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"Madame de Maintenon was seated, facing the plain, in a litter chair with three window-panes...The King was standing to the right of her chair, and every second moment he would bend down to explain to Madame de Maintenon what was going on in the exercises. Each time, she would lower her window four or five fingerlengths...the King spoke to no one but her, other than to give out orders...Everyone was astonished and embarrassed and pretending not to notice, but they were watching this more attentively than anything the army was doing..."

Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon

The Secret Wife of Louis XIV, Francoise d'Aubigne, Madame de Maintenon - Veronica Buckley (pg. 368)

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1830 Louise-Adéone Drölling - Marie-Joseph-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette

(Musée de l'Armée)

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Painted dish. Talavera, 1651-1675

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Plato pintado. Talavera, 1651-1675

Pasta cerámica

Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, CE00019

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Baldassare Franceschini (Volterrano), The Chevalier de Lorraine, depicted as Ganymede, late 17th cent. 

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The Carousel of 1662

Henri Jules de Bourbon, The Duke of Enghien as the King of the Indians

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Portrait of Louis XIII by Marie-Victoire Jaquotot.

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Philippe I, Duke of Orléans. Circle of Pierre Mignard.

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Louis-Auguste de Bourbon (1670-1736).

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"inferior in rank to ourselves"

The Viscount de Noailles and myself were dependent upon our parents, and only possessed the income which they assigned to us. La Fayette, on the contrary, although younger, and inferior in rank to ourselves, found himself, by a singular chance, at the age of nineteen years, sole master of his property, and of his person, and the independent possessor of a hundred thousand livres a year.

Louis Philippe, comte de Ségur, Memoirs and Recollections of Count Segur, Ambassador From France to the Courts of Russia and Prussia, Wells And Lilly-Court-Street, Boston, 1825, p. 85. I find such comments on La Fayette always to be very interesting, because whenever La Fayette is discussed in an American context (in other words; most of the time), he always was THE Marquis. But back home in France, in a truely aristocratic society, he was one of many and did not even have the most exhaulted rank. You could even argue that La Fayette, to a degree, was self-made. Sure, he came from a rich and aristocratic family and married into another rich and aristocratic family and therefor had a very privileged starting point, but this alone did not bring him the prestige, fame, respect or recognition that he enjoyed towards the end of his life.

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Château de Maintenon, Maintenon, Eure-et-Loir, France

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Diego Velazquez, Infanta Maria Teresa, ca. 1652-1653, oil/canvas (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

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Woman’s Gown

c. 1775-1780

silk, liseré satin, bobbin lace

Pitti Palace

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Slipware, probably King Charles II of England and his 24-year-old bride, Catherine of Braganza, daughter of the king of Portugal, 1662

Thomas Toft

Slipware, lead-glazed earthenware decorated with ‘slip’ – a sloppy mixture of clay and water.

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

A cream slip covers the front surface of the plate, while darker slips are used for the decorative elements. These have been trailed across the surface of the vessel, rather like iced decorations upon a cake. This technique reached its peak in the seventeenth century in the potteries of Staffordshire, and much of the best work had Royalist imagery.

The name of Thomas Toft appears at the bottom in large, lively capital letters. Toft is today regarded as the most important producer of slipware pottery in seventeenth-century Staffordshire, but almost nothing is known of his life. Over thirty dishes carry his name, although some of these may have been made by his son, also called Thomas.

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early 18th century Waistcoat (Hungary)

metal yarn, silk fabric

(Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest)

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ca. 1830, “Death of Munrow”

This delightfully naïve ceramic sculpture shows the death of Lieutenant Hugh Monro, a young British army officer serving in India, who was mauled by a tiger while picnicking on a hunting trip in 1792.

via the Victoria & Albert Collection

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The future King George III, age 9, reading in a blanket fort in 1747