There is something infinitely pathetic in recording that Puccini, when fortune smiled upon him, wrote to this brother in great glee to tell him of the success of _Manon_, and to say that he was able to buy the house in Lucca where they were born. But Michael, who had departed to South America to mend his own fortunes, was then lying dead of yellow fever, to which he had succumbed after three days' illness. _Edgar_ being completed, the work brought him in about six times the amount he had obtained for _Le Villi_, while with _Manon_, which followed, his position became practically assured for the future. Always of a shy, retiring disposition, he had often longed to get away from the cramped conditions of town life, and Torre del Lago, on a secluded lake not far from Lucca, lying in beautiful country, surrounded by woods, and connected by canals with the sea--into which it flows just by the spot where Shelley's body was washed ashore and afterwards burned--was an ideal spot to which his thoughts had often turned. He went there to reside first in 1891, about the time he was writing _La Bohème_; but some time before that he had found a partner of his joys in Elvira Bonturi, who, like himself, came from Lucca, and whom he married. Their only son, Antonio, was born in the December of 1886. It was not until 1900 that Puccini built the delightful villa at Torre del Lago to which he is so devotedly attached, and to which he always refers as a Paradise. [Illustration: PUCCINI'S VILLA AT TORRE DEL LAGO] Before finally deciding on a site at Torre del Lago--the Tower of the Lake--Puccini stayed for a time at Castellaccio, near Pescia, where a good deal of _La Bohème_ was put to paper. _Tosca_ was begun at Torre del Lago, and finished during a visit at the country house, Monsagrati, not far from Lucca, of his friend the Marquis Mansi. At the time of _Madama Butterfly_ he was back at Torre del Lago, to which he was taken after his motor accident, but he was at this time the possessor of another country villa at Abetone, in the Tuscan Appenines, and in this latter place a good deal of his latest opera was set down. He has more recently built yet another country villa on the opposite side of the lake to Torre del Lago, on the Chiatri Hill. It is a charming example of the Florentine style of architecture, in which brick and marble are most skilfully blended. But Puccini told me, when last I saw him, that so far he had only spent a week-end in it.