Word: gramont
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...Gramont regards style as a capacity for coping inventively with everything from the design of waistcoats ("the historical monuments of our age," a Louis XVI courtier called them) to the conduct of diplomacy. In his survey, the palace at Versailles and the royalty that lived there soon come to represent elegance proliferating unproductively upon itself. The palace and its people become a symbol of style divorced from reality, in which monarchy turned into a kind of theatrical corruption...
Cold as a Coot. In making visibility "the primary function of the King," says De Gramont, Louis XIV reduced the royal drama to pageantry-style's exquisite confession of meaninglessness. Even the King's defecation became a public act staged on a stool decorated with mother-of-pearl landscapes...
Later, his imitative successors managed to make even sensualism a fraud. Contrary to legend, Louis XV's notorious Deer Park, explains De Gramont, was devoted to rather small-scale lechery-"more of a tired businessman's retreat than a royal orgy-house." Worse, Madame de Pompadour was, by Louis' testimony, cold as a coot, though she plied herself with aphrodisiacs of hot chocolate laced with vanilla, truffles and celery soup. She spent most of her energies keeping official appointments and answering as many as 60 letters a day. Her rewards were the unglamorous ailments of the busy...
...Nothing." What gave monarchy the coup de grace, De Gramont suggests, was a new power, a new style setter: public opinion. "My infallible Queen," Jacques Necker, one of Louis XVl's Finance Ministers, called it in a switch of fealty. Public opinion, influenced by Voltaire and a prestigious literary antiEstablishment, made regal style seem dated and absurd even to aristocrats...
...Gramont sees it, the times were not so much ripe for revolution as overripe with monarchy. Louis XVI was so far out of touch with the changing political style that he did not even suspect a dangerous parallel when he saw one-the American Revolution. While Marie Antoinette gushed about "our good republicans, our good Americans," Louis, it is said, made a gift of a Sevres chamber pot with Benjamin Franklin's likeness on the base...