Left, her father, standing but slumped in despair, and her mother, sitting up in an armchair. Right, a priest kneeling and praying. On the far side of the bed, a young man, possibly meant to be a physician, holding apparently a mirror in front of the woman's face. On the verso, a study for the same subject, in which the mother bends forward over the bed. In the novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857), Emma Bovary on her deathbed also calls for a mirror, but the dramatis personae in the novel are different from those shown in the present drawing
The young man also appears in another drawing by Lalaisse, also with a round framed item: it rests on an easel, and he appears to be gilding the frame with his left hand: Fecker, loc. cit.