Fabulist Jean de la Fontaine received last rites, then lived two more years

Death came as no surprise to Jean de la Fontaine, and he spent two years getting ready for it. Ailing all that time with a disease characterized by his biographers only as “severe,” “serious,” and “dangerous,” he renounced his pleasantly libertine life and began wearing a hair-shirt as penance. Of his scandalous Contes, salacious tales based on Boccacio’s Decameron, he told the priest who administered the last rites: “It is notorious that I have had the misfortune to write this book of infamous Tales. In writing them I did not believe them as pernicious as they are. Now I confess that the book is abominable. I am deeply contrite for having written and published it. I pray for pardon to God, to the Church, and to you, sir, who are his minister… I wish that the work had never been written, and that it were in my power to suppress it entirely."
  

Today La Fontaine is remembered mainly for his more wholesome Fables, adapted from the works of Aesop. His literary life developed only after two other professions proved dead ends. Born July 8, 1621, in Château-Thierry, he was sent by his middle-class family to the seminary of Saint-Magloire to study for the priesthood. He didn’t last long at this pursuit, and then took up law and was admitted to practice.

When La Fontaine was twenty-six, his father arranged a marriage for him to a fourteen-year-old girl named Marie Héricart, who brought with her a dowry of 20,000 livres and a penchant for reading novels and skipping housework. They had one son, and when he was five, La Fontaine left the family in Château-Thierry and settled into a literary life in Paris.

He attracted the patronage of a series of wealthy Parisians. First was Nicolas Fouquet, Minister of Finance for Louis XIV. When Fouquet went to jail for malfeasance, La Fontaine took up with Marguerite de Lorrain, a wealthy widow. After her death, La Fontaine found yet another patron willing to house and cosset him, Marguerite de la Sablière, a banker’s widow. During this period of support he wrote the Contes, as well as the Fables, which established him as a leading literary figure. He also became a great pal of Molière, Racine, and Boileau.

Though schooled in religion from an early age, La Fontaine remained indifferent to it throughout most of his life. He seems to have had a fairly stoic attitude toward life and death, as exemplified in this excerpt from one of his Fables, “Death and the Dying Man” (in my own no doubt faulty translation):
            Yes, Death will come, I must point out,
            But many folks just don’t believe,
            Though there’s no shadow of a doubt.
            One man who wanted a reprieve
            Was very old and gravely ill,
            At least a hundred years in age!

            He said, “I’m working on my will
            And haven’t reached the final page.
            Now listen, Death, just wait a while.
            My wife, you see, says she’d prefer
            You come back later, so that I’ll
            Have some more time to spend with her….”

            “Old man,” said Death, “you have no case—
            You’ve lived at least a hundred years,
            There aren’t ten people anyplace
            As old as you. Spare me your tears!
            You should have been prepared before,
            How many times must you be told
            There are some things you can’t ignore:
            You’re very sick. You’re also old.
            Let me give you some advice
            That will resolve all your concerns.
            Your candle’s out in just a trice,
            Look and see how low it burns.
            Your wife, without you, will be fine—
            Not later than this afternoon.
            Besides, unless I’m very wrong,
            She will be joining you quite soon….”

            Death was absolutely right.
            When I am old, I hope to die
            Just like a guest who makes a toast,
            And bids the other guests good-bye,
            And then politely tells his host,
            “I had a lovely time. Good night.”

In 1693 Madame La Sablière died, and in the same year La Fontaine came down with his severe illness. His poor health caused him to turn to religion. Father Pouget, a twenty-six-year-old curate from the nearby Church of Saint-Roch came to minister to him and later described the experience in his diary:

"M. de la Fontaine, who was a straightforward and plain-spoken man and was very intelligent, said to me simply:  ‘I have read the New Testament, and I assure you it is an excellent book; but there is one thing in it to which I cannot agree—the idea of eternal punishment. I do not see how such an eternity can be in accordance with God's goodness.'

"I replied that it was not necessary that he understand; that there were things even more incomprehensible that he was obliged to believe; that in general all mysteries are incomprehensible.…”

On February 12, 1693, La Fontaine was given the last rites, but he lived on another two years, suffering from his unnamed malady—cancer, perhaps, or congestive heart failure. He accepted the advent of death with calmness, and on February 10, 1695, two years almost to the day from the last rites, he wrote to a friend: "I assure you that your best friend can only reckon on being alive another fortnight.”

But not until April 10 did La Fontaine’s condition worsen, and on April 13 he died at the age of seventy-six. He was buried in the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, which was demolished in 1786. In 1817 remains believed to be those of La Fontaine were reinterred at Père Lachaise Cemetery, next to Molière.

La Fontaine left a whimsical epitaph for himself:
      Jean has gone, in the manner he arrived.
      His money, too, has not survived.
      He earned little wealth, but there’s no need to weep,
      For he lived his life by a strict protocol:
      One half of his time he spent sound asleep,
      And the other half doing nothing at all.

Satirist Nikolai Gogol, 42, died from extreme pious pre-Lenten fasting

Class clown in school, lifelong victim of painful digestive problems, frustrated closeted homosexual, creator of savage satire and groundbreaking realism—Nikolai Gogol met an anguished death after embarking on a ten-day pre-Lenten fast to cleanse his body and soul.

Born March 19, 1809, in the Ukrainian village of Sorochintsy into a family of minor gentry, Gogol attended an all-boys’ school, where he was notorious for his biting wit and his grotesque comic portrayals of old men and women in school plays. He went to St. Petersburg, where he tried to get a job as an actor and to get some of his writings published—failing at both. Instead, he stole some money that his mother had sent him to pay her mortgage and used it for a long holiday in Germany. When his cash ran out, he came back to St. Petersburg, took a low-paying government job, then was hired to teach history in a girls’ school, and—wonder of wonders—managed somehow to wangle appointment as assistant professor of history at St. Petersburg University. Not surprisingly, he felt unqualified for that job and left it after a year.

He immersed himself in his writing and over the next several years produced the well-received short stories “The Overcoat,” “The Nose,” and “Taras Bulba,” as well as a popular satirical play, The Government Inspector. He also continued to work on Dead Souls, a monumental trilogy that was to be a new Divine Comedy, and the first part was published in 1842. By this time Gogol was recognized as a leading literary figure.

His personal life, however, was a mess. A repressed homosexual, he never developed any lasting relationships. Moreover, he was plagued throughout his life by digestive disturbances that are now thought to have been irritable bowel syndrome. He suffered constant intestinal cramps, borborgyma (grumbling of the stomach), constipation, and diarrhea. Gogol claimed that his stomach was malformed and positioned upside down. Despite his continued discomfort, Gogol was a gourmand who could not stay away from rich, fat food—especially his beloved macaroni laced with butter and cheese—which only worsened his condition.

In 1851 Gogol settled in Moscow in a house owned by Count Alexander Tolstoy, a prominent distant forebear of the writer Leo Tolstoy. Gogol had a tight-knit circle of friends, one of whom was a young woman who was married to one of Gogol’s friends and was the sister of another. Gogol felt especially close to her, and when she died at thirty-five of typhus, he was devastated.

He fell into a deep depression and, convinced of his spiritual unworthiness, he turned for comfort to a Russian Orthodox priest, Father Matvey Konstantinovsky. The priest turned out to be a fanatical sadist who instilled in Gogol a pathological fear of damnation. Insisting that his writings were the devil’s work, the priest persuaded Gogol to destroy most of his unpublished manuscripts, including the second part of the unfinished Dead Souls. Gogol then began an extreme fast, in preparation for the feast of Maslenitsa, a pre-Lenten Orthodox celebration in which people gorge themselves on dairy products before the forty days of penitence.

Gogol’s digestive system was so disrupted that when he broke the fast, he became violently ill, and doctors prescribed baths in boiling water and bleeding by leeches, both of which naturally made him feel much worse. Of his stomach woes, he wrote to a friend, “In my internal house so much washing, cleaning, and all kinds of trouble is going on that the landlord can't begin to explain it even to his closest friend." He was able to tolerate only a few sips of water mixed with a tiny amount of wine. His stomach became so shrunken that when his physicians palpated it, they were horrified to feel his backbone.

As one commentator graphically described Gogol’s final hours: “From his nose, the organ that had incited his appetite, seven leeches dangled. Ice packs were placed on his head; hot mustard plasters seared his legs. Eventually his bowels ceased to function. Near the end, when his body temperature dropped precipitously, pitchers of hot water were placed at his feet. Hot loaves of bread nestled against his chilled body. But he could not be saved.”

On March 4, 1852, physically tormented and mentally deranged by his illness and its treatment, Gogol died at his Moscow home. He was forty-two.

The funeral was at St. Tatiana Church at Moscow University, followed by burial at the Danilov Monastery, the grave marked by a stone topped with a Russian Orthodox cross. Fearful that an attack of lethargy might be mistaken for his death and that he would be buried alive, Gogol had wanted an airhole in his coffin and a rope leading to a bell on the surface. There is no evidence, however, that such arrangements were made. In 1931 the monastery was demolished and Gogol’s remains were moved to the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Poet Alexander Pushkin, 37, shot in spleen in lovers’ duel

Only thirty-seven when he challenged his wife’s suspected lover to a duel,  Alexander Pushkin was shot in the spleen and died two days later. Acknowledged as Russia’s greatest poet and the founder of Russian literature, Pushkin will be remembered for his two monumental works, Eugene Onegin and Boris Goudonov.

Born June 6, 1799, to an aristocratic family in Moscow, Pushkin was the great grandson of an African slave who was brought to Russia a century earlier as a gift for Tsar Peter the Great and who worked his way up in the imperial court. Like many young people born into privilege, Pushkin became a radical rebel and was often in trouble with the Tsar’s political police.

Pushkin attended the Imperial Lyceum near Saint Petersburg, and then plunged into the raucous intellectual milieu of the city on the Neva, a life that included heavy drinking, gambling, and womanizing. When he was twenty-one, he published his first major poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila, which made a major splash in literary circles. His activism for social reform resulted in his exile to various provinces and ultimately to seclusion on his mother’s estate.  Meanwhile he finished his epic play Boris Goudonov in 1825, but it was suppressed by the government until 1831—and was never produced in its uncensored form until 2007. Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse, followed in 1833. 

An atheist in his youth, by the time he was in his thirties he had settled into a fairly conventional Russian Orthodoxy, although his beliefs very likely edged toward deism. He also was a member of a militant Masonic lodge known as Ovid.

In 1831, at the age of thirty-two, Pushkin married the sixteen-year-old Natalia Goncharov, with whom he had four children in rapid succession. Natalia was a flighty spendthrift, and Pushkin continued to gamble recklessly, so the family finances were always strained. 

Pushkin was notorious for engaging in duels to defend his honor, having fought some twenty-nine, so when he heard that his wife had been propositioned by her brother-in-law, he challenged him to fight, although dueling had been outlawed. Whether Natalia, who had been known to flirt with others including Tsar Nicholas, reciprocated the proposition in any way is an open question.  Nonetheless, Pushkin and Georges d’Anthès met at sunset on January 27, 1837, in a wooded area on the banks of the Neva half-an-hour’s sleighride outside St. Petersburg. 

Both men were wearing some sort of protective gear, and D’Anthès was wearing the uniform of the Tsar’s Horse Guards regiment with large, shiny buttons. Both men carried pistols, and at ten paces they turned and fired. Both shots were true, but a button on D’Anthès uniform deflected the shot and he received only a slight flesh wound in his arm.  Pushkin took a shot in the belly, piercing his spleen and his femoral artery. He died two days later of internal hemorrhaging.

Pushkin’s funeral was originally scheduled for the St. Petersburg cathedral, but was moved at the last minute to a smaller church because it was feared the many mourners might pose a threat to public order. The Tsar gave orders for a handsome stipend to support Pushkin’s family, who thereafter lived in far greater comfort than Pushkin was ever able to provide.

Playwright William Wycherley dead at 75, eleven days after marrying 16-year-old

In addition to being one of the leading comic playwrights of the English Restoration, William Wycherley was a lascivious rogue whose lust, plus a touch of avarice, helped bring about his death. Noted for several witty comedies that satirized the high society of which he was a part—Love In A Wood, The Gentleman Dancing Master, The Country Wife, and The Plain Dealer (in which he coined the word “nincompoop”)—he produced them all between the ages of thirty and thirty-seven, and never wrote another play, although he lived almost forty more years.

Wycherley, who was born in 1640 in Shrewsbury, was educated mostly in France, where he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, presumably because it was more acceptable in French society. On his return to England, he became a Protestant again—until the accession of the Catholic King James II, when Wycherley reverted to Catholicism once more.  

His main goal seems to have been to latch on to a rich widow and spend her money on drink and other women. He finally succeeded to some extent when he married the Dowager Countess Drogheda—secretly, so that he could maintain his supposed bachelor status as a favorite of King Charles II. The King found out about the marriage anyway, and Wycherley was dumped as tutor to his illegitimate son. 

The Countess was a shrewd cookie who knew about Wycherley’s roving eye, and she kept her husband on a short leash.  She insisted on accompanying him almost everywhere, allowing him to meet his friends without her only at the unfortunately named Cock Tavern directly across from their home in Bow Street—and only if he was seated next to an open window, so that she could see that he was not in the company of any loose women.

No doubt to Wycherley’s relief, the Countess died a few years after their marriage, leaving Wycherley her fortune—which he promptly squandered before falling heavily into debt.  He was sent to debtor’s prison for seven years until King James II freed him and even gave him a pension of £200 per year.

In his sixties, Wycherley suffered from chronic illnesses and constant financial difficulty. He idled away most of his time at Will’s Coffee House, where he met a young Alexander Pope. Pope befriended him and helped him publish some poems, which were ill received and derided by some as obscene.

When Wycherley was seventy-five, his friend Captain Thomas Shrimpton tried to help him by arranging for him to marry a sixteen-year-old girl named Elizabeth Jackson, who had a considerable dowry. Once again the idea of a rich wife—and a young and sexually appealing one, at that—motivated Wycherley, along with a desire to keep his nephew from inheriting any of his paltry estate. Wycherley and Elizabeth were married on December 20, 1715, and during the ten days after the wedding, Wycherley managed to go through most of the dowry to pay his debts. On December 31, Wycherley died suddenly at his home in Covent Garden, probably of a heart attack. His friend Captain Shrimpton married Elizabeth three months later.

Wycherley is buried in St. Paul’s Churchyard, Covent Garden.

Mt. Vesuvius eruption fatal for philosopher Pliny the Elder, 56,

When Mount Vesuvius erupted at Pompeii in 79 A.D., most people understandably tried to flee the path of the molten lava, crushed rocks, pulverized pumice, and sheets of flame that spewed from the volcano. Pliny the Elder, however, headed straight for the inferno. Exactly how he died in this cataclysm that killed more than two thousand residents remains unclear.

Pliny, a philosopher and naturalist noted especially for his Natural History, was also a prominent military commander, which is how he came to be in the vicinity of Pompeii on that fateful August day. Born in Como, Italy, in 23 A.D., Pliny, born Gaius Plinius Secundus, was the son of Gaius Plinius Celer, a Roman equestrian knight, and his wife, Marcella. He studied law in Rome, then entered the army, after which he settled in Rome practicing law and writing. When his friend Vespasian became emperor in 69 A.D., he appointed Pliny to a series of positions as procurator, or governor, of various Roman provinces, in Africa, Spain, and Gaul.

A philosophical Stoic, Pliny believed that virtue, based on knowledge, was its own reward, and the highest good was to live in harmony with cosmic reason, which governs the universe. “The only certainty,” he said, “is that nothing is certain.” Like most Stoics, he paid scant attention to the possibility of a personal afterlife. “It is ridiculous,” he wrote, “to suppose that the great head of things, whatever it may be, pays any attention to human affairs….The world, and whatever we call the heavens, we must think of as a deity, eternal and without limit, neither created nor subject to destruction. To inquire what may be beyond that is no concern of ours, nor is the human mind capable of drawing any conclusions about it.”

Pliny never married or had children, but a favorite nephew, Pliny the Younger, is the source of most of our knowledge of his death. Two months before the events at Pompeii, Pliny the Elder had been appointed commander of the Roman navy. On August 24, 79 A.D., he was stationed at Misenium across the Bay of Naples from Vesuvius, when it began to erupt. Pliny had a cold bath and a light lunch, according to his nephew, and then went up on a hill to get a better view of the volcanic action. Presumably to observe it more closely, he decided to sail toward Pompeii, when he received a message from a woman he knew named Rectina, who was stranded near the foot of the volcano, along with her friend Pomponianus, with no means of escape except by sea. She begged Pliny to come to her rescue, and what began as a voyage of scientific observation suddenly turned into a mission of mercy.

Pliny set out in a light, fast cutter, and as it approached the shore near Pompeii, lava, burning cinders, and crushed rock began to fall on him and his men. When they reached land, Pliny thought they ought to turn back, but his pilot insisted on forging ahead, saying “Fortune favors the brave.” At the town of Stabiae they found Pomponianus, but not Rectina, and then prepared to return to safety across the bay. But there was no wind, and so Pliny thought it would safe enough to wait inside a building until they could sail. Minimizing the danger of the continuing eruption, he and his men ate and drank heartily, and Pliny fell asleep, snoring loudly, according to witnesses.

Fearing the collapse of the building they were in, his men woke Pliny and urged him to get out. They headed for the shore, with pillows tied to their heads to protect them from falling rocks, but on the way Pliny sat down to rest and was unable to get up. Believing him dead, his men left him there, and when they returned three days later after the eruption was over, they found his body intact.

How he died has been widely debated. Overweight and suffering from asthma, he must have perished, say some, from inhaling the volcano’s sulphurous fumes into his weak lungs. The historian Suetonius, basing his account on hearsay, says that Pliny was overcome by unbearable heat and asked a servant to kill him—although his body was found with no apparent injuries. He may, of course, have keeled over from a heart attack or a stroke. However he met his fate, Pliny the Elder was dead at the age of fifty-six.

Philosopher David Hume, 65, faced his death cheerfully

Scottish philosopher David Hume, famous for his Treatise of Human Nature, knew he was dying for several months and faced the inevitability with placid cheerfulness. 

Born in Edinburgh April 26, 1711, Hume enrolled at the University of Edinburgh at the age ten or eleven and immersed himself in philosophical studies so wholeheartedly that he suffered a nervous breakdown. In his late teens Hume began to suffer what one physician diagnosed as a “disease of the learned.” It manifested itself with a coldness all over his body and an attack of scurvy causing a rash on his hands. He was treated with bitters and “anti-hysteric” pills, and ordered to drink a pint of claret every day, which seemed to make him feel much better.

With little money, he moved to a small French village in Anjou, where he could live cheaply, and where he took delight in mocking the beliefs of the Jesuits at the college. When he returned to Scotland, he worked as a tutor until he discovered the young man in his charge was insane, then as a secretary, a librarian, and finally as private secretary of the British ambassador in Paris. Eventually he became chargé d’affaires and lived in high style, developing a great fondness for food, wine, and women. By this time he was well-to-do from the sales of s best-selling history of England. Never married, he built a home in Edinburgh and returned there in 1769 to write, study, and lead an active social life.

Known as “The Great Infidel,” Hume is also the author of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and The Natural History of Religion. He was a champion of empirical reasoning and a purely psychological explanation of human nature. Rejecting his early Calvinist training, he became a skeptic and critic of organized religion, although he stopped short of atheism. One biographer called his beliefs “weakly deistic.”

In 1775 Hume was diagnosed with colon cancer and told he had only a few months to live. He accepted the news calmly and with good cheer. The biographer James Boswell visited him a few weeks before his death and reported that Hume had told him that he regarded the possibility of an afterlife as “a most unreasonable fancy.”

Hume’s friend, the economist Adam Smith, gave this account of his final weeks in a long letter to a mutual friend:

           

            He was advised to go to Bath to drink the waters, 

       which appeared for some time to have so good an effect 

       upon him, that even he himself began to entertain, what 

       he was not apt to do, a better opinion of his own health.  

       His symptoms, however, soon returned with their usual 

       violence, and from that moment he gave up all thoughts 

       of recovery, but submitted with the utmost cheerfulness, 

       and the most perfect complacency and resignation.

            Upon his return to Edinburgh, though he found 

       himself much weaker, yet his cheerfulness never abated, 

       and he continued to divert himself, as usual, with 

       correcting his own works for a new edition, with reading 

       books of amusement, with the conversation of his 

       friends; and, sometimes in the evening, with a party at his

       favorite game of whist. His cheerfulness was so               

       great, and his conversation and amusements run so     

       much in their usual strain, that, notwithstanding all bad 

       symptoms, many people could not believe he was dying.

 

Hume invented various scenarios in which he might try to persuade Charon, the boatman who carries dead souls across the River Styx, to let him live a little longer. Invariably these stories would end with Charon’s rough admonition to Hume: “Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue."

On the August 23, 1776, Hume wrote to Smith, “I go very fast to decline, and last night had a small fever, which I hoped might put a quicker period to this tedious illness, but unluckily it has, in a great measure, gone off.”

Two days later Hume was dead at the age of sixty-five. His physician wrote this account to Smith: “Yesterday, about four o'clock, afternoon, Mr. Hume expired. The near approach of his death became evident in the night between Thursday and Friday, when his disease became excessive, and soon weakened him so much that he could no longer rise out of his bed. He continued to the last perfectly sensible, and free from much pain or feelings of distress. He never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with affection and tenderness. When he became very weak, it cost him an effort to speak, and he died in such a happy composure of mind, that nothing could exceed it."

Hume is buried in the Old Calton Burial Ground, Waterloo Place, Edinburgh beneath a "simple Roman tomb," as he requested in his will. He further stipulated that it be inscribed only with his name and the year of his birth and death, "leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest."

Stendhal, 59, done in by the medicines that he took for syphilis

Stendhal, author of the much acclaimed novels The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le Noir) and The Charterhouse of Parma, collapsed and died on a street in Paris, the victim of side effects from his syphilis medicine.

Born Marie-Henri Beyle on January 23, 1783, in Grenoble, he served in Napoleon’s army and was a government official before turning to writing under the pen name Stendhal—a nom de plume taken from the German town of Stendal in tribute to the writer Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who was born there. The first syllable of the name Stendhal is usually pronounced in the German fashion, to rhyme with “end.” 

Educated by Jesuit priests, whom he hated, he grew to despise the Catholic Church, which he chided in The Red and the Black for hypocrisy and materialism. A foe of organized religion, Stendhal said, “All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.” 

Known as a dandified man-about-town in Parisian literary circles, Stendhal gave his name to an unusual medical condition that he described in an account of his first visit to Florence: “As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart; the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” The condition was named the “Stendhal Syndrome” in 1979 by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who observed similar psychosomatic symptoms—racing heart, nausea, panic, dizziness, paranoia—in numerous first-time visitors to Florence who were overwhelmed by the city’s profusion of cultural riches. (A similar affliction has been identified as “Jerusalem Syndrome.”)

In 1830 Stendhal was named to a minor diplomatic post as French consul in the Papal States, and he spent most of the rest of his life in Italy, largely forgotten as a writer.

Womanizing was one of Stendhal’s chief pastimes, and as often happened in pre-antibiotic days, a severe attack of syphilis was the result. Stendhal attempted to treat his symptoms with potassium and quicksilver, popular over-the-counter remedies. Unfortunately, repeated dosing brought severe side effects that included insomnia, dizziness, tremors, difficulty swallowing, swollen armpits, and shrunken testicles.

On March 22, 1842, while on leave in Paris from his consular post, Stendhal was on his way home from an official dinner at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He collapsed on the Boulevard des Capucines with an apoplectic stroke brought on by his worsening physical disabilities. He was taken to his home and twenty hours later died without regaining consciousness at the age of fifty-nine.

Stendhal’s pious cousin ordered a religious funeral at the Church of the Assumption, but Stendhal himself wanted no prayers said over him, and his burial in the Cimetière de Montmartre was conducted without any clergy or religious ceremony. The news of his death rated a paltry three lines in two Paris newspapers.