Although during the king's formal receptions (the "Honneurs de la Cour") their sovereign origins were acknowledged in deferential prose, foreign princes were not members by hereditary right of the nation's main judicial and deliberative body, the Parlement of Paris, unless they also held a peerage; in which case, their legal precedence derived from its date of registration in that body. Their notorious disputes with ducal peers of the realm, remembered thanks to the memoirs of the duc de Saint-Simon, were due to the princes' lack of rank "" in the "Parlement", where peers (the highest tier of French nobility, mostly dukes) held precedence immediately after the "princes du sang" (or, from 4 May 1610, after the legitimised princes). Whereas at the king's table and in society generally, the prestige of the "princes étrangers" exceeded that of the ordinary peer, the dukes denied this pre-eminence, both in the Montmorency-Luxembourg lawsuit and in the "Parlement", despite the king's commands.