A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 2 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

At length they reached the gate, and escaped from the horrors of the town. "And having my husband with me," says the letter to her sister, "I minded not the loss of all else, though I had only my shift—subucula—left to cover me."

In that plight, the fugitives had to travel ten miles that dreadful night, till they reached the village of Hammelburg. Olympia had been suffering the whole time from tertian fever, and was absolutely unable to proceed further. "Among the poorest of the poor," she writes to Curione, "I might have been taken for the queen of the beggars." At Hammelburg they met with scant hospitality. The people were afraid of giving offence to their prince–bishop by harbouring fugitives from Protestant Schweinfurth. Nevertheless, in the absolute impossibility of dragging herself out of the town, Olympia and her companions were allowed to remain there three days. On the fourth, though still very ill, and hardly able to walk with the support of her husband, the miserable wanderers were obliged again to take the road. But they were still in an enemy's country, and surrounded by danger. At the next town they reached, they were arrested and thrown into prison for several days, while the authorities of the place applied to their superiors for directions what was to be done with them. A general order had been given to put to death all fugitives from Schweinfurth; and these days were spent accordingly, as Olympia says in the letter already quoted, in an agony of hope and fear. They were at length released, and met with assistance of some charitable individuals, especially of one who, without allowing them to know his name, gave them fifteen golden crowns,[120] which enabled them to reach the residence of the Count de Reineck on the Saal. There they were kindly received, and assisted to continue their journey to Erbach, in the Odenwald.

The Counts of this picturesque little mountain town were at that time three brothers, who lived together in the castle, which may yet be seen there; and the eldest of whom had married the sister of the Count Palatine, Frederick II., the principal builder of the magnificent pile, still the boast and ornament of Heidelberg. They were zealous Protestants, who had more than once risked life and fortune in the cause, and enjoyed a very high reputation for their piety among their co–religionists, and even among their opponents, for their virtues and uprightness.

THE COUNTS OF ERBACH.

By these excellent men, and by the Countess, the wanderers were received with open arms, and comforted in every way that their miserable condition required. Olympia was not unknown to them by reputation; and the tale of sorrows she had now to tell, was not needed to make her a welcome guest at Erbach. She reached the hospitable roof utterly prostrated and broken down, almost literally naked, and having lost all that she and her husband possessed in the world. Worst and most irreparable loss of all, her books, those much–loved books, which had been the companions of her life, and with them a great quantity of her manuscripts, had perished in the burning of Schweinfurth.

It needed all the motherly care and kindness of the good Countess of Erbach, who insisted on ministering to her as she lay on a bed of sickness for several days, with her own hands, to restore her to some degree of convalescence.[121] Indeed, the shock which her system had received from the sufferings and fatigue of that awful night during the escape from the city, and the ten miles of weary wayfaring which followed it, was ultimately, though not immediately, fatal to her. She never recovered from the effects of it, though the repose and kind cares of which she was the object in the castle of Erbach, apparently restored her to some degree of health for the present.

Olympia and her husband and little brother seem to have remained some considerable time with these kind and noble hosts. She had an opportunity of observing the ordinary habits of their daily life, and has left us an interesting little sketch of the patriarchal manners prevailing in the pious household of a German country nobleman of that day.[122]

"The Count," she writes, "maintains sundry preachers in the town, and is always the first to be present at their sermons. Every day before breakfast, he gathers around him the members of his family and his servants, and reads to them a portion of one of St. Paul's Epistles. Then he kneels in prayer, together with his whole household. His next care is to visit his subjects, one by one, in their homes, when he talks familiarly with them and exhorts them to piety. For he says, that he is responsible before God for their souls. Would that all princes and lords resembled him!"

Of the Countess she writes to her sister, that "she is a woman religious before all else. Her conversation is ever of God and of the life hereafter, of which she speaks with the greatest enthusiasm and desire."