truth, one must have a very hard heart not
to obey a master who enters with so much kindness into the interests of
one of his domestics; accordingly, the marshal made no objection, and
here he is in his place again, and loaded with benefits."

The king entered benevolently into the affairs of a marshal of France; he
paid his debts, and the marshal was his domestic; all the court had come
to that; the duties which brought servants in proximity to the king's
person were eagerly sought after by the greatest lords. Bontemps, his
chief valet, and Fagon, his physician, as well as his surgeon Marachal,
very excellent men, too, were all-powerful amongst the courtiers. Louis
XIV. had possessed the art of making his slightest favors prized; to hold
the candlestick at bedtime (_au petit coucher_), to make one in the trips
to Marly, to play in the king's own game, such was the ambition of the
most distinguished; the possessors of grand historic castles, of fine
houses at Paris, crowded together in attics at Versailles, too happy to
obtain a lodging in the palace. The whole mind of the greatest
personages, his favorites at the head, was set upon devising means of
pleasing the king; Madame de Montespan had pictures painted in miniature
of all the towns he had taken in Holland; they were made into a book
which was worth four thousand pistoles, and of which Racine and Boileau
wrote the text; people of tact, like M. de Langlee, paid court to the
master through those whom he loved. "M. de Langlee has given Madame de
Montespan a dress of the most divine material ever imagined; the fairies
did this work in secret, no living soul had any notion of it; and it
seemed good to present it as mysteriously as it had been fashioned.
Madame de Montespan's dressmaker brought her the dress she had ordered of
him; he had made the body a ridiculous fit; there was shrieking and
scolding as you may suppose. The dressmaker said, all in a tremble, 'As
time presses, madame, see if this other dress that I have here might not
suit you for lack of anything else.' 'Ah! what material! Does it come
from heaven? There is none such on earth.' The body is tried on; it is
a picture. The king comes in. The dressmaker says, 'Madame, it is made
for you.' Everybody sees that it is a piece of gallantry; but on whose
part? 'It is Langl4e,' says the king; 'it is Langlee.' 'Of course,'
says Madame de Montespan, 'none but he could have devised such a device;
it i