Being neither musical nor obsessed with the literature of the 19th century, I was unaware of this particular vacation trip, as described by Jonathan Gaisman in Standpoint:
The most notoriously unsuccessful holiday in the history of classical music was that taken by Chopin and his androgynous literary lover George Sand (and her family) in Majorca in 1838-1839. The trousered, cigar-smoking Sand was derided by Baudelaire as possessing the morals of a janitress; her future lover Alfred de Musset mordantly observed of the silver dagger which pinned her hair that “a woman of such slight virtue hardly required so immoderate a weapon”. Chopin’s characteristically acidulous comment on his first encounter was, “What an unattractive person la Sand is. Is she really a woman?” That was in 1836; by 1838 the two were lovers. They numbered Delacroix (who painted them both) and Heine among their Paris friends.
In Majorca, where they arrived in November 1838, they soon retreated to a former charterhouse in the valley of Moses or Valdemossa, high in the mountains outside Palma. Here they occupied cell 4. (In the late 20th century, the owner of this cell successfully sued the owner of cell 2, who was passing it off as the composer’s former residence.) Relations with the islanders did not prosper: in her 1841 memoir Un hiver à Majorque, Sand referred to them as “cowards, hypocrites, pickpockets, Indian monkeys, Polynesian savages”. The local newspaper retaliated, describing her as “the most immoral of writers . . . the most obscene of women”. Chopin’s fragile health deteriorated through the winter. A neighbour observed: “That consumptive will go to hell, first for being a consumptive, and next for not going to confession.” Sand claimed that her children were stoned in the streets. They abandoned Majorca in February 1839, leaving the Bauza behind them. As is the way with unsuccessful holidays, this one improved in recollection; Chopin later told Liszt that the short visit was one of the happiest times of his life: “It was as if, like Linnaeus’s clock, the time of day was told by the blossoming of flowers, each with a different perfume and each disclosing other beauties as they opened outwards.”
I cannot say I’ve had such an unsuccessful vacation myself.
