Seeing myself alone with the child, I stripped him of all medical appliances, and seizing him like a mad woman, pressed him to my bosom, laying my forehead against his, and beseeching God to grant him the life which I was striving to pass into his veins from mine.  For some minutes I held him thus, longing to die with him, so that neither life nor death might part us.  Dear, I felt the limbs relaxing; the writhings ceased, the child stirred, and the ghastly, corpselike tints faded away!  I screamed, just as I did when he was taken ill; the doctors hurried up, and I pointed to Armand.

“He is saved!” exclaimed the oldest of them.

What music in those words!  The gates of heaven opened!  And, in fact, two hours later Armand came back to life; but I was utterly crushed, and it was only the healing power of joy which saved me from a serious illness.  My God! by what tortures do you bind a mother to her child!  To fasten him to our heart, need the nails be driven into the very quick?  Was I not mother enough before?  I, who wept tears of joy over his broken syllables and tottering steps, who spent hours together planning how best to perform my duty, and fit myself for the sweet post of mother?  Why these horrors, these ghastly scenes, for a mother who already idolized her child?

As I write, our little Armand is playing, shouting, laughing.  What can be the cause of this terrible disease with children?  Vainly do I try to puzzle it out, remembering that I am again with child.  Is it teething?  Is it some peculiar process in the brain?  Is there something wrong with the nervous system of children who are subject to convulsions?  All these thoughts disquiet me, in view alike of the present and the future.  Our country doctor holds to the theory of nervous trouble produced by teething.  I would give every tooth in my head to see little Armand’s all through.  The sight of one of those little white pearls peeping out of the swollen gum brings a cold sweat over me now.  The heroism with which the little angel bore his sufferings proves to me that he will be his mother’s son.  A look from him goes to my very heart.

Medical science can give no satisfactory explanation as to the origin of this sort of tetanus, which passes off as rapidly as it comes on, and can apparently be neither guarded against nor cured.  One thing alone, as I said before, is certain, that it is hell for a mother to see her child in convulsions.  How passionately do I clasp him to my heart!  I could walk for ever with him in my arms!

To have suffered all this only six weeks before my confinement made it much worse; I feared for the coming child.  Farewell, my dear beloved.  Don’t wish for a child—­there is the sum and substance of my letter!

XLI

THE BARONNE DE MACUMER TO THE VICOMTESSE DE L’ESTORADE
Paris.

Poor sweet,—­Macumer and I forgave you all your naughtiness when we heard of your terrible trouble.  I thrilled with pain as I read the details of the double agony, and there seem compensations now in being childless.