The Question, which the French, and the Finns, and (at various times in their history) the Japanese, and (just now in their socio-economic development) the people of Iceland--and even the English before the barbaric "Dissolution" of their Monasteries--are/were all asking themselves is: ¿How little honest, necessary work, and, conversely, ¿How much public fun and frolic, and exquisite aristocratic leisure, can they (the societies and governances of the world) get away with?

It is well that the French--so appreciatively mindful of their extraordinarily well-behaved children, such faithful guardians of ancient terroirs and assiduous force-feeders of ducks and geese, instinct with the vibrant, undiminshed Latinity of three millennia--should lead the way in this most profound and significant of Humanist endeavors to find the value and the meaning of their own existence in its cultivated enjoyment.

One of the criteria of such possible earthly contentment is what people who were alive at the time said about it.  Another criterion is the variety of their diet. And yet another criterion can be derived carefully by reckoning the number of tools-down, official, religious holidays there were per year, and figuring from that how much time was left for the working classes in a year actually to be working.  In the first category, generally speaking, before the Americans introduced universal literacy, we have only the testimony of aristocrats, such as Talleyrand, Brillat-Savarin and Thomas Jefferson, who alone were literate and could tell us that, at least for the privileged few, life under the old order was indeed sweet--and deliciously lazy. An example of which, not mentioned by Talleyrand, but which I happen to know about, was one of Marie Antoinette's more inspired queenly arbitrary interventions in the order of things (such as she usually catches hell for) when, in one of the last winters of the Old Regime, she delayed for six weeks the return of a whole class of military cadets to their academy, in order that they might continue to supply dancing-partners for the ladies of the French court at the temporary wooden dance-pavilion which had been erected for the season in the Cour d'Honneur.  God bless her for that, I say.