Finally, a vigorous placet dispatched to Colbert July 15th, 1677, obtained a third and last interview with the minister.
In this, Colbert, without making any accusation against Vansleb, intrenched himself in a refusal pure and simple, either to allow him any indemnity or to pay the amount claimed by him for his advances.
Meantime, the poor monk's brother Dominicans who, on his arrival, had received him kindly, had evidently been affected by the disgrace to which an all-powerful minister had consigned the unfortunate traveller, and Vansleb's relations with them soon ceased.
Discouraged and broken-hearted, he left Paris, and after passing a few months with Counsellor Langeois at Atys, accepted the hospitality of M. Texier, the curé of Bourron, a small village near Fontainebleau. This kind priest's sympathy and affection alone, of earthly things, softened his rapid descent to the grave; for he only survived by nine months his arrival at Bourron, where he died June 12th, 1679, at the age of forty-four years.
During his oriental journey, Vansleb had scarcely been free from fever and ague, and he had contracted in Egypt an ophthalmic affection that gave him trouble. But neither of these maladies, nor both of them together, were sufficient to have caused his death. It seemed a sudden sinking of the moral forces rather than the physical that made him so sudden a prey to dissolution.
The man Vansleben's enemies represented him to be would not so easily have succumbed. The liar, the cheat, the libertine they painted would have had no heart to break.
Thus, in the obscurity of a small village, near the solitude of a great forest, Vansleb silently descended into the tomb. The earthly sounds that gathered around his existence had ceased, and the phantom of his fame was buried with his earthly remains. As his death had been obscure, so his last resting-place was hidden from the public gaze. At the peril of his life, he endowed France with the scientific riches that may still be seen in her royal collections; yet under the most prodigal of her monarchs he did not receive the recompense of a winding-sheet, or the poor commemoration of a gravestone.
Even England was more generous, at least in appreciation of his merit.
On Vansleb's return from Egypt, Dr. Bernard, of the University of Oxford, composed in his honor the following lines:
"Deseris Ægyptum spoliis majoribus auctus,
Quam gens Hebræum sub duce Mose tulit!"[107]