seven o’clock
But whosoever will burrow into the historic treasures of those days , when personal interests jostled and thwarted each other around the throne till the whole political centre of France was like a skein of tangled thread , will readily understand that the two Florentines were cats indeed , and very much in their places in a gutter . Their devotion to the person of the queen-mother , Catherine de ' Medici -- who had brought them to the court of France and foisted them into their high offices -- compelled them not to recoil before any of the consequences of their intrusion . But to explain how and why these courtiers were thus perched , it is necessary to relate a scene which had taken place an hour earlier not far from this very gutter , in that beautiful brown room of the Louvre , all that now remains to us of the apartments of Henri II. , in which after supper the courtiers had been paying court to the two queens , Catherine de ' Medici and Elizabeth of Austria , and to their son and husband King Charles IX . In those days the majority of the burghers and great lords supped at six , or at seven o'clock , but the more refined and elegant supped at eight or even nine . This repast was the dinner of to-day . Many persons erroneously believe that etiquette was invented by Louis XIV. ; on the contrary it was introduced into France by Catherine de ' Medici , who made it so severe that the Connetable de Montmorency had more difficulty in obtaining permission to enter the court of the Louvre on horseback than in winning his sword ; moreover , that unheard-of distinction was granted to him only on account of his great age . Etiquette , which was , it is true , slightly relaxed under the first two Bourbon kings , took an Oriental form under the Great Monarch , for it was introduced from the Eastern Empire , which derived it from Persia .