We know a vast amount of what went on in Versailles at the court of the Louis XIV, especially between the years 1691 and 1723, when the French monarchy, having reached the apogee of its power, was descending and slowly wending its way to the murderous French Revolution. Much of what we know comes from a little man with a perhaps exaggerated sense of amour-propre named Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon. From his somewhat shaky position at the middle-distance from power, he was sedulously taking the most careful notes. In his retirement years, between 1723 and his death at the age of eighty in 1755, he turned these notes into his Memoirs, the most extensive, richly amusing, and literarily most impressive memoirs ever written.[1]

Some 1,500 people (servants included) lived within the walls of the grand palace Louis XIV built for himself and his courtiers, who were housed in 250 apartments of various sizes, many of them small and airless, but no less valued for that. Everything within the court of Louis XIV at Versailles was carefully ordered by rank, which was awarded by birth, an order which the King himself frequently subverted by placing power in the hands of the secondary nobility, les noblesse des robes, who became his mandarin bureaucrats.

Whatever one’s position at court, all sought the favor of the King and those closest to him. Louis XIVwas appropriately called the Sun King, for all the other planets