Tiran lo Blanc , devoured as late as the 18th century by Catherine the Great. Castiglione’s

The Courtier

is the most important, and still very readable, handbook of aristocratic conduct. An English equivalent is Sir Thomas Elyot’s

The Boke called the Governor . Noble life under Louis XIV is elegantly chronicled in Mme de Sévigné’s

Letters , while the world of his court is reported and commented upon in incomparable detail through the voluminous

Memoirs

of the Duke de Saint-Simon. Chesterfield’s

Letters to His Son

prescribe how to be a gentleman in the 18th century, while Montesquieu’s contemporaneous

Spirit of the Laws

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