Early in the
morning after the death of his wife, he was persuaded, "ill and anguished
with the most intimate and bitterest of sorrows," to follow the king to
Marly, where he entered his own room by a window on the ground floor.
It was also at Marly--"ill-omened Marly"--that the Duc de Berry, the
younger grandson of Louis XIV., and husband of the profligate daughter of
the Duc d' Orleans--afterward Regent, died, with great suspicion of
poison, in 1714. The MS. memorials of Mary Beatrice by a sister of
Chaillot, describe how, when Louis XIV. was mourning his beloved
grandchildren, and that queen, whom he had always liked and respected, had
lost her darling daughter Louisa, she went to visit him at Marly where
"they laid aside all Court etiquette, weeping together in their common
grief, because, as the Queen said, 'We saw that the aged were left, and
that death had swept away the young.'" St. Simon depicts the last walk of
the king in the gardens at Marly on August 10, 1715. He went away that
evening to Versailles, where he died on September 1.
Marly was abandoned during the whole time of the Regency, and was only
saved from total destruction in 1717, when the Regent Philippe d'Orleans
had ordered its demolition, by the spirited remonstrance of St.
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