Velazquez painted Philip IV more than forty times.
Longinus. About whom nothing whatever is known.
Including his real name.
Carole Landis committed suicide.
Biographers who conclude at the death of their subject and do not at least briefly discuss the survivors.
Joseph Severn, who would remain in Rome through most of the next six decades. Eventually even serving as British Consul.
Claire Clairmont, who outlived Byron by fifty-five years.
Dora Diamant, who died in England well after World War II.
The historical Troy, aka Troy Vila. Specified as having fallen between 1240 and 1230 B.C. Bones of prototypal Hectors lie in the roadways, and there is evidence of step-by-step destruction.
After which the site was entirely abandoned for centuries.
Spinoza died at forty-four of tuberculosis, surely aggravated by glass dust in his lungs from twenty years of grinding lenses for a living.
Ben Richards.
The Aspern Papers.
Juana de Asbaje was illegitimate.
Hardy may have had an illegitimate son by a cousin named Tryphena Sparks.
The Sangreal. And/or Sangrail.
Dost know this water-fly?
Torquato Tasso was twice locked away as insane.
All of Plato came down from antiquity in less maimed form than any other writings, an undeniable sign of the esteem in which it was held.
Nonetheless when Aquinas and other medieval thinkers referred to thephilosopher, with no additional identification, it was universally understood that Aristotle was meant.
Il maestro di color che sanno.
Primo Levi committed suicide by throwing himself down a stairwell.
Through much of her life, Marina Tsvetayeva was forced to endure practically a beggar’s existence. And with her nearest relatives repeatedly imprisoned.
Akhmatova fared little better, confronted by the same family jailings, often subsisting for long periods on little more than black bread.
Frangois Villon’s mother was illiterate.
As Nietzsche saw it, the last Christian died on the Cross.
Ebenezer Cooke.
Tecumseh.
The Wittgenstein pianist/brother, Paul, who lost his right arm in World War I, subsequently commissioned Prokofiev and Ravel and Richard Strauss to compose one-handed works for him. Actually he appears to have been an unexceptional performer.
Surely someone will call?
Legend says that Hesiod was murdered because of seducing a friend’s daughter, who had then hanged herself.
And that when his corpse was discarded at sea it was brought back by dolphins.
T. E. Hulme was killed in action in Flanders in 1917.
Obviously in town, but even at the beach, Protagonist has no car. There are stores on a highway not far from the latter, however. From his entrance at the rear of the house there is a path through the brush leading that way.
The nearest village is only a short walk also.
One follows the highway or for that matter the beach itself to get to it.
Tecmessa.
Isaac Newton died a virgin.
In Brussels, in 1873, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was sentenced to two years at hard labor.
Not long thereafter Rimbaud burned all of his remaining manuscripts. At nineteen. And insofar as is known wrote no more verse.
Mary Shelley was nineteen when she finished Frankenstein.
Je finis par trouver sacré le désordre de mon esprit.
Risë Stevens.
Dewey Dell.
Simeon Stylites, who spent thirty-six years on top of a sixty-foot pillar in the Syrian desert. For most of that time his body a mass of maggot-infested sores.
The maggots no more than eating what God had intended for them, he said.
Henry James was an anti-Semite.
René Char was a saboteur for the Resistance in World War II.
The human skull on that same shelf was given to Reader in Mexico by an archaeologist who had come upon several during a dig.
Its origin should be more intriguing if Reader gives it to Protagonist.
Must We Mean What We Say?
Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius were all ordered to commit suicide by Nero. Each opened a vein.
Lucan was twenty-five. He recited his own verses as he bled to death.
Three years later Nero would be a suicide on his own part.
Presumably Reader will give Protagonist photographs of his son and daughter also. Should he possess certain others?
What mail does he receive?
Anglican. Royalist. Classicist.
Degas was probably impotent.
Berlioz fell in love with Harriet Smithson when he saw her as Ophelia in Kemble’s HamletIn later life she became a shrew.
Ah, what an artist dies with me!
Rossini wrote The Barber of Sevillein less than two weeks.
Welshman. Drunkard. Heterosexual.
Oliver Goldsmith was almost always indigent. Samuel Johnson once rushed money to keep him from being evicted. Goldsmith spent it on drink.
Rilke was eternally someone’s houseguest. Once he had fifty different addresses in four years.
Kätchen Schönkopf.
Frederike Brion.
Lotte Buff.
Lili Schönemann.
Charlotte von Stein.
Christiane Vulpius.
Marianne von Willemer.
Lorenzo Ghiberti devoted twenty-eight years to the East Door of the Florence Baptistry. Michelangelo would say it could have served as the entrance to Paradise.
Five hundred years later, Reader would stand staring where five of the door’s ten panels lay heaped amid muck after having been wrenched away in the Great Flood of November 4, 1966. The night before.
The honor of having been the first documented alcoholic author evidently falls to Aeschylus.
Shaw lived with his mother until he was forty-two. And then had an unconsummated marriage.
John Stuart Mill was Bertrand Russell’s godfather.