I know not what they think, but as for me I would not truck the notion of my immortality for that of an ephemeral happiness.
There is for me a charm in believing myself to be immortal like God himself.

Independently of revealed ideas, metaphysical ideas give me, as regards my eternal happiness, strong hopes which I should not like to give up." As he approached the tomb, his views of religion appeared to become clearer.

"What a wonderful thing!" he would say, "the Christian religion, which seems to have no object but felicity in the next world, yet forms our happiness in this." He had never looked to life for any very keen delights; his spirits were as even as his mind was powerful.
"Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against the disagreeables of life," he wrote, "never having had any sorrow that an hour's reading did not dispel.

I awake in the morning with a secret joy at beholding the light; I gaze upon the light with a sort of enchantment, and all the rest of the day I am content.

I pass the night without awaking, and in the evening, when I go to bed, a sort of entrancement prevents me from giving way to reflections." Montesquieu died as he had lived, without retracting any of his ideas or of his writings.