"After this the king became very ill, and during more than two years after his recovery Frances dragged on a miserable existence at the palace. Mme. Schwellenberg became more and more insolent and intolerable, and now the health of poor Frances began to give way: and all who saw her pale face, her emaciated figure, and her feeble walk predicted that her sufferings would soon be over. "The queen seems to have been utterly regardless of the _comfort_, the _health_, the _life_, of her attendants. Weak, feverish, hardly able to stand, Frances had still to rise before seven, in order to dress the sweet queen, and sit up till midnight, in order to undress the sweet queen. The indisposition of the handmaid could not and _did not escape the notice of_ her royal mistress. But the _established doctrine of the court was that all sickness_ was to be _considered as a pretense until it proved fatal_. The only way in which the invalid could clear herself from the suspicion of malingering, as it is called in the army, was to go on lacing and unlacing, _till she fell down dead at the royal feet_." Finally Miss Burney's father pays her a visit in this palace prison, when "she told him that she was miserable; that she was worn with attendance and want of sleep; that she had no comfort in life,--nothing to love, nothing to hope; that her family and friends were to her as though they were not, and were remembered by her as men remember the dead. From daybreak to midnight the same killing labor, the same recreation, more hateful than labor itself, followed each other without variety, without any interval of liberty or repose." Her father's veneration for royalty amounting to idolatry, he could not bear to remove her from the court--"and, between the dear father and the sweet queen, there seemed to be little doubt that some day or other Frances _would drop down a corpse_. Six months had elapsed since the interview between the parent and the daughter. The resignation was not sent in. The sufferer grew worse and worse. She took bark, but it failed to produce a beneficial effect. She was stimulated with wine; she was soothed with opium, but in vain. Her breath began to fail. The whisper that she was in a decline spread through the court. The pains in her side became so severe that she was forced to crawl from the card-table of the old fury, Mme. Schwellenberg, to whom she was tethered, three or four times in an evening, for the purpose of taking hartshorn. Had she been a negro slave, a humane planter would have excused her from work. But her Majesty showed no mercy. Thrice a day the accursed bell still rang; the queen was still to be dressed for the morning at seven, and to be dressed for the day at noon, and to be undressed at midnight."