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In the year 1681, then, the great king, with bag and baggage with guards, cooks, chamberlains, mistresses, Jesuits, gentlemen, lackeys, Fenelons, Molieres, Lauzuns, Bossuets, Villars, Villeroys, Louvois, Colberts transported himself to his new palace: the old one being left for James of England and Jaquette his wife, when their time should come.

Reduced for companions to needy parasites, he braved and he shocked all decorous opinion by that ostentation of excess, which made Richelieus and Lauzuns the rage. But then Richelieus and Lauzuns were dukes! He now very naturally took the Polite World into hate, gave it scorn for scorn.

In the year 1681, then, the great king, with bag and baggage, with guards, cooks, chamberlains, mistresses, Jesuits, gentlemen, lackeys, Fenelons, Molieres, Lauzuns, Bossuets, Villars, Villeroys, Louvois, Colberts, transported himself to his new palace: the old one being left for James of England and Jaquette his wife, when their time should come.

Reduced for companions to needy parasites, he braved and he shocked all decorous opinion by that ostentation of excess, which made Richelieus and Lauzuns the rage. But then Richelieus and Lauzuns were dukes! He now very naturally took the Polite World into hate, gave it scorn for scorn.

It is as needless to apologize for devoting a whole chapter to local circumstances connected with Madame de Sevigné's life, as it would be to detail the well-known social virtues which have erected this amiable and unpretending woman into a sort of household deity in the eyes of so large a class of persons, while the Lauzuns, the Montespans, and other gay and brilliant favourites of that period, are only recollected with disgust.