Her life then became one of constant labor, which gradually undermined her health. Appreciating the mental indolence of Louis, she would place before him a clear and succinct résumé of all important questions of state affairs, which she, better than any other, knew how to present without wearying him. Realizing that her power depended upon her influence over the king, and that she was surrounded by men and women who were simply waiting for a favorable opportunity to cause her downfall, she was constantly on the defensive. She considered it "the business of her life to make her yoke so easy and pleasant, and from habit so necessary to him, that an effort to shake it off would be an effort that would cause him real pain." Her happiest hours—for she did not love the king—were those spent with her brother, the Marquis de Marigny, in the midst of artists, musicians, and men of letters. As for the queen, she was in the background, absolutely. "All the prerogatives of a princess of a sovereign house were, at this time, about 1750, conferred by the king upon Mme. de Pompadour, and all the pomp and parade then deemed indispensable to rank so exalted were fully assumed by her." At the opera, she had her _loge_ with the king, her tribune at the chapel of Versailles where she heard mass, her servants were of the nobility, her carriage had the ducal arms, her etiquette was that of Mme. de Montespan, Her father was ennobled to De Marigny, her brother to be Marquis de Vandières. The marriage of her daughter to a son of the king and his former mistress was planned, then with a son of Richelieu, then with others of the nobility; fortunately, the girl died. Mme. de Pompadour gradually amassed a royal fortune, buying the magnificent estate of Crécy for six hundred and fifty thousand livres; "La Celle," near Versailles, for twenty-six thousand livres; the Hôtel d'Evreaux, at Paris, for seventy-five thousand livres—and these were her minor expenses; her paintings, sculpture, china, pottery, etc., cost France over thirty-six million livres. Her imagination in art and inventions was wonderful; she retouched and decorated the château in which she was received by the king; she made "Choisy"—the king's property—her own, as it were, by all the embellishments she ordered and the expenditures which her lover lavished upon it at her request. All the luxuries of the life at "Choisy," all the refinements even to the smallest detail, had their origin in her inventions. It was she who planned the fairy château with its wonderful furniture, her own invention.