This deified monarch needed a new temple, and Versailles, where everything was his creation, both men and things, adored its maker. The highest nobility of France, beginning with the princes of the blood, competed for posts in the royal household, where an army of ten thousand soldiers, four thousand servants, and five thousand horses played its costly and luxurious part in the ordered and almost religious pageant of the king's existence. The "_anciennes cohues de France_," gay, familiar and military, gave place to a stilted court life, a perpetual adoration, a very ceremonious and very complicated ritual, in which the demigod "pontificated" even "in his dressing-gown." To pay court to himself was the first and only duty in the eyes of a proud and haughty prince who saw and noted everything, especially any one's absence. Versailles, where the delicate refinements of Italy and the grave politeness of Spain were fused and mingled with French vivacity, became the centre of national life and a model for foreign royalties; hence if Versailles has played a considerable part in the history of civilization, it also seriously modified the life of France. Etiquette and self-seeking became the chief rules of a courtier's life, and this explains the division of the nobility into two sections: the provincial squires, embittered by neglect; and the courtiers, who were ruined materially and intellectually by their way of living. Versailles sterilized all the idle upper classes, exploited the industrious classes by its extravagance, and more and more broke relations between king and kingdom.
But however divine, the king could not wield his power unaided. Louis XIV. called to his assistance a hierarchy of humbly submissive functionaries, and councils over which he regularly presided. Holding the very name of _roi fainéant_ in abhorrence, he abolished the office of mayor of the palace--that is to say, the prime minister--thus imposing upon himself work which he always regularly performed. In choosing his collaborators his principle was never to select nobles or ecclesiastics, but persons of inferior birth. Neither the immense fortunes amassed by these men, nor the venality and robust vitality which made their families veritable races of ministers, altered the fact that De Lionne, Le Tellier, Louvois and Colbert were in themselves of no account, even though the parts they played were much more important than Louis XIV. imagined. This was the age of plebeians, to the great indignation of the duke and peer Saint Simon. Mere reflected lights, these satellites professed to share their master's honor of all individual and collective rights of such a nature as to impose any check upon his public authority. Louis XIV. detested the states-general and never convoked them, and the parlements were definitely reduced to silence in 1673; he completed the destruction of municipal liberties, under pretext of bad financial administration; suffered no public, still less private criticism; was ruthless when his exasperated subjects had recourse to force; and made the police the chief bulwark of his government. Prayers and resignation were the only solace left for the hardships endured by his subjects. All the ties of caste, class, corporation and family were severed; the jealous despotism of Louis XIV. destroyed every opportunity of taking common action; he isolated every man in private life, in individual interests, just as he isolated himself more and more from the body social. Freedom he tolerated for himself alone.