While in a fit of despondency and imagining his friends had forgotten him, Galileo, in a moment of bitterness, wrote in a letter to his daughter: "My name is erased from the book of the living." "Nay," came at once Sister Celeste's cheering reply, "say not that your name is struck _de libro viventium_, for it is not so; neither in the greater part of the world nor in your own country. Indeed, it seems to me that, if for a brief moment your name and fame were clouded, they are now restored to greater brightness, at which I am much astonished, for I know that generally _Nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua_. I am afraid, however, if I begin quoting Latin, I shall fall into some barbarism. But, of a truth, you are loved and esteemed here more than ever."[245] How much Sister Celeste was to her father in every way was not known until after her premature death in her thirty-fourth year. He was never the same man afterward. Disconsolate and broken, he fancied he heard the voice of the daughter he so fondly loved resounding through the house. Brooding over his great loss, the heart-broken old man writes to a friend in words of infinite pathos, "_Mi sento continuamente chiamare della mia diletta figlioula_--I continually hear myself called by my dearly beloved daughter." The eighth of January, 1642, he answered her call and went to join her in a better world. Two other noted investigators, one of them a contemporary of Galileo, owed much to the inspiration and encouragement which they received from women. These were Descartes and Leibnitz. And the women that had the most influence on them were representatives of royal families, who were famous in their day for their love and knowledge and the extent of their intellectual attainments. One of the most noted of these was Elizabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine. She was the favorite pupil of Descartes, and it was to her that he dedicated his great work, _Principia Philosophiae_. She, he declared, understood him better than any one else he had ever met, for "in her alone were united those generally separated talents for metaphysics and for mathematics which are so characteristically operative in the Cartesian system."[246] To this earnest student who was always absorbed in the mysteries of metaphysics and the problems of geometry, Descartes could refuse nothing. When distance separated them he continued his instructions by correspondence. One of the results of this correspondence was his treatise on _Passions de l'Ame_, in which he develops certain ethical views suggested by the _Vita Beata_ of Seneca.