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Drawing on the work of the Duke of Saint-Simon (1675-1755), "Memoirs", Le Roy Ladurie offers a portrait of life under Louis XIV, focusing on the fundamental issues of hierarchy and rank in a tightly controlled setting. Using a range of tools, such as ethnography, history, literary criticism and histography, this is a historical essay about court life, a world in which man is born unequal, a world circumscribed by purity of bloodline, which nonetheless directly preceded the birth of democratic thought and political action. This book is not only about Saint-Simon's place in the court at Versailles but also about the court itself and how it forces us to re-evaluate political life in France during the Old Regime.