from the Princess
until now: a GAZETTE even being printed without the paragraph containing
the account of his suicide; but it was at length, I know not how, made
known to her. And when she heard it, her ladies tell me, she screamed
and fell, as if struck dead; then sat up wildly and raved like a
madwoman, and was then carried to her bed, where her physician attended
her, and where she lay of a brain-fever. All this while the Prince used
to send to make inquiries concerning her; and from his giving orders
that his Castle of Schlangenfels should be prepared and furnished, I
make no doubt it was his intention to send her into confinement thither:
as had been done with the unhappy sister of His Britannic Majesty at
Zell.

'She sent repeatedly to demand an interview with his Highness; which the
latter declined, saying that he would communicate with her Highness when
her health was sufficiently recovered. To one of her passionate letters
he sent back for reply a packet, which, when opened, was found to
contain the emerald that had been the cause round which all this dark
intrigue moved.

'Her Highness at this time became quite frantic; vowed in the presence
of all her ladies that one lock of her darling Maxime's hair was more
precious to her than all the jewels in the world: rang for her carriage,
and said she would go and kiss his tomb; proclaimed the murdered
martyr's innocence, and called down the punishment of Heaven, the wrath
of her family, upon his assassin. The Prince, on hearing these speeches
(they were all, of course, regularly brought to him), is said to have
given one of his dreadful looks (which I remember now), and to have
said, "This cannot last much longer."

'All that day and the next the Princess Olivia passed in dictating
the most passionate letters to the Prince her father, to the Kings of
France, Naples, and Spain, her kinsmen, and to all other branches of her
family, calling upon them in the most incoherent terms to protect her
against the butcher and assassin her husband, assailing his person in
the maddest terms of reproach, and at the same time confessing her
love for the murdered Magny. It was in vain that those ladies who were
faithful to her pointed out to her the inutility of these letters, the
dangerous folly of the confessions which they made; she insisted
upon writing them, and used to give them to her second robe-woman, a
Frenchwoman (her Highness always affectioned persons of that nation