On this day, Louis XVI rewards some old friends. In his account of the earliest days of Louis XVI’s reign, our memoirist writes:
“On the 11th, the King accorded the grandes entrées to his menins…they are MM de La Vauguyon, de Damas, de Montmorin, de Bourbon-Busset, de la Roche-Aymon, de Beaumont, de Choiseul, Quintin, Prince de Montmorency, de Belsunce, de Pons.”
Commentary:
The grandes entrées are highly sought after. No one outside of the royal family and the princes du sang (see glossary) has them by right; they must be bestowed. The chief privilege of the grandes entrées is that they may enter the King’s or Queen’s bedchamber, according to their gender, before mere entrées and everyone else; that matters because it means that they may have the King’s or Queen’s ear during that time.
Pictured: Louis-François-Joseph de Bourbon (1749-1829), Comte de Busset. Credit — Par Auteur inconnu — Painting, Domaine public, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25593716
Menins are the young boys selected to be the companions of princes in childhood. As we see here, they are generally chosen from among the great names of the French nobility. It is interesting to see Bourbon-Busset among these names. That family, still extant in 2026, are descendants of an illegitimate but acknowledged son of Louis de Bourbon (1432-1482), a younger son of the first Duc de Bourbon, and through him a descendant of Louis IX.
The translation from the French is my own. Images that are not my own are in the public domain; I only explicitly credit them when the uploader has made it a condition of sharing his/her work via Wikimedia Commons. Words in italics in the body of the post or bold italics in verbatim translations and image captions are in the Glossary; the royal family and other Bourbons are in the Who’s Who guides; information about the sources is in the Bibliography; all of these are in the Resources section and freely available to paid subscribers and Grandes Entrées. If you have questions, please ask in the comments.
It seems having a saint for an ancestor is enough to keep one’s line alive.