literary transcript

 

17 November 1900

 

It is improbable, is it not, that anything I have said or done will survive me?  Or perhaps I shall be a modern St Procopius, the torments of whose martyrdom were wonderfully increased by each succeeding legend until the time came when his relics healed the sick and opened the eyes of the blind: of course it was the legends that worked the miracles, not the bones.

      On a Christian sarcophagus, on a martyr's tomb in Rome, Anatole France tells us that there is an inscription: 'Whatsoever impious man violates this sepulchre, may he die the last of his own people.'  I have known the full weight of that curse - but also the strange joy which it brings.  I must sleep now.  I feel curiously apart from my writing, as though it were another hand which moves, another imagination I draw upon.  Soon I must ask Maurice to take dictation from me: no doubt he will invent my last hours, and then the transition will be complete.