The closing years of Fénelon’s life were inexpressibly saddened by the number of deaths that swept away in melancholy succession nearly all with whom his heartstrings were most closely intertwined. The first to go was his very dear friend Langeron, who died at Cambrai, November 10, 1710. He probably held a deeper measure of his love than any one else, possessed his entire confidence, which was never in the least degree shaken by mutual disagreement and reproof. He chose him for a coadjutor on the mission to Saintonge, shared with him the loving care of the little prince, to whom he was reader, kept him with him at Cambrai as one of his chief assistants and a principal amelioration of the bonds which tied him there. Three days after the death he wrote: “I have lost the greatest comfort of my life, and the best laborer God has given me in the service of His Church, a friend who has been my delight for thirty-four years. O, how full of sorrow life is! O God, how much our best friends cost us! The only solace of life is friendship, and friendship turns into irreparable grief. Let us seek the Friend who does not die, in whom we shall recover all the rest. Nothing could be deeper or truer than the virtues of him who has died. Nothing could be a greater witness of grace than was his death. I have never seen anything more lovely and edifying.... God’s will is done. He chose to seek my friend’s happiness rather than my comfort; and I should be wanting alike to God and my friend, if I did not will what He wills. In the sharpest moment of my grief I offered up him I so dreaded to lose.”
Still keener, in some respects, was the loss he experienced in the death of the Duke of Burgundy, who passed away February 18, 1712. The ties between them were of the closest description, and the long separation of fifteen years had made no difference in their mutual affection. When the young man—fifteen years old at the time of Fénelon’s banishment in 1697—heard of the sad event, he ran to his grandfather and flung himself at his feet, and implored with tears his clemency, and as a proof of Fénelon’s doctrine appealed to the change in his own conduct and character. Louis was deeply affected, but said that what he solicited was not a matter of favor; it concerned the purity of the Church, of which Bossuet was the best judge. All intercourse between the two was interdicted, and as both were closely watched by spies, it was four years before the slightest communication could pass between them. Then the duke contrived to send a letter in which he declared his unshaken love, saying that indeed his friendship but increased with time, and that he was proceeding more steadily than before in the path of virtue. When, in 1702, Louis gave the Duke of Burgundy command of the army in Flanders, he petitioned with great earnestness that he might be allowed in his passage to the army to see Fénelon. The king consented only on condition that the interview should be in public. They met at a public dinner, where, of course, but little could be said, as everything was closely watched. But the duke in a loud voice exclaimed, in the hearing of all present, “I am sensible, my Lord Archbishop, what I owe to you, and you know what I am.” Fénelon writes concerning the interview as follows: “I have seen the Duke of Burgundy after five years’ separation, but God seasoned the consolation with great bitterness. I saw him only in public for a short quarter of an hour. One must take things as they come and give one’s self up unreservedly to God’s providence.” After this, there was opportunity for a more frequent correspondence, and it is most creditable to both parties, filled with affection and profoundest deference on the part of the younger man, and with the deepest solicitude and wisest counsels on the part of the elder.
The duke’s father, the dauphin, or heir apparent, died in April, 1711, leaving, of course, his son as next in the succession to the throne. Then, indeed, did Fénelon’s hopes and the hopes of the nation rise high. Cambrai became thronged with people who thought it well to be in the good graces of one who might very soon be the power behind the throne and the most important man in France. But alas! alas for human plans and prospects! The dauphine, Burgundy’s wife, died February 12th, of a strange malady which baffled all the physicians; then the duke himself, having caught the infection, died February 18th, and their eldest son succumbed to the same complaint, March 18th. The royal household was overwhelmed, the nation was stunned, and no one felt the loss more than, probably no one as much as, Fénelon. He writes: “I am struck down with grief; the shock has made me ill without any malady. My health has suffered terribly, and whatever revives my grief brings on a certain amount of feverish agitation. I am humbled by my weakness. All my links are broken; there is nothing left to bind me to earth; but the ties which bind me to heaven are strengthened. O, what suffering this true friendship breeds! But if I could restore him to life by turning a straw I would not do it, for it is God’s will.” It was undoubtedly the darkest hour of his days. He never wholly rallied from the blow, or took the same interest in his labors that he did before. But there is the best of evidence that his faith in God did not fail, and that in all the suffering, both for himself and for his country, around which the gloomiest shadows seemed now to be gathering, he had no thought of the Almighty unworthy of his goodness.
In November, 1712, died another most dearly loved and life-long friend, the Duke of Chevreuse, opening up all his wounds afresh, as he says; but he adds, “God be praised, be it ours to adore his impenetrable purposes!” In August, 1714, Fénelon lost the last of that special group who had stuck to him more closely than brothers, the Duke de Beauvilliers. They had never met since he left Versailles, but their hearts were most closely knit. “Our best friends,” he wrote, “are the source of our greatest sorrow and bitterness. One is tempted to say that all good friends should wait and die on the same day. Friendship will be the cause of my death.”
It was to be even so. His frame was feeble, and these fierce attacks affected him severely. In the following November a carriage accident entailed another shock to his system, from which he had not strength to recover. In the month that followed, his friends recognized that he was failing visibly. On the first of January he was attacked by a sharp fever, and it began to be evident that the end was near. For the whole of the six days that remained to him on earth he permitted only the reading of the Holy Scriptures. Over and over they read to him 2 Cor. iv and v, especially the part about the “building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” “Repeat that again,” he said more than once. Other texts of Scripture particularly suited to his condition were read to him again and again. He would try to repeat them himself with a failing voice, while his eyes and his whole countenance were lighted up with a bright expression of faith and love which the sacred words inspired. Several times he asked those around to repeat St. Martin’s dying words, “Lord, if I am yet necessary to Thy people I refuse not labor; Thy will be done.”
On the morning of the 4th he took the blessed sacrament, being carried into the large state bedchamber for the purpose, and gathering about him his attendants, to whom he spoke a few farewell words of tender exhortation. On the 6th he received extreme unction, as one about to depart. And immediately after, bidding every one, save his chaplain, leave the room, summoning all his strength, he dictated to him a few lines addressed to Père Lachaise, the king’s confessor. Being thus about to appear before God, he said: “I have never felt aught save docility to the Church and abhorrence of the novelties attributed to me. I accepted the condemnation of my book with the most absolute unreserve. There never was a moment in my life when I did not entertain the liveliest gratitude and most honest zeal for the king’s person, as also the most inviolable respect and attachment. I wish long life for His Majesty, of whom both Church and State have so great need. If it be permitted me to come before the presence of God, I will continually ask this of Him.” He makes in the letter two requests of the king, neither of them for himself or his family: First, that he will appoint to Cambrai a pious, worthy, orthodox prelate; and secondly, that he will allow the Cambrai seminary to be intrusted to the Sulpician Fathers to whom he owed so much. The rest of that day and the night following he had much agony, and, in a feeble, broken voice, said many times, “Thy will, not mine.” He was surrounded by those who loved him best, his two favorite nephews, the Abbé de Beaumont and the Marquis de Fénelon, arriving in haste from Paris. He gave them all his blessing as long as he could speak. He passed away peacefully, amid the tears of all around, at quarter past five in the morning; aged sixty-three years, five months, and one day.
He was buried in the cathedral of Cambrai, with every tribute of honor and respect, but with all simplicity and without ostentation, as he himself directed. In his will, dated May 5, 1705, he wrote, after declaring that he cherished no thought concerning those who had attacked him save those of prayer and brotherly love: “I wish my burial to be in the metropolitical church at Cambrai, as simple as may be, and with the least possible expenditure. This is not a mere conventional expression of humility, but because I think the money laid out on funerals other than simple had better be kept for more useful purposes; and also I think the modesty of a bishop’s funeral should set the example to the laity and lead them to diminish useless outlay in their burial arrangements.” The last clause says: “While I love my family deeply, and am aware of the needy state of their affairs, I do not think it right to leave anything to them. Ecclesiastical property is not meant to support family wants, and should not pass out of the hands of those who minister in the Church.” It was found, when his affairs were settled up, that after administering for twenty years the great income of his office, which was at his own absolute disposal, he ended a life of persistent and rigorous self-denial with no money in his coffers, and no debts to any man. His public and private life had been ruled by the fundamental principle which he did not fear to proclaim again and again as his conception of truest patriotism: “I love my family better than myself; I love my country better than my family; I love the human race better than my country.” All his days declared, also, that he loved God best of all.
He stood for union with the Divine. He lived ever in the eye of the All-Searcher. All his thoughts and actions had been ruled by the purpose to be perfectly pleasing unto Him. He had, no doubt, failed at some points. He was ever ready to confess it, and lament his weaknesses; for he was human. But not many of mortal frame ever kept more steadily before them from youth to age the high endeavor to be as much as possible like Christ. Neither disgrace nor disappointment daunted him. The failure of earthly ambitions only impressed on him the more that he had a message for mankind that was above such things. And though there were probably not many in his generation that were ready to receive his lofty words, though there are even now not many who are prepared to accept fully his sublime teachings and follow him as he followed the Master, yet there will always be an inward witness in the hearts of some of every age that responds to such voices, and leaps with joy at the summons to put everything away, that God may take full possession of His own. He was absorbed in the hot pursuit of highest holiness. On this his strength was concentrated. Only thus did he attain the success that was vouchsafed him. The spiritual life was to him the only real life. The Presence Divine was ever with him. The Spirit of God filled his heart.
During the outrages of the French Revolution, in 1793, when the graves of the dead were being brutally violated by order of the government with wanton cruelty and savage merriment, and the bodies of the great and noble, the learned and pious, were being scattered to the four winds, an order from government reached Cambrai directing that all the leaden coffins that were there be sent to the arsenal at Douay to be converted into instruments of warfare. The agents proceeded to the Metropolitan Cathedral, entered the vault under the altar, took away the bodies of others, but left the remains of Fénelon; not designedly, it would seem, for they had no veneration for the talents and virtues of the illustrious prelate; not accidentally, for what men call chance is only the providence of God. It was the counsel of unerring wisdom that issued the commission, “Touch not mine anointed and do my prophet no harm.” There are official documents describing the finding of the body afterwards by the mayor of Cambrai. The remains, in a fair state of preservation, were reverently sealed up and replaced in the vault. In 1800 the Emperor Napoleon ordered that “a monument or mausoleum be erected to receive the ashes of the immortal Fénelon;” to which they were to be transferred in due time. This was probably not carried out, as the existing monument to Fénelon is in the new cathedral of the date of 1825. But his chief monument is in the hearts of men, in the veneration and affection felt for him by the whole of Christ’s Church without distinction of name, and in the gratitude of the many, many souls who have been helped on their heavenward journey by his strong, wise words and beautiful example.