Much later I came back to this trusty confidant and made a large cross on the last written leaf. On the new page I wrote:
December 29. Here yawns a terrible hiatus in this book. The most awful days of my life, henceforth to be lonely, so inexpressibly lonely....
On the tenth, after an hour of agony, and after he had called me by name, My Own, My very Own, breathed away his precious life!
Maria Louise, Sister Luise, Pauline, the two physicians, and I stood about his deathbed—endlessly sad and tragic hours....
Have lost everything!
Then followed the days and nights of the deathwatch.
So lovely he lay there with his own characteristic smile on his cold, ice-cold lips, which I could not kiss often enough....
On the thirteenth solemn service for the dead; the weeping inmates of the house and the villagers; the mourning guests. We accompanied the coffin to Eggenburg.
On the fourteenth the journey to Gotha.
On the sixteenth the flaming pyre!