The disastrous thrall holding Louis XIV. to Madame de Maintenon, was an endless theme of wonder and speculation among his subjects. Very few of them ascribed it to pure unadulterated love and affection for his old wife—for she was his elder by three years—while Louis himself was now at an age when the enthusiasm of life slows into some weariness and languor as it recognises the emptiness and futility of all mundane things. There were times when he was lost in brooding thought, and he would wander about his splendid galleries and salons and magnificent gardens, absorbed, if his dull aspect expressed the inward spirit, in melancholy reflection. The glory had departed of his earlier ruling, leaving the nation loaded with debt. The price had to be paid for those brilliant victories of long ago, and accumulation of debt on the many later reverses cried for settlement. The provinces had been deeply impoverished by the absenteeism of their overlords, whose presence the Grand Monarque had for so many years required to grace Versailles, attired in their silks and velvets, sweeping their plumed, diamond-aigretted hats to the polished floors, bowing and crowding to gaze at the sublime process of His Majesty’s getting up, promenading with the great ladies among the fountains and bosquets of Trianon, spending the heaven-bestowed hours in the sweetness of doing nothing but manipulate their rapier-hangers and snuff-boxes; while Jacques Bonhomme, away down in Touraine and Perigord and Berri, and where you will in the length and breadth of fair France, was sweating and starving to keep those high-born gentlemen supplied with money in their purses for the card-tables, and to maintain their lackeys and gilded coaches in the sumptuous style which was no more than Louis required of the vast throng. It was in its way an unavoidable exaction, since the few of the nobility who remained on their own estates had done so at the peril of incurring the severe displeasure of the king, the Sun-King—_Le roi le veut_—whose centre was Versailles.