“One cannot admire sufficiently the meekness, the patience, the unchanging kindness of that angelic woman during this long and cruel malady. In her delirium, which lasted a whole month, she was always thinking of us and fearing to weary her friends. ‘I am very troublesome,’ she would often say; ‘my children,’ she one day added, ‘must make up their mind to have a silly mother since you are willing to have such a silly wife.’ But never the slightest sign of impatience nor of ill humor. Even when it was most repugnant to her to drink anything, a word from me or from her children, or, in our absence, the idea that the nurse might be blamed, sufficed to decide her; and up to the last, each service was acknowledged by a kind word, a motion of the head or of the hand. “‘Never,’ the doctor said, ‘have I seen in the course of a long practice anything to be compared to that adorable disposition and to delirium so extraordinary. No, never have I seen anything which could give me the idea that human perfection could go so far.’ “A few moments before she breathed her last she murmured to us that she was not suffering. ‘No doubt she does not suffer,’ exclaimed the nurse; ‘she is an angel.’ “It was very remarkable to what a degree her wanderings corresponded with the different shades of her affection. When I was concerned, her judgment was always sound. Though placing us all in the most fantastic situations, her mind was never at fault with respect to my principles and feelings. She would exclaim, ‘Decide; you are leader; it is our happy lot to obey you.’ One day I was attempting to calm her; she gayly repeated this verse:— “‘A vos sages conseils, Seigneur, je m’abandonne.’ “With respect to our children,—I speak of all six,—whom she always recognized and welcomed, whom she always spoke to in the kindest and most loving manner, and whose various characters and dispositions ever remained clearly present to her mind, there was still something less lucid in her thoughts than with regard to me. As for her grandchildren, she spoke of them several times to me with charming details; but more frequently her ideas were confused with respect to their number, their sex, and even to the existence of the two last. She was most affectionate throughout to her sister, Madame de Montagu; she frequently inquired from us both how my mother was, fancying we had seen her lately. We shuddered on hearing her calmly say on the morning of her death, ‘To-day I shall see my mother.’ “The last day she told me, ‘When you see Madame de Simiane, give her my love.’ Thus her heart was all life when her poor limbs were already numbed by approaching death. “I have already told you without any particulars that she had received the sacraments. I was present during the ceremony, which was more painful to us than to herself, for she had already taken the sacrament in her bed a short time previously.