Ugo Foscolo

A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray

Samuel Smiles. John Murray, 1891. 2 vols.

20th August, 1822
...Since I must be buried in your country, I am happy in having insured for me the possession during the remains of my life of a cottage built after my plan, surrounded by flowering shrubs, almost within the turnpikes of the town, and yet as quiet as a country-house, and open to the free air. Whenever I can freely dispose of a hundred pounds, I will also build a small dwelling for my corpse, under a beautiful Oriental plane-tree, which I mean to plant next November, and cultivate con amore

The exiled Italian patriot and man of letters was writing to his publisher, John Murray, about Digamma Cottage, the property he had purchased on the South Bank of the Regent's Canal. (See the Anonymous - A Seven Years Absentee entry.) The following year his fellow countryman, Count Pecchio, paid a visit and 'found him lodged in his new cottage, with all the luxury of a Fermier Générale [a wealthy financier], promenading over rooms covered with beautiful Flanders carpets; with furniture of the rarest woods, and statues in the hall; with a hothouse full of exotics and costly flowers; and still served by the Three Graces (I believe more expensive than everything else).' (Quoted in Saint John's Wood: Its History, Its Houses, Its Haunts and Its Celebrities. A.M. Eyre. Chapman & Hall, 1913.)

The Three Graces were his maidservants; two of them turned out to be prostitutes, and one of them ran off with his former translator. This led to a duel, whether in Regent's Park or Primrose Hill is not clear; fortunately no blood was shed. But the extravagance Pecchio had noted soon led to financial ruin, and that same year everything was sold to meet his debts. He died not long after and was buried at Chiswick; later his remains were moved to Florence where, 'with all the pride, pomp and circumstance of a great national mourning,' he was interred alongside monuments to Michelangelo and Galileo. In England however his only lasting fame is at one remove: Wilkie Collins appropriated the name for the villainous Count Fosco in The Woman in White.