she should continue to flee to islands of fantasy. 

‘I have often dreamed of living in a deserted land, and every honest man will confess that he has done the same. But, believe me, friends, our hearts are too affectionate to live alone, and the only alternative left us is to live in mutual tolerance; for we are like children who, though they may tease, brawl, and even fight each other in the womb, can never part.’

I agree with her assessment, but would only add one thing. Despite the awfulness of the entire situation, both Sand and Chopin managed to practice their craft and create art. Winter is not a great travel book, nor is it anywhere near her best work. What’s more, she is demeaning and insulting about the Mallorcans, and yet the work was translated into Spanish and continues to be sold on the island. Indeed, here we are, talking about it nearly 200 years on. Her Winter and his Preludes might not be with us had they been able to drink mojitos by the pool. 

This makes me feel fairly certain that my own Summer in Mallorca will only be a happy memory, and not the subject of my next book. Somewhere in the depths of inconvenience and frustration, the spark for art lives, lit by the friction of just being a human in a maddening and sometimes incomprehensible world. Sand and Chopin took a terrible trip, but managed to turn it into art for us all. 

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What I’m … mourning: Dolly. 

Yes, you are, too. Everyone is. Pull up your preferred streaming platform and turn on one of many playlists. Just her hits alone are sufficient, but that back catalog is deep and rewarding. Oh, and do have a rewatch of Steel Magnolias (I mean, really, it should be a yearly ritual). I don’t have any particular Dolly story, beyond growing up in the deep South in the 1990s, where she was already the patron saint and on her way to being International Treasure. Dalton, Georgia, where I went to high school was in the foothills of Appalachia, a couple of hours (though another world away) from where and how she grew up. She too used adversity, in this case of her childhood poverty, to power her art, crafting stories and songs that spoke to millions of people far away from Sevier County and making her beloved around the world. And then she used her fame to invest in people, building up Dollywood to bring employment to one of the poorest areas of the US, and giving children their own personal book collection through her wonderful Imagination Library. Her memory is a blessing. May we all be a little more Dolly. 

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