Stealing about the large room with soft tread are the pompous doctors, the _ignorant_ doctors, who declared their patient to be getting well. Stately bewigged powdered men these, with silver topped canes carried almost as wands of office; ready at a moment’s notice to draw the lifeblood from their patient, or to order their dispensers in attendance on them in a room hard by to pound up a nauseous drug, in a great mortar, to be administered crude in a revolting draught without any attempt to conceal its horrid taste, for medicine was not administered in those days, in attractive tinctures, with every bitterness covered by some subtle flavouring; it was taken usually in the form of a gritty, stringy draught which turned the stomach of the patient. But around the sick chamber flitted the young wife of Frederick; she was only thirty-two then, and the mother of eight children, which number was very soon to be increased to nine. She was a most devoted wife and scarcely left him, it is said, during his illness. There Frederick lay thinking, with the soft notes of the violin floating around him, and the jarring laughter of the card players breaking in upon him at times. Perhaps he was thinking of his boy George as the music moved him, as it will an artistic nature. “Come, George, let us be good friends while we are permitted to be so!” A clock has just struck the half hour after nine; perhaps the last thought in Frederick’s mind, as he is lying there listening to Desnoyer’s music, is of the God he is so soon to meet. The hand of the clock creeps on to the quarter; it is nearly a quarter to ten. Suddenly the music stops. Frederick is taken with a violent fit of coughing; when it ceases, Dr. Wilmot comes to the bedside. “I trust Your Royal Highness will be better now, and pass a quiet night.” The Princess comes to the foot of the bed and leans over it; Dr. Hawkins approaches the Prince with a candle and gazes anxiously at him; at last he sees something which alarms him, the cough breaks out again with increased violence, Desnoyer places his arms round the Prince and raises him in the bed to relieve him, as he does so the Prince shivers and cries out:-- “Je sens la mort!” (I feel death.) Desnoyers alarmed, cries out to the Princess at the foot of the bed:-- “Madame, the Prince is going.” She rushes round to the head of the bed and bends over her husband. It is over; he is dead. And from the next room comes a burst of laughter from the card players. FOOTNOTES: [73] Just previous to this visit, Doddington had been much engaged in a Motion made in the House of Commons by Townshend, the Prince’s Groom of the Bedchamber, and seconded by a Colonel Haldane concerning a military scandal, which shows that the name of Haldane was not unknown in military debates then. CHAPTER XXIX. THE FINAL SCENE. Under this date of March 20th, Doddington continues his entry in his diary:--