Before long Grünthler was struck down in the midst of his labours. Help there was none. Every man was too much engrossed by his own desperate fight with the misery around him. Medicine there was none, food but little. And Olympia watched alone and helpless by the bedside of her husband; sustained only by the belief that her fervent and unceasing prayers might move Heaven to that miraculous interference with the unseen working of the material laws, which even then mankind had ceased to expect in cases where their operation is seen and comprehended. Even Olympia, whose love for her husband poured itself forth in such earnest supplications, that the fever in his blood might not produce the effect upon his organism, which in other men it did produce,—Olympia herself would not have prayed, that water closing over his head should fail to drown him. Not the less did her belief sustain her in those long hours of dreadful desolation and sickening dread. She was comforted;—though at the cost of a lower ideal of the nature of the Creator than she would have attained had such comfort been impossible to her; and, therefore, at the cost of a proportionate inferiority in her own moral nature. But the physician's malady was not "unto death." He recovered. As M. Bonnet writes;[116] "It required a miracle to save Grünthler.... Olympia's prayers and those of the Church of Schweinfurth were heard; and Grünthler was saved!" Amid the horrors of this time Olympia found means to send out of the city a letter[117] to Lavinia della Rovere. [Sidenote: LETTER TO LAVINIA.] "What a good fortune is it," she writes, "in our misery to have found an opportunity of telling you of our sorrows. Weep for us, my friend; hut at the same time be thankful for our mercies. We are besieged in this town, and shut in without escape, between two great armies. But God has so kept us hitherto, that we have escaped from what seemed certain death. He has fed us, and continues to feed us, in a time of extreme scarcity. My husband, prostrated by disease, was on the brink of the grave. But He hath deigned to recall him to life in mercy to me, who could not have supported so heavy a blow.... In all these afflictions we have had but one consolation, prayer and meditation on the Holy Scriptures. Not once have I turned to look back with regret on the riches of Egypt. And I have felt that to meet death here, is preferable to the enjoyment of all the pleasures of the world elsewhere." "Egypt," and "elsewhere" of course mean Ferrara, with the necessity of concealing her religious faith. She concludes this letter, written amid so great misery, with a burst of affection, which shows how deeply the friendship of her early years had rooted itself in her heart, and how profoundly she had felt the kindness shown to her in her old time of distress.