The end of Pergolese's career was now approaching. For about four years he had had frequent hemorrhages and had shown other signs of pulmonary consumption. Beside having within it the germs of this fatal disease, his constitution had been sapped and weakened by dissipation, and what one of his biographers calls squarely his "_passion effrénée pour les femmes_." To save what strength and life he still had, it was necessary that he should leave Rome for a less trying climate, and he determined to return to the softer and more salubrious air of Naples. One writer says that he betook himself to a property belonging to the Duke of Maddaloni, at Torre del Greco, just at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, where the sunny exposure and the protection of the volcano from the winds of the north are thought to be extremely propitious to such invalids as he. But this stay can have been only temporary, because his final residence is known to have been in a villa at Pozzuoli, which is quite on the other side of Naples and is to be accounted a no less salubrious place of sojourn, having been sought for sanitary reasons by the old Romans. Pergolese was hardly fit to do any work in these days, but he had accepted a commission from the confraternity of San Luigi di Palazzo, in Rome, and was determined to execute it. The subject was a "Salve Regina," and he was to receive for it the munificent sum of ten ducats--equivalent, perhaps, to about eight dollars of the present currency. Like Mozart, laboring over this "Requiem," Pergolese gave his last thought and his last strength to this anthem, and had hardly completed it when, on the 16th of March, 1736. he died. There were rumors at the time, which even had some currency years later, that he had been poisoned, the isolation of his retreat and the peculiarity of some of his symptoms suggesting the possibility of this. But, apart from the fact that his physical condition and his known habits explained his maladies and their inevitable termination, Pergolese was not a figure of sufficient importance to excite jealousy or animosity. His life had not been a public one in the full sense of the word, and in the lyric drama, where he desired most to shine, he had made but one real success--that of "La Serva Padrona."