Comte met Clotilde de Vaux in 1844, when she was in her late twenties and separated from a husband who had fled a gambling debt; she died of tuberculosis in April 1846, and the relationship appears to have remained unconsummated. Her death reorganised his entire system: the philosopher who had spent twenty years arguing that knowledge must be built from verified observation concluded that feeling, not intellect, must govern, and constructed the Religion of Humanity within three years. He prayed to her three times daily for the remaining eleven years of his life, preserved her rooms, and installed her in the system as the pattern of the feminine and a personal patron. His scientific followers, particularly Emile Littre, regarded this as evidence of mental collapse and split the movement over it. She is filed here as an exemplar rather than a power because that is her function in the system: a life held up as the pattern, not a being with agency over anything.