“Monsieur Auclair,” Saint-Vallier spoke up sharply. “I feel that you evade me. Do you yourself believe that the Count will recover?”

“I must ask your indulgence, Monseigneur, but in a case like the Count’s, a medical advisor should not permit himself to believe in anything but recovery. His doubts would affect the patient. If the Count still has the vital force I have always found in him, he will recover.”

From Shadows On The Rock, a superb historical novel published in 1931 by Willa Cather.

“….this novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to that new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of the one they left behind.” (Vintage Classics, 1995)