The Court used to arrive at Marly on a Wednesday and
leave it on a Saturday; this was an invariable rule. The king always
passed his Sundays at Versailles, which was his parish. ... The leading
figure at Marly was Mme. de Maintenon, who occupied the apartments
intended for Queen Marie Therese, but who led the simplest of lives, bored
almost to extinction. She used to compare the carp languishing in the
tanks of Marly to herself--"Like me they regret their native mud." ... At
first Mme. de Maintenon dined, in the midst of the other ladies in the
square salon which separated her apartment from that of the king; but soon
she had a special table, to which a very few other ladies, her intimates,
came by invitation.
Marly was the scene of several of the most tragic events in the life of
Louis XIV. "Everything is dead here, there's no life in any thing," wrote
the Comtesse de Caylus, niece of Mme. de Maintenon, from Marly to the
Princess des Ursins, after the death of the Duchesse de Bourgogne. And, in
a few days afterward, Marly was the scene of the sudden death of the
Dauphin, Duc de Bourgogne, the beloved pupil of Fenelon.
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