He was now running a high temperature. Breathing became so difficult that he nearly suffocated. When, briefly, he felt a little better, he rose from his bed, begging that it might be made up fresh for him so he could die in a decent manner.
His daughter Sally told him she hoped he would recover and live many years longer.
“I hope not,” he said calmly.
They put him back to bed and his physician advised him to change his position so he could breathe more easily.
“A dying man can do nothing easy,” he commented.
Soon afterwards he fell in a coma. Temple and Benjamin Bache, his grandsons, were alone with him when, on April 17, 1790, at the age of eighty-four and three months, the end came.
His death brought an abrupt halt to the petty recriminations that had saddened his last months. In Philadelphia, the city that had grown up with him and because of him, muffled bells tolled, and flags on the ships in the harbor hung at half mast. Some 20,000 attended his funeral, the greatest number the city had ever seen gathered in one spot. As he was lowered into his grave in the Christ Church burying ground beside his wife, a company of militia artillery fired funeral guns in honor of the man who had organized Pennsylvania’s first militia.
In New York, by a motion passed unanimously, the United States House of Representatives voted to wear mourning for a month. Neither the Senate nor the Executive Council followed the example of the House. Ironically, the man chosen to pronounce his funeral eulogy at the Lutheran German Church in Philadelphia was William Smith, his ancient enemy. Although Smith did not do him justice, the crowd before the pulpit sobbed openly.
But it was in France, his adopted country, where the expressions of grief and loss were most tumultuous. The National Assembly proclaimed a period of three months of national mourning for the “benefactor and hero of humanity.” “Antiquity would have raised altars to this mighty genius,” cried the revolutionary leader Mirabeau.
Splendid orations in his honor were delivered by the Jacobins, the Friends of the Constitution, the Academy of Science, the Royal Society of Medicine, the National Guard, the Masonic lodges, the printers of France, and uncounted other societies. All over the country, women wept for him. It is said that one enterprising businessman became rich by selling statuettes of him, made from the stones of the Bastille.