Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon
Louis de Rouvroy, duc de
Saint-Simon (January 16, 1675 – March 2, 1755), French
soldier,
diplomatist and writer of memoirs, was born in Paris
(Hôtel
Selvois, 6 rue Taranne, today at 175 Bd. Saint-Germain). The
dukedom-
peerage granted to his
father,
Claude de
Saint-Simon (1608-1693), is a central fact in his
history.
Peerage
No one was made a peer who was not a nobleman, but men of the
noblest blood might not be, and in most cases were not, peers.
Derived at
least traditionally and imaginatively from the douze pairs
of Charlemagne, the peers were supposed
to represent the chosen of the noblesse, and gradually
became associated with the parliament of Paris as a
quasi-legislative (or at least law-registering) and directly
judicial body. The peerage was further complicated by the
fact that not persons but the holders of certain fiefs were made
peers. Strictly speaking, Saint-Simon was not made a peer, but his
estate was raised to the rank of a
duché-pairie. The peers were, in a way,
representative of the entire body of the Nobility, and it was
Saint-Simon's lifelong ideal to convert them into a sort of great
council of the nation.
The family's main castle, where the
Memoirs were written,
was the castle of La Ferté-Vidame, bought by duke Claude shortly
after being awarded his dukedom. The castle brought with it the
title of
vidame de Chartres. It was a rare title ; in the
Middle Ages a vidame commanded the military forces of a bishop and
performed other feudal duties unsuitable for a man of the Church.
Over time, seven of these titles relating to some of the larger
dioceses became attached to specific
properties and usable as titles by the owner. An earlier Vidame of
Chartres (not related) had been a famous intriguer and participant
in the
Wars of Religion on
the Huguenot side, which still cast something of a shadow over the
title in Saint-Simon's day. Rather oddly, the title was given to an
elderly character in the court novel
La Princesse de Clèves published
in 1678, three years after Saint-Simon was born. Since he himself
went by this title until he was eighteen, it may have been the
subject of jokes.
Life
His father was a tall and taciturn man who was keen on hunting.
Saint-Simon, was the opposite, garrulous, exceptionally short, and
preferred to live indoors. His father had become a minor
favourite of
Louis XIII,
who was addicted to hunting. Louis made him his Master of
Wolfhounds and then gave him a Dukedom when relatively young; he
was 68 when Saint-Simon was born. Saint-Simon was high up the order
of
precedence among the Dukes, but many
of them were higher, in terms of ancestry and wealth.
His mother, Charlotte de L'Aubespine, belonged to a family which
had been distinguished in the public service at least since the
time of
Francis I. Her son Louis
was well educated, to a great extent by herself, and he had for
godfather and godmother
Louis
XIV and Queen
Marie
Thérèse. After some tuition by the
Jesuits, he joined the
mousquetaires gris in
1692.
He
was present at the 1692 siege of Namur
, and the battle of Neerwinden.
Then he began the crusade of his life by instigating an action on
the part of the peers of France against
François-Henri
de Montmorency, duc de Luxembourg, his victorious general, on a
point of precedence.
He fought another campaign or two (not under Luxembourg), and in
1695 married Gabrielle de Durfort, daughter of
Guy Aldonce de Durfort de
Lorges, a marshal who had commanded him. He seemed to have
regarded her with a respect and affection unusual between husband
and wife at the time; and she sometimes succeeded in modifying his
aristocratic ideas. As he did not receive the promotion he desired,
he flung up his commission in 1702. Thus Louis XIV took a dislike
to him, and he kept his place at court only with difficulty. He
was, however, intensely interested in all the transactions of
Versailles, and kept a collection of
informers ranging from dukes to servants, who gave him the
extraordinary secret information which he has handed down.
Saint-Simon's own part appears to have been entirely subordinate.
He was
appointed ambassador to Rome
in 1705, but
the appointment was cancelled before he started. At last he
attached himself to
Philippe
II of Orléans, Louis XIV's nephew and the future Regent. Though
this was hardly likely to conciliate Louis, it gave him at least
the status of belonging to a definite party and it eventually
placed him in the position of friend to the acting Chief of State.
He also was attached to
Louis, duke of
Burgundy, the Dauphin's son and next heir to the throne.
Saint-Simon hated "the bastards," the illegitimate children of
Louis XIV. It does not appear that this hatred was founded on moral
reasons or fear that these bastards would be intruded into the
succession. The true cause of his wrath was that, by Royal fiat,
they had ceremonial precedence over the peers. The Saint-Simon that
is revealed through the Mémoires had many enemies, and had a deep
hatred against many courtiers. However, it should be remembered
that the Mémoires were written 30 years after the facts, by a
disappointed man, and that Saint-Simon as a courtier had lived on
very polite and friendly terms with most.
The death of Louis XIV seemed to give Saint-Simon a chance of
realizing his hopes. The duke of Orléans was at once acknowledged
Regent and Saint-Simon placed on the council of regency. But no
steps were taken to carry out his favourite vision of a France
ruled by the nobility, and he had little real influence with the
Regent.
He
was gratified by the degradation of "the bastards," and, in 1721,
he was appointed special ambassador to Spain
to arrange
for the marriage (which never took place) of Louis XV and Infanta Mariana Victoria of Spain.
There he and his second son received the
grandeeship, and, though he also caught
smallpox, he was quite satisfied with the business:
he could now hope for two lineages of dukes (a grandee was
recognised in France as duke). Saint-Simon was not eager, as most
other nobility, to acquire profitable functions, and he did not use
his influence to repair his finances, even further ruined by the
magnificence of his embassy.
After his return he had little to do with public affairs. His own
account of the cessation of his intimacy with Orléans and
Guillaume Dubois, the latter of whom had
never been his friend, is, like his account of some other events of
his own life, rather vague and obscure. But there can be little
doubt that he was eclipsed, and even expelled from the Meudon
castle by Dubois. He survived for more than thirty years; but
little is known of his life. His wife died in 1743, his eldest son
a little later; he had other family troubles, and he was loaded
with debt. When he died, at Paris on 2 March 1755, he had almost
entirely outlived his own generation and the prosperity of his
house, though not its notoriety. This last was in strange fashion
revived by a distant relative born five years after his own death,
Claude
Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon – the founder of
Socialism. All his possessions, including
his writings, were seized by the State on his death, and a large
part of his Memoirs is missing.
Fame as a writer
It could be said that the actual events of Saint-Simon's life, long
as it was and high as was his position, are neither numerous nor
noteworthy. Yet he posthumously acquired great literary fame. He
was an indefatigable writer, and he began very early to write down
all the gossip he collected, all his interminable legal disputes of
precedence, and a vast mass of unclassified matter. Most of his
manuscripts came into the possession of the government, and it was
long before their contents were fully published. Partly in the form
of notes on
Marquis de Dangeau's
Journal, partly in that of original and independent
memoirs, partly in scattered and multifarious tracts, he had
committed to paper an immense amount of matter.
Saint-Simon's memoirs display a striking voice. On the one hand, he
is petty, unjust to private enemies and to those who espoused
public parties with which he did not agree, and an omnivorous
gossip. Yet he shows a great skill for narrative and for
character-drawing. He has been compared to
Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, and to
historians such as
Livy. He is at the same time
not a writer who can be "sampled" easily, inasmuch as his most
characteristic passages sometimes occur in the midst of long
stretches of quite uninteresting matter. His vocabulary was extreme
and inventive; among other words he is supposed to provide the
first use of "intellectual" as a noun.
A few critical studies of him, especially those of
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve,
are the basis of much that has been written about him. His most
famous passages, such as the account of the death of the dauphin,
or of the
Bed of Justice where his
enemy,
Louis-Auguste de Bourbon,
duc du Maine, was degraded, do not give a fair idea of his
talent. These are his gallery pieces, his great "engines," as
French art slang calls them. Much more noteworthy as well as more
frequent are the sudden touches which he gives. The bishops are
"
cuistres violets" (purple pedants);
M. de Caumartin "
porte sous son manteau
toute la faculté que M. de Villeroy étale sur son baudrier"
(holds under his cloak all the power that M. de Villeroy displays
on his sheath); another politician has a "
mine de chat
fâché" (appearance of a disgruntled cat). In short, the
interest of the Memoirs is in the novel and adroit use of word and
phrase.
He had a decisive influence on writers like
Tolstoy,
Barbey
d' Aurevilly,
Flaubert,
Valle-Inclán,
Proust,
Mujica
Láinez, and many others.
Bibliography
Extensive publication of Saint-Simon's Memoirs did not proceed
until the 1820s. The first and greatest critical edition was in the
Grands écrivains
de la France series. The most accessible modern edition
consists of nine volumes in the
Bibliothèque de la
Pléïade.
English-language translations of the Memoirs
There are a number of English-language translations of
selections of the
Memoirs:
- Memoirs on the Reign of Louis XIV, and the Regency.
Abridged by Bayle St. John. London: Chapman, 1857.
- The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon on the reign of
Louis XIV, and the Regency. 2nd edition. 3 volumes. Translated
by Bayle St. John. London: Swan, Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1888.
- Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon on the Times of Louis XIV
and the Regency. Translated and abridged by Katharine Prescott
Wormeley. Boston: Hardy, Pratt, 1902.
- Louis XIV at Versailles: A Selection from the Memoirs of
the duc de Saint-Simon. Translated and edited by Desmond
Flower. London: Cassell, 1954.
- The Age of Magnificence: The Memoirs of the Duke de
Saint-Simon. Edited and translated by Sanche de Gramont. New
York: Putnam, 1963.
- Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. Edited by W.H.
Lewis. Translated by Bayle St. John. London: B.T. Batsford,
1964.
- Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, volume 1
1691-1709. Edited and translated by Lucy Norton. London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1967.
- Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, volume 2
1710-1715. Edited and translated by Lucy Norton. London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1968.
- Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, volume 3
1715-1723. Edited and translated by Lucy Norton. London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1972.
- Saint-Simon at Versailles. Edited and translated by
Lucy Norton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980. Includes selections
which are omitted from the three longer volumes, which
together include about 40% of the whole work.
Studies of the Memoirs (in English)
- Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1953. Chapter 16 "The Interrupted Supper"
- Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Saint-Simon and the Court of
Louis XIV. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ISBN
0226473201
- De Ley, Herbert. Saint-Simon Memorialist. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1975.
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