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INTRODUCTION[ix]
I.LOUIS XIV[1]
II.MME DE MAINTENON[42]
III.THE DAILY LIFE OF LOUIS XIV[69]
IV.MADAME AND MME DE MAINTENON[90]
V.THE REVIEW AT COMPIÈGNE[93]
VI.THE DEATH OF MONSEIGNEUR[106]
VII.PORTRAITS:
1.Achille de Harlay[140]
2.Mme de Castries[142]
3.Le Nostre[143]
4.Vendôme[144]
5.Vauban[146]
6.D’Antin[152]
7.Le Prince de Conti[157]
8.Le Duc et la Duchesse de Bourgogne[160]
9.Cardinal d’Estrées[172]
10.Beauvillier[177]
11.Fénelon[180]
12.Villeroy[189]
13.Le Duc d’Orléans[191]
VIII.THE ABBÉ DUBOIS AND THE SEE OF CAMBRAI[210]
APPENDIX A. The Councils and the Secretaries of State[215]
APPENDIX B. Extracts from Vauban, Projet d’une dîme royale[217]
Index of Persons mentioned in the Notes[219]
Plan of the Château de Versailles[66]

INTRODUCTION

“People who are old enough to write memoirs have usually lost their memory.” This epigrammatic remark with which a recent writer, not old enough to have lost his memory, opens his reminiscences, has considerable truth in it. Historians now recognise that “memoirs do not supply the certainty of history,” for if the writers have dim memories, they have also lively imaginations. Saint-Simon, the prince of memoir-writers, did not, it is true, begin to transcribe his memoirs till he was well past sixty, but from the age of twenty he had collected materials and made systematic notes. His memoirs were not merely the pastime of his old age but the serious business of his whole life. The result is that he has left us a picture of the Court of Versailles at the close of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth which is unsurpassed in interest. This interest is above all things human. The men and women who fill his canvas are vividly alive. With a few powerful and incisive strokes he first sketches their lineaments and then with merciless penetration proceeds to lay bare their souls. But his memoirs are also coloured by his own alert and energetic personality. They not only portray his age, but they reveal himself; to judge of the fidelity of the picture, we must know something of the man.

Saint-Simon came of an ancient stock, being descended in the direct male line from Matthieu de Rouvroy, surnamed Le Borgne, who fought at Crécy and Poitiers, and Marguerite de Saint-Simon. His immediate ancestors, a branch of the family which dropped the name of Rouvroy for that of Saint-Simon, if not exactly illustrious, followed their monarchs loyally in war and administered their estates successfully in peace. His father, Claude de Saint-Simon, who was born in 1607, chiefly owing to his address in the hunting field rose into high favour with Louis XIII, who created him a duc et pair in 1636. But he fell into disgrace soon afterwards and was ordered by Richelieu to retire from the Court to the fortress of Blaye on the Gironde, of which he was governor. His vacillating attitude on the outbreak of the Fronde made him acceptable neither to Mazarin nor to the rebellious princes, and he did not return to Paris till after the troubles were over. In 1672 he married as his second wife Charlotte de l’Aubespine, by whom he had an only son, born on January 16, 1675, and christened Louis after his royal godfather. At the age of seven, the young Vidame de Chartres, according to the custom of many noble families, was put under the charge of a governor, but his character and opinions were largely moulded by his father and mother. The latter, a highly virtuous woman of method and good sense, applied herself assiduously to the development of his mind and body. From his father he imbibed a profound antipathy for Mazarin, the families of Lorraine, Bouillon, and Rohan, and all Secretaries of State.

In December, 1691, when he was nearly seventeen, he was formally presented to the King, and enrolled as a cadet in the regiment of the Grey Musketeers. In this capacity he took part in the siege of Namur, which is the first event recorded in his memoirs. In 1693, having been given the command of a company of cavalry, he fought at Neerwinden, and at the end of the campaign bought the colonelcy of a regiment. Shortly before this he had succeeded his father as governor of Blaye and Senlis. He was only nineteen, when he gave a signal proof of his energy and of the importance which he attached to matters of precedence, by helping to organise a resistance to the claim of the Maréchal de Luxembourg to take precedence of all ducs et pairs except the Duc d’Uzès. The Dukes lost their case, largely, Saint-Simon alleges, owing to the partiality of the First President of the Parlement, Achille de Harlay.

In the following year (1695) he married Gabrielle de Durfort, the eldest daughter of the Maréchal-Duc de Lorges, a nephew of Turenne. She was a blonde with a fine complexion and figure, and being a modest and excellent woman made him an admirable wife. He on his side was a devoted husband, and he always speaks of her in his Memoirs with the greatest affection and esteem.

After the Peace of Ryswick (1697) his regiment was disbanded, and, on the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, five years later, failing to receive a nomination as Brigadier, he retired from the service on the plea of ill-health. “Voilà encore un homme qui nous quitte,” said the King, and he looked coldly on Saint-Simon in consequence. It was characteristic of the little Duke’s overweening sense of his own importance that before taking this step he held a solemn consultation with six distinguished friends, the Chancellor Pontchartrain, and five Dukes, Lorges, Durfort-Duras, Choiseul, Beauvillier, and La Rochefoucauld, of whom the first three were Marshals of France.

The loss to the army was not irremediable, and the gain to literature was immense. Henceforth Saint-Simon could devote himself with singleness of purpose to the real business of his life. It was in July, 1694, in the camp of Germersheim on the Old Rhine, that “he began to write his memoirs,” by which expression we must understand, not that he began to write a continuous narrative, but that from this time he systematised his observations and inquiries and made careful notes of the results. We learn from a letter to his friend, M. de Rancé, the famous reformer of La Trappe, that his original intention was to relate in detail all personal matters and merely to touch superficially on general events. But he soon abandoned this idea and in his account of the years immediately succeeding his retirement from the army there is little mention of himself.

His chief friends and allies at this period were all men considerably older than himself—the two inseparables, the Duc de Beauvillier and the Duc de Chevreuse, who had both married daughters of Colbert, the Maréchal de Boufflers, the Chancellor Pontchartrain, and Chamillart, the Secretary of State for War. It was through the good offices of Chamillart and Maréchal, the King’s surgeon, that “he became reconciled,” as he characteristically expresses it, with Louis XIV. But he had his enemies as well as his friends, and chief among them were the members of the coterie which, as so often happens towards the end of a long reign, the common hope of favours to come had attracted round the heir to the throne. An important member of this “Cabale de Meudon,” as Saint-Simon calls it, was the Duc de Vendôme, and when in 1708 Louis XIV made the mistake of associating his grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne, with him in the command of the army of Flanders, and dissensions arose between the two commanders, the Cabal warmly espoused Vendôme’s cause. Their unscrupulous intrigues against the Duc de Bourgogne roused the wrath of Saint-Simon, who as the ally of M. de Beauvillier, the young Prince’s former governor, was well disposed in his favour. Throughout the years 1708 and 1709 he threw himself into the contest with his accustomed vigour, and in the following year he helped to achieve a notable victory over the hated Cabal in another field, that of the marriage of the Duc de Berry, Monseigneur’s youngest son. The candidate of Monseigneur’s party was Mlle de Bourbon, while the Duchesse de Bourgogne, well served by Saint-Simon and his friends, favoured the daughter of the Duc d’Orléans. Saint-Simon’s organisation of the “Cabale de Mademoiselle” was a masterpiece of skilful intrigue, and he conducted the campaign with a passionate energy which is faithfully reflected in his narrative. When, however, the coarse and depraved character of the new Duchess revealed itself he bitterly regretted his success.

But the marriage had one beneficial, if unlooked for, result. The Duchesse de Saint-Simon, greatly against her inclination and that of her husband, was appointed lady-in-waiting to the new Duchess, and had assigned to her a set of apartments at Versailles, consisting of an antechamber and five rooms, each with a dark little cabinet opening out of it. In one of these Saint-Simon established himself with his books and his bureau de travail. It was an unrivalled post of observation, which his friends christened appropriately “his workshop.” Meanwhile his intimacy with Beauvillier and Chevreuse brought him into relations with the Duc de Bourgogne, and the only thorn in his felicity was the Cabale de Meudon, which he believed to be bent on his destruction. But from this he was delivered by the Dauphin’s death from small-pox in April, 1711. The next ten months were the happiest of his whole life at Court. His relations with the new Dauphin became more intimate, and in numerous private conversations he discussed with him projects of political reform. Then in 1712 the French Marcellus, the star of noble hopes and aspirations, followed his father to the grave. The blow hit Saint-Simon almost as hard as it did Fénelon. “The sense of my personal loss, the immeasurably greater loss of France, and above all the vanished figure of that incomparable Dauphin pierced my heart and paralysed my faculties.”