CHAPTER IV
It was not simply the weakness of age that made Madame Antoinette Buddenbrook take to her lofty bed in the bedchamber of the entresol, one cold January day after they had dwelt some six years in Meng Street. The old lady had remained hale and active, and carried her head, with its clustering white side-curls, proudly erect to the very last. She had gone with her husband and children to most of the large dinners given in the town, and presided no whit less elegantly than her daughter-in-law when the Buddenbrooks themselves entertained. But one day an indefinable malady had suddenly made itself felt—at first in the form of a slight intestinal catarrh, for which Dr. Grabow prescribed a mild diet of pigeon and French bread. This had been followed by colic and vomiting, which reduced her strength so rapidly as to bring about an alarming decline.
Dr. Grabow held hurried speech with the Consul, outside on the landing, and another doctor was called in consultation—a stout, black-bearded, gloomy-looking man who began going in and out with Dr. Grabow. And now the whole atmosphere of the house changed. They went about on their tip-toes and spoke in whispers. The wagons were no longer allowed to roll through the great entry-way below. They looked in each others’ eyes and saw there something strange. It was the idea of death that had entered, and was holding silent sway in the spacious rooms.
But there was no idle watching, for visitors came: old Senator Duchamps, the dying woman’s brother, from Hamburg, with his daughter; and a few days later, the Consul’s sister from Frankfort and her husband, who was a banker.
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