"Tell me," said he, "does it seem to you that I have dressed Pilate properly?"
"You must not say anything to him," said the Baroness, who was always with him: "it is right; it is excellent; go away with you!"
Thorwaldsen repeated his question.
"Well, then," said I, "as you ask me, I must confess that it really does appear to me as if Pilate were dressed rather as an Egyptian than as a Roman."
"It seems to me so too," said Thorwaldsen, seizing the clay with his hand, and destroying the figure.
"Now you are guilty of his having annihilated an immortal work," exclaimed the Baroness to me with warmth.
"Then we can make a new immortal work," said he, in a cheerful humor, and modelled Pilate as he now remains in the bas-relief in the Ladies' Church in Copenhagen.
His last birth-day was celebrated there in the country. I had written a merry little song, and it was hardly dry on the paper, when we sang it, in the early morning, before his door, accompanied by the music of jingling fire-irons, gongs, and bottles rubbed against a basket. Thorwaldsen himself, in his morning gown and slippers, opened his door, and danced round his chamber; swung round his Raphael's cap, and joined in the chorus. There was life and mirth in the strong old man.
On the last day of his life I sate by him at dinner; he was unusually good-humored; repeated several witticisms which he had just read in the Corsair, a well-known Copenhagen newspaper, and spoke of the journey which he should undertake to Italy in the summer. After this we parted; he went to the theatre, and I home.
On the following morning the waiter at the hotel where I lived said, "that it was a very remarkable thing about Thorwaldsen—that he had died yesterday."