much pleasanter a place.... I am not ignorant that true amity hath arms long enough to embrace, to clasp and hold from one corner of the world unto another.... The Stoics say that there is so great an affinity and mutual relation between wise men that he who dineth in France feedeth his companion in Egypt.... If I be at Rome ... I hold, I survey and govern my house ... I even see my walls, my trees and my rents to grow.”[60] In those days the direction of a household was an admirable apprenticeship to philosophy, since it was a point of honour to maintain a great number of idle people. Thus Madame de la Trémoille had to rule, feed, and place forty men, four of whom were attached to her personal service (chaplain, tailor, groom, and steward), and only three women, of whom one was a nurse. She had to maintain this retinue and give it a stamp of high respectability and discipline, which was all the more difficult because the servants were people of some consequence, there for life, holding places that had been hereditary for several generations; in other words, the house belonged to them, in virtue of some indefinable family collectivism. Further, people had an ingrained propensity to regard generosity as the special mark of an aristocrat; and as this virtue was expected to grow in proportion to rank, it invariably had the drawback of straitening their means. Out of an enormous total expenditure, Madame de la Trémoille had at her disposal only two hundred livres for her personal use. A prince was often worse off than those who lived on his bounty. Further, this “generosity” did not manifest itself only in money: it declared itself in affectionate and gracious actions, which after all involved expense. Thus at Blois no domestic event took place in the household without the cognizance of the Duchess of Orleans; she interested herself in the weddings and gave each couple a present: her children acted as sponsors; she even looked after her servants’ love-children; she watched over the aged; any of her servants or even of their friends who were in trouble were sure of her sympathy; she interceded with the king to obtain pardon for a criminal or the remission of a tax: “You will do both great charity and alms,” she wrote to him, “and to me a singular pleasure.” Here and there in her modest accounts there is a little space vacant, importing a surrender of feudal dues to distressed tenants, a remission of rent, a cancelling of debt.