On account of the diminution in strength, I was afraid of the effects that fatigue might produce, and did not like to see him go so often to Paris as he had lately done, especially to the exhibitions; but when it could not be avoided, I managed to go with him, under the pretext that I was interested in them myself.
On November 4 he asked me if I should like to go with him to the Louvre, where he had to see the Salle des Primitifs. I said yes. He spent an hour there, enjoying heartily the best pictures, and extolling their merits as we were coming back. According to his habit, he was reading in the tram-car on his way home, and I noticed that it was a volume of "Virgil," and in looking up from the book to his face, I observed that he looked paler than usual. I inquired if he felt tired. He answered, "Not in the least." And when we reached home he went up straight to his study, and wrote till the bell called him to dinner. We had a pleasant talk about the pictures he had just studied, while he was eating with a good appetite.
After dinner, as usual, he took up his newspaper and read for about ten minutes, when he suddenly threw it aside and told me the action of the heart was unsatisfactory. I proposed at once to go to the garden, but the suddenness and violence of the attack did not allow him to reach it. When in the open air, just above the few stone steps, he had to stop and grasp the railing till the last anguish deprived him of breath and of life, long before the arrival of the doctors, whom I had sent for as soon as he had felt oppressed.
He had never feared death, whatever might await him after—conscious of a useful and blameless life. He died as he had desired to die, standing alone with me under the moonlit sky, unconfined, escaping from the decrepitude of old age, still in the full possession and maturity of his talents, and in the active use of them.
Two hours before his death he had been writing these last words for the
"Quest of Happiness":—
"If I indulge my imagination in dreaming about a country where justice and right would always surely prevail, where the weak would never be oppressed, nor an honest man incur any penalty for his honesty—a country where no animal would ever be ill-treated or killed, otherwise than in mercy—that is truly ideal dreaming, because, however far I travel, I shall not find such a country in the world, and there is not any record of such a country in the authentic history of mankind."
Let us hope he may have found this ideal country in the unknown world.