There was no costlier chamber in that rich city.
It was a strange staging for death, for the woman on the high bed was dying.

Slowly, fighting every inch of the way with a grim tenacity, but indubitably dying.

Her vital ardour had sunk below the mark from which it could rise again, and was now ebbing as water runs from a little crack in a pitcher.

The best leeches in all Flanders and Artois had come to doctor her.

They had prescribed the horrid potions of the age: tinctures of earth-worms; confections of spiders and wood-lice and viper's flesh; broth of human skulls, oil, wine, ants' eggs, and crabs' claws; the bufo preparatus, which was a live toad roasted in a pot and ground to a powder; and innumerable plaisters and electuaries.