Selections from Saint-Simon

by duc de Louis de Rouvroy Saint-Simon

Two years later he refers in melancholy accents to his changed position. Chevreuse, Beauvillier, and Boufflers were dead, Pontchartrain had retired from office, Chamillart was in disgrace. The one link left to him with the Court was the Duc d’Orléans, who by the death of the Duc de Berry in May, 1714, was marked out as the future regent of the kingdom. In spite of his unpopularity Saint-Simon, who had for some years now been on friendly terms with him, drew to him more closely. He reprobated his licentious and scandalous life, but he defended him against the false accusations of his enemies, and effectively countermined the intrigues of the party that was plotting against him in favour of the Duc du Maine.

On Louis XIV’s death it was partly owing to Saint-Simon’s vehement and energetic insistence that Orléans roused himself from his habitual indolence and persuaded the Parlement to set aside the testament of the late King, which, while it conferred on him the Regency, had put the real power in the hands of the Duc du Maine. Saint-Simon was made a member of the Council of Regency, and the introduction of departmental Councils, in place of the Secretaries of State, was more or less in accord with his own proposals.

The new form of administration, however, was not a success and after a trial of two years was abandoned. Nor did Saint-Simon himself shew any political capacity. He was wanting in tact and adaptability, and worse than this he frittered away on futile questions of precedence and etiquette the time and energy that might have been given to really important matters. Such influence as he had with the Regent came to an end with the rise to power of Dubois, who gladly furthered his request to be sent on a special mission to Spain (1721).

On the death of the Regent (1722) he left the Court and lived for some time with his family in a house which he rented in the Rue Saint-Dominique. But after the marriage of his two sons he resided for at least half the year at his château of La Ferté-Vidame, about 30 miles north-west of Chartres. The château itself, which, as we know from engravings, had the air of a feudal fortress, and in every room of which hung a portrait of Louis XIII, no longer exists. But the park, enclosed by a wall of nearly nine miles, and the forest beyond have preserved their original character.

Here Saint-Simon began and completed the definitive version of his Memoirs, and here in 1743, to his overwhelming grief, he lost his wife, his faithful companion of nearly fifty years. Other misfortunes followed; his two sons preceded him to the grave, and he was driven by his debts to make over the whole of his property to his creditors. He died at Paris in 1755 at the age of eighty. The lives of his father and himself cover between them nearly a century and a half.

Saint-Simon, as we see him in Rigaud’s portrait, was small and delicate—a typical old man’s child—with an extremely alert and eager face. It has been observed that he is seldom mentioned in contemporary memoirs, but these are not numerous for the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV, while three of the chief memoir-writers of the Regency, when Saint-Simon was most prominent, Barbier, Buvat, and Marais, did not belong to Court circles. When he is mentioned it is in no complimentary terms. D’Argenson attacks him for advocating severe measures against the Duc du Maine after the conspiracy of Cellamare. “Mark,” he says, "the odious and bloodthirsty character (anthropophage) of this little saint without genius." But then Saint-Simon in his on the whole highly favourable portrait of D’Argenson’s father, the celebrated head of the Paris police, had said that his character was supple, and that his terrifying appearance resembled that of the three judges of Hades.

It was inevitable that Saint-Simon’s irascibility, intractability, and aristocratic pretensions should arouse considerable enmity, and in the songs and satires of the day he is attacked under the name of boudrillon (bout d’homme) and petit furibond. Mme de Maintenon declared that he was “glorieux, frondeur et plein de vues,” and we have an interesting commentary on this remark in his report of a conversation which took place between the Duchesse de Bourgogne and his wife. The Duchess told her that he had many powerful enemies and that the King had conceived a strong prejudice against him. His intelligence, she said, and his knowledge and capacity for ideas were recognised as far above the ordinary, but everybody was afraid of him, and they could not endure his arrogance and his outspoken criticisms on persons and institutions.

These criticisms would have been more valuable if they had been less concerned with futilities, and less biased by aristocratic prejudices. But Saint-Simon was at heart a true patriot, and was keenly alive to the evils which were sapping the forces of his country. He agreed with reformers like Fénelon and Chevreuse and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre in regarding the absolutism of the King as the chief source of danger, and he shared their dislike of the Controller-General and the four Secretaries of State as the agents of this absolutism. He strongly reprobated the King’s love of war and glory, and the boundless extravagance, which he not only practised himself but encouraged in others. Like La Bruyère and Fénelon, Saint-Simon saw with a compassionate eye the wide-spread misery by which all this glory and magnificence was purchased. He has drawn a moving picture of the terrible winter of 1708-1709, when famine stalked through the land and crushing taxation on the top of high prices “completed the devastation of France.”

Mme de Maintenon further complained that he was “plein de vues,” by which she doubtless meant much the same thing as Louis XIV, when he called Fénelon chimerical. For in Saint-Simon’s schemes for reform, as in Fénelon’s, there was a strong Utopian element, which did not sufficiently take into account the hard facts of political life and the shortcomings of human nature. They both looked back too fondly on the past, they both exaggerated the value of the nobles and the Estates General—Saint-Simon laying more stress on the former, Fénelon on the latter—as checks to absolutism. That there should be a certain similarity between their ideas is only to be expected, for though they were not personally acquainted, they had a common link in the Duc de Bourgogne, and it was just at the time that Saint-Simon was having frequent conferences with the latter that his two great friends, the Duc de Beauvillier and the Duc de Chevreuse, held long conversations on affairs of state with Fénelon at Chaulnes (November, 1711). From the conferences of Saint-Simon and the Duc de Bourgogne sprang the Projets de gouvernement, the manuscript of which was found among Saint-Simon’s papers, and which is undoubtedly from his pen. The conversations at Chaulnes were summarised in the series of short maxims, known as the Tables de Chaulnes, which represent Fénelon’s nearest approach to practical politics.

However deserving of consideration Saint-Simon’s views may have been, his insistence on them in season and out of season cannot have helped to commend them or to make him popular at Court. In his old age he is said to have been a delightful talker, but at Versailles he must have sometimes proved an intolerable bore. “Il faut tenir votre langue,” said Louis XIV to him when he accepted the appointment for his wife. One wonders at the patience with which the Duke of Orleans endured his moral lectures and political disquisitions. But the Duke was too indolent to escape them, and while he must have derived considerable amusement from the peculiarities of his friend’s character he evidently appreciated his transparent honesty. For with all his faults and prejudices, his vanity, his hate, and his vindictiveness, Saint-Simon was essentially honest. It is true that in his intercourse with some men, as for instance Père Tellier, the Duc de Noailles, and Cardinal Dubois, he did not act up to the character which he claims for himself of “droit, franc, libre, naturel, et beaucoup trop simple,” but if his curiosity and thirst for information led him sometimes to assume a friendliness which he did not feel, or if in the slippery days of the Regency he had to meet duplicity with duplicity, he was honest at heart, and he had no lack of moral courage.