Chapter VII: Biographical Narrative

It is true that, strictly speaking, all biography is narrative; but it is also true that in much biography the best narrative is lacking. Thus, in calling this chapter Biographical Narrative, we obviously mean the type of biography in which the narrative, or story, element is stressed, in which the character depicted lives in the mind of the reader because he has been drawn as an actor upon his stage, or, in other words, because he himself acts rather than is acted upon by the faithful but none too vigorous pen of his biographer.

This kind of biographical narrative requires, first, a subject, who, although not a Dr. Johnson, is at least sufficiently striking in personality and achievement to merit one’s attention and interest, and, second, a sense of perception and discrimination on the part of the biographer. The three selections which are given to illustrate biographical narrative fulfill these requirements. One records the life and work of Dr. Trudeau, the beloved physician of Saranac; another depicts Beau Nash, a “character” of the early eighteenth century; a third portrays the eccentric Lady Hester Stanhope of the Pitt house and the Pitt nose.

Even the most cursory reading of the three selections will convince him who reads that the persons portrayed really live, and a careful analysis will show him why and how. It is this analysis which should give him suggestions for his own writing of this kind of narrative.

He will easily discover that the last of the models, _The Beloved Physician_, is far longer than either of the others, that it possesses far greater wealth of anecdote and of detail, and that it lays greater stress upon the work of the man than upon the man himself--or, in other words, that it reveals the physician through his relations to his environment rather than through personal traits and habits.

And yet when he compares it with _Beau Nash_, which is only one-fourth as long, he will be convinced that the subject of the latter is after all just as clearly portrayed. This debonair gentleman of the early eighteenth century with his snuff-boxes, his white beaver, and his two imperious fingers, lives because of the very choice of detail with which his biographer has drawn him. Bath lives, too, with her welcoming abbey bells and her “periwigged men of fashion, immaculate in all but morals.” Here is no wealth of detail at all, but here instead are a few vivid and concrete facts and objects which paint the picture every whit as clearly.

The second selection, _Lady Hester Stanhope_, is written much after the manner of _Beau Nash_; that is, the author, Lytton Strachey, sketches Lady Hester’s meteoric life with a few heavily penciled lines. His details are few, but they are wonderfully telling ones. Moreover, he employs a kind of unifying device which unquestionably adds to the artistic value of his narrative. That device is Lady Hester’s nose, with which Mr. Strachey begins and ends her sensational career.

It hardly seems necessary after even this brief comparative study of the three selections given to suggest methods of handling this type of narrative. The compelling motive of the writer must be to make his subject live; but whether he will do it by presenting it from many sides and in relation to many persons and environments, whether he will seize upon some fault, foible, or individualizing trait, whether he will present a series of amazing and revealing incidents,--the choice must rest with him.

M. E. C.

BEAU NASH

LLEWELYN POWYS

Richard Nash, despot of silk stockings and most tyrannical of beaux, was born at Swansea, 18 October, 1674. His father was a small glass-manufacturer, and in the days of his prosperity the incomparable dandy was wont to say, when twitted as to his reticence concerning his origin, “I seldom mention my father in company, not because I have any reason to be ashamed of him, but because he has some reason to be ashamed of me.” Nash was educated at Oxford, where, in the words of Goldsmith, he showed “that though much might be expected from his genius, nothing could be hoped from his industry”; indeed, it appears that he was compelled to absent himself from the university somewhat abruptly, leaving in his hastily abandoned chambers “some plays, a tobacco-box, and a fiddle.”

After his unceremonious departure from Oxford, Nash occupied himself for the next few years ostensibly in reading law at the Inner Temple, though in reality living “to the very edge of his finances” as a man-about-town. In 1704 he betook himself by stage-coach to Bath, a journey which at that time was performed, “if God permitted, in three days.” Shortly after his arrival the Corporation of Bath elected him Master of Ceremonies of that city, a position which he held with eminent success and unequalled pomp for more than half a century.

It must not be thought that the post was in any way a sinecure. It would be difficult to enumerate all the varied activities by which the debonair gamester converted the humdrum West Country town into the most fashionable centre of eighteenth-century life in England. He superintended the improving of the roads leading to the city, had the streets lighted, regulated the charges of the sedan-chair men, had ballrooms and hospitals built, and contrived suitable shelters around the famous baths. Always an expert in such matters as rank, precedence, and urbane decorum, he transformed the city of Bath into a modish and exquisite resort for gaming, foppery, and gallantry.

When Beau Nash first took up office his sense of the correct was considerably exercised by a certain grossness of manners which prevailed at that time. It seems that in those days men were not at all ashamed to appear at polite gatherings in their jack boots and the ladies in their aprons. As a counterstroke to such unseemly practices, Nash composed the following satirical rhyme:

Come, trollops and slatterns,
Cockt hats and white aprons,
This best our modesty suits;
For why should not we
In dress be as free
As Hogs-Norton ’squires in boots.

Nor was this his only method of displaying his displeasure. If Nash’s eye so much as caught a glimpse of heavy footwear in an assembly-room, he would hurry across to the offender and with a low bow inquire of him “if he had not forgotten his horse.” Recalcitrant dames he would treat still more severely: on one occasion even going so far as to remove with his own hands, from the person of the Duchess of Queensbury, an apron of point lace which was said to be worth 500 guineas.

It was indeed a prim and elegant life that Nash inaugurated, a life in which periwigged men of fashion, immaculate in all but their morals, strutted and minuetted before exquisitely patched and powdered ladies. They met at the pump-room, where they were diverted by the conversation of the “gay, the witty, and the forward”; they met at Spring Gardens, where on summer mornings they would tread a cotillion together on the smooth lawns between the painted flower-beds; they met again as they made a tour “through the milliners and toymen, to stop at Mr. Gill’s, the pastry-cook, to take a jelly, a tart, or a small basin of vermicelli.” Each night they attended a ball opened with the minuet danced by a lady and gentleman “of the highest rank present” and followed by country dances “wherein the ladies according to their quality stood up first.” At an appointed hour Nash would raise two fingers as a sign that it was time for the music to cease, and then, after a short interval for the dancers to cool, the company would take their departure.

What a delightful picture one gets of it all, of the sedate, pleasure-loving old town with its abbey-bells ringing out a welcome to each fashionable arrival, with Beau Nash hurrying down the cobbled streets, his famous white beaver hat on his head, to pay his compliments to each newcomer. And what a gay figure he himself must have cut in those resplendent days; indeed, we learn from Lord Chesterfield that his attire was on one occasion so gorgeous “that as he stood by chance in the midst of the dancers he was taken by many to be a gilt garland.” Though Beau Nash was fond of declaring that “Wit, flattery, and fine clothes were enough to debauch a nunnery,” there is little evidence that he himself ever indulged in intrigues with his fair visitors who every morning like so many lovely nymphs stepped into the elegant health-giving waters and received from the hands of their attendants “little floating dishes into which to lay their handkerchiefs, little nosegays, and sweetmeats.” Judging by the standards of the eighteenth century, it would seem that his personal life defied criticism, for in an age “when a fellow of high humour would drink no wine but what was strained through his mistress’s smock,” he can scarcely be condemned for accepting the blandishments bestowed upon him by his three successive adorers, Lady Betty Besom, Hannah Lightfoot, and Juliana Popjoy.

An issue of the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ at the end of the eighteenth century throws a remarkable light upon the latter years of the last of these women. “Juliana Popjoy,” it says, “died last week. For thirty or forty years she has lived in a hollow tree. She had been mistress to the famous Beau Nash of Bath.”

In Wesley’s journal we find a curious description of a meeting that took place between that honest rantipole evangelist and Beau Nash. Wesley had come to hold a conventicle at Bath, which was, of course, the very stronghold of frivolity. Before his service opened Nash appeared and did not hesitate to protest that his preaching “frightened the people out of their wits.”

“Sir, did you ever hear me preach?” inquired the Puritan of the Dandy.

“No,” came the answer, “but I judge by common report.”

“Common report, Sir, is not enough. Give me leave, Sir, to ask is not your name Nash?”

“My name is Nash.”

“Sir, I dare not judge of you by common report.” And with that, so the story runs, the man of fashion uttered not a word more, but walked silently away.

Are we to suppose that, as sometimes happens to simple souls, Beau Nash experienced at that moment a new and strange misgiving as to the import of the superficial existence which surrounded him and which in part he himself had been responsible for calling into existence? And is there perhaps some connection between his religious susceptibilities on that occasion and the extraordinary conduct of his lady in taking up her residence where patches and cosmetics were replaced by owls’ pellets and bats’ droppings?

Alas! as the years went by the evening of the Beau’s life began to grow cloudy. The old man grew choleric and testy: he became egotistical and would weary the company with his oft-repeated tales. There is something strangely pathetic about the spectacle of this aged “glass of fashion” clinging peevishly to the last remnants of his mock power, which with the passing of the years he had come to consider his natural right. “Old Beau Knash makes himself disagreeable to all who come to Bath. He is now become fit only to read ‘Shirlock’ upon death, by which he may save his soul and gaine more proffits than ever he could by his white hatt, suppose it was to be dyed red,” wrote an impertinent illiterate eager to usurp the old gentleman’s place, who, having lived and prospered in the reigns of half a dozen sovereigns of England, was now “labouring under the unconquerable distemper of old age.”

Sick and decrepit, the antique Macaroni drifted into poverty. At the last, even his cherished collection of snuff-boxes had to be sold, and he gladly accepted a pension of ten pounds to be delivered him on the first Monday of every month.

Only after his death did something of the glamour of his ancient renown revive. For we are told that on a certain afternoon in the middle of February, 1761, the farm-labourers of Somerset unyoked their oxen, the colliers ceased from mining, the weavers from spinning, in order to witness from the stately roof-tops of Bath the body of the celebrated old fop pass by on its way to its final resting place in the Abbey church; there to await the ordained hour when, in a form more glorified than it had ever been by lace or frill, it should be called to appear before the presence of its Maker.

From _Thirteen Worthies_ by Llewelyn Powys. By
permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.,
holders of the copyright.

LADY HESTER STANHOPE

LYTTON STRACHEY

The Pitt nose has a curious history. One can watch its transmigrations through three lives. The tremendous hook of old Lord Chatham, under whose curve Empires came to birth, was succeeded by the bleak upward-pointing nose of William Pitt the younger--the rigid symbol of an indomitable _hauteur_. With Lady Hester Stanhope came the final stage. The nose, still with an upward tilt in it, had lost its masculinity; the hard bones of the uncle and the grandfather had disappeared. Lady Hester’s was a nose of wild ambitions, of pride grown fantastical, a nose that scorned the earth, shooting off, one fancies, towards some eternally eccentric heaven. It was a nose, in fact, altogether in the air.

Noses, of course, are aristocratic things; and Lady Hester was the child of a great aristocracy. But, in her case, the aristocratic impulse, which had carried her predecessors to glory, had less fortunate results. There has always been a strong strain of extravagance in the governing families of England; from time to time they throw off some peculiarly ill-balanced member, who performs a strange meteoric course. A century earlier, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an illustrious example of this tendency: that splendid comet, after filling half the heavens, vanished suddenly into desolation and darkness. Lady Hester Stanhope’s spirit was still more uncommon; and she met with a most uncommon fate.

She was born in 1776, the eldest daughter of that extraordinary Earl Stanhope, Jacobin and inventor, who made the first steamboat and the first calculating machine, who defended the French Revolution in the House of Lords and erased the armorial bearings--“damned aristocratical nonsense”--from his carriages and his plate. Her mother, Chatham’s daughter and the favourite sister of Pitt, died when she was four years old. The second Lady Stanhope, a frigid woman of fashion, left her stepdaughters to the care of futile governesses, while “Citizen Stanhope” ruled the household from his laboratory with the violence of a tyrant. It was not until Lady Hester was twenty-four that she escaped from the slavery of her father’s house, by going to live with her grandmother, Lady Chatham. On Lady Chatham’s death, three years later, Pitt offered her his protection, and she remained with him until his death in 1806.

Her three years with Pitt, passed in the very centre of splendid power, were brilliant and exciting. She flung herself impetuously into the movement and the passion of that vigorous society; she ruled her uncle’s household with high vivacity; she was liked and courted; if not beautiful, she was fascinating--very tall, with a very fair and clear complexion, and dark-blue eyes, and a countenance of wonderful expressiveness. Her talk, full of the trenchant nonchalance of those days, was both amusing and alarming: “My dear Hester, what are you saying?” Pitt would call out to her from across the room. She was devoted to her uncle, who warmly returned her affection. She was devoted, too--but in a more dangerous fashion--to the intoxicating Antinous, Lord Granville Leveson Gower. The reckless manner in which she carried on this love-affair was the first indication of something overstrained, something wild and unaccountable, in her temperament. Lord Granville, after flirting with her outrageously, declared that he could never marry her, and went off on an embassy to St. Petersburg. Her distraction was extreme: she hinted that she would follow him to Russia; she threatened, and perhaps attempted, suicide; she went about telling everybody that he had jilted her. She was taken ill, and then there were rumours of an accouchement, which, it was said, she took care to _afficher_, by appearing without rouge and fainting on the slightest provocation. In the midst of these excursions and alarms there was a terrible and unexpected catastrophe. Pitt died. And Lady Hester suddenly found herself a dethroned princess, living in a small house in Montagu Square on a pension of £1,200 a year.

She did not abandon society, however, and the tongue of gossip continued to wag. Her immediate marriage with a former lover, Mr. Hill, was announced: “il est bien bon,” said Lady Bessborough. Then it was whispered that Canning was “le regnant”--that he was with her “not only all day, but almost all night.” She quarreled with Canning and became attached to Sir John Moore. Whether she was actually engaged to marry him--as she seems to have asserted many years later--is doubtful; his letters to her, full as they are of respectful tenderness, hardly warrant the conclusion; but it is certain that he died with her name on his lips. Her favourite brother, Charles, was killed beside him; and it was natural that under this double blow she should have retired from London. She buried herself in Wales; but not for long. In 1810 she set sail for Gibraltar with her brother James, who was rejoining his regiment in the Peninsula. She never returned to England.

There can be no doubt that at the time of her departure the thought of a lifelong exile was far from her mind. It was only gradually, as she moved further and further eastward, that the prospect of life in England--at last even in Europe--grew distasteful to her; as late as 1816 she was talking of a visit to Provence. Accompanied by two or three English fellow travellers, her English maid, Mrs. Fry, her private physician, Dr. Meryon, and a host of servants, she progressed, slowly and in a great state, through Malta and Athens, to Constantinople. She was conveyed in battleships, and lodged with governors and ambassadors. After spending many months in Constantinople, Lady Hester discovered that she was “dying to see Napoleon with her own eyes,” and attempted accordingly to obtain passports to France. The project was stopped by Stratford Canning, the English Minister, upon which she decided to visit Egypt, and, chartering a Greek vessel, sailed for Alexandria in the winter of 1811. Off the island of Rhodes a violent storm sprang up; the whole party were forced to abandon the ship, and to take refuge upon a bare rock, where they remained without food or shelter for thirty hours. Eventually, after many severe privations, Alexandria was reached in safety; but this disastrous voyage was a turning-point in Lady Hester’s career. At Rhodes she was forced to change her torn and dripping raiment for the attire of a Turkish gentleman--a dress which she never afterwards abandoned. It was the first step in her orientalization.

She passed the next two years in a triumphal progress. Her appearance in Cairo caused the greatest sensation, and she was received in state by the Pasha, Mehemet Ali. Her costume on this occasion was gorgeous: she wore a turban of cashmere, a brocaded waistcoat, a priceless pelisse, and a vast pair of purple velvet pantaloons embroidered all over in gold. She was ushered by chamberlains with silver wands through the inner courts of the palace to a pavilion in the harem, where the Pasha, rising to receive her, conversed with her for an hour. From Cairo she turned northwards, visiting Jaffa, Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus. Her travelling dress was of scarlet cloth trimmed with gold, and, when on horseback, she wore over the whole a white-hooded and tasselled burnous. Her maid, too, was forced, protesting, into trousers, though she absolutely refused to ride astride. Poor Mrs. Fry had gone through various and dreadful sufferings--shipwreck and starvation, rats and blackbeetles unspeakable--but she retained her equanimity. Whatever her Ladyship might think fit to be, she was an Englishwoman to the last, and Philippaki was Philip Parker and Mustapha Mr. Farr.

Outside Damascus, Lady Hester was warned that the town was the most fanatical in Turkey, and that the scandal of a woman entering it in man’s clothes, unveiled, would be so great as to be dangerous. She was begged to veil herself, and to make her entry under cover of darkness. “I must take the bull by the horns,” she replied, and rode into the city unveiled at midday. The population were thunderstruck; but at last their amazement gave way to enthusiasm, and the incredible lady was hailed everywhere as Queen, crowds followed her, coffee was poured out before her, and the whole bazaar rose as she passed. Yet she was not satisfied with her triumphs; she would do something still more glorious and astonishing; she would plunge into the desert and visit the ruins of Palmyra, which only half-a-dozen of the boldest travellers had ever seen. The Pasha of Damascus offered her a military escort, but she preferred to throw herself upon the hospitality of the Bedouin Arabs, who, overcome by her horsemanship, her powers of sight, and her courage, enrolled her a member of their tribe. After a week’s journey in their company, she reached Palmyra, where the inhabitants met her with wild enthusiasm, and under the Corinthian columns of Zenobia’s temple crowned her head with flowers. This happened in March, 1813; it was the apogee of Lady Hester’s life. Henceforward her fortunes gradually but steadily declined.

The rumour of her exploits had spread through Syria, and from the year 1813 onwards, her reputation was enormous. She was received everywhere as a royal, almost a supernatural personage: she progressed from town to town amid official prostrations and popular rejoicings. But she herself was in a state of hesitation and discontent. Her future was uncertain; she had grown scornful of the West--must she return to it? The East alone was sympathetic, the East alone was tolerable--but could she cut herself off for ever from the past? At Laodicea she was suddenly struck down by the plague, and, after months of illness, it was borne in upon her that all was vanity. She rented an empty monastery on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, not far from Sayda (the ancient Sidon), and took up her abode there. Then her mind took a new surprising turn; she dashed to Ascalon, and, with the permission of the Sultan, began excavations in a ruined temple with the object of discovering a hidden treasure of three million pieces of gold. Having unearthed nothing but an antique statue, which, in order to prove her disinterestedness, she ordered her appalled doctor to break into little bits, she returned to her monastery. Finally, in 1816, she moved to another house, further up Mount Lebanon, and near the village of Djoun; and at Djoun she remained until her death, more than twenty years later.

Thus, almost accidentally as it seems, she came to the end of her wanderings, and the last, long, strange, mythical period of her existence began. Certainly the situation that she had chosen was sublime. Her house, on the top of a high bare hill among great mountains, was a one-storied group of buildings, with many ramifying courts and out-houses, and a garden of several acres surrounded by a rampart wall. The garden, which she herself had planted and tended with the utmost care, commanded a glorious prospect. On every side but one the vast mountains towered, but to the west there was an opening, through which, in the far distance, the deep blue Mediterranean was revealed. From this romantic hermitage, her singular renown spread over the world. European travellers who had been admitted to her presence brought back stories full of Eastern mystery; they told of a peculiar grandeur, a marvellous prestige, an imperial power. The precise nature of Lady Hester’s empire was, indeed, dubious; she was in fact merely the tenant of her Djoun establishment, for which she paid a rent of £20 a year. But her dominion was not subject to such limitations. She ruled imaginatively, transcendentally; the solid glory of Chatham had been transmuted into the phantasy of an Arabian Night. No doubt she herself believed that she was something more than a chimerical Empress. When a French traveller was murdered in the desert, she issued orders for the punishment of the offenders; punished they were, and Lady Hester actually received the solemn thanks of the French Chamber. It seems probable, however, that it was the Sultan’s orders rather than Lady Hester’s which produced the desired effect. In her feud with her terrible neighbour, the Emir Beshyr, she maintained an undaunted front. She kept the tyrant at bay; but perhaps the Emir, who, so far as physical force was concerned, held her in the hollow of his hand, might have proceeded to extremities if he had not received a severe admonishment from Stratford Canning at Constantinople. What is certain is that the ignorant and superstitious populations around her feared and loved her, and that she, reacting to her own mysterious prestige, became at last even as they. She plunged into astrology and divination; she awaited the moment when, in accordance with prophecy, she should enter Jerusalem side by side with the Mahdi, the Messiah; she kept two sacred horses, destined, by sure signs, to carry her and him to their last triumph. The Orient had mastered her utterly. She was no longer an Englishwoman, she declared; she loathed England; she would never go there again; if she went anywhere it would be to Arabia, to “her own people.”

Her expenses were immense--not only for herself but for others, for she poured out her hospitality with a noble hand. She ran into debt, and was swindled by the moneylenders; her steward cheated her, her servants pilfered her; her distress was at last acute. She fell into fits of terrible depression, bursting into dreadful tears and savage cries. Her habits grew more and more eccentric. She lay in bed all day, and sat up all night, talking unceasingly for hour upon hour to Dr. Meryon, who alone of her English attendants remained with her, Mrs. Fry having withdrawn to more congenial scenes long since. The doctor was a poor-spirited and muddle-headed man, but he was a good listener; and there he sat while that extraordinary talk flowed on--talk that scaled the heavens and ransacked the earth, talk in which memories of an abolished past--stories of Mr. Pitt and of George III., vituperations against Mr. Canning, mimicries of the Duchess of Devonshire--mingled phantasmagorically with doctrines of Fate and planetary influence, and speculations on the Arabian origin of the Scottish clans, and lamentations over the wickedness of servants; till the unaccountable figure, with its robes and its long pipe, loomed through the tobacco-smoke like some vision of a Sibyl in a dream. She might be robbed and ruined, her house might crumble over her head; but she talked on. She grew ill and desperate; yet still she talked. Did she feel that the time was coming when she should talk no more?

Her melancholy deepened into a settled gloom when the news came of her brother James’s death. She had quarrelled with all her English friends, except Lord Hardwiche--with her eldest brother, with her sister, whose kind letters she left unanswered; she was at daggers drawn with the English consul at Alexandria, who worried her about her debts. Ill and harassed, she hardly moved from her bedroom, while her servants rifled her belongings and reduced the house to a condition of indescribable disorder and filth. Three dozen hungry cats ranged through the rooms, filling the courts with frightful noises. Dr. Meryon, in the midst of it all, knew not whether to cry or laugh. At moments the great lady regained her ancient fire; her bells pealed tumultuously for hours together; or she leapt up, and arraigned the whole trembling household before her, with her Arab war-mace in her hand. Her finances grew more and more involved--grew at length irremediable. It was in vain that the faithful Lord Hardwiche pressed her to return to England to settle her affairs. Return to England, indeed! To England that ungrateful, miserable country, where, so far as she could see, they had forgotten the very name of Mr. Pitt! The final blow fell when a letter came from the English authorities threatening to cut off her pension for the payment of her debts. Upon that, after dispatching a series of furious missives to Lord Palmerston, to Queen Victoria, to the Duke of Wellington, she renounced the world. She commanded Dr. Meryon to return to Europe, and he--how could he have done it?--obeyed her. Her health was broken, she was over sixty, and, save for her vile servants, absolutely alone. She lived for nearly a year after he left her--we know no more. She had vowed never again to pass through the gate of her house; but did she sometimes totter to her garden--that beautiful garden which she had created, with its roses and its fountains, its alleys and its bowers--and look westward at the sea? The end came in June, 1839. Her servants immediately possessed themselves of every moveable object in the house. But Lady Hester cared no longer: she was lying back in her bed--inexplicable, grand, preposterous, with her nose in the air.

From _Books and Characters_ by Lytton Strachey.
Copyright 1922, by Harcourt, Brace and Company,
Inc. By permission.

THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN

AN APPRECIATION OF EDWARD LIVINGSTON TRUDEAU

STEPHEN CHALMERS

I

When Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau died the other day, many people wondered, suddenly realizing their impression that it was long years since he had joined the little band of heroes who have gone down in the battle against disease. And many must have asked themselves what manner of man this was who, sick unto death over forty years ago, could from scantiest materials build a little laboratory in the wilderness and exert an influence which cannot be measured by its practical materialization into five hundred sanitaria for the treatment of tuberculosis by fresh air, rest, and sound philosophy. Here was a man who, from his invalid’s chair, revolutionized this sanitation of business offices and of uncounted homes where ignorance shrank from pure air and sunshine. If I assume the task of sketching that indomitable character, it is only because I was privileged for many years to be Dr. Trudeau’s friend, to whom he chose occasionally to reveal in some degree his inner self.

It may, at the outset, be well to sketch briefly his voyage through the world which benefited so richly from his journeying. He was born in New York City in 1848 of French parents. His mother was a daughter of Dr. François Eloi Berger, a Parisian practicing in New York, and his father a descendant of a Huguenot family, which, leaving France for Canada, later drifted down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Near the Southern city James Trudeau, who was an intimate friend and fellow traveler of the naturalist painter, Audubon, owned a plantation which was confiscated by General Butler in the Civil War. He died later as a result of wounds received while in command of a Confederate post, Island Number Ten, on the Mississippi.

When Edward L., the youngest of his three children, was but little over two years of age, his mother went with her father, Dr. Berger, to Paris. Here the boy was educated at the Lycée Bonaparte. When he was eighteen years of age Edward returned to New York, and found himself hardly able to speak the language of his native city.

He attended the Columbia School of Mines, and after graduation entered the United States Navy. An elder brother who had preceded him to Annapolis was stricken with tuberculosis. Edward nursed his brother up to the hour of the latter’s death six months later, and thus first came into personal contact with that disease to the extermination of which he devoted the rest of his life. He entered the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons, and in the year of his graduation, 1871, practiced medicine in New York City. In the same year, unconscious that he was doomed to his brother’s disease, he married Miss Charlotte Beare, of Douglaston, Long Island, to whom he ever attributed the inspiration of his labors through nearly half a century. The marriage was a perfect one, although attended by many sorrows. Three of their four children died. One son survives--Dr. Francis B. Trudeau. The death of Dr. Edward L. Trudeau Jr., in 1906, was a great blow to his father and a loss to the medical profession.

It was in 1873 that Dr. Trudeau left New York City with the doom of tuberculosis pronounced upon him. He was only twenty-five; the gates of life seemed shut in his face, for it was believed that he had less than six months to live. Hardly able to stand alone, he was taken to Paul Smith’s in the Adirondacks by a friend who was also a distant relation,--Louis Livingston. Smith’s was then a hunters’ inn in the heart of the wilderness, forty miles from the nearest railway point at Ausable Forks. The guide who carried Dr. Trudeau upstairs and put him to bed described his burden as “weighin’ no more’n a lamb-skin.” And the same guide lived to see that lightweight defeat a local champion in the backwoods ring!

A college-mate of Trudeau’s, Edward H. Harriman, was then staying at Paul Smith’s. Harriman, Livingston, and “Uncle” Paul Smith took turns nursing the sick doctor through nights which he was not expected, in nature, to survive. And yet he outlived them all! He improved at Paul Smith’s, then tried a winter at St. Paul, Minnesota. Here he suffered a relapse and was brought back to the Adirondacks, where he again improved. It was at about this time that, being joined by Mrs. Trudeau and their two children, Ned and Charlotte, the family passed through a terrible ordeal on a journey from Malone to Paul Smith’s. A blizzard arose, and the trip, which usually occupied less than a day, took over forty-eight hours. Paul Smith handled the team and wagon. After plunging through miles of snowdrift in the teeth of a biting norther, the horses fell down exhausted. The family’s baggage had previously been abandoned at Barnum Pond. Paul Smith made the sick man as comfortable as possible, wrapped the children in blankets, and buried them for warmth in the snow. When the blizzard abated, the family reached the hunter’s place, after two days of unspeakable hardship.

Surviving this ordeal, seeming even to have thrived upon it, Dr. Trudeau began to consider seriously the possible advantages in pulmonary diseases of exposure to pure cold air. He proposed to spend a winter in the Adirondacks, where the frigid season is prolonged and the thermometer occasionally stands at forty degrees below zero. His friends and medical advisers considered his proposition as a kind of suicidal mania, all except Dr. Loomis and Mrs. Trudeau. Dr. Trudeau had been impressed with the theory of Brehmer, the Silesian, and of Dettweiler, a patient and pupil of Brehmer, that the consumptive was not harmed by inclement weather, provided he accustomed himself to living out of doors, at rest. With the approval of Loomis and Mrs. Trudeau, the doctor carried out his experiment, the results of which practically revolutionized the science of treating tuberculosis. Trudeau so improved that presently he began to practice medicine among the Adirondack natives. He continued to do so for several years, often traveling forty miles in a day or night and in all sorts of weather, to usher, perhaps, some little woodsman into the world, or even to allay anxiety by his mere presence. It has been said that his bedside manner did more than physic in ninety per cent of his cases. Half of his bills were never rendered and a quarter of the other half never paid; but tears would come into the eyes of many a woman when she saw him in after years; and men called him “the beloved physician.”

I have beside me as I write some old prescriptions that were found in the ragged ledger of a general store in the wilderness of forty years ago, when stovepipes and pills were sold over the same counter. There are three of them that reveal as many phases of this humane country doctor, who often came in the night, dressed in mackinaw, pontiacs, and moccasins. Apparently, if the family pig or cow or dog was ailing, Dr. Trudeau was summoned through the wilderness. Here is a prescription calling for carbolic oil, tar, sulphur, and olive oil--which, a veterinary doctor tells me, could not be improved upon to-day as a cure for mange. “_Sig:_” writes Trudeau at the end of the prescription; then, remembering that his patient might lack appreciation even of dog-Latin, he dashes his pen through the word and adds, “Rub on the dog several times!”

There was no liquor license in the woods in those days, and little whiskey, licit or otherwise; yet there was an all-abiding thirst, and men made their own poteen if they could get pure alcohol and some spirits of rye. Trudeau believed that, if a man liked an occasional drink, it was his human right to have it--in reasonable measure. But if the man abused the doctor’s confidence, from that day on he went parched and prescriptionless.

Again, one finds an early prescription for a common symptom of tuberculosis. I brought this prescription to Dr. Trudeau not very long ago and asked him what he would prescribe now--after thirty-five years.

“That--if anything,” he said; “but probably nothing--no physic at all. Open the window--go to bed--and keep your nerve!”

During these early years Trudeau lived the life of the people in many ways. Being restored to health, he hunted and fished with the other sons of the wilderness. Every year up to 1913 he brought home his string of trout and killed his buck. His skill with the rifle was remarkable. It was a natural gift. On one occasion he outmatched all competitors, then, on a challenge, picked off his own empty cartridge shells suspended from the branch of a tree on strings. And as for boxing, it is said that one evening at Paul Smith’s a local champion coaxed the doctor to put on the gloves.

“I promise not to hurt ye,” said the amateur bruiser.

Where the doctor acquired the gentle art no one seems to know; but when the local champion picked himself up at the end of the bout, he allowed that “the doctor’s the quickest thing with the mitts I ever run up ag’in!”

In 1877 Dr. Trudeau left Paul Smith’s and moved into the adjacent hamlet of Saranac Lake, which was then a lumber centre with six houses and a sawmill. The railway was not constructed to that point until 1888. But when the doctor came to the village, gradual developments began. He was followed by a few patients who had placed themselves in his care as a last hope of cure or prolonged life. The town to-day is a small city, the metropolis of the Adirondacks, which grew up around the beloved physician and his great work. It has a remarkable sanitary system, and a health code after one portion of which New York is said to have reformed its own.

II

It was at Saranac Lake during his first winter there that Dr. Trudeau literally dreamed a dream. Loomis had published a paper in the _Medical Record_, drawing attention to the climatic value of the Adirondack air for pulmonary invalids, citing the theories of Brehmer and Dettweiler and, no doubt, having in mind Trudeau’s own case. Shortly after reading this paper, Dr. Trudeau fell asleep while leaning on his gun on a fox runway on the side of Mount Pisgah, near Saranac Lake. He dreamed that the forest around him melted away and that the whole mountain-side was dotted with houses built inside out, as if the inhabitants lived on the outside. As he said many years later, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium, “I dreamed a dream of a great sanitarium that should be the everlasting foe of tuberculosis, and lo!--the dream has come true!”

Shortly after a reception held on January 1, 1915, at which all of the sanitarium patients came to shake hands with the founder, I happened to remark to the doctor on the quaintness of his speech for the occasion. He had spoken of the strange new faces before him, and how there had been a time when he was personally acquainted with each and every one, “his hopes, his fears, and very often the state of his bank account”; and how the girls even told him of their love affairs and of womanly dreams that too often were never fulfilled. The doctor suddenly leaned forward in his invalid’s chair and said to me in a confidential stage-whisper,----

“Would you believe it? I didn’t know what my tongue was saying. I felt strangely aloof for the moment. I saw a younger man thirty years before, leaning on his gun, waiting for a fox. There was not a house, not a sign of a human being. Now----”

His face was all aglow as he spread out his hands.

But even after the dream the beginning of the fulfillment did not occur for five or six years. He had built a house in the village. There, in that wonderful year, 1882, when Koch announced his discovery of the tubercle bacillus, Trudeau, who could not read German, received, as a Christmas present from his friend, C. M. Lea of Philadelphia, a translation of that document which the doctor termed “the most far-reaching, in its importance to the human race, of any original communication”--Koch’s _Etiology of Tuberculosis_. This was young Trudeau’s immediate inspiration. He had an “indifferent medical education,” to quote himself, “no apparatus, and no books”; and the remoteness of his surroundings had removed him from contact with medical men to whom he might apply for instruction.

During brief visits to New York--sometimes at the expense of his health--he learned some of the first principles of bacteriology;--and “I taught myself the rest as best I could.”

His laboratory was a little room in Saranac Lake, heated by a wood stove (there was no coal). He had a home-made thermostat heated by a kerosene lamp, and in this he succeeded in growing the tubercle bacillus, although he had to sit up o’ nights to see that the living organism was not destroyed by varying temperatures. To regulate this, he invented a little shutter arrangement which could be opened or closed. He obtained the bacillus in pure cultures, and with them repeated all Koch’s experiments. The guinea-pigs used for immunizing tests he had to keep in a hole underground which was heated by another kerosene lamp. He again proved that fresh air and natural hygiene were the deadly foes of tuberculosis, by turning loose on an island rabbits that had been inoculated with the disease. Running wild, they soon recovered; while others, similarly inoculated and kept in unhygienic places, died of the disease in a very short time.

While his enthusiasm was thus running high, he built in 1884 on the side of Pisgah--on the place of the dream--a little shack which is still there and which is known among the great buildings now around it as “The Little Red.” This was the nucleus of the present vast sanitarium. He began with two patients, whom he apparently cured by making them sit all day and sleep all night practically in the open air, the windows being open, with the mercury courting the thermometer bulb.

Meanwhile he himself was laboring with his cultures, his home-made thermostat, his guinea-pigs and rabbits. During the week in 1890 when Koch announced his tuberculin as a “cure” for tuberculosis, Dr. Trudeau published in the _Medical Record_ an article describing his failure to obtain any appreciable degree of immunity by injections of sterilized and filtered liquid cultures of the tubercle bacillus (tuberculin). Later experiments with Koch’s tuberculin by thousands of others proved similar failures.

Not long after this, while Dr. Trudeau was lying ill and depressed in New York City, there came from Saranac Lake the news that during the night his house, cultures, guinea-pigs--everything--had been destroyed by fire! It was the last straw. The sick man was in despair; but his indomitable spirit came to the rescue again, and a letter signed by William Osler helped him to accept fresh battle.

“I am sorry, Trudeau,” wrote Dr. Osler, “to hear of your misfortune, but take my word for it, there is nothing like a fire to make a man do the phœnix trick!”

The phœnix rose from its ashes, with the financial help of George C. Cooper, of New York. Near the ruins of Dr. Trudeau’s first house was built the first and best-equipped laboratory in the United States for the study of tuberculosis. Here Trudeau labored for years, searching, as he often said, “in the haystack for the needle that we know is there.” Here his followers still work at all hours in immunizing experiments and in the testing of proposed specific remedies for the cure of tuberculosis. Here many a “patent remedy” of the “cure-consumption” order has met its Nemesis. Here, years before either Friedmann or Piorkowski tried to commercialize his so-called remedies through the press of two continents, the turtle-germ of both was weighed in the scientific balance and discarded as useless. It is not a breach of confidence now to reveal the fact that an article entitled “Has Dr. Friedmann found a Cure for Tuberculosis?” which appeared on two pages of the New York _Times_ on the very morning when the Berlin physician landed in New York, came from the Saranac Laboratory and was the work of several scientific brains, with Dr. Trudeau’s as the master-mind on the subject. That article changed overnight the opinions of many in the medical world regarding the merits of Friedmann’s “specific.” Dr. Trudeau had examined the turtle organism years before, and had labeled it, not only harmless, but quite useless, as an immunizing agent in human tuberculosis.

To go back to the early days of sanitarium work, the success Trudeau achieved by his open-air and rest methods attracted great attention. The sanitarium grew swiftly. Other states of the Union built institutions of somewhat similar design and for similar treatment. To-day, as already remarked, there must be fully five hundred sanitaria for this method of treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis throughout the United States and Canada. The valley of the Saranac itself, with the adjacent Adirondack region, contains several private and state sanitaria that owe their inception, directly or indirectly, to the influence of Trudeau.

The Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium is, and has been from the first, a semi-charitable institution which treats patients at a sum that does not cover the cost of their board and housing. The annual deficit of the institution is comparatively large, as a result, and up to the time of his death it was Trudeau’s personality that attracted voluntary contributions for the continuance of the great work. Such names as Harriman, Sage, Schiff, Rockefeller, Tiffany, have figured in the contributors’ lists. E. H. Harriman was ever a friend and admirer of Trudeau and of his altruistic labors for humanity. In the days when ministers of money sat in Harriman’s antechamber, they were allowed to cool their heels while a frail country doctor was ushered in; and the railroad king let great affairs hang fire while he heard the latest yarn about “Uncle” Paul Smith, or became enthralled by the idealism of the practical dreamer who sat opposite him,--a great head on an emaciated body, a voice resonant with faith’s enthusiasm, even while it broke short in a gasp. This man was sending back to life and usefulness twenty per cent of his patients apparently cured, fifty per cent with the disease arrested, and the other thirty per cent with a fighting chance. And while the restless ministers of finance consulted their watches in the antechamber, Harriman listened--and reached for his check-book!

As for that annual deficit, a friend who merely sought information once wrote to me as follows:--

“What sort of a man is Trudeau? Is he what so many say he is, or just a clever doctor who has made a fortune out of the Adirondacks?”

In a rash moment I referred this to the doctor himself. I do not know that he was ever more upset. He promptly sent me this:--

“I am always puzzled to know why people cannot understand the spirit of the sanitarium work. To give a patient for $7 what costs $12 or $12.50, and to have a deficit of $27,000 on running expenses for the year, can hardly be a business way to make a man rich! Perhaps it is the imposing appearance of my _equipage_ which makes the world think me a coiner of money!!”

The “equipage” to which he referred with irony was a regular country doctor’s buggy, just large enough to accommodate himself (and Mrs. Trudeau, at a pinch), and drawn by a shaggy mare which the townspeople affectionately termed “the old plush horse.” In his latter years some one presented him with a fine carriage and a high-stepping thoroughbred. When Trudeau was called out to inspect this equipage, he looked worried.

“I--I can’t ride in that thing!” he said. “People will think I don’t need any money for my sanitarium!”

He agreed to accept the gift, however, when it was pointed out that the ancient mare was on her last legs. Thereupon the “old plush horse” was pensioned and given a comfortable stall for life. On the first day of her long holiday Dr. Trudeau visited the stable.

“Well, Kitty,” he said, patting the old mare, “your troubles are all over. As for me--I expect this old horse will have to keep plodding along until his left ventricle ceases to contract.”

But the matter of that “fortune” troubled him for some time. A month later he sent me another letter, accompanying a financial report underscored in places.

“This,” he wrote, “is for the gentleman who sized me up as ‘a clever business man who has made a fortune out of the Adirondacks.’ Tell him I begged all this money personally, but not for myself, as I don’t own a cent of it and draw no salary.”

Whatever he earned from private practice barely covered his living expenses. He raised the money to cover that deficit by what he called his “begging letters.” I remember he said to me one day after an anxious silence,--

“I’ve got a young fellow up there [at the sanitarium] who is a first-class radiographer. Then there is a bacteriologist, too. As soon as they get to feeling well they’ll go off and leave me. They are married, or are going to be, I’ve no doubt. If I could only build houses for them and get their _wives_ settled--That’s it!” he broke off. “I’ve got to raise the money for it somehow!”

He raised it, of course. Now there are two new cottages in the sanitarium grounds, and a permanent X-ray expert and a clever bacteriologist have been added to the colony there and to the cause.

When the doctor’s end had been achieved, he told me of his success.

“But why is every one so good?” he asked. “Why do people work for me?”

“They work for--you,” was suggested.

“No, no--I hope not,” he protested. “They work for my work.”

“Well, did you ever consider how much your own personality inspires this work?”

“Oh, come, come!” said he, as pleasurably confused as a girl complimented for the first time on her looks.

“What do people call my work?” he presently asked.

I had never heard it given a name. It was unique. But I ventured the word “philanthropy.” He shook his head.

“A distrustful word these days. Still--yes--say philanthropy, plus science. The sanitarium is the philanthropy--to cure or console; the laboratory is the science--to find a means of further immunizing toward ultimate, permanent cure.”

It was, as a whole, a science and philanthropy of Christ; a sort of Christian science without intellectual sacrifice. To this philanthropy Trudeau would never permit his name to be attached. It was the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium--not “Trudeau.” It was the Saranac Laboratory--not “Trudeau” Laboratory. It was usage and the postal authorities that labeled a little branch post-office, “Trudeau, N. Y.”

His work and worth were recognized, however, during his lifetime. Among the honors conferred upon him were Master of Science, Columbia University, 1889; Honorary Fellow of the Phipps Institute, 1903; LL.D., McGill University, 1904; and LL.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1913. The last-mentioned degree he received _in absentia_. Yale offered to confer the degree of LL.D., but the doctor was too ill to be present at the exercises.

III

I had intended to omit anecdotes in this brief sketch of Trudeau’s life, from the time that he was carried into Paul Smith’s “weighin’ no more’n a lambskin” up to the latter days when he lay on a final bed of suffering. But the anecdotes would creep in; and now they may stay just where they are, for it was characteristic of Trudeau, even when addressing a grave body of physicians and master-surgeons, to lighten his most serious discourses with anecdotal humor; although the first time he ever tried to address his colleagues,--at Baltimore in the eighties,--he fainted from illness, and, while others restored him, Dr. Loomis read the frail doctor’s address to the gathering.

Even in his own sufferings he found a text for interesting discourse that was flavored with the grim humor of grit. It does not seem long ago that I stood by his bedside while he, with one poor portion of a single lung, labored for breath. The possible benefits of artificial pneumo-thorax had not yet been fully established, yet the doctor had been one of the first to submit to the operation, offering himself, it seemed, as a victim of experimentation, although he told the operating physician that he expected no good results,--“For, after all, my dear fellow, the age of miracles is past.” Yet it eased his sufferings for several years, although at the time he was very ill. He assured me that he was not going to die right away.

“No such luck!” said he in the most cheerful manner. “But,” he continued, as connectedly as breath would allow, “what is the scheme of this business--of life--suffering--death? I don’t understand. It reminds me of this English ‘Cat and Mouse’ bill. They put a woman in a cell till she’s near dead of starvation. Then they let her out for a square meal--so she can get strength enough to suffer some more. You’ve got to have feeling, you know, to suffer. There’s a philosophy, by the way, for those who fear the agony of death. As you lose the enduring powers of life, you lose also the sensibility to suffering. It must be so. It is so. I have seen it many times.... Cat and mouse,” he half-mused,--“life and death. Death’s the cat--comes and paws until poor life is about dead to all feeling. Then the cat retires into a dark corner and purrs while the mouse gets a little life back, so as to be more sensible of suffering when the cat comes pawing again. I don’t say there’s no reason behind it--but I can’t see it--can you?”

I may be pardoned personal intrusion for a moment to relate when and where I first saw this remarkable man. I had gone to Saranac Lake in ill health. I asked why there was no statue in the community to the great Trudeau of whom I had read in Stevenson’s Letters. Being reminded that it was not customary to erect statues to the living, I decided to see this (to me) resurrected person. It happened to be about the time of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the sanitarium. When he stood up on a platform and, in a voice tense with emotion, told of his dream that was now materialized, I was filled with a sudden comprehension of the amazing thing that was happening--the celebration of that which this frail man had _lived to achieve_! I wrote several verses and gave them to my own physician, merely as one way of expressing what I thought about it all.

The next morning I was called on the telephone. It was Dr. Trudeau himself; some one had pinned the verses to his pillow on the previous night, and they had added to the happiness of the doctor at the end of one of the proudest days of his life. He asked me to come and see him.

“Do you know,” he said when we shook hands, “writing verses is something beyond my comprehension. I understand poetry, but not how one can write it. My case is like that of Zeb Robare, a guide over at Paul’s. He was asked by some ladies he was rowing the name of a certain mountain up here. ‘That’s Ampersand,’ said Zeb. ‘But, guide, how do you spell it?’ ‘Ah,’ said Zeb, ‘that’s the hell of it, ma’am. I can climb it easy enough, but I couldn’t spell it to save my life!’ That’s how I feel about poetry!”

Oddly coincident, Clayton Hamilton, a writer engaged in a book about Stevenson, called upon Dr. Trudeau to ask about Robert Louis’s sojourn at Saranac Lake. Mr. Hamilton later confessed in cold type, “I had come to ask of R. L. S. and remained to admire this hero of innumerable, unnoted battles,--this maker of a City of the Sick, who, because of him, look more hopefully on each successive rising sun.” Trudeau marveled at the feat of juggling English; yet this author wrote in conclusion: “And the best of our tricky achievements in setting words together dwindle in my mind to indistinction beside the labors and spirit of this man.”

Stevenson, by the way, produced some of his greatest essays during the winter of 1887-88, while he was under Dr. Trudeau’s care at Saranac Lake. Stories of the relationship of the two men have been told and retold. At one time I sent a version of the oft-repeated “oil” story to the doctor for confirmation. It was to the effect that Stevenson, after he had written “The Lantern-Bearers” for the Scribners, went to see Trudeau’s “light” in the laboratory. Stevenson was shown, in the effects of tuberculosis in guinea-pigs, the ravages of the disease that kills one human being in every seven. The sensitive author bolted out of the house, declaring that while Trudeau’s lantern might be very bright, to him it “smelled of oil like the devil.” Fearing that the anti-vivisectionists might make capital of the story, I took the liberty of modifying it. Dr. Trudeau wrote,--

“I thank you for your motive in changing the end of the oil story. I had never thought of the anti-vivisectionists. Had I thought, I could have told you a little more about it. Stevenson saw no mutilated animals in my laboratory. The only things he saw were the diseased organs in bottles, and cultures of the germs which had produced the disease. These were the things that turned him sick. I remember he went out just after I made this remark: ‘This little scum on the tube is consumption, and the cause of more human suffering than anything else in the world. We can produce tuberculosis in the guinea-pig with it; and if we could learn to cure tuberculosis in the guinea-pig, this great burden of human suffering might be lifted from the world.’”

It is true that Trudeau and Stevenson differed a great deal on a great many subjects, but so far as I have been able to judge from much that the doctor has told me, they agreed on so many of the greater things of life that they had to disagree about trivial matters for the sake of something to discuss. They actually got into heated argument over the great issue as to which is superior, the American system of _transferring baggage_, or the British method of _handling luggage_!

Dr. Trudeau assured me, incidentally, that Stevenson had no active symptoms of tuberculosis while at Saranac Lake, but had apparently had the disease and may have developed active symptoms after he went away. He did not die of tuberculosis, although this might have been a contributing cause. Trudeau had a full report made to him regarding the circumstances of Stevenson’s death at Samoa in 1894.

This paternal interest in ex-patients was characteristic of Trudeau. Particularly he liked to address a word of parting advice to a young man going back, apparently cured, to a life of continued usefulness. Here is a typical letter of this kind:--

“Do take my advice and don’t presume upon your physical endurance. When you have once been in the grip of the tiger you ought not to give him a chance to get you again, for he has downed many as good a man as you are; and you must not act on impulse, but use your head and self-control, even if you can’t accomplish all you want to in life. If you can’t have a whole loaf, try and be satisfied with a half one, or else the graham bread will get burned in good earnest and you won’t have any loaf at all!”

His attitude toward the patients, who came to him from all lands, ranks, and conditions, was ever eloquent of the man’s human kindness and sympathy. Many came as broken in spirit as in health, and often with but two hopes: one, that Trudeau would perform the great miracle; the other, that a physician of his reputation would not charge more than this latest victim of tuberculosis could scrape together. I know of one case in which the new patient said, “Doctor--before you do anything--I haven’t much money. How--how much will it cost?”

“Much depends on how much you’ve got, and how bad you are,” said Trudeau, himself assisting to unbutton the patient’s collar. “You see,” he went on disarmingly, “if you are not very bad, it will cost you quite a lot, so I can use the money for those who are. If you are a really bad case--Well--say ‘Ninety-nine,’ please, and keep on saying it while I listen to your chest.”

The doctor’s face became grave as he noted the vibrations caused by the reiterated “nine-nine-nine.” When the examination was over the patient asked,--

“How bad--I mean--how much will it be, doctor?”

For reply Trudeau--and one can imagine the great sympathy that flooded the beloved physician’s face--handed the patient a ten-dollar bill.

“I owe you--that much--at least,” he said.

One can imagine the rest--that speech which he employed so often and to so many:--

“Don’t take it too seriously, but just seriously enough. I am no better off in health than you are, and both you and I, old man, will be a great deal worse before we’re better.”

When, however, he sent some promising young man back into the battle of life, a repaired asset to the world, he liked to refer to him as “another young gladiator with a new blade in his sword.” The following, which he sent to me one day, explains the simile:--

“My sympathies are naturally in the world with the vanquished. My favorite statue is that great one of Victory carrying the dying gladiator, his broken sword in hand. The world applauds and bows before success and achievement; it has little thought for those who fall by the way, sword in hand; and yet it takes most courage to fight a losing fight!”

Speaking of this same statue, “Gloria Victis,” a fine copy of which stood in the hall of his house, he said one day early in the great European war: “When he created that thing, I wonder did the sculptor, Mercié, realize that he was modeling the glory of Belgium in ruin?”

Others saw something of the doctor’s own heroic spirit in that figure, with the broken sword in the drooping right hand, and the left arm still held aloft as if the dying warrior challenged even death--“_Moriturus, te saluto!_”

The last active labor of Dr. Trudeau was the writing of his autobiography, and perhaps the last service of the writer on behalf of the beloved physician was the proof-reading of its pages. The doctor was seized with his mortal illness just after the last pages were written and before he had decided upon a title for his work. The single word, “Aquiescence,” was proposed as descriptive of the life of a man who accepted adverse conditions and, like the master of a ship, turned the ill wind to advantage. The word was taken from a sentence which he had once written to me, “The conquest of Fate comes not by rebellious struggle, but by acquiescence.”

When the title was suggested to the doctor, he was unable to speak, but smiled and shook his head. Later, when he was a little better, he dictated to his secretary, “If the world finds a sermon in my life-story--good; but I don’t want any one to think I was trying to preach one.”

Possibly the impression has been given in these pages that Trudeau was an approachable person. He was, to some; to many he was quite unapproachable, especially interviewers. He feared a scribe. To the present writer he repeatedly said, “Remember--I trust you; but don’t you ever publish what I’m telling you until after I am where I won’t care what the world says about me.”

Even to his most intimate friends he was difficult of approach when, after “studying the ceiling” for many long days, he was irritated beyond human self-control by his sufferings. But even then he could be played like a fine instrument if the player had technique. If the doctor was in that depth of depression out of which he would chant a “De Profundis” of blackest pessimism, all that was necessary was to agree with him that life was “a senseless business”; whereupon he would draw his sword of optimism and flash the text engraven upon its bright blade: “O ye of little faith!” But if you told him he looked well and you hoped he felt so, he would say, “I don’t. I’m utterly miserable!” and sink back in his invalid’s chair with a smile that seemed to add, “There’s little sport in an easy game.”

Characteristic of the man’s philosophy was his own comment on his fits of melancholy, vouchsafed once to a fellow sufferer who had been in depths of depression: “If you go down to the depths at times, you have many glimpses of higher things that people of more even temperament never get; and after all, the ideal is the beautiful in life; the facts of life are hideous.”

He once told a visitor some tales of his experiences with the great human tragedy--told them as if they belonged to the great human comedy, for his humor was irrepressible. But the visitor did not laugh; he went away a sadder and a wiser man. Possibly he thought the doctor hardened; but I shall never forget the expression of Trudeau’s face when I asked him directly if he had not become so accustomed to tragedy that it no longer touched his emotions. The smile left his face; his eyes looked out and beyond with a suddenly moist softness, and he said slowly, “Pity, as an emotion, passes. Pity, as a motive, remains.”

Stephen Chalmers. By kind permission of _The
Atlantic Monthly_.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE

The editors have found these additional selections very useful in teaching biographical narrative:

Barrie, James. _Margaret Ogilvy._ Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Bradford, Gamaliel. _Portraits of Women_, particularly _Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu_ and _Mrs. Pepys_. Houghton, Mifflin Company.

Eliot, Charles W. _John Gilley, Maine Farmer and Fisherman._
Houghton Mifflin Company.

Morley, Christopher. _Silas Orrin Howes_ in _Pipefuls_. Doubleday,
Page & Company.

Strachey, Lytton. _Mr. Creevey_ in _Books and Characters_, and
_Florence Nightingale in Eminent
Victorians_. Harcourt, Brace and Company.