It is not very well known what now became of Mascalbruni; but there is reason to believe that he lay perdu somewhere in the neighbourhood, watching like a vulture over the prey from which he had been driven, the corpse of what was once Louisa.
A suspicious-looking person was frequently seen at night-fall prowling about the environs of the palace; and Miss M.'s femme de chambre, with whom he is said to have carried on an intrigue, was observed by the servants in animated conversation with a stranger in the garb of a peasant among the shrubberies and pleasure grounds.
It was through her medium that Mascalbruni gained intelligence of all that was passing in the palace.
The shock which Louisa had sustained was so sudden, so severe, that, acting on a frame naturally delicate, it brought on a brain fever. Her ravings were so dreadful, and so extraordinary; and so revolting was the language in which she at times clothed them, that even her mother—and no other was allowed to attend her—could scarcely stay by her couch. How perfect a knowledge of human nature has Shakspeare displayed in depicting the madness of the shamelessly-wronged and innocent Ophelia!—The fragments of those songs to which her broken accents gave utterance, especially that which ends with
"Who, in a maid, yet out a maid,
Did ne'er return again,"
may suggest an idea of the wanderings of the poor sufferer's heated imagination.
For some weeks her life hung on a thread; but the affectionate cares and sympathy of a mother, and a sense of the unworthiness of the object of her regard, at last brought back the dawn of reason; and her recovery, though slow, was sufficiently sure to banish all anxiety.
The afflictions as well as the affections of woman are, if I may judge by my own experience, less profoundly acute than those of our own sex. Whether this be owing to constitution or education, or that the superior delicacy and fineness of the nervous system makes them more easily susceptible of new impressions to efface the old, I leave it to the physiologist or the psychologist to explain. The river that is the most ruffled at the surface is seldom the deepest. Thus with Miss M. Her passion, like
"A little brook, swoln by the melted snow,