The fashion of keeping Court and household fools, writes Voltaire in his _Age de Louis XIV._, was for a time the _grande mode_ of all the Courts of Europe. Some sovereigns, however, discarded the practice, and when Charles Louis, Electoral Prince of the Rhine, was asked why he did not keep a Court fool, he replied: “Well, it is easily accounted for. When I am inclined to laugh, I send for a couple of professors from college, set them an argument, and laugh at their folly.”
The Emperor Henry III., surnamed the Black, despised the Court fool--“a licensed scoundrel,” he said, “who obtained for his nonsense rewards that had never properly been showered on the benefactors of mankind.” And Christian I. of Denmark once remarked, that if he were in want of Court fools he had only to give license to his courtiers, who were capable of exhibiting themselves as the greatest fools in Europe. Frederick Barbarossa hated Court fools; and in France, Philip Augustus and Charles VII. had no sympathy for mirth-makers of this description.
On the other hand, few sovereigns extended greater favour to their fools than Maximilian I.; and yet, as it has been remarked, “he found as much peril as profit in his intercourse with them.” On one occasion, when he was loading a fowling-piece, his house fool coming into his presence with a lighted candle was about to place it on an open cask of powder; and at another time his Majesty was playing at snowballs with his fool, when the latter threw one so violently at his right eye, that the imperial sight was damaged for a month. His principal fool or jester was Konrad, popularly styled “The Soldier and Wit of Maximilian,” for, on more than one occasion, he proved himself wiser in his generation than some of the political advisers who counselled their imperial master. Sometimes, however, Konrad’s jokes were of so astounding a nature that he would scarcely have dared to make them on his own responsibility. Such an instance occurred at a banquet given in honour of the Venetian ambassadors, and their Government, who had presented to the Emperor a costly goblet of the purest crystal; when Konrad, in the midst of the revelry and mirth, contrived to hook his spur in the tablecloth, and dancing off to pull with him everything on the table, the crystal goblet lying in fragments on the ground.