compliments. It is too bad to live in a country where you are not sure
of possessing today what you had yesterday. Such things used to take
place only in Turkey."[Footnote: Besenval, ii. 255.]

It is not easy, in looking at the French government in the eighteenth
century, to decide where the working administration ended, and where the
useless court that answered no real purpose began. The ministers of
state were reckoned a part of the court. So were many of the upper
civil-servants, the king's military staff, and in a sense, the guards
and household troops. So were the "great services," partaking of the
nature of public offices, ceremonial honors, and domestic labors. Of
this kind were the Household, the Chamber, the Antechamber and Closet,
the Great and the Little Stables, with their Grand Squire, First Squire
and pages, who had to prove nobility to the satisfaction of the royal
herald. There was the department of hunting and that of buildings, a
separate one for royal journeys, one for the guard, another for police,
yet another for ceremonies. There were five hundred officers "of the
mouth," table-bearers distinct from chair-bearers. There were tradesmen,
from apothecaries and armorers at one end of the list to saddle-makers,
tailors and violinists at the other.

When a baby is at last born to Marie Antoinette (only a girl, to every
one's disappointment), a rumor gets about that the child will be
tended with great simplicity. The queen's mother, the Empress Maria
Theresa, in distant Vienna, takes alarm. She does not approve of "the
present fashion according to Rousseau" by which young princes are
brought up like peasants. Her ambassador in Paris hastens to reassure
her. The infant will not lack reasonable ceremony. The service of her
royal person alone will employ nearly eighty attendants.[Footnote:
Mercy-Argenteau, iii. 283, 292.] The military and civil households of