This reply Count Frontenac was not destined to see. Three months, indeed, before it was penned the curtain had fallen upon his eager, strenuous, and, broadly speaking, honourable life. About the middle of November he fell ill. He was in his seventy-ninth year. In a few days, if not from the first, he knew that he had passed into the shadow of death, that he was at last meeting One whom he could not conquer. The old man made all his arrangements with admirable calmness. On the 22nd November he sent for the notary to make his will. He expressed a desire to be buried, not in the cathedral church, but in that of the Récollets, whose milder theology had best suited his practical and somewhat Erastian turn of mind. He makes pecuniary provision for a daily mass on his behalf for one year, and a yearly one thereafter on the anniversary of his death, Mme. de Frontenac to share in it after her death. His heart was to be placed in a chapel of the Church of St. Nicolas des Champs at Paris, where the remains of his sister, Mme. de Monmort, were already reposing. A merchant of Quebec, François Hazeur, and his private secretary, are named as his executors. He requests Champigny to support his friends in having his wishes carried out. He bequeaths to him a crucifix of aloes wood, and to Mme. de Champigny a reliquary. The bishop, M. de Saint Vallier, came to see him several times during his illness, as also did the intendant; death, not for the first time, was acting the part of reconciler. It was rather expected by the clerical party that, in his last moments, the old warrior would express deep contrition for his deficiencies on the religious side and his frequent opposition to the policy of the church; but in this they were disappointed. "God gave him full time," says an anonymous critic of the period, who has annotated very harshly the funeral sermon preached over his remains, "to recognize his errors, and yet to the last he showed a great indifference in all these matters. In a word, he behaved during the few days before his death like one who had led an irreproachable life and had nothing to fear." The last rites of religion were administered by the Récollet father, Olivier Goyer, and on the 28th November 1698, retaining his faculties to the last, the veteran passed peacefully away.