Queen Victoria in her Journal – 15 March 1861
Oh, what agony, what despair was this1. I knelt before her, kissed her dear hand and placed it next to my cheek; but though she opened her eyes, she did not, I think, know me. She brushed my hand off, and the dreadful reality was before me, that for the first time she did not know the child she had ever received with such tender smiles. I went out to sob… I asked the doctors if there was no hope. They said, they feared, none whatever… As the night wore on into the morning I lay down on the sofa, at the foot of my bed… I heard each hour strike… At four I went down again. All still – nothing to be heard but the heavy breathing, and the striking, at every quarter, of the old repeater, a large watch in a tortoiseshell case, which had belonged to my poor father, the sound of which brought back all the recollections of my childhood… Feeling faint and exhausted, I went upstairs again and lay down in silent misery… The dreaded terrible calamity has befallen us, which seems like an awful dream… Oh God! How awful! How mysterious!…. The constant crying was a comfort and relief but oh the agony of it!2
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