Never in my life did I know so gloomy a period. The people are dying
of cold like flies. The mills are stopped, and that has forced many to
die of hunger. Yesterday they told me a sorrowful story about a woman
who stole a loaf of bread from a baker's shop in Paris. The baker
wanted to arrest her; she said, weeping, "If you knew my misery you
would not take the loaf away from me; I have three little children all
naked; they ask me for bread; I cannot bear it, and that is why I have
stolen the loaf." The commissary before whom they took the woman told
her to take him where she lived; he went there, and found the three
little children sitting in a corner under a heap of rags, trembling
with cold as if they had the ague. "Where is your father?" he asked
the eldest. The child answered, "Behind the door." The commissary
looked to see why the father was hiding behind the door, and recoiled
with horror--the man had hung himself in despair. Such things are
happening daily.
I am very much deserted here, for every one, young and old, runs after
favour. The Maintenon cannot endure me, and the Duchesse de Bourgogne
likes only what that lady likes. I have done my best to conciliate
that all-powerful person, but I cannot succeed in doing so. So I am
excluded from everything, and I never see the king except at supper.
I can only act according to the will of others. I was less bound when
Monsieur was living. I dare not sleep away from Versailles without the
king's permission. It is not wrong, therefore, that I should wish to
be with you in our dear Palatinate; but God does not will that here
below we should be fully satisfied. You and Amélie are free, but your
health is bad; I am lonely, but my health, thank God, is perfect.
You are mistaken if you think that no lamentations are heard here;
night and day we hear of nothing else; the famine is so great that
children have eaten each other. The king is so determined to continue
the war that yesterday he gave up his gold service and now uses
porcelain; he has sent every gold thing he has to the mint to be
turned into coin.
All that one sees and hears is dreadful; we are living in a very fatal
epoch. If one leaves the house one is followed by a crowd of poor
creatures who cry famine; all payments are made in notes; there is no
coin anywhere; all one's contentment is destroyed till better days
appear.
The old lady who is here in such great favour hates me; I have done my
best to obtain her good will, but I cannot succeed; she has vowed to
me and to my son an implacable hatred. One must do what is reasonable
and walk a straight path: God will see to it all.
But that all-powerful lady has always been against me. In the days of
Monsieur his favourites feared that I should tell the king how they
pillaged Monsieur, and how they troubled me with their profligate
lives, and so they wished to get that lady on their side; and to
do so, they told her they knew her life, and that if she was not
for them, they would tell all to the king.[6] (I knew from the lady
herself that a union existed between them, but she did not tell me its
cause, which I learned from a friend of the Chevalier de Lorraine.)
She has persecuted me all her life, and she does not trust a hair of
my head because she thinks me as vindictive as she is herself--which
I am not--and so she tries to keep me away from the king. There is
another reason besides: the affection that she has for the Duchesse
de Bourgogne. As she knows very well that the king, whom I love and
respect much, has no antipathy to me, and that my natural humour
does not displease him, she is afraid that he might prefer a woman
of my age to so young a princess as the Duchesse de Bourgogne; and
that is one reason why she wants to keep me away from the king--which
she takes every possible means to do, so that there is no chance of
changing matters.