This dying man did not consent to die.

He rebelled against death; in this centre of the work his anxieties for the future of the Order, which a little while before had been in the background, now returned, more agonizing and terrible than ever.
"We must begin again," he thought, "create a new family who will not forget humility, who will go and serve lepers and, as in the old times, put themselves always, not merely in words, but in reality, below all men."[21] To feel that implacable work of destruction going on against which the most submissive cannot keep from protesting: "My God, my God, why?
why hast thou forsaken me ?" To be obliged to look on at the still more dreaded decomposition of his Order; he, the lark, to be spied upon by soldiers watching for his corpse--there was quite enough here to make him mortally sad.
During these last weeks all his sighs were noted.

The disappearance of the greater part of the legend of the Three Companions certainly deprives us of some touching stories, but most of the incidents have been preserved for us, notwithstanding, in documents from a second hand.
Four Brothers had been especially charged to lavish care upon him: Leo, Angelo, Rufino, and Masseo.

We already know them; they are of those intimate friends of the first days, who had heard in the Franciscan gospel a call to love and liberty.

And they too began to complain of everything.[22] One day one of them said to the sick man: "Father, you are going away to leave us here; point out to us, then, if you know him, the one to whom we might in all security confide the burden of the generalship." Alas, Francis did not know the ideal Brother, capable of assuming such a duty; but he took advantage of the question to sketch the portrait of the perfect minister-general.[23] We have two impressions of this portrait, the one which has been retouched by Celano, and the original proof, much shorter and more vague, but showing us Francis desiring that his successor shall have but a single weapon, an unalterable love.
It was probably this question which suggested to him the thought of leaving for his successors, the generals of the Order, a letter which they should pass on from one to another, and where they should find, not directions for particular cases, but the very inspiration of their activity.[24] To the Reverend Father in Christ, N ..., Minister-General of the entire Order of the Brothers Minor.