As for the King himself, nobody ever approached his magnificence.  His buildings, who could number them?  At the same time, who was there who did not deplore the pride, the caprice, the bad taste seen in them?  He built nothing useful or ornamental in Paris, except the Pont Royal, and that simply by necessity; so that despite its incomparable extent, Paris is inferior to many cities of Europe.  Saint-Germain, a lovely spot, with a marvellous view, rich forest, terraces, gardens, and water he abandoned for Versailles; the dullest and most ungrateful of all places, without prospect, without wood, without water, without soil; for the ground is all shifting sand or swamp, the air accordingly bad.

But he liked to subjugate nature by art and treasure.

He built at Versailles, on, on, without any general design, the beautiful and the ugly, the vast and the mean, all jumbled together.  His own apartments and those of the Queen, are inconvenient to the last degree, dull, close, stinking.  The gardens astonish by their magnificence, but cause regret by their bad taste.  You are introduced to the freshness of the shade only by a vast torrid zone, at the end of which there is nothing for you but to mount or descend; and with the hill, which is very short, terminate the gardens.  The violence everywhere done to nature repels and wearies us despite ourselves.  The abundance of water, forced up and gathered together from all parts, is rendered green, thick, muddy; it disseminates humidity, unhealthy and evident; and an odour still more so.  I might never finish upon the monstrous defects of a palace so immense and so immensely dear, with its accompaniments, which are still more so.

But the supply of water for the fountains was all defective at all moments, in spite of those seas of reservoirs which had cost so many millions to establish and to form upon the shifting sand and marsh.  Who could have believed it?  This defect became the ruin of the infantry which was turned out to do the work.  Madame de Maintenon reigned.  M. de Louvois was well with her, then.  We were at peace.  He conceived the idea of turning the river Eure between Chartres and Maintenon, and of making it come to Versailles.  Who can say what gold and men this obstinate attempt cost during several years, until it was prohibited by the heaviest penalties, in the camp established there, and for a long time kept up; not to speak of the sick,—­above all, of the dead,—­that the hard labour and still more the much disturbed earth, caused?  How many men were years in recovering from the effects of the contagion!  How many never regained their health at all!  And not only the sub-officers, but the colonels, the brigadiers and general officers, were compelled to be upon the spot, and were not at liberty to absent themselves a quarter of an hour from the works.  The war at last interrupted them in 1688, and they have never since been undertaken; only unfinished portions of them exist which will immortalise this cruel folly.