DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61284#0076
ETIQUETTE AT VERSAILLES
27
or the greatest habitude, to discover the smallest connection between the
sexes here. No familiarity, but under the veil of friendship, is permitted,
and love’s dictionary is as much prohibited as at first sight one should
think his ritual was.”
The writer of this letter at the same time warned Gray not to
believe a syllable of what he read in French novels about love affairs,
or to suppose that a/mie necessarily implied anything more than a
“ decent friend.”
These impressions of social life in Paris, by a man who had the best
opportunities of going behind the scenes that any foreigner could obtain,
were written just before Elisabeth Vigee left her convent school, but they
have a considerable bearing on her experiences of the world when she
had come into notice as a portrait-painter who happened also to be a
pretty woman.
Had the society which centred in Versailles and the Tuileries been
altogether frivolous, it would have come to its death even more quickly than
it did. Not a few of the nobles had, indeed, followed the motto attributed
to the Dues de Broglie : “ Love your wives and your chateaux,” and had
taken away their first objects of affection to rusticate in the second. But
all that we learn from Madame Lebrun of the conversation and habits
of the people whose portraits she painted, who attended her “ evenings,”
and to whose dinners or suppers she went, bears out the general impression
which most students of eighteenth-century France have necessarily formed.
There was plenty of light morality in England too, but with that we have
nothing to do here.
Paris has never been an index to France, either socially or politically,
and at no time has the capital less closely resembled the country in its
ways of life and thought than in the eighteenth century.
The politic measures of Louis XIV in dealing with the nobility had so
concentrated the wealth and culture of the leisured class in and about
the Court that very many of the large estates in the provinces, and many
of the small estates also, were almost entirely neglected by their owners.
La Bruyere’s terrible description of the peasantry towards the end of the
seventeenth century, when the system of Louis XIV was already fully
established, is one of the most famous passages of his series of incisive
character-studies illustrating the manners and thoughts of his time.
A hundred years of abandonment to agents and bailiffs, whose con-
stantly repeated instructions from their employers at Versailles were to
27
or the greatest habitude, to discover the smallest connection between the
sexes here. No familiarity, but under the veil of friendship, is permitted,
and love’s dictionary is as much prohibited as at first sight one should
think his ritual was.”
The writer of this letter at the same time warned Gray not to
believe a syllable of what he read in French novels about love affairs,
or to suppose that a/mie necessarily implied anything more than a
“ decent friend.”
These impressions of social life in Paris, by a man who had the best
opportunities of going behind the scenes that any foreigner could obtain,
were written just before Elisabeth Vigee left her convent school, but they
have a considerable bearing on her experiences of the world when she
had come into notice as a portrait-painter who happened also to be a
pretty woman.
Had the society which centred in Versailles and the Tuileries been
altogether frivolous, it would have come to its death even more quickly than
it did. Not a few of the nobles had, indeed, followed the motto attributed
to the Dues de Broglie : “ Love your wives and your chateaux,” and had
taken away their first objects of affection to rusticate in the second. But
all that we learn from Madame Lebrun of the conversation and habits
of the people whose portraits she painted, who attended her “ evenings,”
and to whose dinners or suppers she went, bears out the general impression
which most students of eighteenth-century France have necessarily formed.
There was plenty of light morality in England too, but with that we have
nothing to do here.
Paris has never been an index to France, either socially or politically,
and at no time has the capital less closely resembled the country in its
ways of life and thought than in the eighteenth century.
The politic measures of Louis XIV in dealing with the nobility had so
concentrated the wealth and culture of the leisured class in and about
the Court that very many of the large estates in the provinces, and many
of the small estates also, were almost entirely neglected by their owners.
La Bruyere’s terrible description of the peasantry towards the end of the
seventeenth century, when the system of Louis XIV was already fully
established, is one of the most famous passages of his series of incisive
character-studies illustrating the manners and thoughts of his time.
A hundred years of abandonment to agents and bailiffs, whose con-
stantly repeated instructions from their employers at Versailles were to