“God will pardon me for leaning to the side of mercy, imploring his and abandoning myself entirely to it.  As for the world, I am not uneasy as to its interpretation of that page of what you call ‘my biography.’  The only chapter that I have ardently desired to add to it, is missing.  May the good angels keep you, and bring me to you in September.”

Through many others of his letters rings this vain “leit-motif” like the wail of Tristan.  But nothing could remove the spell the Church had cast upon the princess.

She sank deeper and deeper into seclusion, and during the twenty-seven years she lived in Rome she left her home in the Via del Babuino only once for twenty-four hours.  She grew more and more immersed in the Church and its affairs.  Gregororius said she fairly “sputtered spirituality.”  She began to write, and certain of her essays were revised by Henri Lasserre, under the name, “Christian Life in Public,” and were widely read, being translated into English and Spanish.  Her chief work was a twenty-four-volume study bearing the thrilling title, “Interior Causes of the Exterior Weakness of the Church.”  This ponderous affair she finished a few days before her death, with hand already swollen almost beyond the power of holding the pen.

Here in Rome, as in Russia and at Weimar, where she was, there was a salon.  But she grew wearier and wearier of life, and weaker and weaker, until she spent months and months in bed, and would rarely cross her door-sill.  To the last she and Liszt were lovers, however remote.  And his letters are rarely more than a few days apart.  He continues to sign himself, even in the final year of his life, “Umilissimo sclavissimo.”  His last letter concerned the marriage of his granddaughter Daniela von Buelow to a man with the ominous sounding name of “Thode.”  Daniela was the daughter of Liszt’s daughter, Cosima, by her first husband.  The marriage took place at Wagner’s home, “Wahnfried,” in Bayreuth.

It was appropriate that Liszt should spend his last years in the company of this Wagner, for whose success he had been the chief crusader, as for the success of how many another famous musician, and for the charitable comfort of how numberless a throng, and in what countless ways!  It was doubly appropriate that his last appearance in public should be at the performance of “Tristan and Isolde”—­that utmost expression of love that was fiery and lawless and yet worthy of the peace it yearned for and never found.

Liszt died on the 31st of July, 1886.  His will declared the princess to be his sole heir and executrix.  She outlived him no long time.  On the 8th of March, 1887, she died of dropsy of the heart.  She was buried in the German cemetery next to St. Peter’s, in Rome.  Her grave bore the legend: 

“Yonder is my hope.”  At her funeral they played the Requiem, Liszt had written for the death of the Emperor Maximilian.  She had wished that this music should “sing her soul to rest.”