Alexandre Bontemps

[4] He was also a member of the Conseil du Roi (the Royal Council) and held a senior rank in the chivalric Order of Saint Lazarus.

He says Bontemps was "rough and brusque in manner, yet respectful and always in his place.... His only skill lay in serving his master, and he was wholly intent on that... [he had been] influential for the past fifty years, and with the Court at his feet.

[10] He used the Swiss Guards stationed around the Palaces and gardens to report on the behaviour of courtiers, including their church attendance, as well as political and sexual intrigues.

[12] In addition one of the ordinary valets was en poste by the King's bed all day, inside the balustrade that separated it, like an altar communion-rail, from the rest of the room.

However, Saint-Simon explains carefully that if the First Gentleman of the year was absent, the Premier valet of the quarter was en commande of the ceremony, attended daily by about a hundred of the greatest courtiers – a significant point of prestige.

There is a portrait of the Comtesse de La Châtre, daughter of Louis XV's Bontemps head valet, by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, dated 1789, the last year of the Ancien Regime.