'You will die very well without that.' She fell back on her pillow. 'My poor father,' murmured she, 'I wished to bid you adieu on my harp; but here I am not free except to die!' Lucile, it is the nurse who related the scene, suddenly extended her arms, called Jenny with a broken voice, and fell asleep like her for ever. "Antoinette was sixteen. She was fair and smiling like the morn, but she was fated to die like the others. Gretry prayed and wept, as he saw her growing pale; but death was not stopped so easily. _Cruel that he is, he stops his ears, there is no use to pray to him!_ Gretry, however, still hoped. 'God,' said he, 'will be touched by my thrice bitter tears.' He almost abandoned music, in order to have more time to consecrate to his dear Antoinette. He anticipated all her fancies, dresses, and ornaments, books and excursions,--in a word, she enjoyed to her heart's desire every pleasure the world could afford. At each new toy she smiled with that divine smile which seems formed for heaven. Gretry succeeded in deceiving himself; but she one day revealed to him all her ill-fortune in these words, which accidentally escaped from her: 'My godmother died on the scaffold: she was a godmother of bad augury, Jenny died at sixteen, Lucile died at sixteen, and I am now sixteen myself.' The godmother of Antoinette was the queen Maria Antoinette. "Another day, Antoinette was meditating over a pink at the window. On seeing her with this flower in her hand, Gretry imagined that the poor girl was suffering herself to be carried away by a dream of love. It was the dream of death! He soon heard Antoinette murmur; '_I shall die this spring, this summer, this autumn, this winter!_' She was at the last leaf. 'So much the worse,' she said; 'I should like the autumn better.' 'What do you say, my dear angel?' said Gretry, pressing her to his heart. 'Nothing, nothing! I was playing with death; why do you not let the children play?' "Gretry thought that a southern journey would be a beneficial change; he took his daughter to Lyons, where she had friends. For a short time she returned to her gay and careless manner. Gretry went to work again, and finished _Guillaume Tell_. He went every morning, in search of inspiration, to the chamber of his daughter, who said to him one day, on awaking: 'Your music has always the odor of a poem; this will have that of wild thyme.'