The Prince, meanwhile, was thought to be mending, and thanksgivings began to be mingled with the prayers offered almost every hour in the churches; but for eighteen days he lay in a most precarious state.  His wife hardly left his bedside, and his sister, Catharine Countess of Schwartzburg, was indefatigable in her attentions.  The Duke of Anjou visited him daily, and expressed the most filial anxiety for his recovery, but the hopes, which had been gradually growing stronger, were on the 5th of April exchanged for the deepest apprehensions.  Upon that day the cicatrix by which the flow of blood from the neck had been prevented, almost from the first infliction of the wound, fell off.  The veins poured forth a vast quantity of blood; it seemed impossible to check the haemorrhage, and all hope appeared to vanish.  The Prince resigned himself to his fate, and bade his children “good night for ever,” saying calmly, “it is now all over with me.”

It was difficult, without suffocating the patient, to fasten a bandage tightly enough to staunch the wound, but Leonardo Botalli, of Asti, body physician of Anjou, was nevertheless fortunate enough to devise a simple mechanical expedient, which proved successful.  By his advice; a succession of attendants, relieving each other day and night, prevented the flow of blood by keeping the orifice of the wound slightly but firmly compressed with the thumb.  After a period of anxious expectation, the wound again closed; and by the end of the month the Prince was convalescent.  On the 2nd of May he went to offer thanksgiving in the Great Cathedral, amid the joyful sobs of a vast and most earnest throng.

The Prince, was saved, but unhappily the murderer had yet found an illustrious victim.  The Princess of Orange; Charlotte de Bourbon—­the devoted wife who for seven years, had so faithfully shared his joys and sorrows—­lay already on her death-bed.  Exhausted by anxiety, long watching; and the alternations of hope and fear during the first eighteen days, she had been prostrated by despair at the renewed haemorrhage.  A violent fever seized her, under which she sank on the 5th of May, three days after the solemn thanksgiving for her husband’s recovery.  The Prince, who loved her tenderly, was in great danger of relapse upon the sad event, which, although not sudden, had not been anticipated.  She was laid in her grave on the 9th of May, amid the lamentations of the whole country, for her virtues were universally known and cherished.  She was a woman of rare intelligence, accomplishment, and gentleness of disposition; whose only offence had been to break, by her marriage, the Church vows to which she had been forced in her childhood, but which had been pronounced illegal by competent authority, both ecclesiastical and lay.  For this, and for the contrast which her virtues afforded to the vices of her predecessor, she was the mark of calumny and insult.  These attacks, however, had cast no shadow