During the summer of 1531 he went so far as to write to the magistrates of Besançon, saying that even before leaving Basel he had thought of moving to their city and now when Freiburg is beginning to be a dangerous place, his thoughts are turning thither again.
Freiburg was plainly growing less attractive—or, let us say, was furnishing more and more occasions of complaint. He had spent nearly two years in the abandoned palace of Maximilian without knowing, if we may believe his own story, whether he was the guest of the city, or whether he was hiring the house wholly or in part, or, if he was hiring it, who his landlord was or what he was to pay. When, after two years, he was called upon to move at the end of three months and to pay back rent for a year and a half, he affects to be overwhelmed with surprise and indignation, and writes a two-column letter to the Provost of Chur, at the far east end of Switzerland, to explain.[189] The result was that he took the hasty, and, as it seems to have appeared to himself, somewhat absurd step of buying a house. He naturally begins the letter, in which he tells this news to John Rinckius, with an enumeration of the disagreeables at Freiburg and ends it by declaring that the house shall not keep him there if things go as he wishes. His account of the affair may serve us as an illustration of the unconquerable humour with which he faced life to the last.[190]
"But now here is something for you to laugh at. If anyone should tell you that Erasmus, now nearly seventy, had taken a wife, wouldn't you make the sign of the cross three or four times over? I know you would, and small blame to you. Now my dear Rinckius, I have done a thing no less difficult and burdensome and quite as foreign to my tastes and habits. I have bought a house, a fine one enough, but at a very unfair price. Who shall now despair of seeing rivers turn about and run up-hill, when Erasmus, who all his life has made everything give place to learned leisure, has become a bargain-driver, a buyer, a giver of mortgages, a builder and, in place of the Muses, is now dealing with carpenters and workers in iron, in stone, and in glass. These cares, my dear Rinckius, which my soul has always abhorred, have just about bored me to death. So far I am a stranger in my own house, for, though it is spacious enough, there is not a nest in it where I can safely trust my poor body. One chamber I have built with an open fireplace and have boarded it, floor and sides, but on account of the plastering I have not yet dared to trust myself in it."
Five weeks later he writes[191]:
"This house I have bought makes me no end of trouble; and yet there is not a place in the whole of it suited to my body."
The biographer of Erasmus is tempted to draw a somewhat pathetic picture of his last years; an aged man, broken with pain and disappointment, rejected by all parties, without influence in the world, living under continual fear of some unforeseen disaster,—these form, indeed, the elements for a sufficiently mournful description. And yet the end of Erasmus' course was such as he had been deliberately planning for himself all his life long. Isolation from all the various groupings of men upon great public questions had been his avowed ideal, and he had reached it. He had never aimed to form a "school" and he left no followers behind him. On the other hand, his activities were practically unchecked by advancing years. His intellectual output during his residence at Freiburg was hardly inferior either in quantity or quality to that of any earlier period of equal length. His correspondence falls off somewhat in volume, but its style is as fresh and the variety of persons to whom it is addressed continues as great as ever. New friends take the place of those he has lost, and his personal philosophy, always a cheerful one, remains to comfort him to the last. He consoles himself by the friendship of individuals against the slights of parties and their leaders.
The only falling off in Erasmus' productivity during the years from 1530 to 1535 is in the quality of originality. We are no longer to expect a Praise of Folly or a new volume of Colloquies; but we can only marvel at the vitality still evident in everything that comes from his restless pen. His humour, unconquered by the growing weaknesses of his flesh, flashes out with almost its old-time brilliancy. His industry seems undiminished. He is seldom without a piece of editorial work, and he is constantly being asked to write dedications for works edited by others.
In 1532 he published his Apophthegmata or Sayings of the Ancients,[192] a work in some ways similar to the Adages, but showing far less of the machinery of scholarship. These are pleasant little stories, generally told in a few lines in anecdote form and designed to carry some moral lesson. They are arranged in groups under the name of the principal person mentioned as, for example, Socratica, Diogenes Cynicus, Philip of Macedon, Demosthenes, and so forth. Doubtless the material for this collection had long been gathering, but the mere arrangement and revision of it was a work to tax severely the patience and endurance of a man so enfeebled by physical troubles as was Erasmus in 1532.