First Part Chapter 46

When they took him away from me, I lay down on the same bed and hoped
to die. There was but a door between us, and it seemed to me I had
strength to force it!

But, alas! I was too young for death; and after
forty days, during which, with cruel care and all the sorry inventions
of medical science, they slowly nursed me back to life, I find myself
in the country, seated by my window, surrounded with lovely flowers,
which he made to bloom for me, gazing on the same splendid view over
which his eyes have so often wandered, and which he was so proud to
have discovered, since it gave me pleasure. Ah! dear Renee, no words
can tell how new surroundings hurt when the heart is dead. I shiver at
the sight of the moist earth in my garden, for the earth is a vast
tomb, and it is almost as though I walked on him! When I first went
out, I trembled with fear and could not move. It was so sad to see his
flowers, and he not there! My father and mother are in Spain.

You know what my brothers are, and
you yourself are detained in the country. But you need not be uneasy
about me; two angels of mercy flew to my side. The Duc and the
Duchesse de Soria hastened to their brother in his illness, and have
been everything that heart could wish. The last few nights before the
end found the three of us gathered, in calm and wordless grief, round
the bed where this great man was breathing his last, a man among a
thousand, rare in any age, head and shoulders above the rest of us in
everything.