I hope you have enjoyed my three-part series on how you too can live like a French king. If you follow my simple guidelines, you will soon be alienating poor people and making the rest of the fabulously wealthy feel like cheap imposters.

We have covered how to build a really big house and fill it with lavish yet useless items made from ludicrously expensive materials gathered from the far corners of the world. We discussed how the decorations should only be furnished by the most overpaid of  artists, and how all of these element must be arraigned by only the snootiest of French interior decorators. We talked about how important the size of the grounds of the estate are to achieving the desired level of awe in all your visitors, and how the spirit of excessive wealth and a ‘money-is-n0-object’ mindset can be extended to every corner of your vast gardens.

But I forgot to mention the mirror room…

Louis XVI isn’t remembered as a good king. But he is remembered… as the guy who knew how to spend his money in such a manner as to make everybody else feel like small potatoes. His palace at Versailles might well be the best example of this mindset in Western history, but even in that monument to wasteful prerogative and blatant disregard for the people he was supposed to be ruling, there is still one room that stands out above all the others, not only as a showcase of just how classy Louis was, but as a memorial to the fact that you can’t really pretend to be living like a king of France unless you are completely and horrifyingly self-obsessed… And believe me, I might not know much about being rich or royal, but I do know something about being self-obsessed…

I give you Versailles’s famed ‘Hall of Mirrors’. I don’t care how big you make your big house, you are not really living like a French king unless it contains at least one big-ass hall full of mirrors.

Yes, the hall still has to have chandeliers made from so much crystal that to walk under them is to risk one’s own life. It still has to have statues… and they must be made from rare marble by the best sculptor of his day in the form of ancient gods and goddesses, with a mix of you and your family’s heads thrown on some of them, or else they must have been looted from actual  historical antiquities collections or archeological sites. It must contain priceless imported marble walls where there aren’t any mirrors, and have lots of solid gold gilding…

And of course the ceilings must still be painted, also by exceptionally talented and costly painters, in an ancient gods motif… with lots more gold just to frame it…

But don’t be stingy with the mirrors…

Your invited guests and future tourists can waste their time looking at the ceilings.

You will be much too busy admiring yourself in the mirrors to be bothered with that nonsense.

And make sure the hall of mirrors is at least as long as a football field. You know the other rich people are going to laugh at you behind your back if you try to cut corners.

And, though I hate to be repetitive, it never hurts to throw in some more art featuring you… preferably attired as an ancient emperor… riding on a horse. Everybody loves horses, as I always say.

Also, make sure the doors on either end of the hall of mirrors reflect the grandeur people are about to experience… ha… reflect the grandeur… hall of mirrors… see what I did there?

I guess it is okay to squeeze a few windows into the hall, but only to remind people that the outside of your big house is just as impressive as the inside.

And that, as they say, is that. Just follow these simple steps, and you too can live like a French king… and not just any run-of-the-mill French king… but the most awe-inspiring, despised and soon-to-have-his-head-removed of all the French kings!