Excerpt from The Great Days of Versailles: Studies From Court Life in the Later Years of Louis XIV The following pages do not profess to be history; still less do they pretend to throw any new light upon a period which is already so exhaustively known through its memoirs and its letters. All that I have attempted to do is to reconstruct from familiar materials a picture of Court life at Versailles in the later years of Louis XIV - the manners, customs, and interests of a unique society which has no counterpart in modern Europe - and to give a brief account of the private life and character of some of the people who figured most prominently in the events of the time. My hope is that such a compilation may be of use to those who intend to study the French eighteenth-century memoirs, by making them familiar with some of the personal questions which counted for so much at the French Court; and, also, that it may not be without interest for that large class of people who have neither time nor opportunity to study the period in detail, and who are forced to be content with the summaries of others. Such a work as I have contemplated is almost necessarily based on Saint-Simon; but no writer needs to be read in a more critical spirit than Saint-Simon. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.