After having suffered so much from separation, and so often traversed France to visit her daughter in Provence, Madame de Sevigne had the happiness to die in her house at Grignan.  She was sixty-nine, and she had been ill for some time; she was subject to rheumatism; her son’s wildness had for a long while retarded the arrangement of her affairs; at last he had turned over a new leaf, he was married, he was a devotee.  Madame de Grignan had likewise found a wife for her son, whom the king had made a colonel at a very early age; and a husband for her daughter, little Pauline, now Madame de Simiane.  “All this together is extremely nice, and too nice,” wrote Madame de Sevigne to M. de Bussy, “for I find the days going so fast, and the months and the years, that, for my part, my dear cousin, I can no longer hold them.  Time flies, and carries me along in spite of me; it is all very fine for me to wish to stay it, it bears me away with it, and the idea of this causes me great fear; you will make a pretty shrewd guess why.”  Death came at last, and Madame de Sevigne lost all her terrors.  She was attacked by small-pox whilst her sick daughter was confined to her bed, and died on the 19th of April, 1696, thanking God that she was the first to go, after having so often trembled for her daughter’s health.  “What calls far more for our admiration than for our regrets,” writes M. de Grignan to M. de Coulanges, “is the spectacle of a brave woman facing death, of which she had no doubt from the first days of her illness, with astounding firmness and submission.  This person, so tender and so weak towards all that she loved, showed nothing but courage and piety when she believed that her hour was come; and we could not but remark of what utility and of what importance it is to have the mind stocked with good matter and holy reading, for the which Madame de Sevigne had a liking, not to say a wonderful hungering, from the use she managed to make of that good store in the last moments of her life.”  She had often taken her daughter to task for not being fond of books.  “There is a certain person who undoubtedly has plenty of wits, but of so nice and so fastidious a sort, that she cannot read anything but five or six sublime works, which is a sign of distinguished taste.  She cannot bear historical books; a great deprivation this, and of that which is a subsistence to everybody else.  She has another misfortune, which is, that she cannot read twice over those choice books which she esteems exclusively.  This person says that she is insulted when she is told that she is not fond of reading:  another bone to pick.”  Madame de Sevigne’s liking for good books accompanied her to the last, and helped her to make a good end.