Duke of Saint-Simon on Versailles

Saint-Simon’s Memoirs are a rich treasure trove of observations and critiques. He turned his forensic eye on all of the major players at Versailles, providing occasionally fierce judgements on life behind the scenes at the palace. 
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A Tattletale’s Mémoire  

Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon, was born at Versailles in January 1675. His father Claude, the first duke, had been a page and favorite of Louis XIII, who appreciated his talent as a huntsman and the fact that when he blew into his hunting horn, he did not slobber. At 16, Claude’s son became one of Louis XIV’s musketeers and joined in the Sun King’s campaigns during that monarch’s endless wars. When he was 18, his father bought him a company of cavalry at whose head he fought in the bloody battle of Neerwinden in 1693, after which he was promoted to colonel. Passed over for promotion to general a few years later, he resigned from the army. He was 27. Though he had been keeping a journal since 1694, his “Memoirs” proper begin in 1691. They end in 1723, 32 years before his death; and they paint a prodigious, personal, petulant, prejudiced portrait of a remarkable time and of the remarkable man who portrayed it.

Puny, spare, sickly, drawn, thin-lipped, sharp-nosed, nervous, choleric, stubborn, sour-tempered, Saint-Simon was an old man’s son. Claude had been almost 70 when Louis was born, and his descendant showed the wear. So did Louis’ descendants: The diarist’s daughter was deformed, his elder son feeble and the younger one, prey to terrible convulsions, may have been epileptic.

Rash in his actions and reactions, our man was subject to fierce passions, his temper and the body he called his “frail machine” recurrently wracked by outbursts of rage: He was fretful, sulky, vexed over nothings, violent in humor, intemperate, with no trace of restraint. There was no need or heed of self-control: For Saint-Simon, pride governed all. He was a noble, and for him French nobility was the greatest— essentially the only— nobility that counted in the world.

He was a duke and peer. After the king himself, after legitimate princes of the blood, only dukes counted. Dukes were a race apart, above mere “people of quality” who dared aspire to approach the king. Far greater than that of lesser folk, Saint-Simon’s pride was the pride of a duke claiming descent from Charlemagne, not of a nobleman or a mere gentleman on whose kind he looked down, as he did more vertiginously on “the vile bourgeoisie.”

There was good reason to be wary of the bourgeois. Unlike most of his contemporaries, our author saw that, throughout the reign of Louis XIV, the Third Estate had been grasping at the levers of power. Commoners had become administrators, magistrates and ministers of state who governed the land and public opinion by their command of letters, and public affairs by their control of finance.

He looked with suspicion on clerks, men of letters, the great courts of law called parliaments, the war machine of the literate plebs called the Academy. He turned baleful eyes on the materialism for which they stood, the power of money, the temptations of conspicuous consumption and on the decadence of a noble First Estate, no longer truly noble, reduced to the level of the populace except that their plebeian rivals were free to work, to trade, to earn, even to serve in the military, while nobles wallowed in idleness and nonproductiveness.

He did not detest the common people. He loved them, or he thought he loved them, paternalistically, as a lord of the Middle Ages might have: in their place, whence they should not challenge his rightful place.

He strove to realize his anachronistic pretensions, he battled, he intrigued, he failed, and his failures infuriated him. Pride turned to vanity, which we know as vexation of spirit, and to pretentiousness. Trivial pursuits became primordial: precedence, etiquette, who should salute whom first, who might sit in the king’s presence, dine at his table, keep his hat on before a duke and peer or cross the throne room in a straight line or diagonally.

His contemporary, the Marquis d’Argenson, himself a diarist, described Saint-Simon as a canting little fool full of conceit, “unjust, odious, and anthropophagous.” Had d’Argenson been able to read the “Memoirs,” he might have thought again. Or maybe not.

Gimlet-eyed concerning individuals, Saint-Simon ignores the historical events around him, perceiving political and social affairs only in terms of personalities, cliques, gestures within the narrow compass of the court.

Contemporary figures that history retains are slighted or pass unnoticed. He doesn’t seem to have heard about Saint-Evremond the essayist or Montesquieu the political philosopher. He refers to Voltaire only as the son of his father’s solicitor, exiled for impudent verse. He despises the French Academy as a place where no gentleman should venture. He deplores his great friend, the Duke of Orleans, dabbling in painting and in chemistry: fads and deprivations of a spirit “born bored,” and too blase for serious pursuits like intrigue or hunting.

In an age in which history turned around kings, queens and other exalted personalities, Saint-Simon was the compleat insider. Involved yet semi-detached, he stood at the center of the central court in Christendom, reported its doings, described its personalities and etched their settings.

Slyly droll in many comments, voluptuous when he savors vengeance, skeptical on principle, credulous when it suits his purpose, he builds his petite histoire out of the dust of history--like a termite tower, but one clad in inexhaustible verbal richness. Envy and jealousy sharpen his perceptions as they do his pen. Fury and hate chafe him. When they burst out, the basic sourness erupts in vitriol, in flames, in delirious descriptions of humiliation and revenge.

Yet this sensitivity, this propensity to intrigue, these ears and eyes ever ferreting for fuel served his curiosity and whetted his talent. So, despite his faults, he gives a wonderful picture of a certain society at a certain time; he names names and identifies personalities, achievements, flaws.

Suspecting, accusing, despising, he presses his curiosity to delve beyond the surface and beyond what’s just below the surface, to plumb hearts and motives to the marrow. Hating, he searches for chinks and weaknesses and finds them, he snuffles until he turns up a truffle: some hidden (preferably shameful) secret, a blemish or a taint.

He seldom stops to think. He does not reflect on acts or people, but he reflects them like a mirror, sometimes a deforming mirror, rapid, dry, callous, clear, zeroing in on the telling detail, sketching a vivid fresco of contemporaries, the more lifelike for being distorted by passion at times:

“Madame de Montchevreuil was a great creature, skinny, yellow, who laughed silly and showed long ugly teeth, of a formal bearing, lacking only a wand to be a perfect fairy.” About Guillaume Dubois, who would become a cardinal and first minister of the king: "[A] small thin man, cutting and mean of mien, with a blond wig and looking like a weasel. All the vices struggled in him over which one would win.”

Saint-Simon’s portraits breathe and move; whiffs of rumor, gossip and prejudice freshen the scenes, cameos and descriptions, especially of situations he has witnessed. A sermon fills two princesses with contrition; they debate penance and conclude that they will order their lackeys to fast. Old Marshal de Villeroy, “an old hand at court,” observes that you hold the chamber pot for a minister in power but empty it over his head when he’s on the skids.

Passionate himself, Saint-Simon’s writing flares coldly: subtle, often bitter, magnificently ferocious, negligent of proprieties, expressive, sensational, vital. His pen probes court society, its trivialities, its corruptions, its built-in decay. His cracks explode like firecrackers: “Smallpox made him blind in one eye, wealth made him blind in both.” “She was a real heiress: rich, ugly and sullen.” A friend’s brother is “as nasty as stupidity allows.”

This goes on for volume after volume, through 11 manuscript tomes, 98 files, countless portfolios and bundles, enough in transcript for a lifetime’s browsing even if you don’t know a thing about the age.

In the 1960s, Lucy Norton translated and edited the thousands of pages of the “Memoirs,” rendering them into three fat volumes “intended for the pleasure of the general reader.” The three volumes now on sale bear out her claim. The translation is clear, crisp and dry as a cold white wine; the English is less harsh and angular than the original French but just as distinguished, as robust, as full of verve. Specialists will go to the original; most readers of French will, too.

But the version Norton offers as “an appetizer” represents more than that: an introduction and a tribute to “things of beauty wrought no more,” which is how Marcel Proust, who loved to ramble through these pages, described Saint-Simon’s spellbinding masterpiece. — By Eugen Weber, for the Times, September 2000

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia