It was the misfortune and the great fault of Louis XIV.

that he preferred the counsels of Louvois to those of Colbert, and that he allowed all the functions so faithfully exercised by the dying minister to drop into the hands of his enemy and rival.
At sixty-four years of age Colbert succumbed to excess of labor and of cares.

That man, so cold and reserved, whom Madame de Sevigne called North, and Guy-Patin the Man of Marble (_Vir marmoreus_), felt that disgust for the things of life which appears so strikingly in the seventeenth century amongst those who were most ardently engaged in the affairs of the world.

He was suffering from stone; the king sent to inquire after him and wrote to him.

The dying man had his eyes closed; he did not open them.