Achievements of Famous Invalids.

Some of the Most Distinguished Workers in the Fields of Literature and Music Have Won Their Triumphs While Defying Disease—Many Examples of Extraordinary Longevity.An original article written forThe Scrap Book.

Some of the Most Distinguished Workers in the Fields of Literature and Music Have Won Their Triumphs While Defying Disease—Many Examples of Extraordinary Longevity.

An original article written forThe Scrap Book.

Ill health and infirmity do not always prevent the accomplishment of great things, and the list of invalids who have been famous for excelling in their chosen field is long and brilliant. Naturally such persons usually have been restricted to the quieter pursuits. Literature seems to have been the field wherein most of them have found congenial occupation, though there have been great invalids in other professions, also.

The long battle of Robert Louis Stevenson against the malady which finally conquered him, is well known to every one. He traveled about, from place to place, searching for the spot where he could hope to live at least long enough to do some of the work which it lay in him to do, until, at last, in the Samoan Islands, in the South Seas, he found the haven for which he had been searching. There the heroic struggle went on for the four last years of his life, and there he was buried high on the peak of Mount Væa, above his island home.

Probably no famous writer suffered for a longer period than did Alexander Pope, who was stricken, when only a child of ten, with a malady which deformed his body and robbed him of health and comeliness, leaving him to forty-six years of invalidism. His constant study and work, combined with this physical infirmity, made his life “one long disease.”

Thomas Carlyle was a chronic dyspeptic, and suffered, all his life, the torments which only those unfortunates, who are victims of this disease, can comprehend. The bitterness of some of his writings which were published after his death may surely be excused when this is considered, for the chronic dyspeptic is generally understood to develop, in spite of himself, a gloomy view of life.

Heinrich Heine, the great German lyric poet, was the victim, during the last twelve years of his life, of relentless disease. He bore his dreadful sufferings so patiently that he appears in a nobler light than ever before during his life. His hearing was bad, his sight was dim, and his legs were paralyzed, yet he wrote some of his most wonderful songs during the long watches of sleepless nights, lying on his “mattress-grave.” He described his condition as “a grave without rest, death without the privileges of the departed,” yet he was never so many-sided as during this period. He produced humorous pieces, political songs, and the tenderest poems. He kept at his work as long as he could hear and speak, his last words being “paper and pencil.”

John Keats, while on a tour of the English Lakes, contracted a throat trouble which developed into consumption. He continued to write, though he failed rapidly in health, and his last volume contains some of his best poems.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was confined to her room for seven years, but was restored to something like a normal state of health before her marriage. The long period of illness was partly caused by the death of her brother, of whom she was extremely fond, and many times her life was despaired of. She wrote in spite of sickness, however, and produced some excellent verse. All her life she struggled against a naturally weak constitution and she worked under difficulties.

Count Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet, was another whose life from childhood was made melancholy by impaired health. In his case it was largely the result of the energy with which he gave himself up to study, when he was only a child, thus undermining an already delicate constitution. He was the victim of a perpetual melancholy, and he wandered to and fro in Italy, always the prey of ceaseless physical tortures, which prevented him from accepting any permanent position that might have relieved the constant and pressing need of money. He attained distinction as a philologist and was offered a university professorship in Germany by Bunsen, but was unable to accept it because of his infirmity.

The three gifted Brontë sisters were all in wretched health. Emily and Anne died within a year of each other, leaving Charlotte to a lonely life of sorrow and heartache. She worked on, in spite of all, with indomitable energy and courage, and the genius of the woman is all the more remarkable when one realizes that her sufferings were both physical and mental. Her work came from an aching heart as well as from a weak and ill body. One short year of happiness was hers at the end, when she became the wife of the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, curate under her father, who had long loved her.

Francis Parkman, the American historian, is an illustrious example of heroic perseverance in the face of great difficulties. He selected as his life work the writing of the history of the rise and fall of the French power in America. He began a most exhaustive research which carried him west into the Black Hills, where the hardships he endured broke down his health and left him a semi-invalid for the rest of his life.

He kept at his appointed task, though fourteen years elapsed between the first part of his work and the second. To occupy the time which his health would not permit him to devote to the greater work, he took up the study of horticulture, in which he grew so proficient that he published a book on roses and was made professor of horticulture in the Harvard Agricultural School.

From 1865 to 1892 he brought out the various parts necessary to complete his great work. During all of this time, however, his health was so precarious that he depended almost entirely upon dictation instead of his pen, and his material was collected for him by hired copyists. The story of his struggle is regarded as one of the most heroic in the history of literature.

William Hickling Prescott was another historian whose labors were made difficult by infirmity. While he was at Harvard he lost the sight of one eye by an accident, and the other was so affected that he was obliged to pass several months in a darkened room. The sight was partly restored, but he could never use it in any trying work, nor more than a little while each day, and he suffered constantly with it and from the apprehension which it occasioned.

With the aid of secretaries and readers he set to work, determined to prepare himself for literature, as more active fields were closed to him. He wrote some himself, in spite of his affliction, using a writing frame designed especially for the blind—and he produced work which placed him in the ranks with the most brilliant historians.

Chopin, the great modern master of pianoforte composition, was unable, because of lack of physical strength, to play some of his own works as he would have them played. A trip to England, of only eleven days’ duration, was enough to develop the latent consumption which was in his family, and from this time on he worked under the advancing ravages of the disease, though he lived twelve years before finally succumbing to its onslaught. Many times during this period he was reported at death’s door.

Handel became blind seven years before his death, yet continued his work and accompanied one of his oratorios upon the organ only eight days before his death.

Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott both were lame from a deformed foot, but suffered no inconvenience from the infirmity. Milton became blind and Beethoven was deaf from about his thirtieth year. He faced the pathetic situation with the brave resolve: “I will grapple with fate; it shall never drag me down.” His life was lived along these lines, and never did his courage falter or his fortitude give way, though the affliction to a musician was almost the greatest he could suffer.

Some of the modern Methuselahs have been persons who were given up by the doctors to fill an early grave. Surely this fact, taken in connection with the many examples that there are of the great things which invalids have accomplished, ought to bring the champions of euthanasia up short. Perhaps it is too much to expect that anything will stop the man who is once thoroughly launched on this delusive line of thought, but for the sake of the timorous who are not, perhaps, as rugged in health as the men who advocate this “simple and humane” reform, the following examples of men and women, not famous, who have attained to a “green old age” in spite of being in an apparently hopeless condition, are quoted. They are taken from a paper written by E. H. Von den Eynden, of Antwerp, and published there in 1882, under the title “Singularités Macrobiologiques”—(Curiosities of Long Life).

Adèle Lambotte died at Liege in 1763, aged one hundred and one years. She was scarcely thirty-two inches in height, and so crippled in her legs and feet that from infancy she was compelled to walk on crutches.

In 1774 there lived at Château Neuf, in Thimerais, France, a certain demoiselle Thierree. At the time, she was over forty years old, and an invalid, forever taking medicines. A contemporary describes her graphically thus:

“A few tufts of grisly hair, two squinting eyes, lost in the multitude of wrinkles and hanging folds of skin that stood for nose and cheeks, and with a head in perpetual oscillation.”

She lived in the open air, strolling from point to point in all sorts of wind and weather. She enjoyed an income amounting to about one thousand dollars, and some of her friends made her a proposition to transfer their property to her providing she would pay them a certain annuity and devise the property back to them at her death.

The bargain was made, and faithfully kept, as far as the annuity was concerned, yet so skilfully did she manage affairs that she soon had an income of two thousand dollars over and above all expenditures. Her friends meanwhile imagined that they had made a good bargain, as her physician had assured them that she “could never see the return of the swallows next spring.”

The swallows came and went, and came and went again, and they got impatient, and in some way the “old mamselle” found it out. Then she set herself to live in earnest. She wept for Louis XVI, lived through and detested the Revolution, saw the funerals of Bonaparte and Charles X, and lived through the barricades of 1830.

Finally, in 1835, she died, aged one hundred and five years, lacking part of a month. On making an inventory of her affairs her executor found upward of four hundred linen chemises, each made with her own hands, not one of which had ever been worn. Her revenue, at the time of her death, was two hundred thousand dollars.

The people who made the bargain had died one after another, the last one more than forty years before her demise.

In 1699 the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences recorded the death of a man, aged one hundred years, whose spinal column consisted of one single bone, the intermediate cartilages having ossified.

About the middle of the seventeenth century there was carried in solemn procession and hung up before the shrine of Notre Dame de Liesse an enormous vesical calculus, on which was engraved the following legend:

“This stone was removed from François Annibal d’Etrées, duke and peer, Grand Marshal of France, by the grace of God through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, September 15, 1654.”

The grand marshal was eighty-two years old when the terrible operation was performed. It gave him a new lease of life, as he did not die until 1675, more than twenty years afterward, aged one hundred and two years and a few months.

A poor girl, daughter of a retainer of the Château de Colemberg, near Boulogne, named Nicole Mare, was born deformed, and, besides having a withered forearm, was so humpbacked that she stood less than four feet high. With all this, she lived to the age of one hundred and ten years. Her occupation was herding cattle, and it is said that the only food she ever tasted was bread and milk.

The celebrated Fontanelle, who, it is said, never enjoyed a well day in his life, and whose constitution was so frail that the least exposure made him ill, yet lived within less than one month of one hundred years.

M. Le Fermy, a peasant of the village of Saint-Justin, near Mont-de-Marsan, France, died in his native village September 13, 1714, aged one hundred and ten years and two months. All his life he was regarded as a feeble man. The note recording his death says:

“He was married five times,althoughhe lived soberly and was regarded as weakly.”

In 1760, at Graessans, in the diocese of Saint-Papoul, France, died a woman whose age is recorded as one hundred and thirteen years and one month. She died of asthma, with which she had suffered for forty-five years.

The Benedictine monk, Brother N. Graillet, of the Abbey of Calvary, at La Fère, France, died in the abbey in 1763, aged one hundred and two years. He had entered the abbey in his thirtieth year, in ill-health and disappointed in life. “For seventy-two years, although always feeble, he obeyed every rule of the abbey, and was always first in filling the functions of the community,” is his record.

Pierre Foucault, a native of Abbéville, died in that place in 1766, aged one hundred and fifteen years. Up to the age of fifty his health had been very precarious, and during the years between fifty and sixty “he suffered many maladies.” After that he recovered his usual health and lived fifty-five years. His father died aged one hundred and two, and his grandfather was accidentally killed while hunting, at the age of eighty-seven.

Madame Ristori, probably an ancestress of the celebrated artiste, died at Empoi—a village in Tuscany—in 1767, aged one hundred and ten years. Her whole life was passed in frightful poverty and hardship. She was an invalid nearly her whole life, and had, besides, almost every disease that can be named, at one or another period of her existence.

Marguerite Couppéc, widow of Richard Couppéc, died at Rouen in 1769. The baptismal register at Caux, where she was born in 1654, shows conclusively that she was one hundred and fifteen years old at death. “All her life,” says her tombstone, “she lived in poverty and illness, having had many most violent diseases, notwithstanding which she was most laborious, being always occupied as long as her hands could work.”

A REQUIEM.By Robert Louis Stevenson.Under the wide and starry sky,Dig the grave and let me lie.Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he longed to be;Home is the sailor, home from sea,And the hunter home from the hill.

A REQUIEM.

By Robert Louis Stevenson.

Under the wide and starry sky,Dig the grave and let me lie.Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he longed to be;Home is the sailor, home from sea,And the hunter home from the hill.

Under the wide and starry sky,Dig the grave and let me lie.Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he longed to be;Home is the sailor, home from sea,And the hunter home from the hill.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

WHAT THEY LAUGH AT ABROAD.

Wit and Humor of the Foreign Jokesmiths, Culled from French, German, and Italian Periodicals, and Translated for “The Scrap Book.”

Young Doctor—Do you think the visitor is really a patient? I am afraid that he is a creditor.

Servant—Well, I heard him groaning. If he isn’t ill he must have a very big bill to collect.—Fliegende Blätter.

Reporter (to old man)—How come you to be so hale and hearty at ninety?

Old Man—Regularity, sir. I have gone on a spree regularly every Sunday, since I was twenty. There is nothing like regularity.—Fliegende Blätter.

She—Oh, George, I want all these people to know that I am married to you.

He—Well, my dear, you had better carry the dress-suit case and the umbrellas.—Le Rire.

Several men were chatting together. One of them, a Greek, was praising his country.

“Greece,” said he, “is the most beautiful land in the world. The blue heavens laugh perennially over Greece.”

“Why, that’s nothing,” said a Hungarian, “the whole world laughs over Hungary.”—Jugend.

Doctor (to maid)—I am Dr. Curewell. They have just telephoned me to come here immediately. How is the patient?

Maid—Oh, doctor, you have arrived too late! My master died not five minutes ago.

Doctor—Well, never mind. In this case, at least, nobody can say that I was the cause of death.—Le Rire.

The Lady—Now, remember, please, I want a very good maid and one that is absolutely discreet.

The Proprietor—You can be perfectly sure of the maid I am going to send you. She has been five years at a telephone switch-board.—Le Sourire.

The Delegates—We demand equal rights, liberty, and absolute pardon for political offenders.

The Czar—Peace, peace, my people! All of you that are not executed will be pardoned.

The Delegates—Huzzah! Long live the Little Father.—Il Fischietto.

Peggy—Only to think of it, my dear, we were entirely alone, and he had the audacity to kiss me.

Lucy—I suppose you were furious; weren’t you?

Peggy—I should say so! I was furious every single time he did it.—Le Sourire.

She (weeping)—Five years ago, as a bride, you promised to love me for an eternity, and here we are on the verge of divorce.

He—Well, the past five years have seemed like an eternity.—Fliegende Blätter.

Father—Do you know, sir, that I actuallysawyou embrace my daughter?

Suitor—I beg your pardon, sir. The truth is, I was so frightfully busy at the time that I failed to notice you. I sincerely hope you will forgive me.—Le Sourire.

She—You don’t love me any more. I know it. I feel it.

He—But, pet, I assure you, I adore you.

She—No, no, no! No man can love a woman with such old clothes as mine.—Le Rire.

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