anent drawing room to
which "access is easy and free to the king's subjects;" where they
live with him, "in gentle and virtuous society in spite of the almost
infinite distance of rank and power;" where the monarch prides himself
on being the perfect master of a household.[1330] In fact, no drawing
room was ever so well kept up, nor so well calculated to retain its
guests by every kind of enjoyment, by the beauty, the dignity and the
charm of its decoration, by the selection of its company and by the
interest of the spectacle. Versailles is the only place to show oneself
off; to make a figure, to push one's way, to be amused, to converse or
gossip at the head-quarters of news, of activity and of public matters,
with the elite of the kingdom and the arbiters of fashion, elegance and
taste. "Sire," said M. de Vardes to Louis XIV, "away from Your Majesty
one not only feels miserable but ridiculous." None remain in the
provinces except the poor rural nobility; to live there one must be
behind the age, disheartened or in exile. The king's banishment of a
seignior to his estates is the highest disgrace; to the humiliation
of this fall is added the insupportable weight of boredom. The finest
chateau on the most beautiful site is a frightful "desert"; nobody
is seen there save the grotesques of a small town or the village
peasants.[1331]

"Exile alone," says Arthur Young, "can force the French nobility to do
what the English prefer to do, and that is to live on their estates and
embellish them."

Saint-Simon and other court historians, on mentioning a ceremony,
repeatedly state that "all France was there"; in fact, every one of
consequence in France is there, and each recognizes the other by this
sign. Paris and the court become, accordingly, the necessary sojourn
of all fine people. In such a situation departure begets departure; the
more a province is forsaken the more they forsake it. "There is not in
the kingdom," says the Marquis de Mirabeau, "a single estate of any size
of which the proprietor is not in Paris and who, consequently, neglects
his buildings and chateaux."[1332] The lay grand seigniors have
their hotels in the capital, their entresol at Versailles, and their
pleasure-house within a circuit of twenty leagues; if they visit
their estates at long intervals, it is to hunt. The fifteen hundred
commendatory abbes and priors enjoy their benefices as if they were
so many remote farms. The two thousand seven hundred