in his honour. It was claimed that La Mettrie wanted to show either his power of gluttony or his strong constitution by devouring a large quantity of pâté de faisan aux truffes. As a result, he developed a gastric illness of some sort. Soon after he began suffering from a severe fever and eventually died. Frederick the Great gave the funeral oration, which remains the major biographical source on La Mettrie's life. He declared: "La Mettrie died in the house of Milord Tirconnel, the French plenipotentiary, whom he had restored to life. It seems that the disease, knowing with whom it had to deal, was cunning enough to attack him first by the brain, in order to destroy him the more surely. A violent fever with fierce delirium came on. The invalid was obliged to have recourse to the science of his colleagues, but he failed to find the succor that his own skill had so often afforded as well to himself as to the public"." Frederick further described him as a good devil and medic but a very bad author. He was survived by his wife and a 5-year-old daughter. La Mettrie's collected Œuvres philosophiques appeared after his death in several editions, published in London, Berlin and Amsterdam. Works Selected works Histoire Naturelle de l'Âme. 1745 (anon.) École de la Volupté. 1746, 1747 (anon.) Politique du Médecin de Machiavel. 1746 (anon.) L'Homme Machine. 1748 (anon.) L'Homme Plante. 1748 (anon.) Ouvrage de Pénélope ou Machiavel en Médecine. 1748 (pseudonym: Aletheius Demetrius) Discours sur le bonheur ou Anti-Sénèque [Traité de la vie heureuse, par Sénèque, avec un Discours du traducteur sur le même sujet]. 1748 (anon.) L'Homme plus que Machine. 1748 (anon.) Système d'Épicure. 1750 (anon.) L'Art de Jouir. 1751 (anon.) Collected works Œuvres philosophiques, 2 vols., Paris: Fayard 1984, 1987 ; [vol. 3] Ouvrage de Pénélope ou Machiavel en Médecine, Paris: Fayard 2002 Œuvres philosophiques, 1 vol., Paris: Coda 2004 Critical editions of his major works Aram Vartanian (ed.): La Mettrie's L'homme machine. A Study in the Origins of an Idea, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) John F. Falvey (ed.): La Mettrie. Discours sur le bonheur in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. cxxxiv (Banbury, Oxfordshire: The Voltaire Foundation, 1975) Ann Thomson (ed.): La Mettrie's Discours préliminaire. in Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1981) Théo Verbeek (Ed.): Le Traité de l'Ame de La