to it. The expenses of the
Pavilion de Marly, in the ten years from 1680 to 1690, amounted to
4501279 _livres_, 12 _sols_, 3 _deniers_. From this one may well judge
that it was no mean thing.

The honour of being accounted a person of Marly in those times was
accredited as a great distinction, for it went without saying in that
case one had something to do with affairs of court, though one might
only have been a "furnisher." To be a courtier of Louis XIV, or to be a
_pensionnaire_ at Versailles, could hardly have carried more
distinction.

The court usually resided at Marly from Wednesday until Saturday, and as
"the game" was the thing it is obvious that the stakes were high.

The vogue of the day was gaming at table, and Marly, of all other
suburban Paris palaces, was an ideal and discreet place for it. "High
play and midnight suppers were the rule at Marly." This, one reads in
the court chronicle, and further that: "The royal family usually lost a
hundred thousand _ecus_ at play at each visit." One "gentleman croupier"
gained as much as three thousand _louis_ at a single sitting.

Madame de Maintenon was the real ruler of Marly in those days; she had
appropriated the apartments originally intended for the queen, from
which there was a private means of communication to the apartments of
the king, and another forming a sort of private box, overlooking the
royal chapel.

Little frequented by Louis XV, and practically abandoned by Louis XVI,
the palace at Marly was sold during the Revolution, after which it was
stripped of its art treasures, many of which adorn the gardens of the
Tuileries to-day; the great group of horses at the entrance to the
Champs Elysees came from the watering place of Marly.

Actually, the royal pavilion at Marly has been destroyed, and there
remain but the most fragmentary, unformed heaps of stones to tell the
tale of its ample proportions in the days of Louis XIV and de Maintenon.

The park is to-day the chief attraction of the neighbourhood, like the
one at Saint Cloud, which it greatly resembles. Across the park lies the
great highway from the capital to Versailles, over which so many joyous
cavalcades were wont to amble or gallop in the days of gallantry. The
pace is not more sober to-day, but gaily caparisoned horses and gaudy
coaches have given way to red and yellow "Rois des Belges," the balance
lying distinctly in favour of the former mode of conveyance, so far as
picturesqueness