Shortly before her death, she wrote to Mme. de Sevigne:  “Here is what I have done since I wrote you last.  I have had two attacks of fever; for six months I had not been purged; I am purged once, I am purged twice; the day after the second time, I sit down at the table; oh, dear!  I feel a pain in my heart—­I do not want any soup.  Have a little meat, then?  No, I do not wish any.  Well, you will have some fruit?  I think I will.  Very well, then, have some.  I don’t know—­I think I will have some by and by.  Let me have some soup and some chicken this evening....  Here is the evening, and there are the soup and the chicken; I don’t desire them.  I am nauseated, I will go to bed—­I prefer sleeping to eating.  I go to bed, I turn round, I turn back, I have no pain, but I have no sleep either.  I call—­I take a book—­I close it.  Day comes—­I get up—­I go to the window.  It strikes four, five, six—­I go to bed again, I doze until seven, I get up at eight, I sit down to table at twelve—­to no purpose, as yesterday....  I lay myself down in my bed, in the evening, to no purpose, as the night before.  Are you ill?  Nay, I am in this state for three days and three nights.  At present, I am getting some sleep again, but I still eat mechanically, horsewise—­rubbing my mouth with vinegar.  Otherwise, I am very well, and I haven’t so much as a pain in my head.”

Her depressing melancholy kept her indoors a great deal; in fact, after 1683, after the death of the queen, who was one of her best friends, she was seldom seen at court.  Mme. de Sevigne gives good reason for this in her letter: 

“She had a mortal melancholy.  Again, what absurdity! is she not the most fortunate woman in the world?  That is what people said; it needed that she should die to prove that she had good reason for not going out and for being melancholy.  Her reins and her heart were all gone—­was not that enough to cause those fits of despondency of which she complained?  And so, during her life she showed reason, and after death she showed reason, and never was she without that divine reason which was her principal gift.”

Her liaison with La Rochefoucauld is the one delicate and tender point in her life, a relation that afforded her much happiness and finally completed the ruin of her health.  M. d’Haussonville said:  “It is true that he took possession of her soul and intellect, little by little, so that the two beings, in the eyes of their contemporaries, were but one; for after his death (1680) she lived but an incomplete and mutilated existence.”

Some critics have ventured to pronounce this liaison one of material love solely, others are convinced of its morality and pure friendship.  In favor of the latter view, M. d’Haussonville suggests the fact that Mme. de La Fayette was over thirty years of age when she became interested in La Rochefoucauld, and that at that age women rarely ally themselves with men from emotions of physical love merely.