The materials which Saint-Simon had accumulated for his great design were derived from many sources, written and oral. His written sources included, besides the Journal of Dangeau, numerous memoirs and histories which were his favourite reading, the great genealogical work of Père Anselme, published in 1674, the Grand Dictionnaire Historique of Moreri, which appeared in the same year, and the work of the German genealogist Imhof, Excellentium in Gallia Familiarum Genealogiae (1687), all of which no doubt had a place in his own library of 6000 volumes.
His oral sources are fairly well known to us, for he generally indicates the quarter from which he derives his information. First in importance were the three ministers, Pontchartrain, Chamillart, and Beauvillier, with all of whom he was very intimate. But both Beauvillier and Chevreuse knew how to be reticent with their young friend when occasion required, and he says that they gave him much less information than either Pontchartrain or the Maréchal de Boufflers. Another useful liaison—to use his favourite term—was that with the Duc and Duchesse de Villeroy, both of whom were great friends of Mme de Caylus, Mme de Maintenon’s cousin. The Duc was a son of the Maréchal de Villeroy and the Duchesse was a daughter of Louvois. Mme de Levis, a daughter of the Duc de Chevreuse, was also of some service, for she was intimate with Mme de Maintenon. The young Duchesse de Lorges, Mme de Saint-Simon’s sister-in-law, was a daughter of Chamillart, and her sister was married to that ardent courtier, the Duc de La Feuillade. Saint-Simon tells us that he generally ended his day with a visit to these ladies, from whom he often learnt something. More suspicious sources of information were the Maréchale de Rochefort, bedchamber-woman to the Dauphine, and friend in succession to all the royal favourites-in-chief; her daughter, Mme de Blansac; and the celebrated Lauzun who married another sister-in-law of Saint-Simon. A Gascon by birth and a farceur by temperament, he evidently enjoyed pulling his brother-in-law’s leg, and the long chapter which Saint-Simon devotes to him just before the close of the Memoirs, though full of amusing and interesting matter, must not be accepted as gospel truth.
One of the most curious figures at the Court was Mme de La Chausseraye, at one time lady-in-waiting to Madame. Thanks to her esprit and her talent for intrigue, she acquired great influence with various ministers and became very rich, losing large sums at cards, but recouping herself by the good things which the King and the Controller-General put in her way. The King was much diverted by her amusing conversation, and she declared that she had won and kept his favour by the sole method of hiding her intelligence and leaving him with a sense of his intellectual superiority. When it is added that she had also great credit with the royal valets, it may be imagined how useful she was to Saint-Simon, and how eagerly he cultivated her society. "J’étois sur elle sur un pied d’amitié et de recherche[3]." One can also imagine his feelings when many years after her death he learnt from her confessor that she had written “very curious” memoirs, but that by his advice she had committed them to the flames.
Saint-Simon’s curiosity was unbounded and he left no channel of information untapped. "Je me suis toujours instruit journellement de toutes choses par des canaux purs, directs et certains, et de toutes choses grandes et petites[4]." And among his more lowly channels were the royal valets. For, as he says, “le hasard apprend souvent par les valets les choses qu’on croit bien cachées.” He was on excellent terms with Bontemps, the King’s chief valet, who died in 1701 at the age of eighty, a man of high character, thoroughly honest and disinterested, and with Bloin, who was in the King’s service at the time of his death. Another serviceable informant, in a somewhat higher position, was Georges Maréchal, who was appointed first royal surgeon in 1703, “l’honneur et la probité même.”
Whenever any chance occasion offered of obtaining special information Saint-Simon pounced upon it with eager avidity. He describes, for instance, how he travelled from Fontainebleau to Paris with the Marquis de Louville, head of the French household of the King of Spain, and how he put so many questions to him that the poor man arrived sans voix et ne pouvant plus parler. Later he records a conversation with the Princesse des Ursins, who had also just returned from Spain. It lasted eight hours, “which seemed to him eight minutes.”
In the concluding chapter of his Memoirs he claims for them accuracy and veracity. He says that the greater part is based on his own personal experience, and that the rest comes to him at first hand from the actors in the events that he narrates. “I give their names, which, as well as my intimacy with them, are beyond all suspicion. When my information comes from a less sure source I call attention to it, and when I am ignorant, I am not ashamed to avow it.”
This claim is made in all good faith, and as far as the sources of information go it is not far from the truth. But when one goes on to inquire how Saint-Simon has dealt with his sources, the result is not quite so satisfactory. For he suffers from the three failings which are the chief sources of error in a historian. Firstly, he is careless—chiefly, indeed, about figures and dates, but he sometimes copies Dangeau incorrectly. Secondly, he is uncritical. Though he does not retail mere gossip, he readily believes current stories. The ministers, the court-ladies, the valets from whom he obtained his information may have told him what they believed to be the truth, but Saint-Simon did not cross-examine them or otherwise control their statements. Moreover, some of his witnesses are evidently untrustworthy, whether from self-interest, or whether, like Lauzun, they were given to drawing upon their own invention. Thus Saint-Simon’s account of some of the events narrated in his Memoirs has been disproved by modern criticism. The death, for instance, of Monsieur’s first wife, Henrietta of England, was certainly due to natural causes, and not, as Saint-Simon says, to poison.
The third and chief disturbing element which must be taken into account in judging of Saint-Simon’s veracity is prejudice—and that no mere ordinary prejudice, but rather a bundle of prejudices, all intensified to the height of passion. As we have seen, his father had instilled into him the dislike of certain families and of all Secretaries of State. It was probably too his father who implanted in him that excessive estimate of his importance as a duc et pair from which sprang his contempt for the whole bourgeoisie, including the noblesse de robe, and his prejudice against the monarch who chose his ministers almost exclusively from that class. It was the same aristocratic prejudice which inspired his hatred of “the widow Scarron,” and his dislike of Villars, whom as the great-grandson of a greffier he could not forgive for being made a Duke. Some, however, of his prejudices were due to nobler motives. It was Vendôme’s sloth and debauchery that blinded him to that commander’s high qualities in the field. It was his righteous indignation at the “double adultery” of Louis XIV and Mme de Montespan that filled him with hatred against their bastards. It was the scandal of the official recognition of the royal harem that still further prejudiced him against the King.
But there were also less worthy prejudices, inspired by more personal feelings. The malignant portrait of Achille de Harlay is partly a reprisal for that magistrate’s supposed partiality in the matter of Luxembourg’s dispute with his fellow dukes and peers. The estimate of the grand Dauphin might have been less contemptuous but for Saint-Simon’s enmity with that cabale de Meudon of which the Dauphin was the centre. Other portraits coloured by the passion of a strong antipathy are those of Père Tellier, the Cardinal de Bouillon, the Duc de Noailles, and the Maréchal de Villars. Blackest of all is the famous portrait of Cardinal Dubois. But though it shews evident signs of personal resentment and class prejudice, and though it has been alleged on the Cardinal’s behalf that an honest woman like Madame and a saint like Fénelon gave him their friendly esteem[5], Saint-Simon’s reading of his character may be mainly due to a deeper insight and a more searching analysis.
But Saint-Simon was a good lover as well as a good hater, and many of his portraits are coloured by the promptings of warm affection. His estimate of the Duc de Bourgogne is, as Sainte-Beuve has pointed out, more favourable than Fénelon’s. His finished picture of Cardinal d’Estrées and his slighter sketch of Cardinal Janson are admirable examples of kindly portraiture. To the Maréchal de Boufflers and to the Chancellor Pontchartrain and his wife he pays noble tributes of admiring friendship. His praise of Catinat, that able commander and disinterested patriot, reads like a page of Plutarch. Memorable too are the portraits of the two Dukes, Beauvillier and Chevreuse, for whom he reserved his deepest affection. He is not blind to their limitations or their failings, but he praises them with the sympathetic comprehension of one who, honest and high-minded himself, can appreciate these qualities to the full when they are displayed in the persons of his friends. The portrait of the Duc de Montfort, the son of his friend the Duc de Chevreuse, is a masterpiece of admiring sympathy[6].