It has been reckoned as a crime against the daughter of a simple nobleman[471], against the widow of Scarron[472], that she should speak in this way of Louis XIV., who had raised her to his bed; but I see in this the accent of a superior nature, which was above the exalted fortune to which she had attained. Only I would have preferred that Madame de Maintenon had not left the dying Louis XIV., especially after hearing these grave and tender words: "I regret only you; I have not made you happy, but I have always had for you all the sentiments of esteem and friendship which you deserve: the only thing that vexes me is to leave you[473]." The last years of that Monarch were an expiation offered to the first. Stripped of his prosperity and his family[474], he allowed his eyes to roam from this window over that garden. He no doubt fixed them on that water-conduit already abandoned since twenty years: great ruins that they were, an image of the ruins of the Great King, they seemed to foretell the exhaustion of his House and to await his great-grandson. The time in which Le Nôtre[475] designed the gardens of Versailles for Mademoiselle de La Vallière was past; the time was also past, more than a century earlier, of Olivier de Serres[476], who said to Henry IV., when planning gardens for Gabrielle: "We can cultivate sugar-canes, so that, coupled with the orange-tree and its companions, the garden shall be perfectly ennobled and rendered most magnificent." In the absorption of those dreams which sometimes confer second sight, Louis XIV. might have discerned his immediate successor hastening the fall of the arches in the Eure Valley to take from them the materials for the mean pavilions of his ignoble mistresses[477]. After Louis XV, he might have seen yet another shadow kneel down, bow its head and lay it silently on the pediment of the aqueduct, as though on a scaffold raised in the sky. Lastly, who knows if, in one of those presentiments attached to royal Houses, Louis XIV. might not, one night, in that Château de Maintenon, have heard a knock at his door: "Who goes there?" "Charles X., your descendant." Louis XIV. did not wake up to see Madame de Maintenon's corpse dragged with a rope round its neck around Saint-Cyr. MAINTENON, _September_ 1836. My host[478] has described to me the half-a-night which Charles X., banished, spent at the Château de Maintenon. The Monarchy of the Capets ended in a castle-scene of the middle-ages; the Kings of the past had gone back into their centuries to die. As in the time of Cæsar, "the gods announce a great change and revolution in affairs[479]." The manuscript of one of M. le Duc de Noailles's nieces[480], which he was good enough to show me, relates the incidents which that young lady witnessed. He has permitted me to make the following extracts: