The king merely wrote, Pay cash; I know the object of this expenditure (_Bon au comptant: je sais l'objet de cette depense_).] [Illustration: Versailles---526] Colbert was mistaken in his fears for Louis XIV.'s glory; if the expenses of Versailles surpassed his most gloomy apprehensions, the palace which rose upon the site of Louis XIV.'s former hunting-box was worthy of the king who had made it in his own image, and who managed to retain all his court around him there, by the mere fact of his will and of his royal presence.
Colbert was dead before Versailles was completed; the bills amounted then to one hundred and sixteen millions; the castle of Marly, now destroyed, cost more than four millions; money was everywhere becoming scarce; the temper of the comptroller of finances went on getting worse.

"Whereas formerly it had been noticed that he set to his work rubbing his hands with joy," says his secretary Perrault, brother of the celebrated architect, "he no longer worked but with an air of vexation, and even with sighs.

From the good-natured and easy-going creature he had been, he became difficult to deal with, and there was not so much business, by a great deal, got through as in the early years of his administration." "I do not mean to build any more, Mansard; I meet with too many mortifications," the king would say to his favorite architect.

He still went on building, however; but he quarrelled with Colbert over the cost of the great railings of Versailles.

There's swindling here," said Louis XIV.