"Sire," said M.de Vardes to Louis XIV, "away from Your Majesty one not only feels miserable but ridiculous." None remain in the provinces except the poor rural nobility; to live there one must be behind the age, disheartened or in exile.

The king's banishment of a seignior to his estates is the highest disgrace; to the humiliation of this fall is added the insupportable weight of boredom.

The finest chateau on the most beautiful site is a frightful "desert"; nobody is seen there save the grotesques of a small town or the village peasants.[1331] "Exile alone," says Arthur Young, "can force the French nobility to do what the English prefer to do, and that is to live on their estates and embellish them." Saint-Simon and other court historians, on mentioning a ceremony, repeatedly state that "all France was there"; in fact, every one of consequence in France is there, and each recognizes the other by this sign.

Paris and the court become, accordingly, the necessary sojourn of all fine people.

In such a situation departure begets departure; the more a province is forsaken the more they forsake it.