After the failure of this scheme, subterranean water-courses were contrived. The _plaisir du roi_ must be sated at any cost, and at length a magnificent garden was created, filled with a population of statues and adorned with gigantic fountains. Soon the king tired of the bustle and noise of Versailles, and a miserable and swampy site at Marly, the haunt of toads and serpents and creeping things, was transformed into a splendid hermitage. Hills were levelled, great trees brought from Compiègne, most of which soon died and were as quickly replaced; fish-ponds, adorned by exquisite paintings, were made and unmade; woods were metamorphosed into lakes, where the king and a select company of courtiers disported themselves in gondolas; cascades refreshed their ears in summer heat. Precious paintings, statues and costly furniture charmed the eye inside the hermitage--and all to receive the king and his intimates from Wednesday to Saturday on a few occasions in the year. St. Simon writes of what he saw, and estimates that Marly cost more than Versailles.[136] Nothing remains to-day of all this splendour: it was neglected by Louis' successors and sold in lots during the Revolution. After a life of wanton licentiousness, Louis, at the age of forty, was captivated by the mature charms of a widow of forty-three, a colonial adventuress of noble descent, who after the death of her husband, the crippled comic poet Scarron, became governess to the king's illegitimate children by Madame de Montespan. Soon after the death of the queen Maria Theresa, the widow Scarron, known to history as Madame de Maintenon, was secretly married to her royal lover, who for the remainder of his life was her docile slave. At the famous military manoeuvres at Compiègne after the Peace of Ryswick, organised to display the resources of the country and to enable the court to witness the circumstance of a great siege, Louis was seen, hat in hand, bending over Madame de Maintenon's sedan-chair, which stood at a coign of vantage on the ramparts, explaining to her the various movements of the troops. "I could describe the scene," says St. Simon, "as clearly forty years hence as I do now." An _aide-de-camp_, approaching from below to ask the king's orders, was dumbfoundered by the sight and could scarcely stammer out his message. The effect on the soldiers was indescribable: every one asked what that chair meant over which the king was bending uncovered. [Illustration: VERSAILLES--LE TAPIS VERT.]