All that one sees and hears is dreadful; we are living in a very fatal epoch. If one leaves the house one is followed by a crowd of poor creatures who cry famine; all payments are made in notes; there is no coin anywhere; all one's contentment is destroyed till better days appear. The old lady who is here in such great favour hates me; I have done my best to obtain her good will, but I cannot succeed; she has vowed to me and to my son an implacable hatred. One must do what is reasonable and walk a straight path: God will see to it all. But that all-powerful lady has always been against me. In the days of Monsieur his favourites feared that I should tell the king how they pillaged Monsieur, and how they troubled me with their profligate lives, and so they wished to get that lady on their side; and to do so, they told her they knew her life, and that if she was not for them, they would tell all to the king.[6] (I knew from the lady herself that a union existed between them, but she did not tell me its cause, which I learned from a friend of the Chevalier de Lorraine.) She has persecuted me all her life, and she does not trust a hair of my head because she thinks me as vindictive as she is herself--which I am not--and so she tries to keep me away from the king. There is another reason besides: the affection that she has for the Duchesse de Bourgogne. As she knows very well that the king, whom I love and respect much, has no antipathy to me, and that my natural humour does not displease him, she is afraid that he might prefer a woman of my age to so young a princess as the Duchesse de Bourgogne; and that is one reason why she wants to keep me away from the king--which she takes every possible means to do, so that there is no chance of changing matters. MARLY, 1709. I wish you could be with us here, just to see how beautiful the gardens are; but one ought to be able to walk about them with kind and agreeable people, and not with persons who hate and despise one another mutually,--sentiments that are met with here more frequently than those of friendship. Last Wednesday I went to Paris; every one was in alarm about the bread-famine. As I was going to the Palais-Royal, the people called out to me: "There is a riot; forty persons are killed already." An hour later the Maréchal de Boufflers and the Duc de Grammont had appeased it all; we went tranquilly to the opera and returned to Versailles on Saturday. VERSAILLES, June, 1710.