Her later poems record increasing misery and loneliness, restless travel, “loveless loves” and premonition of death. From the three posthumous volumes come such titles as “Solitude Nocturne,” “Résurrection Mauvaise,” “Déroute,” “Vieillesse Commence,” “Détrônée,” and “Cyprès de Purgatoire.” Short quotations will suffice to convey their tone: L’amour dont je subis l’abominable loi M’attire vers ce que je crains le plus, vers toi![30] or: Les êtres de la nuit et les êtres du jour Ont longtemps partagé mon âme, tour à tour ... Les êtres de la nuit sont faibles et charmantes ... On ne boit qu’un baiser décevant sur leur bouche... Et leur amour n’est qu’un mensonge de la nuit ...[31] or: Le monde inhospitable est pareil à l’auberge Où l’on vit mal, tout est mal, on dort mal. Et pendant que le cri des femmes se prolonge, Je cherche le Palais Impossible du Songe.[32] The Dream here was not, of course, such as comes with sleep, but that illusion of Love which she had pursued all her life. The final volume, _Haillons_, is filled with cries of pain and horror, of foreseeing the end and wanting it to come swiftly. The known facts of her last year are gleaned from Colette’s _Ces Plaisirs_ and from news notes following her death. She was living alone in her Paris residence, an “Arabian Nights dream” of luxury crowded with the trophies of her travels. Colette conveys vividly the macabre effect of rooms hung with gloomy colors and inadequately lighted by brown tapers; the exotic flowers and food and drink; and the unpredictable eccentricity of the hostess, dressed always in diaphanous black or violet, who might walk out in the middle of a dinner in response to mysterious summons from a nameless “Friend.” This figure was so anonymous and so capriciously tyrannous that Colette surmises she may have been the figment of an imagination already clouded by intemperate habits. It is known that the unhappy poet was drinking to excess, an indulgence particularly dangerous in view of her thyroid imbalance. A few weeks before her death she was to appear in a tableau as Lady Jane Grey on the executioner’s scaffold, and wishing to enhance her effectiveness as the tragic heroine, Vivien put herself through a punishing regime of violent exercise, little food, and much alcohol. She made a brilliant appearance, but fainted on the stage and was carried home to bed. Soon afterwards, as the result of further drinking to escape black depression, she strangled while attempting to eat and was quickly stricken with pneumonia.[33] It was at this point that, with the utmost secrecy, she joined the Church of Rome, as Violet Shilleto had done before her. Colette’s matter-of-fact surmise is that a dour and disapproving elderly maid was responsible for summoning a priest while her mistress was delirious, and Natalie Clifford Barney in the longest of her memorial poems to the dead girl agrees with Colette in implying external pressure: