monarch, and secondly and more importantly, on the development, under Louis, of France itself.
Saint-Simon takes the view that France suffered because Louis did not make proper use of the aristocracy in France, and that occurred because of Mazarin's manipulation of Louis's conception of the nobility as a threat to the monarchy. Thus it was that Louis drew his public officials, including ministers and military commanders, almost entirely from the middle classes, which according to Saint-Simon were on the one hand envious of the fact that they were not of noble birth and which were obsequieous in their attention to the king. The effect was to inflate the king's idea of himself as both monarch and personality: "Flattery fed the desire for military glory that sometimes tore him from his lvoes, which was how Louvois so ealsiy invovled him in major wars and persuaded him that he was a better leader and strategist than any of his generals. . . . and [he] truly believed that he was what they said."
Saint-Simon's implicit analysis appears to be that that the inflation of Louis's ego led to the consolidation of absolute, divine-right monarchy as a matter of French policy. Saint-Simon cites "a pride so colossal that, truly, had not God implanted in his heart the fear of the devil, even in his worst excesses, he would literally have allowed himself to be worshipped." Hence, too, according to Saint-Simon's analysis, the extravagance of the court that Louis caused to be built and attended at Versailles, which was suited to the enterprise of the next best thing to worship, and which .as. the locus of near-worship functioned to impoverish the members of the aristocracy who were obliged to mee tthe royal standard of extravagance when they attended the king at court: "The truth is that he used this means deliberatley and successfully to
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