XLVI

MME. DE MACUMER TO THE COMTESSE DE L’ESTORADE 1829.

My sweet, tender Renee, you will have learned from the papers the terrible calamity which has overwhelmed me.  I have not been able to write you even a word.  For twenty days I never left his bedside; I received his last breath and closed his eyes; I kept holy watch over him with the priests and repeated the prayers for the dead.  The cruel pangs I suffered were accepted by me as a rightful punishment; and yet, when I saw on his calm lips the smile which was his last farewell to me, how was it possible to believe that I had caused his death!

Be it so or not, he is gone, and I am left.  To you, who have known us both so well, what more need I say?  These words contain all.  Oh!  I would give my share of Heaven to hear the flattering tale that my prayers have power to bring him back to life!  To see him again, to have him once more mine, were it only for a second, would mean that I could draw breath again without mortal agony.  Will you not come soon and soothe me with such promises?  Is not your love strong enough to deceive me?

But stay! it was you who told me beforehand that he would suffer through me.  Was it so indeed?  Yes, it is true, I had no right to his love.  Like a thief, I took what was not mine, and my frenzied grasp has crushed the life out of my bliss.  The madness is over now, but I feel that I am alone.  Merciful God! what torture of the damned can exceed the misery in that word?

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.  The patient resignation of my Felipe was angelic.  The sight of his brother and Marie gave him a moment’s pleasure and easing of his pain.