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.

Too many cups of coffee proved fatal for Honoré de Balzac, 51

Honoré de Balzac loved a cup of coffee. In fact, it was said that he loved coffee so much that he drank some 50 cups a  day, and caffeine proved to be his undoing. 

Born May 20, 1799, Honoré was schooled with the Oratorian fathers before enrolling at the Sorbonne. The son of a social-climbing lawyer, who changed the family named from Balssa to the aristrocratic-sounding Balzac, Honoré was not to be outdone in upward mobility: he later added the “de” before Balzac in order to sound even more aristocratic.

Known for his novels La Comédie humaine, Eugénie Grandet, Le Père Goriot, and La Cousine Bette, Balzac started his career as a lawyer, and then was a businessman, with interests in slag processing, lumber mills, type foundries, and publishing. One ill-fated venture was the issuance of cheap editions of Molière’s plays, which did not sell and had to be discarded as waste paper.

During his various business ventures, he was also writing. His novels were often scandalous, dealing with such subjects as incest and immoral priests, and not surprisiingly incurred the wrath of the Catholic Church, although Balzac himself apparently remained a believer. He wrote in La Comédie humaine, “Christianity, and especially Catholicism, being a complete repression of man's depraved tendencies, is the greatest element in Social Order.”

Balzac’s work regimen was highly disciplined. As he described it: “I go to bed with the chickens at six or seven in the evening. I wake up at one o’clock in the morning, and work until eight. Then I go to sleep again for an hour and a half, when I have a little nourishment and a cup of black coffee, and go back into my harness until four in the afternoon. That’s when I take a bath, receive guests, and perhaps go out. Then after dinner I go to bed again. I’ll have to lead this life for some months, not to let myself be snowed under by my debts.”

Balzac explained his caffeine addiction in an essay called “The Pleasures and Pain of Coffee,” in which he confessed, “Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. It sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles. It accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects.”

In 1832 Balzac received a letter about one of his novels from a woman in Russia and he began a fifteen-year correspondence with her. Ewelina Hanska was married to a wealthy Polish landower, and when he died Balzac wooed her, winning her hand over a formidable rival, the pianist and composer Franz Liszt.

Apparently his excessive coffee consumption was the cause of Balzac’s deteriorating health: frequent stomach cramps, headaches, nervous twitches, and hypertension. Shortly after his marriage, his wife wrote to her daughter of his “extreme weakness” and “profuse sweating.”  On the night of August 18, just five months after his wedding, Balzac became gravely ill.  His wife had gone to bed, but his mother was still with him when he died, of caffeine poisoning leading to heart failure, at the age of fifty-one.

The funeral was attended by virtually every noted writer in Paris. Pallbearers included Alexandre Dumas père and fils and Victor Hugo, who also delivered the eulogy. In his remarks he noted, “It is not the end, it is the beginning! It is not extinction, it is eternity! Is it not true, my listeners, such tombs as this demonstrate immortality? In the presence of the illustrious dead, we feel more distinctly the divine destiny of that intelligence which traverses the earth to suffer and to purify itself—which we call man.” Balzac was buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Essayist Charles Lamb, 59, dead of erysipelas after grazing his cheek

The poet and essayist Charles Lamb was taking a walk in London a few days before Christmas in 1834, when he tripped and fell, scraping his cheek slightly on the pavement. A few days later he was dead from that tiny scratch. Known nowadays mostly for his Essays of Elia, his Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, and the Tales from Shakespeare written with his deranged sister, Mary, Lamb was born on February 10, 1775, in London.

Both he and his sister suffered mental disorders, but Mary was homicidally psychopathic. In 1796 she murdered their mother. The Times of London gave this account: 
 
               It appeared by the evidence adduced, that while the  
         family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized 
         a case-knife laying [sic] on the  table, and in a menacing 
         manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice,              
         round the room. On the calls of her infirm mother to 
         forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud 
         shrieks approached her parent. The child, by her cries, 
         quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but              
         too late. The dreadful scene presented to him the 
         mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her 
         daughter yet wildly standing over her with the              
         fatal knife, and the old man her father weeping by her 
         side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of 
         a severe blow he received from one of the forks she had 
         been madly hurling about the room. 

Charles arrived on the scene too late to stop her and could only snatch the knife from her hand to prevent more mayhem. He devoted the rest of his life to caring for Mary, who was eleven years older and outlived him by thirteen years.

Lamb’s essays were written under the pen name Elia, the name of a co-worker at South Sea House, the trading company that was the subject of one of the first essays. In two volumes, the essays are elegant, whimsical observations on scenes from his childhood and later life. When the South Sea House went out of business, Lamb took a job as a clerk at the East India Company, where he remained for twenty-five years. The Shakespeare tales, co-authored with Mary during her lucid periods, are simplified re-tellings of Shakespeare’s plays for children.

One of those people known as “spiritual but not religious,” Lamb had a distaste for organized Christian denominations but regarded the New Testament as the “best guide” for one’s life. At times he seemed drawn to Unitarianism. His good friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge was of the opinion that Lamb’s “faith in Jesus had been preserved” even in the light of his sister’s ghastly violence, and William Wordsworth also regarded Lamb as a faithful Christian. He wrote of him in a long poem after his death: “O, he was good, if e’er a good Man lived!”

Shortly after Lamb tripped and fell during his walk, he developed erysipelas, a streptococcal infection of the skin and soft tissue sometimes known as St. Anthony’s fire. It is accompanied by fever, chills, and malaise, and it can be fatal if it causes bacteremia or septic shock, which infect the blood system. This is evidently what happened to Lamb, and after four days of illness, he died on December 27, 1834, in the home on Church Street, Edmonton, in north London, that he shared with Mary. He was fifty-nine.

He is buried in the churchyard of All Saints Church in Edmonton, where Mary joined him in 1847.

Montaigne, 59, Victim of Rare Quinsy Infection While At Mass

“The first modern man,” Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, is remembered for inventing a new literary form in his Essais—a word that means “attempts” and that consisted of his cogent observations on religion, love, friendship, death, and his own psyche. “Modern” in the sense that he elevated the individual human being to a position of pre-eminence in the scheme of things, he said when his first book of essays was published, “I am myself the matter of my book.”

 

Montaigne  was born February 28, 1533, to a family of minor nobility and major wealth at the Chateau de Montaigne near Bordeaux, France, of which his father was mayor. He was tutored at home, and in the aristocratic manner spoke only Latin until he was six. Every morning he was awakened by a musician playing a zither or lute.  He continued his education at the College of Guyenne and the University of Toulouse, where he studied law.  Following in his father’s footsteps, he became a member of the Bordeaux local assembly.

A turning point in his life was meeting Étienne de la Boétie, a judge and writer of political philosophy, who became Montaigne’s closest friend and mentor. La Boétie died of dysentery at the age of thirty-three, and Montaigne supervised the posthumous publication of his works.

In 1565 Montaigne married Françoise de la Chassaigne, daughter of a colleague in a wedding pre-arranged by his family. They had six daughters, only one of whom survived to adulthood.

In 1571, Montaigne retired from public life and devoted himself to writing his Essais. He set up a retreat in a round room in the family castle, lined with thousands of books, where he worked in seclusion for most of every day. The first two books of his Essais were published in 1580. They reflected Montaigne’s skepticism of absolute truths in matters of religion, philosophy, and politics. He is famous for posing the rhetorical question Que sais-je? (“What do I know?”)

Despite his skepticism, Montaigne remained a loyal Roman Catholic who said daily prayers and was an important moderating influence in the hostilities between Catholic and Protestant factions in France. He served as mayor of Bordeaux and continued his writing with a third book of Essais published in 1587.

In his youth Montaigne was terrified of death; not only had his friend La Boétie died at an early age, Montaigne’s father succumbed to kidney stones shortly afterward, and his younger brother had a fatal hemorrhage after being hit in the head by a tennis ball. "With such frequent everyday examples passing before our eyes," he wrote, "how could we possibly avoid thinking of death and of how it constantly grips us by the throat?"

He got over that fear in an out-of-body near-death experience in his thirties. He was thrown off his horse and knocked unconscious in a collision with another rider. As his friends rushed to help him, he began to cough up blood and clutch at his chest. His own recollection, however, was that he was floating on a cloud of pleasure.  He concluded from this experience that death was a natural occurrence and worrying about it was a waste of time.

Montaigne had much to say about death in his Essais. In “To Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die,” he wrote: “Of the many benefits that virtue confers upon us, contempt for death is one of the greatest, as the means by which human life acquires a gentle tranquility, and a pleasant taste for living, without which no other pleasure would exist. The end of mankind is death; it is a necessary goal. The ignorant do not think about it—but one must take the bull by the horns and face it squarely. We can fight death by disarming him of his strangeness if we are familiar with him and think about him often. That will encourage and strengthen us, even as we remember in the midst of our jollity and feasting, that we are frail beings.”

In 1578 Montaigne had an attack of kidney stones, which continued to plague him for the rest of his life.  He disdained the advice of local physicians and sought cures during travels to Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. It wasn’t the stones, however, but an attack of quinsy that caused his death on September 23, 1592.

Quinsy, also known as peritonsillar abscess, is a rare bacterial infection, resulting in a concentration of pus between the tonsils and the throat wall. It is accompanied by fever, sore throat, neck pain, swollen lymph nodes, paralysis of the tongue, and eventually an inability to swallow or even to open the mouth. Afflicted with these symptoms and sensing that death was near, Montaigne summoned several friends and a priest, whom he asked to say mass. Montaigne tried to raise himself up during the elevation of the consecrated host, and he died immediately afterward. He was fifty-nine.

Montaigne was buried on his estate, but after some months the remains were moved to a church in Bordeaux. During the French Revolution, what was thought to be his coffin was moved with much fanfare to a museum—but it was later discovered it was the wrong coffin. Today, the Bordeaux Tourist Office says that Montaigne is buried at the Musée Aquitaine in Bordeaux, but others sources say that tomb is a cenotaph that does not contain the body, which is at the church of Foeuillens in Bordeaux. It is also claimed by some that Montaigne’s heart is separately interred in the parish church near his home in the town of Saint-Michele-de-Montaigne.