Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/186

172 to Dampierre, which would have recalled too vividly the brilliant days of the past, but to a modest villa at Gagny near Chelles. There, far from the gaze of the world, she awaited her last hour, and died in obscurity at the age of seventy-nine, in the same year with the Cardinal de Retz and Madame de Longueville. She would have neither funeral solemnities nor funeral oration; she forbade that they should give her any of those titles which she had learned to despise; she wished to be interred obscurely in the little old parish church of Gagny. There, in the southern aisle near the chapel of the Virgin, some faithful but unknown hand has inscribed on a slab of black marble, the following epitaph: "Here lies Marie de Kohan, Duchess de Chevreuse, daughter of Hercule de Rohan, Duke de Montbazon. She espoused, in her first marriage, Charles d'Albert, Duke de Luynes, peer and constable of France; and in her second marriage, Claude de Lorraine, Duke de Chevreuse. Humility having deadened in her heart all the grandeur of the age, she forbade the revival at her death of the least mark of this grandeur, which she wished to end by burying beneath the simplicity of this tomb, having ordered that they should inter her in the parish church of Gagny, where she died at the age of seventy-nine, on the 12th of August, 1679."