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On the morning of 3 January 1889, passers-by in Turin's Piazza Carlo Alberto might not have been unduly surprised to see a cabdriver brutally beating his reluctant animal, but they were probably taken aback by what happened next, as a man, distinguished chiefly by his abundant moustaches and burning gaze and recognised by some, perhaps, as a lodger in a nearby pension, rushed forward and — in an uncanny acting out of a famous dream-sequence in Dostoevsky's class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">Crime and Punishment — flung his arms defensively around the horse's neck, weeping and crying. Taken back to his lodgings, the madman was later escorted home to Switzerland, where, after a period in psychiatric clinics in Basel and, subsequently, Jena, he was handed over to the care of his mother and sister for what was to be a ten-year period of almost complete dissociation from the world about him, an intellectual and emotional paralysis that ended only with his death on 25 August 1900. If those who had witnessed his very public collapse might have been shocked by the incident, his friends, though also shocked and, of course, saddened, could scarcely have been surprised. This was, after all, a man who had been signing his recent letters, variously, "Caesar", "Dionvsos' and even "The Crucified".

DOI: 10.1057/9780230377813_5

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