Dressed as a miniature courtier, his hair powdered, the child was inducted into a protocol intended to squeeze out of him any vestige of warmth or humanity. Idleness was the gateway to vice; there should be no downtime, and no daydreaming. Day and night, three attendants watched him. Every casual word was reported to his tutors. All signs of emotion, in his presence, were to be erased; he should neither express feeling, nor see it expressed. Above all, the child who would grow up to own a tenth of France was to be protected from his fellow countrymen; he should never glimpse a common, hungry Frenchman, a grubby Frenchman with an ardent heart.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 105