The mystery was, however, never explained.  Maisons died before its darkness could be penetrated.  His end was terrible.  He had no religion; his father had had none.  He married a sister of the Marechal de Villars, who was in the same case.  Their only son they specially educated in unbelief.  Nevertheless, everything seemed to smile upon them.  They had wealth, consideration, distinguished friends.  But mark the end.

Maisons is slightly unwell.  He takes rhubarb twice or thrice, unseasonably; more unseasonably comes Cardinal de Bissy to him, to talk upon the constitution, and thus hinder the operation of the rhubarb; his inside seems on fire, but he will not believe himself ill; the progress of his disease is great in a few hours; the doctors, though soon at their wits’ ends, dare not say so; the malady visibly increases; his whole household is in confusion; he dies, forty-eight years of age, midst of a crowd of friends, of clients, without the power or leisure to think for a moment what is going to happen to his soul!

His wife survives him ten or twelve years, opulent, and in consideration, when suddenly she has an attack of apoplexy in her garden.  Instead of thinking of her state, and profiting by leisure, she makes light of her illness, has another attack a few days after, and is carried off on the 5th of May, 1727, in her forty-sixth year, without having had a moment free.

Her son, for a long time much afflicted, seeks to distinguish himself and acquire friends.  Taking no warning from what has occurred, he thinks only of running after the fortune of this world, and is surprised at Paris by the small-pox.  He believes himself dead, thinks of what he has neglected all his life, but fear suddenly seizes him, and he dies in the midst of it, on the 13th of September, 1731, leaving an only son, who dies a year after him, eighteen months old, all the great wealth of the family going to collateral relatives.

These Memoirs are not essays on morality, therefore I have contented myself with the most simple and the most naked recital of facts; but I may, perhaps, be permitted to apply here those two verses of the 37th Psalm, which appear so expressly made for the purpose:  “I have seen the impious exalted like the cedars of Lebanon:  Yea, he passed away, and, lo, he was not; yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.”

But let me leave this subject now, to treat of other matters.  On Friday, the last day of August, I lost one of the best and most revered of friends, the Duc de Beavilliers.  He died at Vaucresson after an illness of about two months, his intellect clear to the last, aged sixty-six years, having been born on the 24th of Oct 1648.