D’Annunzio, the Immortal Who Died

He was born in a backward province, in a town of no consequence. His father was a politician and lecher, his mother one of those saintly women that Italy is famous for. He was one of five children. None of the others ever amounted to much. He had his first glimpse of glory at sixteen, the glory of Pushkin and Balzac that never tarnishes, and he was never to lose sight of it, even in the final years of his life when toothless and senile he died on a day he had predicted.

When I visited Gabriele D’Annunzio’s villa which overlooks Lake Garda in northern Italy, it was November 1976. The big hotels along the lake were closed for the winter, the guides—the villa is now a national monument—stood around the cloakroom in their overcoats with newspapers stuffed in their pockets. D’Annunzio bought this villa just after the First World War when it was not much more than a small farmhouse. He named it the Vittoriale which meant roughly, “signifying victory,” and set about enlarging and rebuilding it to his taste. It is filled with books, sculpture, grand pianos, bas-reliefs, and all the memorabilia of his life, even the airplane in which he flew over Vienna.

On the days I was there, few other visitors appeared. The grounds were empty except for an occasional workman. In one of the outlying buildings a large exhibition of photographs of D’Annunzio’s life was in its final, unattended days. I had taken a tour of the main house the day before and now wanted to go through slowly with a notebook. The guide had wandered off and I was alone in a room when a man engaged in replacing a light bulb suddenly noticed me and, straightening up, demanded what was I doing? Photography or making notes was absolutely forbidden, he said. An argument began and finally the guide agreed we would have to obtain permission. We walked down to the administrative offices near the gate. The president of the Vittoriale was not in but an assistant, a woman in her fifties, came out to see us. I explained that I was a writer interested in D’Annunzio. I had taken the tour and was merely going through again and making notes. I showed her some pages.

Ah. If I had only written for permission, she told me, everything would have been all right. As it was, she was sorry, she could not permit it.

“But what objection,” I said, “can there be to making notes?”

“Don’t you see, if we let you do it then all the writers will want to come and do it,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. “How obvious.”

No one wrote like D’Annunzio; no one, not even Byron, led so scandalous and unforgivable a life, and no one has seen his legend vanish more quickly. He was not just the national poet of Italy, he was a Great Poet, that phenomenon which appears only once in a century like a comet, and he saw himself rise and rise further still until he seemed to be as bright as anything in the heavens. At the time of his fame, in the period just before and after the First World War, he was the most romantic and perhaps the greatest figure of the century. But the verdict seems to have come in early. He will not stand with Dante. He will not stand with Wagner. He will not stand with Napoleon.

Gabriele D’Annunzio was born in Pescara, a town in the Abruzzi, in 1863. It was the same year in which Cavafy was born, Chekhov was three. Joseph Conrad six, and Tolstoy was thirty-four. He was the youngest child and a superior student. In those days education was classical. He read Latin and Greek, he knew French perfectly and some English. He had, from the first, an extraordinary ear, an eye that was smitten by beauty, and a desire that was to earn him a place in literature. His first book of poetry was published while he was still in school. It was youthful, passionate, and well-written. He sent a copy with a flattering inscription to the reigning poet of the time, Carducci, and was noticed by the critics. One called him an extraordinary talent. Another, in a phrase that could be applied to him throughout his life, said he deserved a medal and a sound thrashing. With a taste for the extravagant which was to be both his strength and weakness, he sent a false report of his death to a newspaper. Obituaries appeared throughout the country. He was launched.

In Rome he was the very picture of a young poet, romantic and unspoiled, but within a few years the skimpy black suit had vanished and he was summoning waiters in cafés with imperious raps of the cane and borrowing money from them as well. He met the great Carducci who had been his model. He married, in a great scandal and over the fierce objections of her family, the very eligible daughter of the Duke of Gallese. He had no money and expensive tastes. Soon after his marriage he began the series of love affairs that were to continue uninterrupted for more than thirty years and were to include some of the most highly placed women of his time. Meanwhile, he was writing, volume after volume of poetry, journalism, and in 1888 the first novel, Il Piacere (The Child of Pleasure).

His writing was opulent, dazzling, sensuous. He made no distinction, he used to say, between the soul and the flesh. It was a fatal lack. He had abandoned his wife and three children. His mistresses, the important ones, began with a beautiful, middle-class Roman he had first caught sight of standing outside a bookstore. There followed a Sicilian princess, then Eleonora Duse and a marchesa whose father was nothing less than prime minister. All of these and the ones after were infamous. He stood trial for adultery. He fought duels. He was detested by fellow writers, by decent people, the church, many critics, and not a few husbands. He was amoral, grasping, shrewd, and the greatest writer in Italy.

As is the case with all Don Juans, his power came from within. He was anything but handsome. He was short, baldheaded, with bulging eyes and a prominent nose. His hips were broader than his shoulders. His teeth were described as yellow, white, and black. There was something faintly vulgar about him, something ordinary. And yet, women wrecked their lives for him and, abandoned, remembered him forever. It was quite simple: he was a god, and they believed he was. Their letters, their vows, their acts of self-immolation are all the same. The intoxicant he used was his fame.

By 1898 he had settled in a villa outside of Florence where he was to remain for twelve years, the most productive of his life. It was the periodo solare, his years of the sun. Duse had a house close by and their collaboration was one of both spirit and flesh. She was, next to Sarah Bernhardt, the most celebrated actress in the world. “A noble creature, chosen by me, who ruined herself for me,” he later wrote. It was D’Annunzio’s practice to take his novels directly from his personal life. Like George Sand, he wrote his notes almost literally on the body of his partner. In the case of Duse, he did not even wait until they had separated, but in 1900 published Il Fuoco (The Fire), which revealed brutally frank details of their relationship. “I love you but I shall make use of you,” the hero says. It was a huge success and immediately translated into six languages.

During the same period, however, he wrote plays for her, almost one a year, and the poetry which is considered to be his imperishable achievement. When in 1910, hopelessly in debt from years of lavish spending, he went to France, he took with him a world reputation. He spent five years of self-imposed exile there. They were years of excess, even for a man who was used to everything. Then in 1914 the war broke upon France like a thunderstorm.

Now began one of the most exalted phases of his life. Though he was a voluptuary, there was another side to D’Annunzio. He came, it must be remembered, from a region that was both primitive and violent. Virility was his creed. He believed Italy was a great nation, that it had been and was to be again. For a young nation the path to greatness was war. Though the horrors of the conflict were already apparent, D’Annunzio did all he could to bring Italy into it. His fiery speeches in Genoa and Rome were a major factor. On May 23, 1915, Italy joined the Allies.

In anguish at the bitterness of no longer being young and exhausted by years of pleasure, he nevertheless succeeded in joining the army. He was fifty-three. The military authorities recognized he would be of greater value if allowed to fill an unconventional role, and as a result he saw action on land, at sea, and in the air. Although he was in a privileged position, there is no question of his valor. He won the highest decorations. He lost an eye in an aircraft accident. The apogee of his military career was a spectacular raid over Vienna in which he led his squadron and dropped leaflets instead of bombs.

In the end he was disappointed. The fever of the war was over. Like many other men he found it difficult to face peace. Italy had spent too much, there was little to show for it. A year after the war he had one final adventure, he led a force of volunteers, the arditi, into Fiume, a seaport east of Trieste, to seize it for Italy. For over a year he remained there, making speeches from a balcony and refusing to be dislodged. The government finally took courage and moved against him. He capitulated. He was not punished.

When Mussolini, with whom he had been on intimate terms, seized power in 1922, D’Annunzio had already withdrawn to the villa where he remained for the rest of his life. Although he may have had a certain contempt for the Fascists, he had inspired them, helped prepare the ground for them, and was sympathetic with their aims. He continued to write; a national edition of his works comprised some forty-nine volumes.

He was still the greatest of heroes to two generations of Italians. In 1924 he was made a prince, a hereditary title, the Prince of Montenevoso. He fervently supported the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. His teeth were gone, he was a trembling old man, addicted to cocaine. The last photographs show someone looking close to ninety, the nose swollen in a collapsed face, the chin that of a tortoise. The Vittoriale, he had enlarged with state funds into a museum and monument. It was, as well, a mausoleum, a shrine, a tomb like that of the kings. He died suddenly on March 1, 1938, and lay in state in the uniform of a general of the air force. On his finger was his mother’s gold ring. On the photograph of her kept near his bed was written, non pianger piu . . . from a line of Dante’s, “Weep no more, your beloved son is coming home.”

Ariel. A name he called himself and often signed, sometimes as Gabriel Ariel. In every poet, to some degree, there is this lyric angel and the sheer beauty of language is his domain.

Bacca a Luisa. The last of the women. She was a young pianist that he met in Venice during the war and who was with him thereafter. D’Annunzio was passionately devoted to music. He believed the Italian language possessed musical elements that were Wagnerian in their power. He felt himself, in fact, to be the heir to Wagner whose death in Venice with the hero carrying the coffin is the closing scene of one of the novels.

Canto Novo (New Song). The second book of poems, published when he was nineteen. In it was exuberance, sensuality, and an assured voice which cried, “. . . Sing of the immense joy of living, of being strong, of being young, of biting the fruits of the earth, with strong, white, ravenous teeth . . .” Suddenly he was famous.

Capponcina. The villa on a hillside at Settignano, overlooking Florence. The city at that time had great cultural prestige. He remodeled the villa, which was rented, to conform to his taste. The rooms were various shades of gold, there was heavy furniture, statuary, pillows, brocade, and bric-a-brac of every description. He had horses, servants, dogs, and two apartments in town. He lived the life of a gran signore, traveling frequently, often with Duse, and writing prodigiously, plays, novels, his greatest poems. From the furnace of his mind, as he said. Towards the end, when Duse had been replaced, the scale of living went from extravagant to ruinous and favorite horses were sleeping on Persian rugs. In 1911, when he had gone to France, the contents of the villa were put up at auction to satisfy the creditors. Everything was sold, furnishings, horses, pictures, even the dogs.

Duse, Eleonora. She was born in a hotel and died in one. The child of traveling players, her name was on posters when she was six. At sixteen she played Juliet in Verona and scattered roses on the body of Romeo; her ascension had begun. She was plain, with a high forehead, faded-looking, austere. She used no makeup. She made herself up morally, she used to say. She was Bernhardt’s great rival, playing in competition in the same city on many occasions and once in the same theater. They died within a year of each other, Bernhardt in 1923, Duse in 1924.

When she was twenty she was seduced by a newspaper publisher and had a child, who died. She carried the coffin to the cemetery herself, it was in Marina di Pisa, a small seaside town where she would later go with D’Annunzio. When she was twenty-three she married a minor actor. They had a daughter. The husband, she ultimately left in Buenos Aires. She formed her own company and became the mistress of the poet Arrigo Boito. Divorce was nonexistent in Italy then, they could not marry. She was playing Ibsen, Shakespeare, Sardou and Dumas and reading the morning papers in an old shawl and tortoise-shell glasses. There were tours to England, America, all of Europe.

She had been urged to read D’Annunzio by a friend and found herself both attracted and repelled. Boito was eighteen years her senior, wise, idealistic, paternal. Now came the incandescent young poet trailing scandalous relationships and an immense reputation. Amori et dolori sacra—26 Settembre 1895—Hotel Royal Danieli—Venezia is written in his notebooks with an asterisk. Sacred love and pain. It was the night they became lovers. Even before this she had recognized in him the inspired poet the theater had been waiting for and he at last had found his heroine.

In the nine years that they were together, he wrote many plays for her and she determinedly kept them in her repertoire even though they were unsuccessful, even sending him money and false reports from half-empty houses in America. His best play, La Figlia di Iorio, he gave to another actress, just as he had given an earlier one to Bernhardt. Still they traveled and went on tour. They planned a national theater they would have at Albano, immortal plays beneath the stars. Meanwhile, beneath her nose he was writing the novel that exposed her before the world. She could have stopped its publication but chose not to. What was her suffering, she said, compared to the question of giving Italian literature another masterpiece? At the same time she felt soiled and ashamed. The character in the novel, who was called Foscarina, had invaded her life.

The following year she put out 400,000 lire, then an enormous sum, to open his newest play. “To the divine Eleonora Duse,” it was dedicated. By 1903 his unfaithfulness was flagrant. It was the end. In desperation she wrote to her successor begging for a share of D’Annunzio’s life. She then disappeared, in a sense, into tours and distant cities. After several years she retired and bought a small house in the country. Rilke tried to raise money for a theater for her but was unsuccessful. She had a slight limp. During the war she acted a little and worked in hospitals. Her path crossed D’Annunzio’s once, in Udine; he passed in a cheering crowd. Their last meeting was in Milan. She was in her sixties and wanted to produce one of his plays. As he left her he is reported to have said, “How you have loved me!”

She was on tour in America when she died, in Pittsburgh, on April 21, 1924. Her body was returned to Italy and is buried in the cemetery of Asolo, in the theater where we will all act someday, as she liked to say. All of D’Annunzio’s letters to her were burned. To the end, though, she still blessed him, the great giver of life who had made her what she was. Before him, she said, she had not existed.

Exile. 1910 to 1915. He went first to Paris where he lived at the Hotel Meurice and quickly met everyone of importance. This was the Paris of Isadora Duncan, Proust, Diaghilev, and Stravinsky. He divided his time between the capital and a small summer resort near Bordeaux and resumed the life he had been living in Italy, mirrors, divans, damasks, women in emeralds and pearls. He seduced and was seduced. He caught syphilis. He raced greyhounds. Also, he triumphed. He was a figure, a cult. Plays poured forth, vast works of pretension and self-indulgence. Among these the grandest was The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.

Fantasia. The yacht on which he went to Greece, with four companions including his French translator, Herelle, in 1895. D’Annunzio spent the days lying naked in the hot sun and having the sailors cool him with buckets of water. The conversation was mostly of cities and women and on a vulgar level. They read little or nothing and asked the guides to take them to brothels. In Athens they visited museums—the treasures of Mycenae had recently been discovered by Schliemann. From this trip and from notebooks that contained laundry lists and women’s addresses came the first book of the Laudi, the series that includes D’Annunzio’s finest work. When he returned with Duse some years later, he gave a speech saying that he owed to Greece the maturity of his mind.

Father. Francesco Paolo D’Annunzio, mayor of Pescara, landowner and bankrupt. He was born Rapagnetta but took the name of an uncle who had adopted him, providing his son with a priceless legacy although Gabriele D’Annunzio was called Rapagnetta by detractors all his life. The father had small eyes, full lips, dyed hair when he was older, and an unquenchable sexual appetite. He arranged to send his son to the finest school, however, and paid for the printing of his first book of poems. He died in 1893. D’Annunzio did not return home in time for the funeral.

Flying. He flew for the first time in 1909 with the American pilot Glenn Curtiss. He experienced rapture, comparable only to the purest sensations of art and love, he said.

Some of his best descriptions are those of pilots who were his comrades and whom he could still recall vividly even when an old man.

Genoa. It was here he came in 1915, returning from exile in France with his eyes blindfolded as he neared the border should the emotion of seeing his homeland again prove too powerful. Here he delivered the first of the orations that helped to bring Italy into the war. Italy had an alliance with the Central Powers but had entered into negotiations with the Allies to see who would offer the most for her participation. It is likely D’Annunzio knew of this; his speech had been submitted for government approval. The occasion was the anniversary of Garibaldi’s sailing fifty years earlier, there were some of his white-bearded veterans in the crowd. D’Annunzio was not just a writer standing up to speak. He had taken curtain calls, delivered eulogies, gone on lecture tours. He was an actor playing the role of his life. The reaction of the crowd was frenzied. He felt the drunkenness that comes from a feverish mob. He went on to Rome where 40,000 people were waiting for him at the station. “No!” he cried in a speech, “We will not be a museum, a hotel, a vacation resort, a horizon painted Prussian blue where foreigners come for their honeymoons . . .” He was constantly interrupted by applause. His rooms at the hotel were drowned in flowers. He was summoned to meet the king who held out his hand, D’Annunzio said, to the good fighter who expressed the feelings of his people. A few days later Italy was at war.

Hardouin, Maria. Daughter of the Duke of Gallese, she was for fifty-five years the wife of D’Annunzio and his widow for sixteen. As a young girl she was slender, blonde, and unassuming. D’Annunzio had been invited to the family palace by her mother. The daughter was then eighteen with a taste for poetry and art. Soon they were exchanging notes and meeting secretly. They tried to elope but were caught. The affair was made even more infamous by D’Annunzio’s poem, “Sin of May,” that told of a blonde virgin and the gift she gave the poet, not to mention newspaper articles and his many confidences to friends. Three months pregnant and over the fierce objections of her father she was married without dowry in an almost empty church. After the honeymoon they settled for a while in Pescara. There were a few years of happiness, but she had made a terrible mistake, she would have done better to buy his books than to marry him, she later said. She discovered the first infidelities from a letter which fell out of his pocket. She bore him three sons; by the time the last one arrived D’Annunzio merely telegraphed instructions as to its naming.

Il Fuoco (The Fire). The most swinish book ever written, as one critic said. The scene is Venice, an autumnal city where a famous actress past her prime is desperate and wandering. The Hero is tormented by never having possessed her just after one of her triumphs on the stage when she was still hot from the breath of the crowd. Duse was five years older than he, but in the novel D’Annunzio makes it twenty. It was a work of pure invention, he insisted. People did not understand the real essence of the book which was “an act of gratitude.”

La figlia di Iorio (The Daughter of Iorio). His most successful play and the only one which remains popular. He wrote it in thirty-three feverish days at Nettuno in the summer of 1903. The summer was his favorite time for work. He would begin at four in the afternoon, have a light meal at eight, and work until dawn. He preferred to be near the sea.

Laudi (Praises). The four books which contain the best of D’Annunzio’s poetry. They were part of a projected series of seven, each to bear the name of one of the Pleiades. The full title is In Praise of Sky, Sea, Earth, and Heroes. Of the four, Alcyone, published in 1904, is generally conceded to be the finest. It describes the sensations of a Tuscan summer, the sounds, smells, glare, the burning noons. Many of the poems are of astonishing beauty, and when asked in old age which of his works he would like to see preserved, he said, “Alcyone.”

Leone, Elvira. The dark-haired woman he had seen in front of a bookstore, she was the first important mistress. He saw her a second time at a concert. It was the spring of 1887, she was just recovering from a long illness. Within a week he had possessed her and renamed her Barbara. They had seven days of love in a small hotel in Albano. Their desire was, in his words, irreparable and unhealable. She was separated from her husband and lived with her parents. She would come to D’Annunzio in the room where he worked and give herself to him. He made detailed notes of her body which she found and read. These, as well as her letters, he used in a novel, Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death), in which she is the heroine. “There is but one intoxication on earth,” the hero says, “the certainty, the absolute unshakable certainty of possessing another human being.”

Libyan War. In 1911, stimulated by the conquests of her powerful neighbors, Italy entered the final phase of the colonial era like the last stock buyer before the crash. Italian regiments sailed for North Africa to fight for the desert, and D’Annunzio’s poems in praise of the adventure, written from exile and published prominently in the pages of the Corriere della Sera, made him a national poet at last.

Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien (The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian). A zeppelin of the theater, written in French, in five “mansions,” as the acts were called, with music by Debussy and a cast of two hundred. It was created for the dancer Ida Rubinstein. The costumes and decor were by Bakst. A glittering audience attended the premiere on May 22, 1911, and it was three in the morning when the last curtain fell. Proust found it boring despite the climax when the dancer was bound half naked to a tree and, avid for martyrdom, died beneath a rain of arrows. There were only ten performances although it reappeared after the war in Milan and more recently in Paris.

Mistresses. A hysterical Sicilian princess with whom D’Annunzio had two children followed Barbara Leone. Her name was Maria Gravina. She had run away from her husband and it was he who had them tried for adultery; they were convicted but never went to prison. She was moody, suicidal, and jealous to the point of madness, she used to wait for D’Annunzio with a loaded revolver in her hand. After six years he finally parted from her by packing a small suitcase and saying he was going to Rome for twenty-four hours. He never returned. Next came Duse and after her, the tall, blonde Alessandra di Rudini who came to the Capponcina on a path the servants had strewn with rose petals, D’Annunzio at her side in a suit of white silk. She was a widow at twenty-six and a noted horseman. Nike, he called her. It was she who introduced D’Annunzio to the Lake Garda region where she had a house.

Nathalie de Goloubeff was Russian, a singer, she had been sculpted by Rodin. She had two children and a rich husband; D’Annunzio always preferred other men’s wives, proven women, as it were. She dreamed of performing in his Phaedra. She began learning the part, had costumes made, took singing lessons. Telegrams with secret words flew between them. Mixed with fervent expression were powerful erotic acts. “A great naked bee with beautiful tresses,” he called her. When, after several years, he became indifferent, she retired to a farm outside Paris where she cared for his greyhounds and pitied her lost life. He sometimes visited her there. Until 1932 she held on to the farm though the dogs were gone and she had lost everything in the Russian revolution.

He would weep if he saw her again, she wrote. She sold his letters, stipulating that they not be published during his lifetime. She died a beggar in a small hotel in Meudon in 1941. Among her few possessions was a handsome dog collar with the name of their great greyhound, Agitator, that had won at St. Cloud.

Montesquiou, Robert de. The tall, arrogant, homosexual poet who was the model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus. He introduced D’Annunzio to the society of Paris in 1910 and was his greatest champion. It was Montesquiou who took him to the dressing room of Ida Rubinstein after a performance of the ballet Cleopatra. D’Annunzio fell to his knees and, looking up at the boyish body, the long legs, the narrow head, whispered, “Saint Sebastien.”

Mussolini. Their paths crossed after the war when Mussolini was editor of Popolo d’Italia and still a Socialist. He supported D’Annunzio’s march into Fiume and even encouraged him to go further, to overthrow the government in Rome. Dear Comrade, it was, and My Dear Friend. D’Annunzio did not have the talent or instinct for such a coup, however. Mussolini later cooperated with the government to bring the Fiume occupation to an end. From this time on he was central to D’Annunzio’s life, paying him, flattering him, and in a sense confining him. He made a number of visits to the Vittoriale, the last in March 1938 when he walked behind the coffin.

Ortona. D’Annunzio’s mother’s birthplace near Pescara and the seat of his candidacy for parliament in 1899. He ran successfully as a conservative. He was not and never had intended to be only a poet; the world had to understand that he was capable of everything. His political career consisted of two speeches, a duel, and a dramatic change of party when he walked across the Chamber of Deputies from the right to the left, from death to life, he said. In the following election he ran from a district of Florence and was soundly defeated.

Vienna. It was described as one of the greatest exploits of the war. The mission had been cancelled several times. At last the weather was right. On August 12, 1918, the planes took off at dawn, one by one, and reached the Austrian capital by midmorning. “Over Vienna a pale mist lay,” D’Annunzio reported. “Our manifestos drifted down like leaves falling in autumn.”

People of Vienna. We are flying over Vienna and could drop tons of bombs, on the contrary, we leave a salutation and a flag with its colors of liberty . . .

There was scrambling in the streets for the leaflets. Seven hundred miles, the newspapers hailed, with two crossings of the Alps and the stormy Adriatic. D’Annunzio delivered a speech: “We passed in our flight . . . the Isonzo, like a ribbon fallen from heaven, and forgotten Sabotino . . . Caporetto, like the Despair, which climbed up to tear our wings, all our slaughterhouses, our cemeteries, our Calvaries, our holy places. No, comrades, don’t weep . . . Remember, remember, remember . . .” Elated by his success he planned a series of flights over all the capitals of Europe, flying directly over Mont Blanc, the highest point on the continent, as a symbol, but the war ended.

World War I. He saw action on land, with the 77th Regiment. He led a raid by torpedo boats against the harbor of Buccari. He commanded a flying squadron, made speeches to troops, won medals, fell to his knees to kiss the earth of battlefields. In Venice, while convalescing and half-blind, he wrote on slips of paper handed to him by his daughter the book that is regarded as his finest prose, Notturno (Nocturne). The war exhilarated him. At the head of his bed was a banner, on the dressing table, talismans and perfume. He flew in patent-leather boots with high heels and sometimes held the bombs between his knees. In the air over Italy he was battered by his age, the passions of his heroines crashing back to him, the memories, the trampled lives. He had no fear, he said, because he expected every mission to be his last and he could desire no greater glory than to die for Italy with “her beautiful limbs, from which harvests, artists and heroes were born.” Death, he described as the male genius to whom youth was consecrated. Blood, wounds, and sacrifice, they were woven into themes to create an invincible nation, a great Italy rejoicing in just battle. “You with us,” the blue and white banner of his squadron said, “We with you.”

He had seduced a nation. He had as much as anyone brought his country into war. And afterwards the seizure of Fiume. He had spent himself. He had always considered himself a god and behaved as one, but physically and psychologically he was exhausted. The cloak of heroism which he had fashioned for himself had become heavy. With such a cloak, how much further could he march?

He went as far as Lake Garda. His uniforms are there, his letters from Rostand and Anatole France, his signed copies of Wagner’s librettos. His death mask is there, as well, the nose larger, the eyes closed and at peace or at least in repose like a performer resting, like a gambler who need no longer play.

The Paris Review

Fall/Winter 1978