Madame du Hausset records that it hurt him to laugh: at most he could force a smile. And that smile meant: “we will grant you anything, provided you don’t expect our attention.” With dull pedantry, which destroyed his natural elegance, he repeated the same stories several times, never finding anyone who could make him realize what boredom it produced. He is credited with many fairly banal bons mots that are admired for their wit, whereas certain remarks of devastating lucidity are cited as expressions of his patent lack of decorum. He was obsessed about idle kings (“rois fainéants”), and Cardinal Fleury, who coerced him to inaction, while exhorting him to maintain some semblance of activity, was once imprudent enough to speak to him about it. “One day I reached the point of telling the king that there had been certain kings of France who had been deposed because they did nothing.⁶⁰⁸ It seemed to affect him deeply. He made no reply at the time, but two days later he said: ‘I have reflected on what you told me about certain of my predecessors who were deposed—but tell me, when those sovereigns were deposed, did they get good pensions?’ ”

“… in the small apartments of Versailles, he appeared like a big and gloomy and sad child, with something in his spirit that was cold, malicious, sarcastic …”⁶⁰⁹

The Parc aux Cerfs, whose name alone invited resentful subjects to dream of continual, cloistered lechery, was “a fairly poor house with a tiny garden, closed off in the cul-de-sac of rue des Tournelles and rue Saint-Médéric; it consisted of four bedrooms and several small sitting rooms, and could accommodate two or three women at most, indeed it seemed designed to accommodate just one.”⁶¹⁰ The house bore that name because it was built, during the time of Louis XIII, in a district on the edge of Versailles where there was a park of wild animals. It was inhabited not by thousands of round-breasted gopis pining for Krishna but by one or two girls at a time, waiting for the visits of an unknown lord, who sometimes passed himself off as a Polish gentleman and forgot to remove his blue sash. And every so often, for a month or so, the house was even empty. In that place, absolutist whim ended up establishing the foundation for a very bourgeois institution: the kept woman. And even Madame de Pompadour, who oversaw such pleasures, later administering births and pensions, went as far as coining a maxim that regulated the countless future ménages of lesser rank: “It is his heart that I want.”⁶¹¹ As for the rest, she was relieved to forgo it. She would no longer have to eat chocolate with triple vanilla and truffles for breakfast, to rouse her “very cool temperament,” seeing that “men, as you well know, attach such importance to certain things.”