In the early days of the New Year, the dying man’s hopes were raised by the sight of “a famous Egyptologist who looks like a corpse, has looked like one for fourteen years, who is much worse than I am, & yet lives on and does things. My spirits have gone up immensely since I have known him.”... But the middle of the month saw the cold north-east wind come down on Mentone, and it blew the flickering candle of Beardsley’s life to its guttering. After the 25th of January he never again left his room. February sealed his fate. He took to his bed, from which he arose but fitfully, yet at least he was granted the inestimable boon of being able to read. The Egyptologist also took to his bed--a bad omen for Beardsley. By the end of February the poor plagued fellow had lost heart--he felt the grave deepening and could not summon the will any further to clamber out of it. [Illustration: THE DEATH OF PIERROT “_As the dawn broke, Pierrot fell into his last sleep. Then upon tip-toe, silently up the stair, noiselessly into the room, came the comedians Arlecchino, Pantaleone, il Dottore, and Columbina, who with much love carried away upon their shoulders, the white frocked clown of Bergamo; whither, we know not._”] The sands in the hour-glass of Pierrot were running low. It was soon a fearful effort to use his beloved pen. Anxious to complete his designs and decorations for the _Volpone_, and remembering the pushing forward of the _Prospectus_ that he had urged on the publisher, he had fallen back on the pencil--as the elaborately drawn _Initial_ letters show--for each of the scenes in _Volpone_, employing pencil with the consummate tact and beauty of craftsmanship that had marked his pen line and his aquatintesques in line and wash. Whatever dreams he had of full-paged illustrations in line and wash had now to be abandoned. Just as in his Great Period of _The Savoy_ he had come nearer to nature and had discovered the grass on the fields and flowers in the woods to be as decorative under the wide heavens as they were when cut in glasses “at Goodyears” in the Royal Arcade; just as he had found that fabrics, gossamer or silk or brocade, were as decorative as were flat black masses; just as he found intensely musical increase in the orchestration of his line as he admitted nature into his imagination; so now he came still nearer to nature with the pencil, and his Satyr as a terminal god illumined by the volume of atmosphere and lit by the haunting twilight, like his Greek column against the sky, took on quite as decorative a form as any flatness of black or white in his Japanesque or Greek Vase-painting phases. But as his skilled fingers designed the new utterance to his eager spirit, the fragile body failed him--at last the unresponsive pencil fell from his bloodless fingers--his work was done.