It needed all the motherly care and kindness of the good Countess of Erbach, who insisted on ministering to her as she lay on a bed of sickness for several days, with her own hands, to restore her to some degree of convalescence.[121] Indeed, the shock which her system had received from the sufferings and fatigue of that awful night during the escape from the city, and the ten miles of weary wayfaring which followed it, was ultimately, though not immediately, fatal to her. She never recovered from the effects of it, though the repose and kind cares of which she was the object in the castle of Erbach, apparently restored her to some degree of health for the present. Olympia and her husband and little brother seem to have remained some considerable time with these kind and noble hosts. She had an opportunity of observing the ordinary habits of their daily life, and has left us an interesting little sketch of the patriarchal manners prevailing in the pious household of a German country nobleman of that day.[122] "The Count," she writes, "maintains sundry preachers in the town, and is always the first to be present at their sermons. Every day before breakfast, he gathers around him the members of his family and his servants, and reads to them a portion of one of St. Paul's Epistles. Then he kneels in prayer, together with his whole household. His next care is to visit his subjects, one by one, in their homes, when he talks familiarly with them and exhorts them to piety. For he says, that he is responsible before God for their souls. Would that all princes and lords resembled him!" Of the Countess she writes to her sister, that "she is a woman religious before all else. Her conversation is ever of God and of the life hereafter, of which she speaks with the greatest enthusiasm and desire." Grünthler's friends were meanwhile endeavouring to find some independent position for him. There is a letter from one Hubert of Heidelberg to him, among the collection of Olympia's letters,[123] in which he tells him, that all the councillors of the Palatine's court being then at Worms, "seeking means to avert, if possible, the calamities that menace Germany," he has no immediate hope of being able to obtain for him a chair in the University of Heidelberg. "But be assured," he continues, "that my house is open to you and to your family. Come to me without hesitation; and be sure that better days are in store for you;—'Grata superveniet, quæ non sperabitur, hora.'" [Sidenote: TO HEIDELBERG.]