"I am done up, I would that I were dead."
She wrote to Madame de La Maisonfort:
"Do you not see that I am dying of melancholy.... I have been young and pretty; I have tasted pleasure... and I protest to you that every condition leaves a horrid void."
Madame de Maintenon exclaimed:
"What a torment to have to amuse a man who is no longer capable of amusement!"
It has been reckoned as a crime against the daughter of a simple nobleman[471], against the widow of Scarron[472], that she should speak in this way of Louis XIV., who had raised her to his bed; but I see in this the accent of a superior nature, which was above the exalted fortune to which she had attained. Only I would have preferred that Madame de Maintenon had not left the dying Louis XIV., especially after hearing these grave and tender words:
"I regret only you; I have not made you happy, but I have always had for you all the sentiments of esteem and friendship which you deserve: the only thing that vexes me is to leave you[473]."
The last years of that Monarch were an expiation offered to the first. Stripped of his prosperity and his family[474], he allowed his eyes to roam from this window over that garden. He no doubt fixed them on that water-conduit already abandoned since twenty years: great ruins that they were, an image of the ruins of the Great King, they seemed to foretell the exhaustion of his House and to await his great-grandson. The time in which Le Nôtre[475] designed the gardens of Versailles for Mademoiselle de La Vallière was past; the time was also past, more than a century earlier, of Olivier de Serres[476], who said to Henry IV., when planning gardens for Gabrielle:
"We can cultivate sugar-canes, so that, coupled with the orange-tree and its companions, the garden shall be perfectly ennobled and rendered most magnificent."