He retired to Croisset, shut himself up in solitude, deeply wounded as he was, for long months, and slowly began to work anew. He grew old. He lost by death his older friends, George Sand and Théophile Gautier; the friends of his youth and those who were his comrades in thought, Louis Bouilhet, Feydeau, Jules de Goncourt, and others. He grew lonely. His health gave way; there came a time when he could not endure walking,--indeed, could not even bear to see others walk. He became poor. He lost his property, which from the kindness of his heart he had intrusted to his only niece, and which her husband had foolishly squandered, and during the latter years of his life he was tormented with anxieties regarding means of subsistence. Toward the last he rarely went to Paris; indeed, he did not even go into his garden. His sole exercise consisted in an occasional walk from his bed-chamber to his study, and down stairs to take his solitary meals. He died in May, 1880, and was buried at Rouen. The funeral procession was small; only a few friends from Paris followed him to his last resting-place. From Rouen scarcely any one attended the funeral, for he was almost entirely unknown to the majority of the inhabitants, and by the minority who knew him, he was hated as an immoral and irreligious writer. [1] The titles are: Madame Bovary, Salammbô, L'éducation sentimentale, La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, Le Candidat, Trois Contes, Bouvard et Pécuchet. [2] See Th. de Banville's _Odes funambulesque: Vilanelle des pauvres housseurs,_ and two _Triolets._ FREDERIK PALUDAN-MÜLLER. 1881. From Germans who were conversant with the Danish language, I have frequently heard the remark, "Paludan-Müller, not Oehlenschläger, is the greatest poet Denmark has produced in this century. How strange this has never been recognized!" It has never been recognized because it is not the case. Intellectual superiority has here been confounded with poetic, or personal maturity preferred to the originality of genius. In Meyer's "Konversations-Lexikon" we read: "Paludan-Müller is unconditionally the most important Danish author of our century, quite as much owing to his wealth of ideas, as to the depth of his moral earnestness and the beauty of form displayed in his diction." Questionable as the justice of this assertion appears to me, it is equally unquestionable that Paludan-Müller (born Feb. 7, 1809, died Dec. 28, 1876) is far more calculated to interest the foreign reader than any other modern Danish author, and his deep, inquiring mind is especially in harmony with the German mind. [Illustration: FREDERIK PALUDAN-MÜLLER.] I.