A very few weeks of this idle life and good living worked its effect upon Marie Louise. In February 1680, Mme. Villars writes: ‘She has grown so fat, that if it goes much further, her face will be round. Her bosom, strictly speaking, is already too full; although it is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. She usually sleeps ten or twelve hours, and eats meat four times a day. It is true that her breakfast and her luncheon (collation) are her best meals. She always has served for lunch a capon boiled and broth, and a roast capon. She laughs very much when I have the honour to be with her. I am quite sure that it is not I who am sufficiently agreeable to put her into such a good humour, and that she must be pretty comfortable generally. No one could behave better than she does, or be sweeter and more complaisant with the King. She saw his portrait before she married him, but they did not paint his strange humour, nor his love of solitude. The customs of the country have not all been turned upside down to make them more agreeable for her, but the Queen-Mother does everything she can to soften them. All sensible people think that the young Queen could not do better than contribute on her side to the tenderness and affection that the Queen-Mother shows for her.... When I tell you that she is fat, that she sleeps well and laughs heartily, I tell you no more than the truth; but it is no less true that the life she leads does not please her.... But, after all, she is doing wonderfully, and I am quite astonished at it.’[304] Already we see by this, that before Marie Louise had been in Madrid three months, she was going her own way, and was being humoured to the top of her bent by Mariana. She had been sold into a slavery of utter boredom, married to a degenerate imbecile; and she had neither brains, heart, nor ambition to take a leading part in politics, or to play the rôle that she was intended to fill in Spain by her uncle King Louis. All that was left for her, then, was to eat, drink, sleep, and be as merry as her grim surroundings would allow; and let the world wag as it would. The society of the capital and Court had reached the lowest degree of decadence; and a strong, high-minded Queen would have found ample work in reducing at least her own household to decency. Every lady in the palace and elsewhere had a gallant, and was proud of it; and it was a universal practice in theatres and public places, or even at windows looking upon the street, for lovers to converse openly in the language of signs. Immorality and vice had reached such a terrible pitch that mere children who could afford it lived in concubinage, and few people, high or low, were free from preventible disease.[305]