because it is an agreeable place, arranged just as they would have it,
and purposely to suit the social aptitudes of the French character.
The court is a vast permanent 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.[30] 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 élite 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.[31]

"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