'
'All right,' she answered; and I turned round and went to sleep again."
The result of the earthquake was a great and sudden exodus from Cannes,
and indeed from all the Riviera. Visitors fled in panic, but Sir Richard
and Lady Burton went about their usual business, and were amused at
seeing the terrified people rush off to the railway-station, and the
queer garments in which they were clad. Shortly after Lady Burton was
terribly frightened from another cause. Her husband had an epileptic
fit, and it was some time before she and the doctors could bring him
round again. Henceforth it became necessary for them to have always
with them a resident doctor. They both of them disliked the idea of
having a stranger spying about them very much; but it was inevitable,
for the epilepsy was a new development, and as Burton says, "My wife
felt, though she had successfully nursed me through seven long illnesses
since our marriage, that this was a case beyond her ken." So Dr. Ralph
Leslie was telegraphed for, and came out from England to Cannes, where
he joined them. Then commenced what they called their _Via Crucis_ to
Trieste. Lady Burton thus describes her troubles at that time:
"On February 23 we were shaken to a jelly by the earthquakes--three
strong shocks and three weeks of palpitating earth in the Riviera. On
February 26 my poor darling Dick had an epileptic fit, or, more properly
speaking, an epileptiform convulsion, which had lasted about half an
hour, and endangered his life.
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