Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/728

688 The result of the earthquake was a great and sudden exodus from Cannes, and indeed from all the Riviera. Visitors fled in panic, but Sir Richard and Lady Burton went about their usual business, and were amused at seeing the terrified people rush off to the railway-station, and the queer garments in which they were clad. Shortly after Lady Burton was terribly frightened from another cause. Her husband had an epileptic fit, and it was some time before she and the doctors could bring him round again. Henceforth it became necessary for them to have always with them a resident doctor. They both of them disliked the idea of having a stranger spying about them very much; but it was inevitable, for the epilepsy was a new development, and as Burton says, "My wife felt, though she had successfully nursed me through seven long illnesses since our marriage, that this was a case beyond her ken." So Dr. Ralph Leslie was telegraphed for, and came out from England to Cannes, where he joined them. Then commenced what they called their Via Crucis to Trieste. Lady Burton thus describes her troubles at that time:

"On February 23 we were shaken to a jelly by the earthquakes—three strong shocks and three weeks of palpitating earth in the Riviera. On February 26 my poor darling Dick had an epileptic fit, or, more properly speaking, an epileptiform convulsion, which lasted about half an hour, and endangered his life. I had six doctors and two nurses, and we watched and tended him for fifteen days; and I telegraphed for an English doctor to England by express, who came, and