He was hurt, and withdrew almost entirely from the world.

Four days before his death, however, "he was in company.

All at once he perceived that he was becoming deaf, yes, stone deaf.

He returned to Versailles, where he had apartments at Conde's house.
Apoplexy carried him off in a quarter of an hour on the 11th of May, 1696," leaving behind him an incomparable book, wherein, according to his own maxim, the excellent writer shows himself to be an excellent painter; and four dialogues against Quietism, still unfinished, full of lively and good-humored hostility to the doctrines of Madame Guyon.

They were published after his death.
We pass from prose to poetry, from La Bruyere to Corneille, who had died in 1684, too late for his fame, in spite of the vigorous returns of genius which still flash forth sometimes in his feeblest works.
Throughout the Regency and the Fronde, Corneille had continued to occupy almost alone the great French stage.