At this juncture Louis XIV., who had hitherto dressed with great simplicity, indicated that he desired his court should appear in all possible magnificence.  Instantly the shops were emptied.  Even gold and silver appeared scarcely rich enough.  Louis himself planned many of the dresses for any public occasion.  Afterwards he repented of the extent to which he had permitted magnificence to go, but it was then impossible to check the excess.

Versailles, henceforth in all its grandeur, contains an apartment which is called, from its situation, and the opportunities it presents of looking down upon the actors of the scene around, L’OEil de Boeuf.  The revelations of the OEil de Boeuf, during the reign of Louis XV., form one of the most amazing pictures of wickedness, venality, power misapplied, genius polluted, that was ever drawn.  No one that reads that infamous book can wonder at the revolution of 1789.  Let us conceive Saint-Simon to have taken his stand here, in this region, pure in the time of Louis XIV., comparatively, and note we down his comments on men and women.

He has journeyed up to court from La Trappe, which has fallen into confusion and quarrels, to which the most saintly precincts are peculiarly liable.

The history of Mademoiselle de la Valliere was not, as he tells us, of his time.  He hears of her death, and so indeed does the king, with emotion.  She expired in 1710, in the Rue St. Jacques, at the Carmelite convent, where, though she was in the heart of Paris, her seclusion from the world had long been complete.  Amongst the nuns of the convent none was so humble, so penitent, so chastened as this once lovely Louise de la Valliere, now, during a weary term of thirty-five years, ’Marie de la Misericorde.’  She had fled from the scene of her fall at one-and-thirty years of age.  Twice had she taken refuge among the ‘blameless vestals,’ whom she envied as the broken-spirited envy the passive.  First, she escaped from the torture of witnessing the king’s passion for Madame de Montespan, by hiding herself among the Benedictine sisters at St. Cloud.  Thence the king fetched her in person, threatening to order the cloister to be burnt.  Next, Lauzun, by the command of Louis, sought her, and brought her avec main forte.  The next time she fled no more; but took a public farewell of all she had too fondly loved, and throwing herself at the feet of the queen, humbly entreated her pardon.  Never since that voluntary sepulture had she ceased, during those long and weary years, to lament—­as the heart-stricken can alone lament—­her sins.  In deep contrition she learned the death of her son by the king, and bent her head meekly beneath the chastisement.