It is the will of the king, one must frequent his apartments to obtain his favors; otherwise, on the first application for them the answer will be, “Who is he?  He is a man that I never see.”  In the king’s eyes there is no excuse for absence, even should the cause is a conversion, with penitence for a motive.  In preferring God to the king, he has deserted.  The ministers write to the intendants to ascertain if the gentlemen of their province “like to stay at home,” and if they “refuse to appear and perform their duties to the king.”  Imagine the grandeur of such attractions available at the court, governments, commands, bishoprics, benefices, court-offices, survivor-ships, pensions, credit, favors of every kind and degree for self and family.  All that a country of 25 millions men can offer that is desirable to ambition, to vanity, to interest, is found here collected as in a reservoir.  They rush to it and draw from it. — And the more readily 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.”