Pascal said that the solitude of death was the bitterest pang of humanity; and because one must die alone, the end of life is its heaviest trial. Some Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, very French, have essayed, in their peculiar fashion, to elude the disaster, simply by dying in public. People in Paris died in public in the seventeenth century. Death, as Mr. Herman Merivale puts it, was but the last scene of the play, to be performed with a theatrical bow and exit. He shows us the young beauty, perishing of dissipation, who made her adieux to the world in appropriate costume and sentiments; and the worn-out statesman, who might not turn his face to the wall in peace, but was surrounded by a whole court in full dress, and talked on till his husky accents could no longer convey the last of his smart sayings to the listeners.[42] With all his fribbles and frivolities Horace Walpole was not quite Frenchified enough to willingly face death in a French hotel, with all its noise and excitement, “and, what would be still worse, exposed to receive all visits; for the French, you know,” he writes to Conway, “are never more in public than in the act of death. I am like animals, and love to hide myself when I am dying”—which refers to his periodical, and prolonged, and always perilous attacks of gout. “If,” says the author of “Life in the Sick-room,” “I could not trust my friends to save me from involuntary encroachment at the last, I had rather scoop myself a hole in the sand of the desert, and die alone, than be tended by the gentlest hands, and soothed by the most loving voices in the choicest chamber.” Wordsworth’s Marmaduke exclaims,— “Give me a reason why the wisest thing That the earth knows shall never choose to die, But some one must be near to count his groans. The wounded deer retires to solitude, And dies in solitude: all things but man, All die in solitude.”