A dangerous scarlet fever had spread over the neighbourhood after the severe and tempestuous winter, and one of the queen's young pages was attacked by it, and died in a few days. When he was dead, and laid in his coffin for interment, her Majesty expressed a great desire to see him. The ladies opposed this wish, and requested her not to do it. She still persisted in her resolution, and went down to the apartment in which he lay. Mantel, the queen's valet, had purposely locked the door and taken the key, and when Caroline Matilda asked him for it, he answered her that it could not be found. After several vain endeavours, therefore, she went up-stairs again. Mantel carried in the tea to her Majesty. In a few minutes the queen suddenly got up, and before any of her ladies could stop or prevent her, she ran down to the chamber where the corpse lay. Unfortunately, the door was then open. She stepped in, and stayed about a minute—not more—looking at it. She expressed no particular horror or emotion, more than was natural on looking at such an object.[56]
This took place on May 2nd, 1775. On the next morning the queen complained to her bed-chamber woman that the image of the dead page had appeared to her all through the night, and filled her with terror.[57] Still she slightly recovered herself, although a little girl of four years of age, Sophie von Benningsen, whom she had adopted when left an orphan, and as some consolation for the loss of her own daughter, had also been attacked by the disease, and filled her with fresh alarm. She went as usual to the Jardin François, but felt unwell, and evidently had the seeds of infection within her, for, on the third day after the visit to the chamber of death, she was unable to ascend the stairs leading to her apartments without the help of her lady-in-waiting.
"I must force myself to seem less tired than I really am," she said to her companion, "so that my good Omptéda (the grand maîtresse), who did not like my driving out, may not scold me."
She complained of sore-throat and chill, but sat down to dinner with her court, though she was unable to eat anything. When the card-tables were placed in the evening, the queen felt too indisposed to play. The ladies proposed her having a sofa, and looking on at them; but Mantel then presumed to speak, and advised her Majesty going immediately to bed. The queen consented, and ordered her women to undress her. The illness, however, made such alarming progress, that the grande maîtresse on the next morning called in Dr. von Leyser, the physician in ordinary.
"You have twice," the queen said to the physician, "extricated me from a dangerous indisposition since the month of October; but this exceeds your skill: I know I am not within the help of medicine."
Leyser affected cheerfulness; but at once requested that Dr. Zimmermann, a very celebrated physician at Hanover, might be called in.
In the meanwhile the queen's condition grew worse every moment, and she requested to see Magister Lehzen, the pastor of the city church. The latter at once arrived, and, in the ante-chamber, was informed by Dr. Zimmermann of the great danger that menaced the queen's life. When he was shown into the bed-room, the queen said to him, in a weak voice:
"You did not imagine me so ill as you find me."
Lehzen assured Caroline Matilda how greatly he lamented it, and tried to console the exalted sufferer with the consoling words of faith, read her spiritual hymns, more especially Gellert's beautiful canticle, "Ne'er will I seek to injure him;" and concluded with a prayer on the text of St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians:—