"on the other shore." Constant passed the last night of her life by her bedside. She had seemed so much better that at eleven o'clock Mathieu de Montmorency left, convinced that in the morning he would find her revived. She suffered no pain during the concluding hours, and the brightness of her intellect was not even momentarily dimmed. Sleep visited her as usual; then at 5 o'clock she opened her eyes again, for the last time on the world. A few moments later she passed away, so quietly that her watchers did not note the precise moment in which her great soul was exhaled. The date of her death was 14th July 1817.
The news of it was the signal for, perhaps, the most widely-spread and most genuine outburst of grief ever known. Joubert, indeed, asserts the contrary, and not only declares that she was not regretted, but adds that Constant, meeting him casually the very day after the event, did not even allude to it. It never seems to have occurred to Joubert that Constant might have had some other and deeper cause for silence than indifference. From such a nature reserve was perhaps the only tribute that could be more eloquently expressive than the loud lamentations of other friends. These abounded, and even Châteaubriand, who, after all, had not been bound to the dead woman by such ties of constant friendship as attached Schlegel, Sismondi, and others—even he records with a sort of jealous care that in the last letter she ever wrote to Madame de Duras, a letter penned in "large, irregular characters like a child's," there was an affectionate allusion to "Francis."
Bonstetten and Sismondi have both left records of their grief at her funeral. The latter, writing immediately after it to his mother, said: "My life is
