The court of Louis XIV held talented writers, great artists, celebrated beauties, and "men and women of impeccable virtue."
Greene: "no one was more talked about than the singular Duc de Lauzun."1
The duke's qualifications for this were as follows.
He was short, "almost dwarfish."
He was "prone to the most insolent kinds of behavior."
He slept with the king's mistress.
He openly insulted other courtiers — and the king.1
And Louis XIV, the Sun King, the most status-conscious monarch in Europe:
was so beguiled by the duke's eccentricities that he could not bear his absences from the court.1
The interpretation is three sentences and unusually flat:
It was simple: The strangeness of the duke's character attracted attention. Once people were enthralled by him, they wanted him around at any cost.1
Then the generalisation:
Society craves larger-than-life figures, people who stand above the general mediocrity. Never be afraid, then, of the qualities that set you apart and draw attention to you.2
The case is doing one job in the chapter: proving that the qualities you would normally suppress — the ones that make you difficult — can be the exact qualities that secure your position.
Everything else in the chapter involves a technique. Barnum hires a man to lay bricks. Aretino chooses an elephant. Mata Hari invents a childhood. Lustig sends himself blank telegrams.
Lauzun did nothing at all.
He was short and insolent, and he behaved badly, and Greene does not suggest any of it was calculated. There is no evidence in the account that the duke was running a strategy — Greene says "the strangeness of the duke's character," which is a description of a person rather than of a method.
Which makes this the only case in Law 6 where the attention is entirely unengineered, and that is what makes it worth building. It is the chapter's control condition: it shows the raw effect operating with no technique on top of it.
The specifics matter, because they are the two things a courtier absolutely could not survive at Versailles.
He slept with the king's mistress. At Law 2 in this same build, Michael III's chief councillor was given the emperor's mistress as a gift, and Greene treats the transfer as one of four escalating concessions in a relationship that ended with the emperor's head on a pike. Access to a ruler's mistress was a matter of enormous consequence.
He insulted the king openly. At Law 4, Greene reports the Earl of Essex telling Elizabeth her "conditions were as crooked as her carcass" — "it cost him his head, which his insurrection had not cost him but for that speech."3
So the two acts here are, elsewhere in this book, the acts that get people killed.
And the duke's outcome is that the king could not bear him to be absent.
What that establishes is something narrower and more interesting than society craves larger-than-life figures. The court had one position available for a person who could not be predicted or offended into behaving, and Lauzun occupied it. Because everyone else at Versailles was performing calibrated deference, the one man who visibly was not became the only source of unmanaged reaction in the building — and for a king surrounded by people telling him what he wanted to hear, that is a scarce and valuable thing.
Which connects it directly to Louis's own technique. At Law 4, Greene documents the king's "I shall see" — silence deliberately maintained so that "no one could try to deceive him by saying what they thought he wanted to hear, because no one knew what he wanted to hear."4
Louis had engineered his court to prevent flattery and had thereby created a court that could produce nothing else. The duke was the exception, and the king's inability to bear his absence is not aesthetic delight in eccentricity. It is a man starved of unmanaged human response keeping the one person who supplied it.
You have a quality that reads as a liability in your setting — you are blunt, or odd, or visibly unwilling to perform the expected register.
The instinct, and usually the correct instinct, is to file it down.
The Lauzun case identifies the specific condition under which you should not, and it is a fact about the environment rather than about you.
Ask what your setting has too much of. Versailles had an oversupply of deference. In an environment saturated with a behaviour, the person who does not perform it is not merely different — they are supplying something genuinely scarce.
Then ask who is starved of it. The duke's position depended entirely on the king. Not on the court, which presumably found him intolerable. The value of an unmanaged response is highest to the person most insulated from unmanaged responses, which in any organisation is whoever is most senior.
And check that the quality is real. Greene's whole reading is that Lauzun's strangeness was his character. A performed version of this is a person being difficult on purpose, which reads as exactly what it is and has none of the value — the scarcity is in the authenticity, because a calculated insolence is just another calibrated performance.
The honest limit: this is a description of a niche, not a strategy. Versailles had one Lauzun and the count is not incidental. The position exists, it is singular, and it is already occupied in most rooms — and someone who mistakes an ordinary tolerance for their manner as this niche will discover the difference quickly.
Strongest support. A named figure in a well-documented court, and the sheer improbability of the outcome — the two specified acts are elsewhere in this same book the acts that end careers and lives — makes the case genuinely puzzling rather than merely illustrative.
Tension — Greene's explanation is the weakest in the chapter. "It was simple: The strangeness of the duke's character attracted attention." That describes the effect and supplies no mechanism, in a chapter that is otherwise specific about mechanisms.
Tension — the case has no technique in it, and it is filed as an instruction. "Never be afraid of the qualities that set you apart" is drawn from a man whose qualities were involuntary. The advice generalises a piece of luck.
Tension — against Law 1, hard. Never Outshine the Master. Lauzun insulted the king in public and slept with his mistress, and prospered. Greene's Law 1 has three men destroyed for far less — a party, a statue, and in Astorre Manfredi's case for merely being charming in the wrong man's presence. The book contains no account of why Lauzun is exempt.
🚩 SINGLE SOURCE · 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY — no date, no source, no specific incident; the duke's career at the French court was in fact considerably more turbulent than a two-sentence summary suggests, including a period of imprisonment that Greene does not mention. [POPULAR SOURCE].
Open questions.
Greene's Discreet Versus Overt Flattery — Law 1, built at the start of this build — instructs the subordinate to make the master appear more intelligent, to act naive, to commit harmless mistakes that create opportunities to ask for help, and to tone down wit.
Lauzun did the precise opposite of every item on that list and was indispensable.
The pair is not a contradiction so much as a market observation, and it is the most useful thing the two produce together.
Law 1's techniques are what every competent courtier at Versailles was already doing. Which means their supply was effectively infinite and their marginal value approached zero — a man performing perfect discreet flattery in a room of a hundred men performing perfect discreet flattery is invisible.
Lauzun's value was positional: he was the only unit of his kind in the market.
What the pair yields: Law 1 describes how to be safe and Law 6 describes how to be scarce, and in a saturated court the two are opposites. Greene teaches both as general rules. The reconciliation is that safety is correct when your risk is being removed, and scarcity is correct when your risk is being unnoticed — and Versailles, for most of its inhabitants, was a place where the second was the real danger.
→ behavioral-mechanics · Attention Without Discrimination
Law 6 Part I's claim is that the quality of attention is irrelevant — better to be slandered and attacked than ignored.
Lauzun is the case that most nearly proves it and, examined closely, narrows it.
He generated the worst possible kinds of attention: insolence, scandal, public insult of the sovereign. By the chapter's headline claim, all of it converted to power, which is what appears to have happened.
But the conversion ran through one observer, and the parent page has already established that the absolute holds only where audiences are fungible. Here the audience had size one and the absolute held anyway — which looks like a counterexample and is not.
The reason is that Louis XIV was not evaluating him. The king was being entertained, and entertainment does not involve judgement in the way patronage or reputation do. Lauzun was not being assessed as a courtier and found acceptable; he was being consumed as a diversion.
The insight the pair produces: indiscriminate attention converts where the observer is a consumer and fails where the observer is a judge. Barnum's ticket-buyers consumed. Victoria, in a theatre, judged — and Lola Montez was finished. Same law, same chapter, and the variable is not the size of the audience but what they are doing with you.
→ psychology · Emotional Mastery as Power Foundation
The Preface page records Greene's actual position: feel the emotion, express it carefully, never let it hold the pen on a decision.
Lauzun is the case where the governed interior appears to be entirely absent and the outcome is good, which is a problem for the Preface's rule and worth stating rather than smoothing.
Every technique in this book assumes a gap between what you feel and what you do. Lauzun's insolence reads, on Greene's own account, as ungoverned — he was not deploying rudeness, he was rude.
And that is precisely the source of its value under this page's reading. A calibrated insolence is a performance, and a court of performers can detect one. What Louis could not get anywhere else was a reaction that had not been through the governor.
The insight neither page yields alone: the governed interior is what makes you safe and what makes you interchangeable. Everyone at Versailles had one; that is what a court is. Which means the Preface's discipline has an unpriced cost that only becomes visible in a saturated environment — you are buying reliability with the same currency that buys scarcity, and you cannot hold both.
Lauzun is what the exception looks like, and Greene's inability to explain him is the tell that the book has no room for it.
Sharpest implication. Louis XIV had deliberately engineered a court in which nobody could tell him what he wanted to hear, because nobody knew what he wanted to hear — and the result was a court that could produce nothing but management. The duke's value was not his eccentricity. It was that he was the last unmanaged response in the building, and the king could not bear his absence for the same reason Hiero could not learn about his own breath from his wife: a perfectly calibrated environment stops returning information.
Generative questions.