The final moment was drawing near. The four daughters of Marie Leczinska spent the last nights at their mother’s bedside with a devotion which made them resemble Sisters of Charity. At the moment when the death struggle was about to begin, Louis XV. kneeled beside his wife’s bed, and said to her, weeping: “Here are our daughters whom I present to you.” A Christian, the mother understood what these words implied; and raising her eyes to heaven, she gave her children her last blessing.

It is an hour of torture and anguish, a doleful hour, an hour heart-rending above all, when one loses a cherished mother. The grief borders on stupor. One feels one’s self the sport of a bad dream. One cannot grow accustomed to so horrible a thought. Those holy, venerable hands will never again be laid in blessing on your head! Those lips whence issued counsels so wise, words so affectionate, are closed forever! That heart, so warm, so loving, is cold; it beats no more. Again you call to your mother; you call, and for the first time, alas! she does not answer you. Then, all she has done for you, your childhood, your youth, your whole life, rises up before you. Long years of devotion, of sacrifices and tenderness, are concentrated in a single minute. The heart, invaded by memories as by a rising tide, overflows, and you burst into sobs. Oh! woe to him who at this fatal moment believes that all ends here below! Woe to him who has not the conviction that the dead woman is in heaven, that she is watching over her children; that they can still love and implore her; that she will always be their strength, their consoler, their good angel! But happy in the midst of tears, happy amid the most cruel trials, the Christians who then recall the prayer of Saint Louis, lamenting his mother, Blanche of Castile: “I return thee thanks, O my God! Thou hadst lent me a good, an incomparable, mother; but I know well she was not mine! Now, Lord, thou hast withdrawn her to thyself.... Thus has thy Providence determined. It is true that I cherished her beyond all creatures in the world.... Nevertheless, since thou hast thus ordained, may thine adorable will be done! My God! may thy holy name be blessed forever!”

Marie Leczinska died in angelic tranquillity. She was still trying to say her rosary, when death interrupted on earth the prayer which the holy woman was about to resume in heaven. These beautiful words of Massillon were realized for the pious Queen: “The soul of the just, during the days of their mortal life, dare not gaze fixedly upon the profundity of God’s judgments; they work out their salvation with fear and trembling, they shudder at the bare thought of that terrible future where the just themselves will hardly be saved, if they are judged without mercy; but on the bed of death, ah! the God of peace, who manifests Himself, calms their agitations; their fears cease of a sudden and are changed into a sweet hope, their dying eyes pierce the cloud of mortality which still environs them, and see that immortal country after which they have sighed so long, and where they have always dwelt in spirit.” Oh! you who have seen a saintly mother die, you who have in your hearts a regret and an expectation, do not forget!

It was the 24th of June, 1768, when Marie Leczinska yielded her last breath. The very day before she had entered her sixty-eighth year. Her reign had lasted forty-three years, and during that long period she had caused no tears to flow but those of joy and gratitude. Her women, her servants, her poor, collected the least scraps of her clothing to preserve as relics. Her mortal remains, exposed for eight days on a bed of state, was the object of a real cult on the part of the people. The Archbishop of Troyes preached her funeral sermon. “Pontiff of the living God,” said he, addressing himself to the Archbishop of Paris, “fear not to offer above her tomb an incense which may one day be offered above her altars.” Compare this life and death with those of the Marquise de Pompadour, if you wish to know what vice is, and what is virtue.

Marie Leczinska is the last queen who has ended her days upon the throne of France. The women, who for now a century have worn the royal or imperial crown in our unhappy and inconstant land, have all been the innocent victims of the Revolution and the caprices of fate. One perished an august martyr on the scaffold; another died at the moment of the invasion, her heart broken by the afflictions of her vanquished country. A third faded away almost forgotten in the little duchy given her in exchange for the finest empire of the world. A fourth died holily in a foreign land, regretting perhaps that she had been Queen; and there is one who, at this very moment, is sadly rewarded for her charity and courage, her virtue and her patriotism. To-day, above all, might a Bossuet say before Versailles abandoned or the Tuileries in ruins: Et nunc, reges intelligite! Erudimini, que judicatis terram! And now, O Kings, comprehend! Be instructed, O ye who judge the earth!

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