As he had always been sincere in his successive opinions, the Duke of Montmorency deserved general esteem.  His profound piety, his unchanging gentleness, his exhaustless charity, made him a veritable saint.  He was the complete type of the Christian nobleman.  His name, his character, the very features of his countenance, were all in perfect harmony.  The adversaries of the Revolution could not refrain from honoring this good man.  On receiving the title of governor to the Duke of Bordeaux, he felt rewarded for the devotion and virtue of his whole life.  But he regarded this grave employment as a heavy burden, “an immense and formidable honor, the terror of his feebleness, and the perpetual occupation of his conscience.”  This was the thought expressed in his reception discourse at the French Academy.  The Count Daru replied to him.  At the same session M. de Chateaubriand read a historic fragment.  It was the first time since leaving the ministry that the celebrated writer had appeared in public, and he chose to do so to adorn the triumph of him whose rival he had been.

The Duke Mathieu de Montmorency died six months before he was to enter upon his functions as governor to the Duke of Bordeaux.  It was Good Friday of the year 1826, at three o’clock in the afternoon.  Before the tomb in the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas, his parish, the Duke was praying like a saint, when suddenly he was seen to waver, and then to fall.  Those near him ran to him, raised him; he was dead.  The news had hardly spread when the church was filled with a crowd of poor people, who wept hot tears over the loss of their benefactor.  On the morrow the Duchess of Broglie wrote to Madame REcamier, for whom the deceased had had an almost mystic tenderness:—­

“Holy Saturday.  Oh, my God! my God! dear friend, what an event!  I think of you with anguish.  All the past comes up before me.  I thought I could see the grief of my poor mother, and I think of yours, my dear friend, which must be terrible.  But what a beautiful death!  Thus he would have chosen it—­the place, the day, the hour!  The hand of God, of that saviour God, whose sacrifice he was celebrating, is here!”

Father Macarthy said, in a sermon preached in the Chapel of the Tuileries:—­

“Happy he, O God, who comes before Thy altar, on the day of Thy death, at the very hour when Thou didst expire for the salvation of the world, to breathe out his soul at Thy feet, and be laid in Thy tomb!”

Lastly, the Duke de Laval-Montmorency wrote to Madame Recamier:—­

“I say it to you, my dear friend, I avow it without false modesty, I never have had any merit or any honor in life, save from action in common with my angelic friend.  He alone is happy; he is so beyond doubt; from heaven he sees our tears, our desolation, our homage; he will be our protector on high as he was our friend, our support, upon the earth.”

The death of the virtuous Duke caused Charles X. great grief.  He said:  “There are in me two persons, the king and the man, and I know not which is the most affected.”