ABSTRACT
In speaking of the magnificence that marked the truly grand elites of previous reigns, the ambassador from Berlin, Baron Spanheim, implies that by 1690 few great nobles at the French Court had the means to live like the semi-independent grands of years past. Earlier in his memoir, he reports that Armagnac had the best portions of his family’s fortunes and favour at Court.2 But Armagnac was described by Saint-Simon as having too many children to support, and ‘very little patrimony’.3 In a similar contrast, while one courtier states that Armagnac’s younger brother, the chevalier de Lorraine, supported himself at Court with little more than his good looks,4 another wrote of a house he owned which was grand enough to entertain the King, not once, but frequently, on his journeys from Versailles to Fontainebleau.5 How can these contradictions be reconciled? By what means did Court elites manage to sustain themselves, their friends and their families at the pinnacle of the Court hierarchy for successive generations?
