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. 
—Photo source, public domain

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

Marie Antoinette’s Etiquette vs Anglomania

“For my own part, I prefer to eat lettuce salad with my fingers rather than with a fork, and Queen Marie Antoinette and other ladies of the Eighteenth century were of my way of thinking. If the ladies could only see how pretty is their gesture when their diaphanous forefinger and thumb grasps a leaf of delicate green lettuce, and raises that leaf from the porcelain plate to their rosy lips, they would all immediately take to eating salad à la Marie Antoinette.”
– Photo of Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette from Pinterest 

Anglomania in Eating 

_______________________

Some Plain Talk About the Finicky Ways of “Overly Dainty” People

The Anglo-Saxons are afraid to use their fingers to eat with, especially the English. Thanks to this hesitation, I have seen in the course of my travels in the Old World, many distressing sights. I have seen a lady attempt to eat crawfish (écrevisse) with a knife and fork, and abandon the attempt in despair. I have also seen men in the same fix. I have seen—oh, barbarous and cruel spectacle!—Anglo-Saxons, otherwise apparently civilized, cut off the points of asparagus, and eat these points only with a fork, thus leaving the best part of the vegetable on their plates. As for artichokes, they generally utterly defeat the attacks of those who trust only to the knife and fork. 

Fingers must be used for eating certain things, notably asparagus, artichokes, fruit, olives, radishes, pastry, and even small fried fish; In short, everything which will not dirty or grease the fingers may be eaten with the fingers. For my own part, I prefer to eat lettuce salad with my fingers rather than with a fork, and Queen Marie Antoinette and other ladies of the Eighteenth century were of my way of thinking. If the ladies could only see how pretty is their gesture when their diaphanous forefinger and thumb grasps a leaf of delicate green lettuce, and raises that leaf from the porcelain plate to their rosy lips, they would all immediately take to eating salad à la Marie Antoinette. Only bear in mind, good ladies, that if you do wish to eat lettuce salad with your fingers, you must mix your salad with oil and vinegar, and not with that abominable ready-made, white “salad dressing,” to look upon which is nauseating. 

May heaven preserve us from excessive Anglomania in matters of table service and eating. The English tend to complicate the eating tools far too much. They have too many forks for comfort, and the forms of them are too quaint for practical utility. Certainly silver dessert knives and forks are very good in their way, because they are not susceptible to the action of fruit acids, but it is vain and clumsy to attempt to make too exclusive use of the knife and fork in eating fruit. Don’t imitate, for instance, certain ultra-correct English damsels who eat cherries with a fork and swallow the stones because they are too modest, or rather too asinine, to set them out on to the plate. Eating is not a thing to be ashamed of. 

To thoroughly enjoy a peach you must bite it, and feel the juicy perfumed flesh melt in your mouth. But let the Anglomaniacs say what they please, there is no necessity of sticking a fork into the peach, and peeling it while so impaled, as if it were an ill-favored and foul object. A peach is as beautiful to the touch as it is to the eye; a peach held between human fingers has its beauty enhanced by the beauty of the fingers. However dainty and ornate the silver dessert knife and fork may be, it always irritates me to see people out up their peaches, or pears, or apricots, or what not, into cubes and parallelepipeds, as if dessert were a branch of conic sections. 

Imitate Marie Antoinette, ladies; use your fingers more freely: eat decently, of course, but do not be the slave of silly Anglomania or Newport crazes. To eat a pair or an apple conveniently, cut it into quarters, and peel each quarter in turn as you eat it. The  peach, too, can be cut into quarters, if the eater is timid. Apricots do not need peeling, nor plums either. Would you be bold enough to peel a fresh fig, or to touch such a delicate fruit even with the purest silver instruments? —Theodore Child in Harper’s Bazar, 1890

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

Outrageous 18th C. Fashion Etiquette

Trends in fashion etiquette, which ruled at the court of Versailles and influenced fashion beyond France, were so over-the-top outrageous, that this parody of an elaborate “hairstyle” is not too far off from some of the actual style fads of the day. Titled “The Lady’s Maid, or Toilet Headdress,” this features an anonymous woman with her hair in an overly exaggerated inverted pyramid, which fills the greater part of the hair design and is supporting a dressing-table, draped with muslin festoons and holding a large oval mirror, a pair of candlesticks, vases of flowers, a watch, a pin-cushion, toiletries, a pair of buckles, rings, a necklace, two books, a pen, small scissors and more. circa 1776 

— Source British Museum .org

Ancient Fashion Jargon 

The language of the fashion plate and the woman’s paper is sufficiently appalling to the mere man even in these days of emancipated and, we may presume, more grammatical womanhood; but, according to an extract from a fashion journal of 1787, the jargon of those days was even more astounding. 

This is how the paper described the dress of a certain Mlle. D. at the opera: “She appeared in a dress of ‘stifled sighs,’ ornamented with ‘superfluous regrets,’ the bodice cut in a ‘perfect candor’ point and trimmed with ‘indiscreet complaints.’ Her hair was dressed in ‘sustained sentiments,’ with a headdress of ‘sustained conquest,’ ornamented with several ‘flyaways’ and ‘downcast eye’ ribbons, and her collar was ‘beggar on horseback’ color.”

No doubt all these marvelous terms conveyed some meaning to the fashionable woman of the days when French society danced on the edge of the volcano of 1789, but to their descendants of today, they have absolutely no meaning. — San Bernardino Sun, 1908

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

Etiquette and Food of Louis XV

He who receives friends and pays no attention to the repast prepared for them, is not fit to have friends.

Dining in the Reign of Louis XV

Louis XV of France's reign, from 1723-1774, managed to bridge the dazzling opulence of his predecessor to the tragic exorbitance of his successor. Reflecting changes during his reign, were the culinary offerings of the kitchen of Louis VX.

According to The Physiology of Taste, by Brillat-Savarin, in 1825, “The reign of Louis XV was no less happy for gastronomy. Eighteen years of peace healed painlessly the wounds made by more than sixty years of war; wealth created by industry, and either spread out by commerce or acquired by its tradesmen, made former financial inequalities disappear, and the spirit of conviviality invaded every class of society. It is during this period that there was generally established more orderliness in the meals, more cleanliness and elegance, and those various refinements of service which, having increased steadily until our own time, threaten now to overstep all limits and lead us to the point of ridicule.”

The French born, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, gained his fame as an epicure and gastronome and helped found the genre of the gastronomic essay. He made famous the aphorism, "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are." He believed that food defined a nation and wrote of the food in the reign of Louis XV. 

A Samplng of Brillat-Savarin's French Food Etiquette of the Era:

•  A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye.

• A cook may be taught, but a man who can roast, is born with the faculty.

•  The most indispensable quality of a good cook is promptness. It should also be that of the guests.

• To wait too long for a dilatory guest, shows disrespect to those who are punctual.

• He who receives friends and pays no attention to the repast prepared for them, is not fit to have friends.

• The mistress of the house should always be certain that the coffee be excellent; the master that his liquors be of the first quality.

• To invite a person to your house is to take charge of his happiness as long as he be beneath your roof.

And a 1740 Sample Menu for Ten

• 1st course: the bouilli (meat with its broth); an entree of veal cooked in its own juice; an hors d'oeuvre.

• 2nd course: a turkey; a plate of vegetables; a salad; a creamy pudding 

• Dessert: some cheese; some fruit; a jar of preserves.

• Plates were exchanged only three times, after the soup, at the second course, and for dessert. 

• Coffee was very rarely served, but quite often there was a cordial made from cherries or garden pink, still something of a novelty then.

“Supper” was was not the main meal of the day, but a meal served later in the evening.

Supper eaten by Louis XV at the Chateau in September of 1755

The Soups

• Two oilles: One of large onions, One a l'espagnole
• Two potages: One de sante, One of turnip puree

The Entrees

• Small pies a la balaquine, Rabbit fillets a la Genevoise, Filet mignon of Mutton with sauce piquant, Fillets of Pheasant en matelote, Quails with bay leaves, Turtle doves a la vinitienne, Partridges a l'ancient salmy, Small garnished Pigeons, Blanquette of Fowls with truffles, Marinade of Campines, Fowl wings en hatelets, Leg of Veal glazed with its own juice, Minced game a la turque, Sweetbreads St. Menehould, Rouen Ducklings with orange, Halicot with dark veloute sauce.

Four Releves

• Roast Mutton of Choisy, Rump of Beef a l'ecarlate, Sirloin, minced with chicory, Caux Fowls with raw onion

Four Main Entremets

• Pheasant pie, Jambon de Perdrouillet, Brioche, Croquante

Two Medium Entremets — Roasts

• Small chickens, Campines, Ortolans, Thrushes, Guignards, Red-leg Partridges, Pheasants, Rouen Duckling

Sixteen Small Entremets

• A Coffee Cream, Artichokes a la galigoure, Cardoons a l'essence, Cauliflower with Parmesan, Eggs with partridge gravy, Truffles a la cendre, Spinach with gravy, Cocks' crests, Animelles, Green beans with verjuice, Ham omelette, Turkey legs a la duxelles, Mixed ragout, Chocolate profiterolles, Small jalousies, Creme a la genest.

 

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

An Etiquette Problem at Versailles

"Reception of Condé in Versailles"—  Depiction of the great Escalier des Ambassadeurs, in Versailles of 1674, when Louis XIV welcomed the Grand Condé, who has just defeated William of Orange in the battle of Seneffe. This event marked the end of almost fifteen years of exile for the Grand Condé, which had been designed by the king to punish "his cousin" for leading the Fronde against the monarchy.

Painfully Ill from the Etiquette at Versailles?

'The royal court of France used to be a great place for etiquette. Louis XIV once caught a severe cold owing to the fact that on his arising from his bed one cold morning, the lord of the chamber, whose duty it was to hand him his shirt, happened to be absent. Not one of the numerous courtiers present had the courage to trangress etiquette by handing the garment to the shivering monarch."—London Scrap Book, 1908

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

Etiquette and Louis XV's Court Dance

Dancing the minuet– The minuet became a most fashionable dance in the 17th and 18th centuries.

An 18th century formal ball was one of the very limited opportunities at which a young lady could increase her chances of meeting suitors and finding a husband. A complete knowledge of etiquette and social codes, along with a graceful carriage and fine dress, was necessary to making the most advantageous match.

“Delighted with the minuet, Louis XV made it the special dance of the French royal court— and it was at court that the dance acquired it's exquisite grace and beauty.” –Lillian Eichler

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

Etiquette and French Civilitiés

Swallowing wine too rapidly, one may choke himself, “which is impolite and inconvenient.” 

In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries in France there were books which gave the rules of conduct. These books of etiquette were known as the Civilitiés. They are occupied to a great extent with the civilities of the table, and one may see in them precisely how Paris dined in the 17th and 18th centuries.

At the close of the 17th century it still seemed necessary to remind the host he must not chastise his servants at table, and the guest that if he swallows his wine too rapidly he may choke himself, "which is impolite and inconvenient." According to the Civilités you sat down to table with your hat on, removing it only if your health is toasted "by a person of quality." And how, we wonder, did they judge these "persons of quality"? 

Every Civilité of the 17th and 18th centuries enjoins you to go to dinner with your hands clean. Apparently there is only one towel, for the Civilité requests that "a dry corner be left for the person who is to use it afterward." 

Furthermore the Civilité extorts the man of polish not to scratch himself in company, not to snuff the candle with his fingers, not to blow in his soup, not to return the meat to the dish after smelling it, not to talk with his mouthful, not to pocket the fruit at dessert. These rules of conduct give us an excellent insight into what social life must have been like in the 17th century. Civilités warned the people only against those things they actually did, those habits and customs which actually existed. — Lillian Eichler 

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

Etiquette at Versailles ~A Victorian View

Men's high heeled shoes, tights and garters, all helped to show off their muscular calves which was very fashionable for the day ~ Louis XIV, also known as the "Sun King", (reigning from 1643–1715, one of the longest reigning monarchs in history), decreed, among other oddities, that only nobility could wear heels that were coloured red, and that no one’s heels could be higher than his own.

A Victorian Era Take on the French Royal Court: In the First Quarter of the 18th Century

The tension of the struggle which the previous century had witnessed was withdrawn, and society sprang back with the recoil to a light-hearted gayety, unlike our national earnestness.

The nation took its ease from grave pursuits. Life retained a little of the adventurous. Men had wealth to gratify and leisure to cultivate new tastes; they acquired literary reputations as amateurs or critics. The club and coffee house, the newspaper, the bookseller and publisher, proclaimed the rise of an idle class and a reading public, and heralded the time when plebeian genius no longer needed a patrician Maecenas.

Moral and metaphysical inquiry was the chief stimulus to thought, as faction was to energy. A new premium was set on the acts of society when women became a power, and when the difference between the tie-wig and the full-bottom or the upset of a teacup was fraught with the fate of an empire. The romance of life was concentrated on the pursuit of gallantry.

At Versailles, artificial manners and strict etiquette were combined with loose conduct.

Pope was never more truly the mirror of his own times than when he threw all the passion of which he was capable into the love epistle of Eloisa. Moral refinement fell hopelessly behind advancing civilization. As at Versailles, artificial manners and strict etiquette were combined with loose conduct. It was not 'til decorum was outraged that the moral law was considered. Unless misconduct sinned against taste it was hardly regarded as an offense but at Versailles vice was draped with all the grace and painted with every allurement which civilization could supply.

At St. James's she was sufficiently brazen to move without a blush for her nakedness, and society imitated the coarseness of the Court. Over the social and political memoirs of the day is shed the charm of that class of French literature; there is the same incongruous juxtaposition of serious and gay, politics and scandal, combined with something of the same neatness and finish of mind that touches lightly the light things of society, and something of the same sprightly wit and sparkling epigrams to temper the despotism of the Whig aristocracy. 

                                    

The Dog Barber~ For sport hunting, specially designed enclosures for accomodating dogs (according to the type of game they hunted), kennels at Chantilly also housed not only all of the various valets needed, but a bakery too.

Poetry shared in the same lack of enthusiasm. It was the poetical age of reason. It was still the fashion for men of letters to appear before the public in verse, but prose was usurping the place of poetry. Artistic elegance and scholarly form replaced the varied fancy, the exuberant imagination of the older English school. Poetry subsided into an argumentative, didactic, useful character. It grew classical and courtly, embellished familiar objects and every-day events. But it ceased to be "intellectual opium eating." It was kept in touch with all the movements of the day, scientific, political, religious, social.

And this picture of contemporary life was not conveyed through any literary medium. The generation which placed Roman heroes on the stage in perruques and buckles, or adorned the hand that wrote upon the wall at Belshazzar's feast with ring and ruffle, did not seek the disguise of classical or mediaeval costume. Its active interests were represented in a simple straightforward style in the ordinary dress of the day. The sublimity and greatness of poetry disappeared, but it was instinct with natural life. 

The Edinburgh Review, 1884

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura Graber, is the Efitor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia