"Arrange chamber marked V for Mme. de Montespan, opening a door in the place marked 1.... Mme. de La Valliere will lodge in the chamber marked Y, in which a door must be made in the place marked 3N...." The expense of the numerous doors, with many others equally irregular, entered into the budget of the Minister of War. How was it possible to keep the budget accounts? How reduce unnecessary expenses? Colbert himself was obliged in his budget of the Marine to give space to the "_ladies_." In 1678, Mme. de Montespan conceived the fantasy of fitting out a privateer, a vessel belonging to the King, be it understood, manned with the royal sailors. Some weeks later, a second and third vessel were sent out in the same manner as privateers, always at the King's expense, "by Mme. de Montespan and the Comtesse de Soissons."[280] Including everything, the taste of Louis XIV. for conversation and the society of women, without mentioning the rest of his follies, probably cost France more than all the buildings erected by the Grand Monarch, but the one outlay can be calculated, and the other not. The large expenses of Versailles and of Marly are often alluded to, while the unfortunate peasants, who fled across the frontier after every military spectacle offered to the "_ladies_," are forgotten. Louis XIV. was incapable of keeping accounts; that is his sole excuse. It is strange, however, that a man so methodical, having a mind so steady, so well regulated, had never been able to comprehend that figures are figures, and that no one is able to make two crowns out of one. Colbert never succeeded in controlling the waste of his master, even in cases when the added profusion in no way increased the pleasure, and appears to us as a mere barbarous lavishness. [Illustration: =DUCHESSE DE LA VALLIERE AND HER CHILDREN= From the painting by P. Mignard in the possession of the Marquise d'Oilliamson] It is known that in the seventeenth century the repasts were abundant. Those of Louis XIV. were excessively so. In 1664, the King, having invited the Pope's legate to dine with him _tete-a-tete_, those in attendance counted the dishes; there were eighty, not including thirty-eight for dessert. This was certainly excessive, and Colbert had said in the Memorial of 1660, "I declare to your Majesty ... that a useless meal, costing a thousand crowns, gives me an incredible pain." But the lavishness of fifteen years later was far greater. On January 16, 1680, the King married Mlle. de Blois, his daughter by La Valliere, to Prince Louis-Armand de Conti, nephew of the great Conde. "The wedding festival was royal," wrote Bussy-Rabutin; "there were seven hundred dishes on a single table, served in five courses, that is to say, one hundred and forty dishes to each course." Mme. de Sevigne points the moral. "The young husband was ill the entire night. It would be a temptation to say 'Well deserved!'"