The King fell ill at Lyons, not during the early part of August, as has been said, but on September 22, and here especially dates are of the utmost importance.[79] He was seized with a fever, which consumed him. The seventh day--the 29th--it was complicated by a dysentery, which exhausted him. The attack of this last complaint, produced by one of those medicines then much in vogue, was so violent, and its consequences so rapid, that by midnight the doctors despaired of saving him. Marie de Medicis had retired. Anne of Austria, who did not leave the royal patient, resolved to have him warned by his confessor of the danger he was in. But, at the first cautiously spoken words, Louis XIII. conjured Father Suffren, and those who surrounded him, not to hide the truth from him. He learned it with calmness and courage, confessed, communicated, and asked pardon of all for any wrong he might have done them; then, calling the Queen, he embraced her tenderly, and addressed to her a touching farewell. As she retired on one side in order to weep freely, the King prayed Father Suffren to go and find her, and again beg her from him “to pardon him all the unpleasantnesses he might have caused her the whole time of their married life.” He afterwards conversed with Richelieu, and offered a spectacle of the most edifying resignation. Towards the middle of the day, the Archbishop of Lyons was preparing himself to bring in the extreme unction, when the doctors, who had already bled this exhausted body six times in succession, ordered a seventh bleeding.[80] But then the true cause of the illness, which was unknown to them, was made clear; an internal abscess broke, and nature saved the patient at the moment when the intervention of his physicians promised to be fatal.[81] Louis XIII., soon re-established in health, left Lyons with the Queen, who did not cease to lavish on him the most tender cares, and whose sincere grief had touched him. In this crisis the two spouses had forgotten the past.[82] The repugnance and the coldness of the one, the wounded pride of the other, had disappeared, and they were naturally led to appreciate whatever goodness and amiability were to be found in each other’s natures.[83]