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Mary Stuart - Celebrated Crimes by Alexandre Dumas père
page 5 of 243 (02%)
heaps mourning upon mourning, casting a black veil before my sight.
Adieu then, one last time, dear France; for never shall I see you more."

With these words, she went below, saying that she was the very opposite
of Dido, who, after the departure of AEneas, had done nothing but look at
the waves, while she, Mary, could not take her eyes off the land. Then
everyone gathered round her to try to divert and console her. But she,
growing sadder, and not being able to respond, so overcome was she with
tears, could hardly eat; and, having had a bed got ready on the stern
deck, she sent for the steersman, and ordered him if he still saw land at
daybreak, to come and wake her immediately. On this point Mary was
favoured; for the wind having dropped, when daybreak came the vessel was
still within sight of France.

It was a great joy when, awakened by the steersman, who had not forgotten
the order he had received, Mary raised herself on her couch, and through
the window that she had had opened, saw once more the beloved shore. But
at five o'clock in the morning, the wind having freshened, the vessel
rapidly drew farther away, so that soon the land completely disappeared.
Then Mary fell back upon her bed, pale as death, murmuring yet once
again--"Adieu, France! I shall see thee no more."

Indeed, the happiest years of her life had just passed away in this
France that she so much regretted. Born amid the first religious
troubles, near the bedside of her dying father, the cradle mourning was
to stretch for her to the grave, and her stay in France had been a ray of
sunshine in her night. Slandered from her birth, the report was so
generally spread abroad that she was malformed, and that she could not
live to grow up, that one day her mother, Mary of Guise, tired of these
false rumours, undressed her and showed her naked to the English
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