“One has no more luck at our age,” Louis XIV. had said to his old friend, Marshal Villars, returning from his most disastrous campaign. It was a bitter reflection upon himself which had put these words into the king’s mouth. After the most brilliant, the most continually and invariably triumphant of reigns, he began to see fortune slipping away from him and the grievous consequences of his errors successively overwhelming the state. “God is punishing me, I have richly deserved it,” he said to Marshal Villars, who was on the point of setting out for the battle of Denain. The aged king, dispirited and beaten, could not set down to men his misfortunes and reverses; the hand of God himself was raised against his house; death was knocking double knocks all round him. The grand-dauphin had for some days past been ill of small-pox; he died in April, 1711; the duchess of Burgundy was carried off by an attack of malignant fever in February, 1712; her husband followed her within a week, and their eldest child, the duke of Brittany, about a month afterward. There was universal and sincere mourning in France and in Europe. The most sinister rumors circulated darkly; a base intrigue caused the duke of Orleans to be accused; people called to mind his taste for chemistry and even magic, his flagrant impiety, his scandalous debauchery; beside himself with grief and anger, he demanded of the king to be sent to the Bastile; the king refused curtly, coldly, not unmoved in his secret heart by the perfidious insinuations which made their way even to him, but too just and too sensible to entertain a hateful lie, which, nevertheless, lay heavy on the duke of Orleans to the end of his days.