all classes of persons,
beginning even with the brothers and sisters of the monarch.

Speaking here of etiquette, I do not allude to majestic state, appointed
for days of ceremony in all Courts. I mean those minute ceremonies that
were pursued towards our Kings in their inmost privacies, in their hours
of pleasure, in those of pain, and even during the most revolting of human
infirmities.

These servile rules were drawn up into a kind of code; they offered to a
Richelieu, a La Rochefoucauld and a Duras, in the exercise of their
domestic functions, opportunities of intimacy useful to their interests;
and their vanity was flattered by customs which converted the right to
give a glass of water, to put on a dress, and to remove a basin, into
honourable prerogatives.

Princes thus accustomed to be treated as divinities naturally ended by
believing that they were of a distinct nature, of a purer essence than the
rest of mankind.

This sort of etiquette, which led our Princes to be treated in private as
idols, made them in public martyrs to decorum. Marie Antoinette found in
the Chateau of Versailles a multitude of established customs which
appeared to her insupportable.

The ladies-in-waiting, who were all obliged to be sworn, and to wear full
Court dresses, were alone entitled to remain in the room, and to attend in
conjunction with the dame d'honneur and the tirewoman. The Queen
abolished all this formality. When her head was dressed, she curtsied to
all the ladies who were in her chamber, and, followed only by her own
women, went into her closet, where Mademoiselle Bertin, who could not be
admitted into the chamber, used to await her. It was in this inner closet
that she produced her new and numerous dresses. The Queen was also
desirous of being served by the most fashionable hairdresser in Paris.
Now the custom which forbade all persons in inferior offices, employed by
royalty, to exert their talents for the public, was no doubt intended to
cut off all communication between the privacy of princes and society at
large; the latter being always extremely curious respecting the most
trifling particulars relative to the private life of the former. The
Queen, fearing that the taste of the hairdresser would suffer if he should
discontinue the general practice of his art, ordered him to attend as
usual certain ladies of the Court and of Paris; and this multiplied the
opportunities of learning details respecting the ho