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He left with her for Majorca, "fresh as a rose and rosy as a turnip." He returned spitting blood and within an ace of death. Chopin lived on & off at Nohant for seven productive years—but not as George's lover. Instead, she nursed him like an ailing child, firmly denied him any closer relationship.
Maurois does not flinch from giving a clinical history of the relationships that caused George Sand to be described as "a walking graveyard." Nor does he deny that it was her fatal psychological weakness always to pick on men who were too weak to dominate her. And yet. his complete portrait convincingly presents a figure of memorable strength. Sand, Maurois shows, was the forerunner of today's emancipated woman. All her characteristics would have been considered admirable—in a man. Her friends were legion; most of her ex-lovers confessed that though she had nearly been the death of them, she had been the making of them as well. Count d'Orsay was not trying to be funny when he wrote to her: "You are a much-loved woman, in addition to being the one outstanding man of our times."