Volume 3: Chapters 8–10 Summary

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Chapter 8

The company has reached Switzerland, even further diminished. They travel to Chamonix, but since winter is now coming, Adrian proposes that they move on to the warmer climate of Italy. There are now only four of the company left: Lionel, Adrian, Clara, and Evelyn. They travel across the Alps and down to Milan, where they take up residence in the Viceroy’s palace. Here, they establish an orderly existence, riding and exploring the deserted palaces during the day and passing the evenings in reading and conversation.

When summer comes, the four survivors travel to Lake Como, where they take up residence in a villa called the Pliniana, because it is situated on a site described by Pliny the Younger in his letters. Lionel believes they might have been happy here if they could have forgotten the horrors they had seen. Clara has become withdrawn and silent and is devoted to Evelyn, caring for him like a mother. One day, when Adrian and Lionel return from a foraging trip, they find that Evelyn has succumbed to a sudden fever. For two weeks they watch anxiously at his bedside, until finally he dies. Clara tells them that she does not believe she will live if they stay by Lake Como, saying that she feels something in the landscape urging her to die. The three survivors therefore make their way to Rome.

Chapter 9

Adrian expresses the wish to travel to Rome via Venice, and he, Lionel and Clara arrive there by boat on September 6th. They look down from the tower of San Marco on the ruined city and then across the sea to Greece. Clara says that she wants to go to Greece, where her parents are buried, rather than to Rome. Lionel objects, but Adrian is delighted with the idea, so they set sail across the open sea.

A storm blows up, and the boat is upset. Lionel loses sight of Clara and Adrian but sees that he is near the shore and manages to reach it. He falls senseless on the beach and conjectures that he must have lain there unconscious for a long time. When he awakes, he wanders round the beach for a long time, hoping to discover some sign of human life, unwilling to accept that he is the last man alive. He compares himself to Robinson Crusoe but says that Crusoe was more fortunate because he could always hope for rescue. Robinson Crusoe was terrified by a footprint, but Lionel would have fallen down and worshiped such a sign that he was not alone.

Eventually, Lionel enters the city of Ravenna, where he finds oxen, horses, and dogs, but no human inhabitants. Although there are thousands of abandoned houses, he is too disconsolate to find a bed for the night and lies down to sleep on the pavement, with a marble step for a pillow.

Chapter 10

Lionel awakes and thinks about Adrian and Clara, the last of many people to depart from his life, and his only companions for the last year. For three days he wanders around Ravenna, then leaves it and strikes out into the countryside “without purpose or aim.” When he arrives in Forli, he goes into a palace and looks at himself in a mirror. The figure he sees is wild and unkempt, dressed in tattered clothing. He dresses himself more respectably, in case he should meet with any other survivor, and then conceives the idea of writing in every town through which he passes, in white paint, the words “Verney, the last of the race of Englishmen, had...

(This entire section contains 727 words.)

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taken up his abode in Rome.”

He walks along the plain beside the Apennines, meeting no one, until finally he reaches Rome and wanders around the imperial monuments. Eventually, he decides to write a book, though he has no idea who will ever read it. He passes a year in composing his narrative, never seeing any other human being, his only companion a shaggy sheepdog. Having written his book, he decides to begin traveling again and sets off in a boat with a small store of food and a few books, to sail the Mediterranean and then the seas of the world without hope or joy. The Supreme Being, the angels, and the spirits of the dead will see the tiny boat and its solitary inhabitant, the last man.

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Volume 3: Chapters 5–7 Summary

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