He, too, was bisexual in his instincts. He glorified purity and sobriety as over-compensation for his shortcomings in both these respects. Much as he did, he never could complete the great work he had long planned, and despair at his impotence to achieve his ambitions made him at last take flight to insanity as a refuge and finally to joint suicide with a woman. Late in life he lost the power to distinguish between fact and fancy, so fully had his writing become a surrogate for life. Wagner said that if life were as full as we wish it to be, there would be no need of art, and von Kleist’s biographer seems to doubt whether to call his end a victory or a surrender. His wooing of death was not, like Segantini’s, a continuation and consummation of the thanatopsis mood of adolescence but was rather due to a growing endogenous lethargy and apathy. He lost his appetite for life, from which he had expected more than it has to give even to the most favored, and thus at the critical age when men are prone to weigh themselves in the balance, he found incompleteness and inferiority both within and without and so threw himself into the arms of the Great Silencer. Everything conventional had long since palled upon him. “His early fixation upon an unattainable goal was broken down and he pursued the unattainable until he fancied he found it in death.” The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War seemed, for a time, to afford him an outlet for his pent-up desires without compelling him to resort to illness. In his ground _motif_ De Maupassant[17] belongs to the same category as Lenau and von Kleist. He inherited neurotic trends from both parents and died in 1893 at the age of forty-three, having experienced most of the episodes of life and during his twelve productive years written fourteen volumes and climbed to the very summit of the French Parnassus. His morbidity was partly congenital and partly metasyphilitic. Had he lived his simple life in his Normandy home, instead of coming to Paris, he might have survived but he fell a victim to narcotics, ether, hashish, morphine, cocaine, Bacchus, and Venus. Like so many great men afflicted with the same disease, his symptoms showed many marked departures from its ordinary course, and before its active stage his divarications in the fields of various abnormal symptom-groups were many. His passion for the horrible is perhaps best illustrated in his shuddering “Horla.”