He also began attending in a ridiculously minute manner to his diet, and insisted that everything he ate should first be carefully weighed. In the course of his last illness, which was a very protracted one, he suddenly announced that he was dead, and refused all nourishment, on the ground that dead men did not eat. The doctors were in despair, but, at length, they decided to humour him in his delusion that he had ceased to exist, but to maintain that dead men did occasionally eat. They offered to produce examples of their contention, and several men unknown to their illustrious patient were accordingly brought in, who pretended to be dead, but ate nevertheless. This trick succeeded, and for the remaining weeks of his life the prince consented to take food, but only in the presence of the doctors and his fellow-corpses. As _Monsieur le Prince_ grew worse, his wife summoned up sufficient courage to beg him to think of his conscience and to see a confessor. He angrily refused, and persisted in his refusal, notwithstanding her tears and supplications. As a matter of fact, he had been seeing Père de la Tour of the Oratory for some months past, though in the strictest secrecy. He had at first demanded that the reverend father should come to him by night, and in disguise. Père de la Tour replied that he would be quite willing to visit _Monsieur le Prince_ under cover of darkness, but that the respect he owed to the cloth would not permit him to masquerade in the attire of a layman. After some hesitation, the penitent consented to waive this condition; but he caused the most elaborate precautions to be taken to prevent his visitor being recognized. He was admitted, at dead of night, by a little back door, where a confidential servant of the prince, with a lantern in one hand and a bunch of keys in the other, was waiting to receive him, and conducted to the sick-room along dark passages and through many doors, which were unlocked and locked again after him as he passed. Having at length reached his destination, he confessed _Monsieur le Prince_, and was then conducted out of the house by the same way and in the same manner as he had entered it. Similar precautions were observed on each of his subsequent visits. Henri Jules de Bourbon, fifth Prince de Condé, died on 1 April, 1709, at the age of sixty-six. His last instructions to his son were to carry out all the improvements which he had projected at Chantilly, and to take care that none of the honours due to his rank were omitted at his funeral. And so he passed away, “regretted by no one, neither by servants nor friends, neither by child nor wife. Indeed, _Madame la Princesse_ was so ashamed of her tears that she made excuses for them.”[249]