The Dauphiness was a perfect wife and mother. Her goodness, sweetness, and charity rendered her at once lovable and worthy of veneration.... One finds consolation for the scandals of the court in contemplating a united household, a Christian household which set an example to France. Unhappily death was soon to break up this virtuous and holy life. The Dauphin, at the age of thirty-six, fell ill in November, 1765. Had we not good reason to say, at the beginning of this study, that epochs in appearance most scandalous and corrupt contain, like every other, treasures of edification? The admirable death of the son of Louis XV. is a proof of this verity. The agony of the Dauphin was about to commence. “Thanks be to God,” he said to his confessor, the Jesuit Callet, as soon as he saw him enter, “I have never been dazzled by the splendor of the throne to which I was summoned by my birth; I saw it only from the side of formidable duties by which it is accompanied, and the perils that surround it; I would desire to have a better soul, but I hope in the infinite mercy.” Then, turning towards his sisters and his wife, the good Prince exclaimed: “I cannot tell you how glad I am to be the first to go; I shall be sorry to leave you, but I am well pleased not to remain behind you.” The next day, November 13, the Archbishop of Rheims came to bring the sacraments. Louis XV. was kneeling at the threshold of the chamber, while the Duke of Orleans and the Prince of Condé approached the bed to hold the communion cloth. After the Mass the Dauphin said: “God has made me taste at this moment so sweet a consolation that I have never known one like it.” And as the Queen was speaking of his recovery: “Ah, mamma!” he exclaimed with vivacity, “keep that hope for yourself, for my part I do not desire it at all.” The Prince, who had one day said, while looking at Paris from the terrace of the Château of Bellevue: “I am thinking of the delight that ought to be experienced by a sovereign in causing the happiness of so many people;” this truly exemplary Prince was taken, December 20, 1765, from the affection of a people, who honored his virtues and his sincere devotion. Nine days afterward, the Dauphiness wrote to her brother, Prince Xavier of Saxony: “The good God has willed that I should survive him for whom I would have given a thousand lives; I hope He will grant me the grace to employ the rest of my pilgrimage in preparing, by sincere penitence, to rejoin his soul in heaven, where I doubt not he is asking the same grace for me.”