The last years of Henrietta Maria's life were calm and peaceful, except for her ill-health. "I have never had a day free from pain for twenty years," she said shortly before her death to her friends at Chaillot. She had little to trouble her beyond the gentle sorrow of seeing those with whom she had been associated pass, one by one, to the silence of the grave. Her brother, the Duke of Orleans, ended his restless life in the year of the Restoration, leaving his title to his nephew, Henrietta's son-in-law. Cardinal Mazarin passed away in 1661, avaricious to the last, and counting with dying fingers the treasures to which his heart still clung. Four years later Queen Anne of Austria followed him, after an illness the infinitely pathetic record of which is to be found in the pages of Madame de Motteville. She was a great loss to her sister-in-law, the more so as Henrietta's faithful friend, the Abbé Montagu, was so high in her favour that it was feared he would succeed to the influence and position of Mazarin, and thus France be under a foreigner once more. The tie between these two was of no ordinary strength. Not only had Montagu been a friend and companion of the unforgotten Buckingham, but Anne never ceased to remember the service which he had rendered to her in the past. When he returned to France, after his long imprisonment, sobered by trouble, and so far from desiring the ecclesiastical honours on which his heart had once been set that he turned from them when offered, he became in some measure her spiritual adviser, a rôle for which he was well suited, as he knew probably better than any one else the secrets of the past. From his lips, at her own request, the dying Queen received the solemn intimation of the approach of death, and almost her last conscious words were addressed to him. "M. de Montagu knows how much I have to thank God for," she said, fixing her eyes on the Abbé as he knelt weeping beside her, words which both Madame de Motteville, who was present, and Montagu himself interpreted as bearing witness to Anne's innocence in the days when she compromised her reputation by vanity and coquetting.[427]