Every hour I say to Death, 'When you like!' What is
he waiting for?"[43]
[Footnote 41: Letter to Bennet. He did not believe in patriotism.
"Patriotism? Fetichism! Cretinism!" (_Memoires_, II, 261).]
[Footnote 42: Letter to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 July, 1862.]
[Footnote 43: _Memoires_, II, 391.]
And yet he fears the death he invites. It is the strongest, the
bitterest, the truest feeling he has. No musician since old Roland de
Lassus has feared it with that intensity. Do you remember Herod's
sleepless nights in _L'Enfance du Christ_, or Faust's soliloquy, or the
anguish of Cassandra, or the burial of Juliette?--through all this you
will find the whispered fear of annihilation. The wretched man was
haunted by this fear, as a letter published by M. Julien Tiersot
shows:--
"My favourite walk, especially when it is raining, really raining
in torrents, is the cemetery of Montmartre, which is near my house.
I often go there; there is much that draws me to it. The day before
yesterday I passed two hours in the cemetery; I found a comfortable
seat on a costly tomb, and I went to sleep....
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