| "eanwhile, the army had undertaken a siege. Her passion for the Prince of Navarre gave her continued fear, even through some mortal horrors which agitated her. Her fears proved only too well founded; she received letters from the army; she learned from them of the end of the siege, but she also learned that the Prince of Navarre had been killed the last day.
She lost her consciousness and her reason; she was several times deprived of one or the other. This excess of misfortune appeared to her in moments a kind of consolation. She cared nothing for her comfort, for her reputation, nor for her life; death alone appeared desirable to her: she was hoping for it from her grief or was resolved to seek it.
A vestige of shame obliged her to say she was suffering excessive pain to give a pretext for her crying and her tears. If a thousand adversities made her return to herself, she saw that she had merited them, and nature and Christianity deterred her from being homicidal toward herself and deferred carrying out what she had resolved.
It wasn't long after she was in this violent depression, when the Count of Tende arrived. She believed she knew all the sentiments that her unhappy state could inspire in him; but the arrival of her husband gave her still a trouble and a confusion which was new to her.
He knew upon arriving that she was ill and, as he had always conserved some reputation for honesty in the eyes of the public and of his servants, he went at first into her bedroom. He found her as a person beside herself, as a person crazed and she could not restrain her tears, that she was attributing always to physical pain which tormented her.
The Count of Tende, touched by the state that he saw her in, grew tender toward her and, thinking he would take her mind off her pains, he spoke to her of the Prince of Navarre's death and of his wife's affliction.
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