RELÂCHE was Satie's last work. Composers who had supported him in the past, including Auric and Roland-Manuel, were critical of this ballet, and as a result Satie wrote to both terminating their friendship. Roland-Manuel's trenchant dismissal of the work, and indeed of the composer as his article is entitled ‘Adieu Satie’, was published in December 1924: ‘Farewell Relâche, farewell Satie. May you be dragged to the abyss with your love of wrong spellings and your cult of bad taste, this supposed classicism which is but an absence of grace and this appalling romanticism which even distrusts sincerity.’ This article leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth, not only because Satie could never be accused of romanticism (or, indeed, wrong spellings), but also because Roland-Manuel would have been aware that Satie was by then terminally ill. Nine months after Satie's death, Roland-Manuel published a belated apology in the same magazine. Another singularly ill-timed article was published in Belgium: written in spring 1925, the musical satire Tombeau de Socrate was published at the end of July following Satie's death on the first day of that month. Paul Hooreman and Andre Souris decided they would try to out-parody Satie, composing a piece which featured no bar lines, key signature or clefs at the start of lines, whose musical language combined pseudo-Gregorian chant and pseudo-‘mazurka java’.

Darius Milhaud was one of very few people with whom Satie never fell out. His memoir, Notes sans musique, first published in 1949, includes vivid descriptions of Satie's last year and death. Milhaud and his wife Madeleine were the composer's principal carers, together with Brancusi, Derain and the young composer Robert Caby (1905–92), who met Satie at the dress rehearsal of Relâche. Brancusi brought Satie chicken broth which he had made himself. Picasso was another regular visitor to the composer's bedside, somehow managing to overcome his fear of illness and death to pay homage to his friend and collaborator. John Richardson, in the third volume of his magisterial biography of Picasso, notes that the great painter even changed Satie's sheets.