to him in credit, favor, and stability than all his financial schemes put together. . . .  His last arrangement concerning the vingtième was only talked about for one day, while everybody is still talking about his fête; at Paris, as well as in Versailles, its attractions are dwelt on in detail, people emphatically declaring that Monsieur and Mme. Necker are a grace to society."[10] Good society devoted to pleasure imposes on those in office the obligation of providing pleasures for it.  It might also say, in a half-serious, half-ironical tone, with Voltaire, “that the gods created kings only to give fêtes every day, provided they varied; that life is too short to make any other use of it; that lawsuits, intrigues, warfare, and the quarrels of priests, which consume human life, are absurd and horrible things; that man is born only to enjoy himself;” and that among the essential things we must put the “superfluous” in the first rank.

According to this, we can easily foresee that they will be as little concerned with their private affairs as with public affairs.  Housekeeping, the management of property, domestic economy, are in their eyes vulgar, insipid in the highest degree, and only suited to an intendant or a butler.  Of what use are such persons if we must have such cares?  Life is no longer a festival if one has to provide the ways and means.  Comforts, luxuries, the agreeable must flow naturally and greet our lips of their own accord.  As a matter of course and without his intervention, a man belonging to this world should find gold always in his pocket, a handsome coat on his toilet table, powdered valets in his antechamber, a gilded coach at his door, a fine dinner on his table, so that he may reserve all his attention to be expended in favors on the guests in his drawing-room.  Such a mode of living is not to be maintained without waste, and the domestics, left to themselves, make the most of it.  What matter is it, so long as they perform their duties?  Moreover, everybody must live, and it is pleasant to have contented and obsequious faces around one. — Hence the first houses in the kingdom are given up to pillage.  Louis XV, on a hunting expedition one day, accompanied by the Duc de Choiseul,[11] inquired of him how much he thought the carriage in which they were seated had cost.  M. de Choiseul replied that he should consider himself fortunate to get one like it for 5,000 or 6,000 francs; but, “His Majesty paying for it as a king, and not always paying cash, might have paid 8,000 francs for it.” — “You are wide of the mark,” rejoined the king, “for this vehicle, as you see it, cost me 30,000 francs. . . .  The robberies in my household are enormous, but it is impossible to put a stop to them.” — So the great help themselves as well as the little, either in money, or in kind, or in services.  There are in the king’s household fifty-four horses for the grand equerry, thirty-eight of them being for Mme. de Brionne, the administratrix