Madame Ristori, probably an ancestress of the celebrated artiste, died at Empoi—a village in Tuscany—in 1767, aged one hundred and ten years. Her whole life was passed in frightful poverty and hardship. She was an invalid nearly her whole life, and had, besides, almost every disease that can be named, at one or another period of her existence.
Marguerite Couppéc, widow of Richard Couppéc, died at Rouen in 1769. The baptismal register at Caux, where she was born in 1654, shows conclusively that she was one hundred and fifteen years old at death. “All her life,” says her tombstone, “she lived in poverty and illness, having had many most violent diseases, notwithstanding which she was most laborious, being always occupied as long as her hands could work.”
A REQUIEM.
By Robert Louis Stevenson.
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;