The sessions of the Assembly are junketings of six weeks' duration, in which the intendant expends 25,000 livres in dinners and receptions.[1412] Equally lucrative and useless are the court offices[1413], so many domestic sinecures, the profits and accessories of which largely exceed the emoluments.

I find in the printed register 295 cooks, without counting the table-waiters of the king and his people, while "the head butler obtains 84,000 livres a year in billets and supplies," without counting his salary and the "grand liveries" which he receives in money.
The head chambermaids to the queen, inscribed in the Almanac for 150 livres and paid 12,000 francs, make in reality 50,000 francs by the sale of the candles lighted during the day.

Augeard, private secretary, and whose place is set down at 900 livres a year, confesses that it is worth to him 200,000.

The head huntsman at Fontainebleau sells for his own benefit each year 20,000 francs worth of rabbits.

"On each journey to the king's country residences the ladies of the bedchamber gain eighty per cent on the expenses of moving; it is said that the coffee and bread for each of these ladies costs 2,000 francs a year, and so on with other things." "Mme.