- If; later, and under less exacting masters, and in the general laxity of the eighteenth century, this discipline is relaxed, the institution nevertheless subsists;[32] in default of obedience, tradition, interest and amour-propre suffice for the people of the court.  To approach the king, to be a domestic in his household, an usher, a cloak-bearer, a valet, is a privilege that is purchased, even in 1789, for thirty, forty, and a hundred thousand livres; so much greater the reason why it is a privilege to form a part of his society, the most honorable, the most useful, and the most coveted of all. — In the first place, it is a proof of noble birth.  A man, to follow the king in the chase, and a woman, to be presented to the queen, must previously satisfy the genealogist, and by authentic documents, that his or her nobility goes back to the year 1400. — In the next place, it ensures good fortune.  This drawing room is the only place within reach of royal favors; accordingly, up to 1789, the great families never stir away from Versailles, and day and night they lie in ambush.  The valet of the Marshal de Noaillles says to him one night on closing his curtains,

“At what hour will Monseigneur be awakened?” “At ten o’clock, if no one dies during the night."[33]

Old courtiers are still found who, “at the age of eighty, have passed forty-five on their feet in the antechambers of the king, of the princes, and of the ministers. . .

You have only three things to do,” says one of them to a debutant, “speak well of everybody, ask for every vacancy, and sit down when you can.”

Hence, the king always has a crowd around him.  The Comtesse du Barry says, on presenting her niece at court, the first of August, 1773, “the crowd is so great at a presentation, one can scarcely get through the antechambers."[34] In December, 1774, at Fontainebleau, when the queen plays at her own table every evening, “the apartment, though vast, is never empty. . . .  The crowd is so great that one can talk only to the two or three persons with whom one is playing.”  The fourteen apartments, at the receptions of ambassadors are full to overflowing with seigniors and richly dressed women.  On the first of January, 1775, the queen “counted over two hundred ladies presented to her to pay their court. " In 1780, at Choisy, a table for thirty persons is spread every day for the king, another with thirty places for the seigniors, another with forty places for the officers of the guard and the equerries, and one with fifty for the officers of the bedchamber.  According to my estimate, the king, on getting up and on retiring, on his walks, on his hunts, at play, has always around him at least forty or fifty seigniors and generally a hundred, with as many ladies, besides his attendants on duty.  At Fontainebleau, in 1756, although “there were neither fêtes nor ballets this year, one hundred and six ladies were counted.”  When the king holds a “grand