After eight days, she had become so used to prison, that it seemed she had never lived in any other manner. Her evenings, at first so much feared, became the most agreeable part of the day, and darkness, far from terrifying, revealed to her treasures of musical conception, which she had felt for a long time, though unable to evolve in the excitement of her profession. When she saw that improvisation and the exercise of memory would suffice to fill her evenings, she devoted a few hours of the day to note her inspirations, and to study her authors with more care than she had been able to do amid a thousand emotions, or beneath the eye of an impatient, and systematic teacher.
To write music she first made use of a pin, with which she pricked notes between the lines, and afterwards with little pieces of wood, stripped from the furniture, and which she charred against the stove when it was hottest. As this occupied much time, and she had a very small quantity of ruled paper, she saw it would be best to exercise the powerful memory with which she was gifted, and trust the numerous compositions she made every evening to it. Practice enabled her to do this so thoroughly, that she could pass from one to the other of these unwritten compositions without confusion.
Yet, as her room was very warm, thanks to the fuel which Swartz kindly added to the allowance, and as the rampart on which she walked was perpetually swept by an icy wind, she could not avoid several days' cold, which deprived her of the pleasure of singing at the Berlin theatre. The surgeon of the fortress, who had been ordered to see her twice a week, and to give an account of her health to Von Poelnitz, wrote that her voice was gone exactly on the day when the baron, with the king's consent, was about to suffer her to appear before the public again. Her egress was thus postponed, without her feeling any chagrin at it. She did not wish to breathe the air of liberty until she had become so used to her prison as to be able to return to it without regret.
She consequently did not nurse the cold with so much care as an actress usually displays for that precious organ, her throat, and thus experienced a phenomenon known to the whole world. Fever produces in every one's brain a more or less painful illusion. Some think that the angles, formed by the sides of the wall, draw near to them, until they seem finally to press and crush their frames. They see the angles gradually diverge and leave them free, return again, and resume the same alternative of annoyance and relief. Others take their bed for a wave, which raises and depresses them between the ceiling and the floor. The writer of this veracious history, is made aware of fever by the presence of a vast black shadow, which spreads upon a brilliant surface, in which she is placed. This spot of shade, swimming in an imaginary sun, is perpetually expanding and contracting. It dilates so as to cover the whole brilliant surface, and again contracts so as to be a mere thread, after which it extends again, to be successively attenuated and thickened. This vision would not be at all unpleasant for the dreamer, if he did not imagine, from some unhealthy sensation, difficult to be understood, that he was himself the obscure reflection of some unknown object, floating without repose in an arena embraced by the fires of an invisible sun. So great is this, that when the imaginary shadow contracts, his own being seems to diminish and elongate, so as to become the shadow of a hair; and when it expands, to be the reflection of a mountain overhanging a valley. In the reverie, however, there is neither mountain nor valley. There is nothing but the reflection of an opaque body making on the sun's reflection, which the black ball of a cat's eye makes in the transparent iris, and this hallucination, unaccompanied by sleep, becomes intensely painful.