evidence: In the roster of famous last words—from Goethe’s "More light!" to Nathan Hale’s "I regret I have but one life to give for my country" to John Maynard Keynes’s debonair "I should have drunk more champagne"—surely the final utterance of James Madison deserves an honored place. Bedridden with rheumatism at 85, the fourth president had spent 19 years in retirement at Montpelier, the columned brick Virginia plantation house where he had grown up since age nine or ten; where, as a young legislator, he had pored over history and political philosophy to help frame his plan for the United States Constitution; and where, as a 46-year-old ex-congressman, he had brought his wife of three years to live with his parents on their 5,000 rich Piedmont acres. That final morning in 1836, Sukey, his wife’s longtime maid, had brought him his breakfast, as usual; another slave, his valet Paul Jennings, got ready to shave him, as he had done every second day for 16 years; his favorite niece, the widowed Nelly Willis, sat by him to keep him company, as the June sun filtered through the twin poplars in the backyard and warmed the book-filled sickroom.