Braving his attacks, he holds fast to his work, making huge efforts to implement his promises: “The next instalment (of _The Idiot_) is announced for April, and I’ve nothing ready, except one unimportant chapter. What am I to send? I have no idea. The day before yesterday I did some writing all the same, in a state bordering on madness.” If the sole consequence were pain and discomfort! But, alas! “I notice to my despair that I am no longer fit to work as quickly as of old, indeed, as up till quite recently.” Again and again he laments the weakening of his memory and his imagination, and at the age of fifty-eight, two years before his death, he said: “For a long time I’ve been conscious that where work is concerned, the longer, the more difficult, and so my thoughts are gloomy, and there is nowhere solace for me.” And yet, he could write _The Karamazovs_. When Baudelaire’s _Letters_ were published last year, M. Mendès was shocked and protested, in no measured terms, either, invoking the poet’s right to have his intimate concerns respected. No doubt there will always be ultra-sensitive, easily shocked readers who prefer to see only the heads and shoulders of great men, who rise up in revolt at the publication of personal documents and private correspondence, discerning in these only what can agreeably flatter a mediocre intelligence which delights to find a hero bound by the same infirmities as itself. So they talk of “indiscretion”; or if they are of a romantic turn of mind, of “ghouls”; at the mildest, of “unhealthy curiosity.” “Leave the man in peace,” they say, “his work alone is of account.” Agreed! but the wonder of it, and, to me, the profound lesson of it, is, that the “work” should have been written in spite of the “man.”