German and Austrian Prisons: Prisons of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Austria-Hungary; the Fortresses of Magdeburg and SpielbergGriffiths, Arthur
History
German and Austrian Prisons: Prisons of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Austria-Hungary; the Fortresses of Magdeburg and Spielberg
Griffiths, Arthur
Prisons -- Austria -- History; Prisons -- Germany -- History
Her companion who was with her until her death on April 4, 1836, and
never left her, bore witness to her religious resignation in bearing
her physical suffering caused chiefly by a chest complaint. She
remained more or less unconscious for some months, but on the night
before her end her mental faculties returned and she passed away
peacefully. She was the first person to be buried in the Protestant
cemetery which King Frederick William III had given to the evangelical
congregation at Glatz.
A year before her death she had ordered a costly oak coffin. Clad in a
white petticoat, a cap trimmed with pale blue ribbon on her head, her
hands encased in white gloves, on one finger a ring which had belonged
to her late husband and with his portrait on her breast, she lay as
if asleep, an expression of peace upon her unchanged face. Several
carriages, filled with her friends and acquaintances, followed the body
to the grave, which was decorated with moss and flowers, and when the
clergyman had finished his discourse, six poor boys and the same number
of girls, to whom she had shown great kindness, sang a hymn in her
honour. Instead of the sexton, the hands of friends and poor recipients
of the dead woman’s charity filled in the grave and shaped the mound
above it. It was a bitterly cold morning, and yet the cemetery could
hardly contain the people who thronged it.
Thus Frau “Geheimräthin” Ursinus died in the odour of sanctity. Her
many relatives, who greatly needed money, only received one-half of
her fortune; the other half she parcelled out into various bequests
and several pious institutions benefited; and we may thus fairly
conclude that she desired to rehabilitate her accursed name by
ostentatious deeds of charity. She left her gaoler, who had treated her
considerately, five hundred thalers and his daughter a piano. Doctor
Friedham, who had procured the royal favour through which she was
liberated from the fortress, received a substantial legacy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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