This morning he confessed, but the priest had omitted to bring with him the necessary apparatus for celebrating Mass.  On the Tuesday, however, M. de la Boetie summoned him to aid him, as he said, in discharging the last office of a Christian.  After the conclusion of Mass, he took the sacrament; when the priest was about to depart, he said to him:  “Spiritual father, I implore you humbly, as well as those over whom you are set, to pray to the Almighty on my behalf; that, if it be decreed in heaven that I am now to end my life, He will take compassion on my soul, and pardon me my sins, which are manifold, it not being possible for so weak and poor a creature as I to obey completely the will of such a Master; or, if He think fit to keep me longer here, that it may please Him to release my present extreme anguish, and to direct my footsteps in the right path, that I may become a better man than I have been.”  He paused to recover breath a little; priest was about to go away, he called him back and proceeded:  “I desire to say, besides, in your hearing this:  I declare that I was christened and I have lived, and that so I wish to die, in the faith which Moses preached in Egypt; which afterwards the Patriarchs accepted and professed in Judaea; and which, in the course of time, has been transmitted to France and to us.”  He seemed desirous of adding something more, but he ended with a request to his uncle and me to send up prayers for him; “for those are,” he said, “the best duties that Christians can fulfil one for another.”  In the course of talking, his shoulder was uncovered, and although a man-servant stood near him, he asked his uncle to re-adjust the clothes.  Then, turning his eyes towards me, he said, “Ingenui est, cui multum debeas, ei plurimum velle debere.”

M. de Belot called in the afternoon to see him, and M. de la Boetie, taking his hand, said to him:  “I was on the point of discharging my debt, but my kind creditor has given me a little further time.”  A little while after, appearing to wake out of a sort of reverie, he uttered words which he had employed once or twice before in the course of his sickness:  “Ah well, ah well, whenever the hour comes, I await it with pleasure and fortitude.”  And then, as they were holding his mouth open by force to give him a draught, he observed to M. de Belot:  “An vivere tanti est?”

As the evening approached, he began perceptibly to sink; and while I supped, he sent for me to come, being no more than the shadow of a man, or, as he put it himself, ‘non homo, sed species hominis’; and he said to me with the utmost difficulty:  “My brother, my friend, please God I may realise the imaginations I have just enjoyed.”  Afterwards, having waited for some time while he remained silent, and by painful efforts was drawing long sighs (for his tongue at this point began to refuse its functions), I said, “What are they?” “Grand, grand!” he replied.  “I have never yet failed,” returned I, “to have the honour