GENIUS IN LOVE AND DEATH—Paul Wiegler; translated by Carl Raushenbush —Boni ($2.50).
Author Wiegler presents a portfolio of 21 thumbnail biographies: impressionistic studies of men and women of genius. Some are boudoir, some bedside scenes. Heloise and Abelard, separated for life, long for each other and finally share a grave; Byron, fair, fattish and 40, dies of fever at Missolonghi; Goethe walks through the night to one of his many assignations; Oscar Wilde, under his enforced pseudonym of Sebastian Melmoth, dies a pariah at the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris; George Sand and Alfred de Musset kiss and wrangle; Tolstoy, in his last illness, flees his troublesome wife and dies on a hard bench in the railway station at Astapovo.
Author Wiegler, German biographer of the fashionable(Lytton Strachey—Andre Maurois)school, gives, not annotated footnotes to historical figures, but dramatic glimpses of human beings.
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