Though even in his later years he remained interested in lofty and intellectual pursuits, as may be gathered, apart from his enthusiasm for art and nature, from his wide reading in history, serious poetry and philosophy, yet in his private life there became increasingly marked the signs of moral and mental weakness which gradually gained the mastery over his once pure and noble nature. A prominent feature was his blind craving for solitude. He cut himself off from society, and avoided all intercourse with his family, even with his devotedly affectionate mother. With his ministers he came to communicate in writing only. At the end he was surrounded only by inferior favourites and servants. His life was now spent almost entirely in his castles far from the capital, which irked him more and more, or in short and hasty journeys, in which he always travelled incognito. Even the theatre he could now only enjoy alone. He arranged private performances in his castles or in Munich at fabulous cost, and appointed an official poet to his household. Later his avoidance of society developed into a dread of it, accompanied by a fear of assassination and delusions that he was being followed. Side by side with this pathological development his inborn self-consciousness increased apace, turning more and more to megalomania, and impelling the weak-willed monarch to those extraordinary displays of magnificence which can still be admired to-day in the castles built or altered by him, such as Berg on the Starnberger See, Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee, Hohenschwangau, Neuschwanstein, &c., which are among the most splendid buildings in Germany. It is characteristic of the extravagance of the king's ideas that he adopted as his model the style of Louis XIV. and fell into the habit of imitating the _Roi Soleil_. He no longer stayed for any length of time in one castle. Often he scoured the country in wild nocturnal rides, and madness gained upon him apace. His mania for buying things and making presents was comparatively harmless, but more serious matters were the wild extravagance which in 1880 involved him in financial ruin, his fits of destructive rage, and the tendency to the most cruel forms of abnormal vice. None the less, at the time when the king's mental weakness was increasing, his character still retained lovable traits--his simple sense of beauty, his kindliness, and his highly developed understanding of art and artistic crafts. Louis's love of beauty also brought material profit to Bavaria.