For my own part, I freely pardoned her injustice
towards myself, and sincerely forgive the priest if he (as I have
been told) excited her bitterness against me.
The severe shock I had experienced might have terminated fatally
for me, had not my thoughts been compelled to rouse themselves
for the contemplation of the alarming prospect before me. It was
more than four o'clock in the morning when I returned to the
chateau, and at nine I rose again without having obtained the least
repose. The king had inquired for me several times. I instantly
went to him, and my languid frame, pale countenance and heavy
eyes, all which he took as the consequences of my concern for his
indisposition, appeared greatly to affect him; and he sought to
comfort me by the assurance of his being considerably better.
This was far from being true, but he was far from suspecting
the nature of the malady to which his frame was about to become
a prey. The physicians had now pronounced with certainty on the
subject, nor was it possible to make any mystery of it with me,
who had seen Anne on her sick-bed.
In common with all who knew the real nature of the complaint, I
sought to conceal it from the king, and in this deception the
physicians themselves concurred. In the course of the morning a
consultation took place; when called upon for their opinion, each
of them endeavoured to evade a direct answer, disguising the name
of his majesty's disease under the appellation of a cutaneous
eruption, chicken-pox, etc.
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