 Bergson died on January 3, 1941 at the age of 81. World War II had of course already begun, and Germany, occupying France, had established the Vichy government. There is a rumor that he had converted to Catholicism near the end of his life, but there is no document to support this rumor. In fact, in a letter to Emmanuel Mounier, Madame Bergson quotes her husband saying “I would have converted [to Catholicism], if I had not seen over many years the great wave of anti-semitism preparing itself to expand over the world.” Madame Bergson continues in the letter to say that her husband had resolved not to be baptized (Béguin and Thévenaz 1941, pp. 11–12; also Soulez and Worms, p. 277). Because of his fame, the Vichy Government offered Bergson exemptions from anti-Semitic regulations, but he refused. It is also rumored that he contracted the cold that killed him while waiting in line to register as a Jew. Apparently, in the same will which his wife mentions in the letter to Mounier (Béguin and Thévenaz 1941, p. 12), Bergson had instructed that all of his papers be destroyed. The story goes that his wife obeyed this order, throwing all of her husband’s papers into the fireplace. There is a rumor that she destroyed a half-written manuscript. The result of this destruction is that the Bergson Archives in Paris (stored at Librairie Jacques Doucet on the Place de Panthéon in Paris) contain only Bergson’s personal library. So, the situation is very different for Bergson than for many other important French and German philosophers of the 20th Century who have massive archives (Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty). The lack of archival material is one reason why Bergson went out of favor during the second half of the Twentieth Century. We shall return to this problem of Bergson’s temporary disappearance from the philosophical scene.