In 1581, Mary made a still more melancholy representation of her condition. "I am reduced to such an excessive weakness," she says, "especially in my legs, that I am not able to walk a hundred steps, and yet I am at this moment better than I have been for these six months past. Ever since last Easter, I have been obliged to make my servants carry me in a chair; and you may judge how seldom I am thus transported from one spot to another, when there are so few people about me fit for such an employment."[184] In the midst of all this distress, it was only from resources within herself that she was able to derive any consolation. Her religious duties she attended to with the strictest care, and devoted much of her time to reading and writing. At rare intervals, she remembered her early cultivation of the Muses; and she even yet attempted occasionally to beguile the time with the charms of poetry. She produced several short poetical compositions during her imprisonment; and of these, the following Sonnet, embodying so simply and forcibly her own feelings, cannot fail to be read with peculiar interest: "Que suis je, helas! et de quoi sert ma vie? Je ne suis fors q'un corps privé de coeur; Un ombre vain, un objet de malheur, Qui n'a plus rien que de mourir envie. Plus ne portez, O ennemis, d'envie A qui n'a plus l'esprit à la grandeur! Je consomme d'excessive douleur,-- Votre ire en bref ce voira assouvie; Et vous amis, qui m'avez tenu chere, Souvenez vous, que sans heur--sans santé Je ne saurois aucun bon oeuvre faire: Souhaitez donc fin de calamité; Et que ci bas étant assez punie, J'aye ma part en la joye infinie."[185]