In the winter of 1901 he was at Ajaccio, and he wrote to a friend: “You will be surprised at this present address. But it’s all right,—‘Napoleon and I, you know.’”
In another letter to the same friend, speaking of a public official with whom he had some legal transactions, he remarks: “Say that I know how devotedly kind he has been in his care of me, but the care of the state overwhelms him. You cannot serve the republic ... and Whistler.”
For many years his heart had troubled him, and towards the last the warnings came more frequently and persistently. The year before his death he was quite ill at The Hague, and one of the London papers printed the following of a semi-obituary flavor:
“Mr. Whistler is so young in spirit that his friends must have read with surprise the Dutch physician’s pronouncement that the present illness is due to ‘advanced age.’ In England sixty-seven is not exactly regarded as ‘advanced age;’ but even for the gay ‘butterfly’ time does not stand still, and some who are unacquainted with the details of Mr. Whistler’s career, though they may know his work well, will be surprised to hear that he was exhibiting at the Academy forty-three years ago. His contributions to the exhibition of 1859 were ‘Two Etchings from Nature,’ and at intervals during the following fourteen or fifteen years Mr. Whistler was represented at the Academy by a number of works, both paintings and etchings. In 1863 his contributions numbered seven in all, and in 1865 four. Among his Academy pictures of 1865 was the famous ‘Little White Girl,’[48] the painting that attracted so much attention at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. This picture—rejected at the Salon of 1863—was inspired, though the fact seems to have been forgotten of late, by the following lines of Swinburne:
“‘Come snow, come wind or thunder
High up in air,
I watch my face and wonder
At my bright hair, etc., etc.’”
The item called forth the following characteristic correction, dated from The Hague:
“Sir: I feel it no indiscretion to speak of my ‘convalescence’ since you have given it official existence.
“May I therefore acknowledge the tender little glow of health induced by reading, as I sat here in the morning sun, the flattering attention paid me by your gentleman of ready wreath and quick biography.