of things, and, despite the natural moderation of his mind, he propounded theories so perilous for absolute power that he dared not have his book printed at Paris, and brought it out in Geneva; its success was immense; before his death, Montesquieu saw twenty-one French editions published, and translations in all the languages of Europe.  “Mankind had lost its titledeeds,” says Voltaire; “Montesquieu recovered and restored them.”

The intense labor, the immense courses of reading, to which Montesquieu had devoted himself, had exhausted his strength.  “I am overcome with weariness,” he wrote in 1747; “I propose to rest myself for the remainder of my days.”  “I have done,” he said to M. Suard; “I have burned all my powder, all my candles have gone out.”  “I had conceived the design of giving greater breadth and depth to certain parts of my Esprit; I have become incapable of it; my reading has weakened my eyes, and it seems to me that what light I have left is but the dawn of the day when they will close forever.”

Montesquieu was at Paris, ill and sad at heart, in spite of his habitual serenity; notwithstanding the scoffs he had admitted into his Lettres persanes, he had always preserved some respect for religion; he considered it a necessary item in the order of societies; in his soul and on his own private account he hoped and desired rather than believed.  “Though the immortality of the soul were an error,” he had said, “I should be sorry not to believe it; I confess that I am not so humble as the atheists.  I know not what they think, but as for me I would not truck the notion of my immortality for that of an ephemeral happiness.  There is for me a charm in believing myself to be immortal like God himself.  Independently of revealed ideas, metaphysical ideas give me, as regards my eternal happiness, strong hopes which I should not like to give up.”  As he approached the tomb, his views of religion appeared to become clearer.  “What a wonderful thing!” he would say, “the Christian religion, which seems to have no object but felicity in the next world, yet forms our happiness in this.”  He had never looked to life for any very keen delights; his spirits were as even as his mind was powerful.  “Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against the disagreeables of life,” he wrote, “never having had any sorrow that an hour’s reading did not dispel.  I awake in the morning with a secret joy at beholding the light; I gaze upon the light with a sort of enchantment, and all the rest of the day I am content.  I pass the night without awaking, and in the evening, when I go to bed, a sort of entrancement prevents me from giving way to reflections.”

Montesquieu died as he had lived, without retracting any of his ideas or of his writings.  The priest of his parish brought him the sacraments, and, “Sir,” said he, “you know how great God is!” “Yes,” replied the dying man, “and how little men are!” He expired almost immediately on the 10th of February, 1755, at the age of sixty-six.  He died at the beginning of the reign of the philosophers, whose way he had prepared before them without having ever belonged to their number.  Diderot alone followed his bier.  Fontenelle, nearly a hundred years old, was soon to follow him to the tomb.