)[2127] and perform domestic service
about his person. Add to these their equals, as noble and nearly as
numerous, dwelling with the queen, with Mesdames, with Mme. Elisabeth,
with the Comte and Comtesse de Provence and the Comte and Comtesse
d'Artois.--And these are only the heads of the service; if; below them
in rank and office, I count the titular nobles, I find, among others,
68 almoners or chaplains, 170 gentlemen of the bedchamber or in waiting,
117 gentlemen of the stable or of the hunting-train, 148 pages, 114
titled ladies in waiting, besides all the officers, even to the lowest
of the military household, without counting 1,400 ordinary guards who,
verified by the genealogist, are admitted by virtue of their title to
pay their court.[2128] Such is the fixed body of recruits for the royal
receptions; the distinctive trait of this regime is the conversion
of its servants into guests, the drawing room being filled from the
anteroom.

Not that the drawing room needs all that to be filled. Being the source
of all preferment and of every favor, it is natural that it should
overflow[2129]. It is the same in our leveling society (in 1875), where
the drawing room of an insignificant deputy, a mediocre journalist, or
a fashionable woman, is full of courtiers under the name of friends and
visitors. Moreover, here, to be present is an obligation; it might be
called a continuation of ancient feudal homage; the staff of nobles is
maintained as the retinue of its born general. In the language of the
day, it is called "paying one's duty to the king." Absence, in the
sovereign's eyes, would be a sign of independence as well as of
indifference, while submission as well as regular attention is his due.
In this respect we must study the institution from the beginning.
The eyes of Louis XIV go their rounds at every moment, "on arising or
retiring, on passing into his apartments, in his gardens,. . . nobody
escapes, even those who hoped they were not seen; it was a demerit with
some, and the most distinguished, not to make the court their ordinary
sojourn, to others to come to it but seldom, and certain disgrace to
those who never, or nearly never, came."[2130] Henceforth, the
main thing, for the first personages in the kingdom, men and women,
ecclesiastics and laymen, the grand affair, the first duty in life,
the true occupation, is to be at all hours and in every place under the
king's eye, within reach of his voice and of his gl