untiring care, self-abnegation, angelic sweetness and serenity of this humble woman gained the attachment of the whole family, and established an ascendency over Alfred’s impressionable imagination.  She did not confine her office to her patient’s physical welfare, but strove earnestly to minister to him spiritually.  His long convalescence “was like a second birth.  He did not seem more than seventeen:  he had the joyousness of a child, the fancies of a page, like Cherubino in the Marriage of Figaro.  All the difficulties and subjects of despair which preceded his malady had vanished in a rose-colored distance.  He passed his days in reading interminable books—­Clarissa Harlowe, which he already knew, the Memorial of St. Helena, and all the memoirs relating to the Empire.  In the evening we all gathered about his writing-table to draw and chat, while Soeur Marcelline sat by knitting in bright worsteds.  Auguste Barre, our neighbor, came to work at an album of caricatures in the style of Toeppfer’s, and we all amused ourselves with the comic illustrations:  Alfred and Barre had the pencil, the rest of us composed a text as absurd as the drawings.  Who will give us back those delicious evenings of laughter, jest and chat, when without stirring from home or depending on anything from without our whole household was so happy?” Alas! they were not of long duration.  By and by Sister Marcelline went away, leaving her patient a pen on which she had embroidered, “Remember your promises.”  He was afflicted by her departure, and wrote some lines to her, who, as he said, did not know what poetry meant, but he could never be induced to show them, although he repeated them to Paul and their friend Alfred Tattet, who between them contrived to note down the four following verses: 

    Poor girl! thou art no longer fair. 
    By watching Death with patient care
      Thou pale as he art grown: 
    By tending upon human pain
    Thy hand is worn as coarse in grain
      As horny Labor’s own.

But weariness and courage meek
Illuminate thy pallid cheek
Beside the dying bed: 
To the poor suffering mortal’s clutch
Thy hard hand hath a gentle touch,
With tears and warm blood fed.

* * * * *

Tread to the end thy lonely road,
All for thy task and toward thy God,
Thy footsteps day by day. 
That evil must exist, we prate,
And wisely leave it to its fate,
And pass another way;

But thy pure conscience owns it not,
Though ceaseless warfare is thy lot
Against disease and woe;
No ills for thee have power to sting,
Nor to thy lip a murmur bring,

    Save those that others know.

De Musset held in peculiar sacredness and reverence whatever was connected with this good woman and his feeling for her:  seventeen years after this illness the embroidered pen and a piece of her knitting were buried with him by almost his last request.