In May 1848, not a
year after his first attack, he went out of doors for the last time; but
his disease took more than eight years to kill him. For nearly eight
years he lay helpless on a couch, with the use of his limbs gone, wasted
almost to the proportions of a child, wasted so that a woman could carry
him about; the sight of one eye lost, that of the other greatly dimmed,
and requiring, that it might be exercised, to have the palsied eyelid
lifted and held up by the finger; all this, and besides this, suffering
at short intervals paroxysms of nervous agony. I have said he was not
preeminently brave; but in the astonishing force of spirit with which he
retained his activity of mind, even his gayety, amid all his suffering,
and went on composing with undiminished fire to the last, he was truly
brave. Nothing could clog that aerial lightness. "Pouvez-vous siffler?"
his doctor asked him one day, when he was almost at his last gasp;--
"siffler," as every one knows, has the double meaning of _to whistle_
and _to hiss_:--"Helas! non," was his whispered answer; "pas meme une
comedie de M.
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