the Duke of St. Simon, prince of memoirists.
Never has the frippery of a court been shrivelled by such fierce and
consuming light, glaring like a fiery sun on its meretricious
splendours. And what a court it is! What a gilded crowd of princes and
paramours, harlots and bastards, struts, fumes and intrigues through
these Memoirs! By a few strokes of his pen, in words that bite like
acid, he etches for us the fools and knaves, the wife-beaters and
adulterers, the cardsharpers and gamesters, the grovelling sycophants
with their petty struggles for precedence or favour, their slang,
their gluttony and drunkenness, their moral and physical corruption.

External grandeur and regal presence,[141] a profound belief in his
divinely-appointed despotism, and in earlier years a rare capacity for
work, the lord of France certainly possessed. "He had a grand mien,"
says St. Simon, "and looked a veritable king of the bees." Much has
been made of Louis' incomparable grace and respectful courtesy to
women; but the courtesy of a king who doffs his hat to every serving
wench yet contrives a staircase to facilitate the debauching of his
queen's maids-of-honour, and exacts of his mistresses and the ladies
of his court submission to his will and pleasure, even under the most
trying of physical disabilities, is at least wanting in consistency.
Louis' mental equipment was less than mediocre; he was ignorant of the
commonest facts of history, and fell into the grossest blunders in
public. Like all small-minded men, he was jealous of superior merit
and preferred mediocrity rather than genius in his ministers. Small
wonder that his reign ended in shame and disaster.

[Footnote 141: Louis used, however, to stilt his low stature by means
of thick pads in his boots.]

On the 6th of June 1662, the young Louis, notwithstanding much public
misery consequent on two years of bad harvests, organised a
magnificent carrousel (tilting) in the garden that fronted the
Tuileries. Five companies of nobles, each led by the king or one of
the princes, were apparelled in gorgeous costumes as Romans, Persians,
Turks, Armenians and Indians. Louis, who arrayed as emperor, led the
Romans, was followed by a superb train of many squires, twenty-four
pages, fifty horses each led by two grooms, and fifty footmen dressed
as lictors, carrying gilded fasces. The royal princes headed similar
processions. So great was the display of jewels that all the precious
stones in th