Up to this time Philip had not been particularly demonstrative towards his French bride; and she had not quite got over her fear of him. But her dangerous illness struck both him and her mother with dismay. Each of them was determined to use her as a means to keep a hold upon the other, and her death threatened to be disastrous for both; but, apart from this, her mother was devotedly attached to her, and Philip was beginning to love her as he loved no other person in the world, except, years afterwards, his elder daughter by her. Couriers galloped backwards and forwards between Paris and Toledo with daily news of the progress of the malady. No fear for his health, no remonstrance from his courtiers, could persuade Philip to keep away from his sick wife; and for long periods during the most dangerous stages of her illness he would not leave her side. Catharine was almost beside herself with anxiety. For her everything depended upon her daughter’s success in gaining influence over her husband, and for this Isabel’s beauty was as necessary as her life. The attack proved to be light, and the patient was soon out of danger; but Catharine showered upon the ladies in attendance questions and counsels innumerable, as to the marks left by the fell disease. The many remedies she sent appear, according to Brantome, to have given way to the one which he mentions as having saved the Queen from disfigurement; namely, the covering of the exposed skin with fresh white of egg. Though Isabel was soon out of danger her convalescence was long and tedious, and the intimate details of her bodily habit and condition that passed between Catharine and Madame de Clermont, frank to the extreme of coarseness, show how increasingly the Queen-Mother was depending upon her Spanish son-in-law to sustain her amidst the warring interests that were rapidly dividing France.