Versailles became more and more serious and gloomy. “La vie de la cour est un jeu sérieux, mélancolique,” says La Bruyère in the _remarque_ which follows that quoted above. A far worse feature was the inevitable growth of hypocrisy. “Un (faux) dévot est celui qui, sous un roi athée, serait athée.” A good story in illustration of this hypocrisy is told by Saint-Simon. On Thursday and Sunday evenings during the winter it was the King’s habit to attend the service of benediction in the chapel at Versailles, which in consequence was always filled with the ladies of the Court. But, if it became known that the King was not going to attend, the chapel was nearly empty. One evening M. de Brissac, major of the body-guard, an honest man who hated shams, came into the chapel just before the service and announced that His Majesty was not coming, whereupon all the ladies except three or four quietly withdrew, and when the King arrived he was much surprised to find the chapel empty. On Brissac’s telling him after the service what had happened, he laughed heartily, but the ladies, says Saint-Simon, would gladly have strangled Brissac. This anecdote well illustrates the hypocrisy of the age. Beneath the outward veneer of piety free thought and immorality reigned unchecked. Memoirs, letters, and sermons all confirm the truth of Saint-Simon’s picture. In his funeral oration on the Prince de Conti, who died in 1707, Massillon speaks of “un siècle, où la religion est devenue le jouet, ou de la débauche, ou d’une fausse science.” In a well-known letter written by Mme de Maintenon to the Princesse des Ursins in the same year she says, “Je vous avoue, Madame, que les femmes de ce temps-ci me sont insupportables: leur habillement insensé et immodeste, leur tabac, leur vin, leur gourmandise, leur grossièreté, leur paresse, tout cela est si opposé à mon goût, et, ce me semble, à la raison, que je ne puis le souffrir.” There was no worse specimen of her sex than the Duchesse de Berry, whose marriage Saint-Simon had done so much to promote, and of whom he says in his portrait of her, drawn at the close of Louis XIV’s reign, that “except for avarice, she was a model of all the vices[7].” [7] _Mémoires_, ed. Chéruel, XI. 198-204. The men were naturally no better than the women, and at the _hôtel_ in the Temple of the Grand Prior of Vendôme he and his brother, the Duc de Vendôme, especially during the years between the Peace of Ryswick (1697) and the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701), gave cynical displays of drunkenness and debauchery.