The Garden of Swords by Max Pemberton

There followed upon her illness a week of dreams, which were the delirium of a brain overwrought, and of the burden she had carried for so many days. She knew not where she was or whose were the voices which spoke to her, but seemed to be living in a world apart -- in a dreadful valley of shadows and of constant turmoil. Faces came to her fitfully in her dreams, the faces she had known in childhood -- her mother's face and the face of Edmond bending over her while she slept. To him she stretched out her arms, but could not touch his hand before the vision passed. No finality even of the dream was permitted to that burning brain. As in a whirlpool of the mind she was tossed hither and thither in thought; now battling with the flames, which gave a golden radiance to the city of doom; now living through the night of Woerth again; now at her husband's feet imploring him, for love of her, to save the life of their friend. A thousand voices spoke to her, but she could recognize none of them. She did not know that Strasburg, minute by minute, crumbled to the dust. Sleep gave her nought but this prompting to labour unceasing of the mind, to this unending battle of the flame and smoke and faces of her visions.

Reason came back to her at last; but ten days had passed, and she was in the Place Kleber no longer. When she opened her heavy eyes and sought to raise herself upon her bed, she saw that they had carried her to a strange house and laid her in a strange room. So bare and gloomy and vault-like was that chamber that she might well have been in the tombs. Even the pillars which carried the arches of the vaulted ceiling suggested an abiding place of the dead. The candles burning at her bedside were as watch-lights to her eyes. She heard no sound of any voice, but only the thunder of the cannon rolling distantly over the city above. Her weakness was beyond expression. She could not lift a hand from the coverlet of the bed. She thought that she was dying, and the rest of death seemed to come upon her as the sweetest gift of God.