"'At such a time,' I said, 'the best qualification that a confessor could have was to be a pious man.'
"'Ah, I have it!' he replied; 'the Abbé Bossuet is the man. He has just been nominated for the bishopric of Condom.'"
Hereupon Louis, disgusted at such callousness, and unable to support the sight of Madame's sufferings, took an affectionate leave of her and hastened back to Versailles.
Bossuet was sent for, but in the meantime the rumour "Madame se meurt!" had reached Paris, and a host of persons flocked to St. Cloud. Among them were the great Condé and the old Maréchal de Gramont, father of the Comte de Guiche, who went to her bathed in tears. "She told him pathetically that he was losing a good friend, that she was dying, and at first she thought she had been poisoned by mistake." Then turning to her sincerest friend, whose simple narrative of her death should have made all others superfluous, she said with something of her old gaiety—
"'Madame de La Fayette, my nose has shrunk already.'
"I answered by my tears, for what she said was only too true, and I had noticed it before. The hiccough seized her. She told Esprit (one of the doctors) that it was the death-hiccough. She had asked several times how soon she should die; she repeated the question, and although she was answered as a person not near death, we saw well that she had no hope. Her thoughts never rested on life; she never uttered a word of reflection on the destiny which was taking her off in the prime of life; never questioned the doctors as to whether it were possible to save her; showed no impatience for remedies, except in so far as the violence of her pains made her long for them; exhibited a calmness in the certainty of death, in the suspicion of poison; in short, a courage of which no example can be found, and which it is difficult even to represent."
When Montague, the English Ambassador, arrived, she said—
"You see the sad condition I am in. I am going to die. Ah! how I pity the King, my brother, for I am sure he loses the person in the world who loves him best."
"A little while later," says Montague in a letter he wrote to Charles, "she called me again, bidding me be sure to say all the kind things in the world from her to her brother, and thank him for all his kindness and care of her.
"'Pray tell my brother I never persuaded him to join France out of my own interest, but because I thought it for his honour and advantage, for I always loved him above all things in the world.'