She was sixty-nine, and she had been ill for some time; she was subject to rheumatism; her son's wildness had for a long while retarded the arrangement of her affairs; at last he had turned over a new leaf, he was married, he was a devotee.
Madame de Grignan had likewise found a wife for her son, whom the king had made a colonel at a very early age; and a husband for her daughter, little Pauline, now Madame de Simiane.

"All this together is extremely nice, and too nice," wrote Madame de Sevigne to M.de Bussy, "for I find the days going so fast, and the months and the years, that, for my part, my dear cousin, I can no longer hold them.

Time flies, and carries me along in spite of me; it is all very fine for me to wish to stay it, it bears me away with it, and the idea of this causes me great fear; you will make a pretty shrewd guess why." Death came at last, and Madame de Sevigne lost all her terrors.

She was attacked by small-pox whilst her sick daughter was confined to her bed, and died on the 19th of April, 1696, thanking God that she was the first to go, after having so often trembled for her daughter's health.

"What calls far more for our admiration than for our regrets," writes M.de Grignan to M.de Coulanges, "is the spectacle of a brave woman facing death, of which she had no doubt from the first days of her illness, with astounding firmness and submission.