In most respects, most of us probably have a considerably higher standard of living than Marie Antoniette, simply because of what technological advancement has provided us with.

e.g.

https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/the-timaru-herald/20160530/281784218342032

Ver­sailles stank. Not just the bod­ily tang one might ex­pect 200 years be­fore the in­ven­tion of de­odor­ant (that was 1888: a paste ap­plied to the un­der­arms), but a rank stench that per­me­ated every room, every cor­ri­dor, and wafted over the gar­dens.

‘‘I shall never get over the dirt of this coun­try,’’ sniffed Ho­race Walpole on a visit to France.

Ver­sailles, the cen­tre of French po­lit­i­cal power from 1682, had more than 700 rooms but no func­tion­ing loos un­til 1768. By the time of the revo­lu­tion, there were still only nine bath­rooms, all in the pri­vate royal apart­ments. The con­tents of cham­ber pots were of­ten sim­ply flung out of the win­dows.

The royal dogs were not house­trained but nor were the courtiers and their ser­vants who crammed into the build­ing. The re­sult was a lava­to­rial free-for-all, from which no cor­ner of the palace was spared.

‘‘Ver­sailles was a vast cesspool,’’ wrote one his­to­rian. ‘‘The odour clung to clothes, wigs, even un­der­gar­ments. Beg­gars, ser­vants, and aris­to­cratic vis­i­tors alike used the stairs, the cor­ri­dors, any out-of-the-way place, to re­lieve them­selves.’’

For Louis XIV and his later im­i­ta­tors, ar­chi­tec­ture was pol­i­tics, a way to over­awe ri­vals for power - no­bil­ity, princes and lawyers - and fo­cus at­ten­tion ex­clu­sively on the ruler. But while Ver­sailles looked mag­nif­i­cent from the out­side, on the in­side it was over­crowded, smelly and in­fested with ver­min.

Most of us probably wouldn't readily tolerate living like that.

French royalty could, no doubt, have live musicians or actors performing works that they want. But on the other hand, we have a vast digital library of video and audio of such scope and content...they could only comprehend them as dreams brought to life, created with resources well beyond what they could afford, because we have spread the costs over many and provided the output to many.

We can eat food from around the world in any season.

If I want the air in my living space to be chilly in summer, I can do so.

There are definitely some services that I'm sure that French royalty could avail themselves of that we cannot. But I think that it's easy to lose perspective of how staggering the increases of standard-of-living have been over a couple of centuries.