Nevertheless, he loved her, and loved her desperately.  How pathetic it is.  One has little inclination to smile when one sees the depths of that desolate heart.  Do you think he did not see, as clearly as you or I would see, the wrinkled old face, the indifference of age, the “triste raison,” in her he idealised?  Remember, he was the most ironical of men.  But he did not wish to see these things, he wished to cling to a little love, which would help him to live in the wilderness of life.

“There is nothing real in this world but that which lives in the heart....  My life has been wrapped up in the obscure little village where she lives....  Life is only endurable when I tell myself:  ‘This autumn I shall spend a month beside her.’  I should die in this hell of a Paris if she did not allow me to write to her, and if from time to time I had not letters from her.”

So he spoke to Legouve; and he sat down on a stone in a Paris street, and wept.  In the meantime, the old lady did not understand this foolishness; she hardly tolerated it, and sought to undeceive him.

[Footnote 47:  Memoires, II, 396.]

     “When one’s hair is white one must leave dreams—­even those of
     friendship....  Of what use is it to form ties which, though they
     hold to-day, may break to-morrow?”

What were his dreams?  To live with her?  No; rather to die beside her; to feel she was by his side when death should come.

     “To be at your feet, my head on your knees, your two hands in
     mine—­so to finish."[48]

He was a little child grown old, and felt bewildered and miserable and frightened before the thought of death.

Wagner, at the same age, a victor, worshipped, flattered, and—­if we are to believe the Bayreuth legend—­crowned with prosperity; Wagner, sad and suffering, doubting his achievements, feeling the inanity of his bitter fight against the mediocrity of the world, had “fled far from the world"[49] and thrown himself into religion; and when a friend looked at him in surprise as he was saying grace at table, he answered:  “Yes, I believe in my Saviour."[50]

[Footnote 48:  Memoires, II, 415.]

[Footnote 49:  “Yes, it is to that escape from the world that Parsifal owes its birth and growth.  What man can, during a whole lifetime, gaze into the depths of this world with a calm reason and a cheerful heart?  When he sees murder and rapine organised and legalised by a system of lies, impostures, and hypocrisy, will he not avert his eyes and shudder with disgust?” (Wagner, Representations of the Sacred Drama of Parsifal at Bayreuth, in 1882.)]

[Footnote 50:  The scene was described to me by his friend, Malwida von Meysenbug, the calm and fearless author of Memoires d’une Idealiste.]

Poor beings!  Conquerors of the world, conquered and broken!