Marly was the scene of several of the most tragic events in the life of Louis XIV. "Everything is dead here, there's no life in any thing," wrote the Comtesse de Caylus, niece of Mme. de Maintenon, from Marly to the Princess des Ursins, after the death of the Duchesse de Bourgogne. And, in a few days afterward, Marly was the scene of the sudden death of the Dauphin, Duc de Bourgogne, the beloved pupil of Fénelon. Early in the morning after the death of his wife, he was persuaded, "ill and anguished with the most intimate and bitterest of sorrows," to follow the king to Marly, where he entered his own room by a window on the ground floor. It was also at Marly--"ill-omened Marly"--that the Duc de Berry, the younger grandson of Louis XIV., and husband of the profligate daughter of the Duc d' Orleans--afterward Regent, died, with great suspicion of poison, in 1714. The MS. memorials of Mary Beatrice by a sister of Chaillot, describe how, when Louis XIV. was mourning his beloved grandchildren, and that queen, whom he had always liked and respected, had lost her darling daughter Louisa, she went to visit him at Marly where "they laid aside all Court etiquette, weeping together in their common grief, because, as the Queen said, 'We saw that the aged were left, and that death had swept away the young.'" St. Simon depicts the last walk of the king in the gardens at Marly on August 10, 1715. He went away that evening to Versailles, where he died on September 1. Marly was abandoned during the whole time of the Regency, and was only saved from total destruction in 1717, when the Régent Philippe d'Orléans had ordered its demolition, by the spirited remonstrance of St. Simon.... The great pavilion itself only contained, as we have seen, a very small number of chambers. The querulous Smollett, who visited Marly in 1763, speaks of it as "No more than a pigeon-house in respect to a palace." But it was only intended as the residence of the king. During the repairs necessary in the reign of Louis XV., who built Choisy and never lived at Marly, the cascade which fell behind the great pavilion was removed. Mme. Campan describes the later Marly of Louis XVI., under whom the "Marly journey" had become one of the great burdens and expenses of royal life. The Court of Louis XVI. was here for the last time on June 11, 1789, but in the latter years of Louis XVI., M. de Noailles, governor of St. Germain, was permitted to lend the smaller pavilions furnished to his friends for the summer months. Marly perished with the monarchy, and was sold at the Revolution, when the statues of its gardens were removed to the Tuileries. A cotton mill was for a time established in the royal pavilion; then all the buildings were pulled down and the gardens sold in lots!