While visiting the office of the Minister of War, Louis XV saw a pair of spectacles on the table. He picked them up and said: “Let me try them, to see how good they are.”
He began to read a paper that had been left on the table with feigned neglect and immediately perceived that it was full of fatuous and flattering praise. Laughing, he put the spectacles back down and said: “No, these are much better than my own. They can really magnify things.”
Edmond Guérard, Dictionnaire encyclopédique d’anécdotes (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1872), Vol. 2, p. 435 (Nobility.org translation).
Short Stories on Honor, Chivalry, and the World of Nobility—no. 417
