The death of the Présidente de Tourvel is narrated as an intimate sequence of reversals: after more than two days unconscious, she awakens at the news that the Vicomte de Valmont is dead, prays for his forgiveness, and dies at eleven that night. Madame de Volanges’s account to Madame de Rosemonde makes the brief return of Tourvel’s awareness the emotional center of the event. It also gives the death a significance beyond private loss: the framing preface had mocked as impossible the story of a young president dying of grief, and Tourvel’s final hours give that supposedly incredible fate its stark narrative answer.

The report and its fatal coincidence

Madame de Volanges writes to Madame de Rosemonde knowing that she already grieves for the Vicomte de Valmont. She must now report another death: Tourvel has died the previous evening, at eleven. The two losses are joined by a cruel interval. Although Tourvel has been unconscious for more than two days, she survives long enough to hear that the Vicomte de Valmont is dead. Madame de Volanges presents this timing as a fatal coincidence, as if human prudence could neither prevent it nor soften its effect.

The news arrives during a visit from Tourvel’s doctor. That morning, neither the doctor nor Madame de Volanges had been recognized; Tourvel had given no answer and made no sign. When the doctor tells Madame de Volanges of the Vicomte de Valmont’s death, Tourvel suddenly regains her senses. The change is so abrupt that Madame de Volanges cannot tell whether it comes from nature alone or from the repeated mention of death and the Vicomte de Valmont. The account preserves that uncertainty rather than claiming a medical explanation, making the return of consciousness both a bodily event and a moment of recognition.

Recognition, refusal, and prayer

Tourvel throws back the curtains and demands to know whether the Vicomte de Valmont is dead. Madame de Volanges initially tries to persuade her that she has misheard, but Tourvel insists that the doctor repeat the account. When Madame de Volanges attempts once more to dissuade her, Tourvel answers privately that he had already been dead to her. The remark gives the news its particular force: the man’s physical death follows a rupture that had already made him emotionally lost to her, yet hearing that he has actually died still breaks through her unconsciousness.

After listening for a short time, Tourvel stops the account and asks for the curtains to be closed. She will not let the doctor approach to treat her. Once he has left, she sends away her attendant and maid as well. In the privacy that follows, she asks Madame de Volanges to help her kneel on the bed and support her. She remains silent for a while, weeping, before raising her joined hands toward heaven and submitting to divine justice. Her prayer asks that her own acknowledged misfortunes not become a reproach against the Vicomte de Valmont, and that he be forgiven. The scene is not a reconciliation between the two: it is Tourvel’s final act of concern for him, spoken after she has learned of his death.

The last hours

After the prayer, Tourvel sinks into Madame de Volanges’s arms. She is returned to bed and suffers a prolonged faint, from which ordinary assistance eventually revives her. When she regains consciousness, she asks for Father Anselme, calling him the only physician she now needs and saying that she feels her sufferings will soon end. She is short of breath and can speak only with difficulty. The episode makes her expectation of death explicit without turning it into a sudden or instantaneous collapse: there is still time for a further request and for the arrival of her confessor.

Tourvel also sends Madame de Volanges a cassette containing papers of her own, with instructions that it be passed to Madame de Rosemonde after her death. The handoff is practical, but its destination connects the last hours to the friendship that surrounds her. She speaks tenderly of Madame de Rosemonde and of the latter’s affection for her, as much as her condition allows. The account does not disclose the papers’ contents; it records only Tourvel’s wish that they reach her friend after she is gone.

Father Anselme arrives at about four o’clock and remains alone with Tourvel for nearly an hour. When the others return, her face is calm and serene, while it is plain that the priest has been crying. He stays for the final ceremonies of the Church. Madame de Volanges dwells on the contrast between the patient’s quiet resignation and her confessor’s visible grief: those gathered are moved, and the woman they mourn is the only one who does not mourn herself. The contrast turns the deathbed into a scene of communal witness, with Tourvel’s composure set against the pain of those who attend her.

Death and the meaning of the ending

The remainder of the day passes in the customary prayers, interrupted by Tourvel’s frequent fainting spells. Toward eleven in the evening she appears more oppressed and distressed. Madame de Volanges reaches for her arm; Tourvel still has the strength to take her hand and place it on her heart. Madame de Volanges feels no beat, and Tourvel dies at that moment. The last gesture is small and bodily, but it makes the final recognition unmistakable: the narrator’s hand is on the heart whose beat has ceased.

In reflecting on the death, Madame de Volanges recalls that, less than a year earlier, she and Madame de Rosemonde had discussed Tourvel’s apparently secure happiness. She lists her virtues, gentle character, beloved and loving husband, agreeable society, beauty, youth, and fortune, then concludes that so many advantages were lost through a single imprudence. Her lament is both personal mourning and a moral interpretation of the catastrophe; she questions the inscrutability of Providence without pretending to understand it. The letter also reports that Cécile Volanges faints on hearing of the sudden deaths of two people she knew, and Madame de Volanges has her put to bed. The losses thus reach beyond Tourvel’s deathbed, prompting a warning about the force of grief on the young.

The event also answers, with deliberate irony, the preface’s claim that no young and beautiful president could die of grief in the supposedly enlightened present. That prefatory voice had used the example to cast doubt on the correspondence’s plausibility. The final account does not reduce Tourvel’s death to a clinical diagnosis of grief, but it makes the sequence the preface declared unthinkable—the sudden awakening, the news of the Vicomte de Valmont’s death, the prayer, and Tourvel’s own death within hours—central to the novel’s tragic conclusion. Because the event reaches the reader through Madame de Volanges’s letter to Madame de Rosemonde, it is at once a death, a witnessed bedside account, and a final act of correspondence carrying Tourvel’s last words and papers toward her friend.