Final Chapters

by Jim Bernhard

  Swift suffered from Ménière’s disease, causing him to have bouts of severe vertigo and progressive deafness. Seeking escape from the pressures of London, he returned to Ireland and was ordained a minister in the Church of Ireland. He was given a small parish in Kilroot, where he spent two years preaching, gardening, doing house repairs, and writing. After leaving Kilroot, he shuttled back and forth for many years between Ireland and England, in various positions as a secretary to politicians, an adviser to the Tory government, and a church official. At the age of forty-five, he accepted the prestigious position of dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, where he remained until his death.

  Although he never married (so far as is known), Swift was romantically and enigmatically involved with two women named Esther. One was Esther Johnson, whom he referred to as Stella, who was an object of lifelong infatuation (and whom he may have secretly married). The other was Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he called Vanessa. The exact nature of his relationships with them is still a subject of conjecture, but there is no doubt that he was inconsolably grief-stricken when each one died: Vanessa in 1723, at age thirty-five, and Stella in 1728, at age forty-seven.

  Death figured increasingly in Swift’s life after this. He was able to keep his sense of humor about it, and he had fun imagining his own demise in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift:

  The time is not remote, when I

  Must by the course of nature die;

  When, I foresee, my special friends

  Will try to find their private ends.

  Though it is hardly understood

  Which way my death can do them good,

  Yet thus, methinks, I hear ‘em speak:

  “See, how the Dean begins to break!

  Poor gentleman, he droops apace:

  You plainly find it in his face.

  That old vertigo in his head

  Will never leave him till he’s dead.

  Besides, his memory decays;

  He recollects not what he says;

  He cannot call his friends to mind;

  Forgets the place where last he dined;

  Plies you with stories o’er and o’er;

  He told them fifty times before.

  How does he fancy we can sit

  To hear his out-of-fashion wit?

  . . .

  Behold the fatal day arrive!

  “How is the Dean?”—“He’s just alive.”

  Now the departing prayer is read.

  “He hardly breathes”—“The Dean is dead.”

  . . .

  My female friends, whose tender hearts

  Have better learned to act their parts,

  Receive the news in doleful dumps:

  “The Dean is dead (and what is trumps?)”

  After two of his closest friends, John Gay and John Arbuthnot, died, Swift began to show signs of mental illness. At the age of seventy-four, he suffered a stroke, losing the ability to speak. He once foresaw such a disability: “I shall be like a tree and die at the top.” As it turns out, he did. He was legally declared of “unsound mind,” and guardians were appointed to oversee his affairs. Shamefully, some of his servants went so far as to charge curious gawkers a fee to get a glimpse of the Dean in his sadly impaired condition. Swift died on October 19, 1745, at the age of seventy-seven.

  He was buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, next to Esther Johnson. Most of his estate of twelve thousand pounds was left to establish a hospital for the mentally ill. He left his own Latin epitaph, which is translated:

  Here is laid the Body

  of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Sacred Theology,

  Dean of this Cathedral Church,

  where ferocious Indignation

  can no longer

  lacerate his Heart.

  Go forth, Voyager,

  and copy, if you can,

  this vigorous (to the best of his ability)

  Champion of Liberty.

  ALEXANDER POPE

  Born to a Roman Catholic family in Protestant England, denied a formal education, and sickly from childhood, Alexander Pope overcame those odds and achieved fame, wealth, and literary prominence as a poet, satirist, and translator. Son of a well-to-do linen merchant, he was born in London on May 21, 1688, and had a scattered education, learning a little Greek and Latin as a private pupil of various schoolmasters and Catholic priests. He suffered from Pott’s disease, a form of tuberculosis that affects the spine, which left him hunchbacked and only four feet six inches in height. He relished his poor health, and in one poem refers to “this long disease, my life.”

  Through his father’s friends, Pope was introduced into London literary society as a prodigy and began a life devoted almost exclusively to writing—“poetry his only business,” as he said, “and idleness his only pleasure.” An acerbic wit who made many enemies with his caustic comments, he was a master of the heroic couplet, evidenced in such works as his Essay on Criticism and Essay on Man. The Rape of the Lock, a mock-heroic poem, is regarded as a witty classic, satirizing pretentious society. The Dunciad, which excoriated many of England’s leading literary lights, including the Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber, was dedicated to Pope’s good friend, Jonathan Swift.

  Among the aphorisms for which Pope is remembered are “The proper study of Mankind is Man”; “To err is human, to forgive divine”; “A little learning is a dangerous thing”; and “An honest man’s the noblest work of God.” Pope’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey earned him eight thousand pounds on their publications—a fortune in those days, and an edition of Shakespeare added to his wealth. He purchased a home in Twickenham, near London, where he and his mother lived. Pope’s continued barbed comments earned him the nickname “Wasp of Twickenham.”

  Pope never married, but he is alleged to have maintained a long-lasting love affair with a childhood friend named Martha Blount, to whom he willed the use of his estate during her lifetime. He also wrote witty letters to a number of other female friends.

  With lifelong maladies, Pope must have been constantly aware of the imminence of death. When he was only twenty-four, he wrote “The Dying Christian to His Soul,” a reverie in which he considers what it might be like to die:

  I.

  Vital spark of heavenly flame!

  Quit, oh quit this mortal frame:

  Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying,

  Oh the pain, the bliss of dying!

  Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,

  And let me languish into life.

  II.

  Hark! they whisper; Angels say,

  Sister Spirit, come away.

  What is this absorbs me quite?

  Steals my sense, shuts my sight,

  Drowns my spirits, draws my breath?

  Tell me, my Soul, can this be Death?

  III.

  The world recedes; it disappears!

  Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears

  With sounds seraphic ring;

  Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!

  O Grave! where is thy Victory?

  O Death! where is thy Sting?

  His worsening illness brought Pope respiratory problems, frequent fevers, eye inflammations, and abdominal pains. On May 29, 1744, Pope felt so ill that he called for a priest to administer the last rites. The next day, his physician visited him and told him he was much improved. Pope disdained the diagnosis: “Here am I,” he said, “dying of a hundred good symptoms.” And indeed he was right: he did expire, surrounded by friends, that evening about eleven o’clock, at the age of fifty-six. The precise nature of his final illness is not known, but was probably congestive heart failure.

  Pope left specific instructions for his burial in his will: “I resign my Soul to its Creator in all humble Hope of its future Happiness, as in the Disposal of a Being infinitely Good. As to my Body, my Will is, That it be buried near the Monument of my dear Parents at Twickenham . . . and that it be carried to the Grave by six of the poorest Men of the Parish, to each of whom I
order a Suit of Grey coarse Cloth, as Mourning.”

  Even though he was nominally a Roman Catholic, Pope was buried as he wished in Twickenham’s Anglican Church of St. Mary the Virgin. His friend William Warburton later added a Latin inscription to the tomb which translates as the epitome of faint praise: “He wrote nothing inept.”

  VOLTAIRE

  Few corpses get to ride to their funerals sitting up in a carriage, looking as if they were alive, as Voltaire did. The man known as Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet on November 21, 1694, to a minor government official and his aristocratic wife. The fourth of five children, he attended the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand (formerly the Collège de Clermont), the same school attended by Molière, who, along with Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille, was one of his idols.

  At his father’s insistence, François-Marie tried his hand at law school and as secretary to a diplomat, but gave up these jobs in favor of writing plays. He wrote some fifty or more in his lifetime, along with two thousand histories, philosophical tracts, and scientific articles—and an estimated twenty thousand letters. His most famous work is Candide, or The Optimist, a satire of the philosophy of Leibniz and others who believed “this is the best of all possible worlds.”

  As a pen name, he used Voltaire, which is an anagram of the Latinized spelling of his surname (AROVET), plus the letters “LI,” an abbreviation for “le jeune,” French for “the younger.” Voltaire was noted as a hedonist, a skeptic, and a champion of empirical science, freedom of religion and expression, and separation of Church and State. An avowed enemy of hypocrisy, he was frequently at odds with the king and government officials, with haute society, and with Catholic clergy. Voltaire’s iconoclastic opinions involved him in several disputes with prominent dignitaries, sometimes requiring him to flee Paris. During one such exile, he spent three years in England, where he became well acquainted with Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay.

  Voltaire had romantic attachments to two women, first to Emilie du Chatelet, a married aristocrat who was also a distinguished mathematician, in whose home he lived for fifteen years; and later in his life to his widowed niece, Marie Louise Denis.

  Voltaire was a fierce critic of organized religion, but believed in a supreme being, in the tradition of Deism. “It is perfectly evident to my mind,” he wrote, “that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.” On one occasion, when fellow Deist Benjamin Franklin visited him in Paris and asked Voltaire to bless his grandson, Voltaire’s blessing was “God and liberty.” He is also famous for saying, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

  Voltaire’s death at age eighty-three was preceded by several months of painful illness, resulting from prostate cancer. In February of 1778, he was living in Paris, and his friend Madame du Deffand, who had a noted salon, reported that he frequently suffered bladder pain, hemorrhoids, and vertigo. He suffered for many weeks from bouts of slow, painful urination, alternating with incontinence. He was also severely constipated, his doctor reporting a “complete cessation of peristaltic movement.”

  Knowing that he was dying, church officials tried to persuade him to recant his anti-ecclesiastical statements. On February 10, an abbé named Gaultier visited Voltaire and gave him absolution for his sins—although Voltaire refused to accept Communion, claiming he was coughing blood.

  By April he was in increasing pain, agitated, and unable to sleep, but he continued to involve himself in the absentee management of his estate at Ferney and in Parisian literary business. He was working on revisions of his play Irene, for the Comédie-Française, and on a new dictionary he was urging the Académie Française to publish. On May 7, Voltaire attended a meeting about the dictionary, but was not well enough to return for another on May 9. On May 10, he developed a high fever and summoned his doctor, Théodore Tronchin, who gave him an opiate to relieve his distress. Voltaire overdosed and was in a stupor for several days.

  On the morning of May 30, Gaultier and another priest came to his bedside to exhort him once more. They asked him if he believed in the divinity of Christ. Voltaire replied, “In the name of God, don’t mention that man to me again—and let me die in peace.” Asked to renounce Satan, Voltaire observed, “This is not the time to make any more enemies.” He expired at eleven o’clock on the evening of May 30, 1778.

  Despite the absolution he had earlier received from Abbé Gaultier, the Church refused him a Catholic burial. Voltaire’s nephew, Alexandre Mignot, Abbé of Scellières, near Troyes, was determined that his uncle would be laid to rest in consecrated ground. It was decided to transport Voltaire to the Scellières abbey, where he could be buried in a Catholic ritual. In a bizarre plot to circumvent interference by church authorities during the journey, Voltaire’s corpse was embalmed and then dressed in his usual clothing, and he was propped up in a carriage, as though he were still alive. The subterfuge worked and Voltaire reached his destination, where a funeral mass and Christian burial were accorded to him on June 2. The following day, the Bishop of Troyes heard what was afoot and issued an order forbidding church participation in Voltaire’s funeral, but it was too late—he was already safely six feet underground. Thirteen years later, French revolutionaries honored Voltaire by moving his remains to Paris, where he was interred in the Panthéon.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  Benjamin Franklin would have rated several pages in Who’s Who, if only it had been published in his day. He was an author and epigrammatist, a successful newspaper editor, a skilled printer, a prosperous entrepreneur, an innovative postmaster, an accomplished musician, a respected scientist, a prolific inventor, a dedicated public servant, a wily diplomat, and the only Founding Father to have signed all four of the documents establishing the United States of America: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, the Treaty of Alliance with France, and the Constitution.

  Born on January 17, 1706, in Boston to a soap- and candle-maker named Josiah and his second wife, a staunch Puritan named Abiah, young Benjamin attended Boston Latin School until the age of thirteen. At seventeen, he ran away from home and found work as a printer’s devil in Philadelphia. Largely self-taught, without the benefit of higher education, he nonetheless later founded the University of Pennsylvania and received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and St. Andrews universities.

  Franklin published several newspapers, including the Pennsylvania Gazette, and became wealthy from the annual publication of Poor Richard’s Almanack, in which he dished out such adages as “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” He invented the lighting rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, the odometer, and a glass musical instrument he called an “armonica.” He played the violin, the harp, and the guitar, and composed classical music. His experiments with lightning and electrical current gained international scientific acclaim. He established America’s first subscription library, which survives today as a research institute: the Library Company of Philadelphia. He served in numerous government posts, including Philadelphia city councilman, justice of the peace, member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, governor of Pennsylvania, first postmaster general of the United States, and first ambassador to France.

  Whew! And if all that wasn’t enough, he also founded the American Philosophical Society and the first hospital in colonial America.

  Franklin and his common-law wife, Deborah Read, had two children, but only their daughter, Sarah, lived to adulthood. They also raised William, Franklin’s illegitimate son. Always one with an eye for the ladies, Franklin had a reputation for dalliance during his lengthy sojourns in Europe—but the truth, alas, is probably that these relationships were platonic.

  Franklin, the child of Puritan parents, thought of himself as a Christian, but he did not attend church services, and his religious beliefs were those of a Deist. In reply to an inquiry, he wrote:

/>   Here is my Creed: I believe in one God, creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we can render to him, is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think the system of morals and his religion as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see; but I have some doubts as to his divinity: though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.

  The afterlife, for Franklin, would be a jolly party, as he expressed in a letter to his sister-in-law after her husband’s death: “Our friend and we are invited abroad on a party of pleasure—that is to last forever. His chair was first ready and he is gone before us. We could not all conveniently start together, and why should you and I be grieved at this, since we are soon to follow, and we know where to find him.”

  In his final years, Franklin suffered numerous ailments: lung disease, gout, psoriasis. A hearty eater and drinker during his prime, he observed in old age, “People who live long, who will drink the cup of life to the very bottom, must expect to meet with some of the usual dregs.” When he was seventy-six, he developed kidney stones that caused him pain and impaired his mobility for the rest of his life.

  On the occasion of George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, Franklin wrote to him: “For my own personal ease, I should have died two years ago. But though those years have been spent in excruciating pain, I am pleased that I have lived them, since they have brought me to see the present situation.”

  In April 1790, while living in Philadelphia at the home of his daughter, Sarah Bache, Franklin developed an abscess in his left lung—caused by an infection that would be called pleurisy today. He told a visitor, “The pains will soon go away. Besides. . .what are the pains of a moment compared with the pleasures of eternity?”