By these excellent men, and by the Countess, the wanderers were received with open arms, and comforted in every way that their miserable condition required. Olympia was not unknown to them by reputation; and the tale of sorrows she had now to tell, was not needed to make her a welcome guest at Erbach. She reached the hospitable roof utterly prostrated and broken down, almost literally naked, and having lost all that she and her husband possessed in the world. Worst and most irreparable loss of all, her books, those much–loved books, which had been the companions of her life, and with them a great quantity of her manuscripts, had perished in the burning of Schweinfurth.
It needed all the motherly care and kindness of the good Countess of Erbach, who insisted on ministering to her as she lay on a bed of sickness for several days, with her own hands, to restore her to some degree of convalescence.[121] Indeed, the shock which her system had received from the sufferings and fatigue of that awful night during the escape from the city, and the ten miles of weary wayfaring which followed it, was ultimately, though not immediately, fatal to her. She never recovered from the effects of it, though the repose and kind cares of which she was the object in the castle of Erbach, apparently restored her to some degree of health for the present.
Olympia and her husband and little brother seem to have remained some considerable time with these kind and noble hosts. She had an opportunity of observing the ordinary habits of their daily life, and has left us an interesting little sketch of the patriarchal manners prevailing in the pious household of a German country nobleman of that day.[122]
"The Count," she writes, "maintains sundry preachers in the town, and is always the first to be present at their sermons. Every day before breakfast, he gathers around him the members of his family and his servants, and reads to them a portion of one of St. Paul's Epistles. Then he kneels in prayer, together with his whole household. His next care is to visit his subjects, one by one, in their homes, when he talks familiarly with them and exhorts them to piety. For he says, that he is responsible before God for their souls. Would that all princes and lords resembled him!"