This reply Count Frontenac was not destined to see. Three months, indeed, before it was penned the curtain had fallen upon his eager, strenuous, and, broadly speaking, honourable life. About the middle of November he fell ill. He was in his seventy-ninth year. In a few days, if not from the first, he knew that he had passed into the shadow of death, that he was at last meeting One whom he could not conquer. The old man made all his arrangements with admirable calmness. On the 22nd November he sent for the notary to make his will. He expressed a desire to be buried, not in the cathedral church, but in that of the Récollets, whose milder theology had best suited his practical and somewhat Erastian turn of mind. He makes pecuniary provision for a daily mass on his behalf for one year, and a yearly one thereafter on the anniversary of his death, Mme. de Frontenac to share in it after her death. His heart was to be placed in a chapel of the Church of St. Nicolas des Champs at Paris, where the remains of his sister, Mme. de Monmort, were already reposing. A merchant of Quebec, François Hazeur, and his private secretary, are named as his executors. He requests Champigny to support his friends in having his wishes carried out. He bequeaths to him a crucifix of aloes wood, and to Mme. de Champigny a reliquary. The bishop, M. de Saint Vallier, came to see him several times during his illness, as also did the intendant; death, not for the first time, was acting the part of reconciler. It was rather expected by the clerical party that, in his last moments, the old warrior would express deep contrition for his deficiencies on the religious side and his frequent opposition to the policy of the church; but in this they were disappointed. "God gave him full time," says an anonymous critic of the period, who has annotated very harshly the funeral sermon preached over his remains, "to recognize his errors, and yet to the last he showed a great indifference in all these matters. In a word, he behaved during the few days before his death like one who had led an irreproachable life and had nothing to fear." The last rites of religion were administered by the Récollet father, Olivier Goyer, and on the 28th November 1698, retaining his faculties to the last, the veteran passed peacefully away.
What manner of man he was, this narrative, it may be trusted, has in some measure shown. Compounded of faults and virtues, his was a character that appealed strongly to average human nature. Common people understood, admired and trusted him. His faults were those common, everyday ones,[55] which it is not impossible to forgive; and he had the more than compensating virtues of courage, decision, simplicity, underlying kindliness, and humour. His nature, vehement, turbulent, and self-asserting throughout his early and middle manhood, was gaining towards the end that ripeness in which, according to Shakespeare, lies the whole significance of life. The Abbé Gosselin has defined with great exactness his attitude towards religion. "Frontenac," he says, "was a Christian and a religious man after the fashion of his time, and as people generally are in the great world; attached to the church, but with all the Gallican ideas of the period, according to which the church was only a dependency of the state; making it a point of honour to discharge the duties incumbent on a gentleman and a Christian, but drawing a clear distinction between the demands of duty and those of perfection."[56] The late Abbé Verreau, quoted by Gosselin in his Life of Laval, has a few words of mingled praise and blame, which, perhaps, in their general effect are not far from the truth. "The harsh doctrines of Jansenism," he says, "and domestic troubles had infused into his nature something unrefined which the outward manners of the aristocrat did not entirely conceal. . . . When, however, he yielded to the natural bent of his mind, he attracted every one by the intellectual grace and charm of his conversation. . . . His ambition was to be in New France the reflection of the great monarch who ruled in Old France." The Abbé probably exaggerates the effect of Jansenist doctrines upon the mind of Frontenac, and also that of his conjugal difficulties; but he rightly discerns an element in his character which clashed with his finer and more distinguished qualities.
There is no known extant portrait of Frontenac. For many years a certain photograph was sold at Quebec as representing him on his death-bed, and was reproduced in different works relating to Canadian history. Parkman, the historian, sent it to the late M. Pierre Margry of Paris, the well-known authority on early Canadian history, who at once pronounced that it was not a portrait of Frontenac at all, but had been taken from one of the illustrations published in Lavater's celebrated work on physiognomy, the original being a German professor of the name of Heidegger. How it ever came to pass for a portrait of Frontenac remains a mystery. The matter is fully discussed in Mr. Ernest Myrand's work, Sir William Phipps devant Quebec. So far as appears, it was through a correspondence between Mr. Myrand and M. Pierre Margry, that the fact of the unauthenticity of the alleged portrait of Frontenac first became known in Canada.
The funeral sermon over the deceased governor was preached by the Récollet father who had attended his death-bed, and the manuscript of it is still preserved in the library of Laval University. The eulogium of the sympathetic father may here and there be a little forced; but surely a generous meed of praise was due to the man who, when past the meridian of life, had undertaken and borne unflinchingly for many years the burden of so difficult and dangerous an administration as that of Canada. The manuscript has been annotated by an anonymous and unfriendly ecclesiastical hand, one of whose criticisms is quoted above. The critic's point of view is further indicated by the comment on the preacher's statement that Frontenac diligently practised the reading of spiritual books. "As for his reading, it was often Jansenist books, of which he had a great many, and which he greatly praised and lent freely to others." The odium theologicum here is not difficult to discern. The people, however, who cared little for theological subtleties and animosities, but who judged their fallen chief as a man and an administrator, mourned him sincerely. His death was announced by the intendant to the king in words that are almost touching; and Callières, a good soldier, and a man after his own heart, ruled in his stead.