He Answers Nobody

With the magnificent gesture peculiar to him, Gabriele d'Annunzio, now Prince of Snowy Mountain, wrote to the newspaper Provincia di Brescia affecting proud disdain of the world, the flesh and the devil outside of his villa: "I beg you to declare that I have become the solitary, proud artist of 1911. It is my firm decision not to care or to know what happens outside my villa. Every evening, I burn before an altar of stone the heap of the day's unopened and unanswered letters. To write to me is useless, to come to my door equally useless. I answer nobody; I receive nobody. Neither prayer nor insolences can break my monastic enclosure. My dogs are wise and bite well. Have I made myself clear?"