4 ideas
Louis XIV controlled a potentially rebellious nobility by making tiny, arbitrary distinctions the currency of status. Examples include who held the candlestick at his coucher, who was named for a Marly trip, and whom he noticed or pointedly ignored. Because these favors cost the king nothing and could be withdrawn at will, nobles spent their fortunes and energy competing for them at Versailles instead of building independent power in the provinces.
Saint-Simon argues that Louis XIV deliberately staffed his ministries with men of modest or recent birth rather than great nobles. Such ministers owed their entire standing to him and could be dismissed without political cost. The same move shut the high aristocracy out of real government, leaving them with ceremonial rank and no function.
At a lit de justice in the Tuileries in August 1718, the Regent Orléans broke the resistance of the Paris Parlement. In the same session he stripped the duc du Maine, Louis XIV's legitimized bastard, of the elevated rank the late king had given him between the princes of the blood and the dukes. Saint-Simon, who had helped prepare the coup, describes watching the humiliation of Maine's partisans with open, savored delight. For him it was the vindication of a lifetime's fight over precedence.
Formal etiquette hides real loyalties in ordinary times, but a sudden event forces them to leak into the body before people can compose themselves. Saint-Simon's account of the night Monseigneur, the Dauphin, died in April 1711 treats the crowded palace as an instrument. He reads each courtier's grief, relief, or calculation from their faces, postures, and haste to map who had bet on which heir.