Villefranche and Cap de St. Hospice are both concerned in the astounding journey that was made by the dead body of Paganini.
A ROAD IN BEAULIEU.
Paganini, the immortal violinist, died at Nice on May 27th, 1840, in the Rue de la Préfecture in a house which has been already indicated (page [25]). He died of tuberculosis at the age of 56. His religious opinions appear to have been indistinct and his religious observances even less pronounced. In the closing hours of his life he was denied or failed to receive the last rites of the Church and, after his death, the clergy refused to allow his body to be buried in consecrated ground.
On the day following his decease the coffin was deposited in the cellar of a house near by, a house that stands at the junction of the Rue de la Préfecture and the Rue Ste. Réparate.[[24]] The cellar was in the possession of a friendly hatter. The body then appears to have been removed to an “apartment” in a hospital at Nice, but the facts at this point in the narrative are confused.[[25]]
Paganini’s son took action against the bishop for refusing to permit the body to be buried within the pale of the Church. In this action young Paganini failed. He appealed against the decision of the clergy and the matter was finally referred to the Papal Court at Rome. Pending judgment the body was taken to Villefranche and placed in a lazaretto there. In about a month the smell emitted by the corpse was complained of and accordingly the coffin was taken out of the building and placed on the open beach near the water’s edge.
This gave great distress to the friends of the dead artist and so one night a party of five of them took up the coffin and carried it by torch-light round the bay to the point of Cap de St. Hospice. Here they buried it close to the sea and just below the old round tower which still stands on this spit of land. Over the coffin was placed a slab of stone. All this happened within a year of the maestro’s death.
In 1841 the son decided to take the body from the Cap de St. Hospice and convey it to Genoa, because it was in Genoa that his father was born. Here it was hoped he could be laid at rest. A ship was obtained and the coffin was lifted from the grave near the old tower and placed on the deck. When Genoa was reached the party with the coffin were not allowed to land because the vessel had come from Marseilles and at that port cholera was raging.
The ship thereupon turned back and sailing westwards brought the dead man to Cannes. Here also permission to land a coffin, which was already highly suspected, was refused. The position seemed desperate but near Cannes are the Lerin Islands and among them the barren and lonely rock known as Sainte Ferréol. Here the body was once more buried and again covered with a stone. On this strange little desert island it remained, in utter loneliness, for four years, in the company only of the seabirds and of some blue iris flowers that made the rock less pitiable.