My wife, too, died—mercifully without much suffering.
After four years’ death-in-life, unable to speak or move, she passed quietly away at Montmartre on the 3rd March 1854. Her last hours were sweetened by Louis’ presence. He was home on leave from Cherbourg four days before she died.
I had been out for two hours when one of her nurses came to tell me all was over, and I returned but to draw aside the shroud and kiss her pale forehead.
Her portrait, painted in the days of her radiant beauty, and which I had given her the year before, hung above her bed, looking calmly down on the poor shell that had once enshrined her brilliant genius.
My sufferings were indescribable. They were intensified by one feeling that has always been the hardest for me to bear—that of pity.
Again and again I went over Henriette’s troubles and their crushing weight bore me to the earth. Her losses before our marriage, her accident, the fiasco of her second appearance, her lost beauty and renown, our home quarrels, her jealousy—not, in the end, without cause—our separation, her son’s absence, her helplessness and dreary years of retrospection, of contemplating approaching death and oblivion.
Oh, the pity of it! It turns my brain.
Shakespeare! Shakespeare! Thou alone couldst have understood us both, thou alone couldst have pitied us—poor children of Art—loving, yet wounding each other through our love! Thou art our God, if that other God sits aloof in sublime indifference to our torments. Thou art our father. Help us! Save us!
De profundis ad te clamo!
Alone I went about my sorrowful task.