Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/63

48. But poor little Charlotte was not so easily released; for thirty days she was very ill. Margaret scarcely left her side. She dearly loved this tender spiritual little soul, to whom in after days she dedicated a poem of which we shall hear more than once again: Le Myrouer de l'âme pescheresse. While she stooped over the bed, tending the sick child in anxious loneliness of fear, the great affairs of the world went on outside. Milan was recaptured, siege laid to Pavia; but these battles and sieges seemed all dim and lifeless, like a figured tapestry shaken in the wind; while, alive, suffering and real, little Madame Charlotte lay upon her knees, and Margaret spoke with her of Jesus and of Paradise. At last an end came, the poor little girl succumbed to exhaustion: "delivered from a little body that could not live on earth till eight years old," and Margaret writes to Briçonnet in a strain of strange religious exultation, like to that she displayed again in later years upon the death of her only son:—

"Where the Strongest has come, he hath vanquished the armed flame, and bath commanded the sea to stop its waves, and hath left content and joyous, nor able to praise him enough, my heart and my spirit. Even (to say the truth) he hath cured and fortified my body, vainly labouring with little repose, for the space of a month, while the little lady was ill. But after her death, I suffered for the King, from whom I had concealed his daughter's illness; who yet divined her death, having dreamed three times that she said to him: 'Farewell, my King, I go to Paradise!' [Adieu, mon Roy, je voys en Paradis!] and this caused him an extreme sorrow, which (by the goodness of God) he endured patiently, And Madame,