Galerie des Modes, 36e Cahier, 5e Figure

Duke and Peer, decorated with Orders of the King, occupying one of the first places at Court.  He is dressed in an embroidered summer suit. (1781)

This costume is a suit à la française, in the fashion of the season.  About the "orders of the king", they are: first the order of St. Esprit, consisting of a gold cross with eight points, flaming with green enamel in the middle of and topped en coeur with a silver dove, and is worn on the left side of the suit, at the same time as a wide sky-blue moiré ribbon passes over the right shoulder under the left arm, in the form of a baldric.

The second order is that of St. Louis, intended to reward military merit without the distinction of birth.  it consists of a cross with eight points, enameled with white, edged with gold, holding in the middle the image of St. Louis and suspended, for knights, from the buttonhole of the suit by a red ribbon.

At the end of the ancien régime, the peerage contained forty-nine members: five princes of the blood, six ecclesiastic peers, and thirty-eight "dukes and peers".

[This description was not original to the plate.]