Courts and courtiers -- Fiction; German fiction -- Translations into English; Germany -- Fiction
Quite towards the end, when the dissolution had already attacked the
brain, the Grand Duke made one wish clear, which, though scarcely
understood, was hastily complied with, although its fulfilment could not
do the slightest good to the Grand Duke. Certain words, apparently
disconnected, kept recurring in the murmurings of the sick man. He named
several stuffs, silk, satin, and brocade, mentioned Prince Klaus
Heinrich, used a technical expression in medicine, and said something
about an Order, the Albrecht Cross of the Third Class with Crown.
Between whiles one caught quite ordinary remarks, which apparently
referred to the dying man's princely calling, and sounded like
"extraordinary obligation" and "comfortable majority"; then the
descriptions of the stuffs began again, to which was appended in a
louder voice the word "Sammet."(1) At last it was realized that the
Grand Duke wanted Doctor Sammet to be called in, the doctor who had
happened to be present at the Grimmburg at the time of Klaus Heinrich's
birth, twenty years before, and had, for a long time now, been
practising in the capital.
(1) _I.e._, velvet.
The doctor was really a children's doctor, but he was summoned and came:
already nearly grey on the temples, with a drooping moustache,
surmounted by a nose which was rather too flat at the bottom,
clean-shaven otherwise and with cheeks rather sore from shaving. With
head on one side, his hand on his watch-chain, and elbows close to his
sides, he examined the situation, and began at once to busy himself in a
practical, gentle way about his exalted patient, whereat the latter
expressed his satisfaction in no uncertain fashion. Thus it was that it
fell to Doctor Sammet to administer the last injections to the Grand
Duke, with his supporting hand to ease the final spasms, and to be, more
than any of the other doctors, his helper in death--a distinction which
indeed provoked some secret irritation amongst the others, but on the
other hand resulted in the doctor's appointment shortly afterwards to
the vacancy in the important post of Director and Chief Physician of the
"Dorothea," a Children's Hospital, in which capacity he was destined
later to play some part in certain developments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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