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Paris, Beautiful Paris. For all its sumptuousness and its galaxy of the first names of France, the chateau was a bore with bowing courtiers incapable of scraping up an amusing conversation. As everyone knew, life in the provinces was dreary too, and anyone who lived there was considered a mere "vegetable with powers of locomotion." Some noblemen of wit and wealth defied the King's pique and choseParis. It was a dirty city. The streets were choked with mud and refuse, and the stench could be smelled two miles outside the city gates. Here, a nobleman lived on a grand scale. A bachelor might have "37 servants, of whom five are the personal attendants of the five senior servants." A childless couple might manage with 65 or so servants, but would require several more if there were children. The nobles, to the extent of their means, aped the King's style of living, and the bourgeois aped and sometimes outdid the nobles.
It was a century of fascinating contrasts. Literature nourished. Corneille, Racine, Moliere, La Fontaine turned out their masterpieces; Pascal wrote his Pensees, Descartes his Discourse on Method. Medicine, meanwhile, was in a parlous state. In one year, Louis XIII was bled 47 times, got 212 enemas. Louis XIV got the same kind of treatment, but, despite everything his physicians did, he survived for 77 years. By that time, he had done his full part to prepare the deluge.