The late king contracted a great many debts because he would not retrench his luxury in anything; and that has been the cause of great malversations on the part of business men and their partisans; for when one sou had been lent to the king they turned it by agreement with their creatures into a pistole. Thanks to their rascality, on which no check was put, they have enriched themselves, but the king, and now the country, have been impoverished. My son works night and day, with no thanks from anybody, to bring things back to a good condition. He has many enemies, who pour out against him all sorts of horrid threats, and do all they can to rouse the hatred of the people against him; in which they succeed easily, especially because he is no bigot. He is so little self-interested that he has never touched a farthing of what comes to him as regent, although he has great needs because of his numerous children. The young king has around him persons who are very ill-disposed towards my son,--one especially, though he is his brother-in-law; but he is also the falsest of hypocrites. He has an air as if he would eat the very images of saints, but he is none the less the most wicked man on earth. In the days of the late king when that man flattered any one and spoke to him kindly it was taken as a proof that he had played him some evil trick. He contributed to get his mother sent away from Court so as to please the old woman, and he was so anxious to prevent her return to Versailles that he ordered her furniture turned out of doors, as it were. You can imagine what a man of that nature is capable of doing. I fear him for my son as I do the devil; and I think that my son is not sufficiently on his guard against him. The old woman wants his life; all that they say of that diabolical woman is below the truth. When my son reproached the Maintenon quite gently for slandering him, and asked her to look into her conscience, where she knew that what she said were falsehoods, she replied: "I spread that rumour because I believed it." My son said: "No, you could not have believed it, for you knew the contrary." Thereupon she answered insolently (and I admired the patience of my son): "Did not the dauphine die?" "Could she not have died without me?" asked my son, "was she immortal?" The old woman replied: "I was in such despair at her loss that I blamed the person who they told me had caused it." My son said to her, "But, madame, you knew of the report that was rendered to the king; you knew that I had done nothing, and that Mme. la dauphine was not poisoned at all." "That is true," she replied, "I will say no more about it." That humpback Fagon, the favourite of the old _guenipe_, used to say that what displeased him in Christianity was that he could not raise a temple to the Maintenon and an altar for her worship. PARIS, 1717.