But now, in the midst of this cold, nicely balanced existence, or these serious misunderstandings even, a heavy blow falls suddenly in the shape of illness: the husband is struck down. Instantly a change comes over everything. Womanly kindness gushes forth as from a natural spring. The wife’s concern is still, as is always the case in matrimonial questions, only with the bodily realm, but the soul breaks through. For the first time the wife asserts herself, less perhaps out of affection for a man from whom only yesterday she held aloof, than in obedience to a natural instinct for combatting material things, pain and disease. Differences of temperament, character, position, philosophical views, all drop out of sight: sensibility alone shines forth triumphant. The house is in commotion, messengers scour the country in search of distant physicians, the chaplain sets off to arrange for masses and votive candles. See, at the bedside of Pierre de Bourbon, the great Anne of France, once the haughty regent of the kingdom, now fixing her eyes steadfastly on the sick man, taking no rest day or night, declining aid from anyone, measuring out potions and remedies with her own hand, administering the doses herself, warming the bed, doing for the patient little offices of infinite delicacy without a touch of constraint; an eye-witness goes so far as to say that she “made it her delight.” The wedded wife is not a love-sick girl, a scribbler of verses; she has no need of imagination, of airs and graces, of enthusiasm: here she is seen in all her grave nobility. She is a sister of mercy. The woman who could not pardon a cross-grained husband resigns herself without hesitation to a future of poultices, cooling draughts, and rheumatism. Some there are who endure this lot for long years without flagging, some who encounter it at the very outset of their married life. It is their natural vocation. The attraction exercised on women by suffering is one of the most singular phenomena in the realm of psychology. It is as evident as the attraction of the magnet for iron. Women are born nurses and doctors, with a passion for tending the sick, for dedicating themselves with all their wealth of tenderness, for devoting their delicate fingers to the binding up of wounds. Between this passion and the passion of love there is an intimate relationship; in both is involved the bestowing of life on man; but in this case the problem is very simple, presenting none of the moral complications of love. Matter-of-fact and practical women are not the least strongly convinced of the vocation of their sex for medicine. So general was the impression in regard to this that a certain pious author advised that the doors of the medical school should be thrown open freely to women, that they should be taught all that men were taught, indeed a little more (Greek and Arabic), and that they should then be sent off to the Holy Land to aid in the conversion of the infidels.