I was also truly afraid of dying--first, because it would have given me horrible pain to lose a life which seemed to me so rich in beauty and happiness, and to leave my dear ones: Frederick with whom I wished so much to grow to old age, Rudolf whom I wished so much to train up to manhood; and secondly, too, not in respect to myself but with regard to Frederick, the thought of death was horrible to me because I knew as well as one can know anything that the pain of laying me in the grave would be to the bereaved one well-nigh intolerable. No! No! People who are happy, and people who are beloved by those they hold dear, cannot feel any contempt for Death. The chief ingredient in the latter is contempt for life. On my sick bed, where sickness buzzed around me with its deadly power, as the warrior on the battlefield hears the buzz of the bullets around him, I was able to enter perfectly into the feelings of those soldiers who love their lives and who know that their death will plunge hearts they love into despair.
“There is but one thing,” said Frederick in reply to me when I communicated this thought to him, “in which the soldier has the advantage of the fever-patient--the consciousness of duty fulfilled. Still I agree with you in this: to die with indifference, to die with joy, as we are on all hands told to do, is what no happy man can do--only those could who were exposed in former times to all the ills of life, or those who have nothing left to lose in a peaceful existence, or such as can only free their brethren from shame and an intolerable yoke by their own death!”
When the danger was over how I enjoyed my recovery--my new birth! That was a feast for both of us, like the happiness of our re-union after the Schleswig-Holstein war, but still different. Then the joy came with a single stroke, and here little by little, and, besides, since that time we were closer to each other--ever closer.
My father had visited me daily during my illness, and shown much concern; but for all that I knew that he would not have taken my death to heart overwhelmingly. He was much more attached to his two younger daughters than to me, and the dearest of all to him was Otto. I had become to some extent estranged from him by my two marriages, and particularly by the second, and perhaps also by my totally different way of thinking. When I was completely recovered, which was in the middle of June, he removed to Grumitz, and gave me a warm invitation to come to him there with my little Rudolf. But I preferred, since Frederick was prevented from leaving the city by his duties, to take my country holiday quite close to Vienna, where my husband could visit me daily, and so I hired a summer lodging at Hietzing.