A brother like this was a great annoyance to Madame de Maintenon.  His wife, an obscure creature, more obscure, if possible, than her birth; —­foolish to the last degree, and of humble mien, was almost equally so.  Madame de Maintenon determined to rid herself of both.  She persuaded her brother to enter a society that had been established by a M. Doyen, at St. Sulpice, for decayed gentlemen.  His wife at the same time was induced to retire into another community, where, however, she did not fail to say to her companions that her fate was very hard, and that she wished to be free.  As for d’Aubigne he concealed from nobody that his sister was putting a joke on him by trying to persuade him that he was devout, declared that he was pestered by priests, and that he should give up the ghost in M. Doyen’s house.  He could not stand it long, and went back to his girls and to the Tuileries, and wherever he could; but they caught him again, and placed him under the guardianship of one of the stupidest priests of St. Sulpice, who followed him everywhere like his shadow, and made him miserable.  The fellow’s name was Madot:  he was good for no other employment, but gained his pay in this one by an assiduity of which perhaps no one else would have been capable.  The only child of this Comte d’Aubigne was a daughter, taken care of by Madame de Maintenon, and educated under her eyes as though her own child.

Towards the end of the year, and not long after my return from the army, the King fixed the day for the marriage of the Duc de Bourgogne to the young Princesse de Savoy.  He announced that on that occasion he should be glad to see a magnificent Court; and he himself, who for a long time had worn only the most simple habits, ordered the most superb.  This was enough; no one thought of consulting his purse or his state; everyone tried to surpass his neighbour in richness and invention.  Gold and silver scarcely sufficed:  the shops of the dealers were emptied in a few days; in a word luxury the most unbridled reigned over Court and city, for the fete had a huge crowd of spectators.  Things went to such a point, that the King almost repented of what he had said, and remarked, that he could not understand how husbands could be such fools as to ruin themselves by dresses for their wives; he might have added, by dresses for themselves.  But the impulse had been given; there was now no time to remedy it, and I believe the King at heart was glad; for it pleased him during the fetes to look at all the dresses.  He loved passionately all kinds of sumptuosity at his Court; and he who should have held only to what had been said, as to the folly of expense, would have grown little in favour.  There was no means, therefore, of being wise among so many fools.  Several dresses were necessary.  Those for Madame Saint-Simon and myself cost us twenty thousand francs.  Workmen were wanting to make up so many rich habits.  Madame la Duchesse actually sent her people to take