To these two classes of favourable and unfavourable portraits, the former softened by affection, the latter exaggerated by hate, must be added a large number of portraits in which good and bad are intermingled, and which bear throughout the stamp of an impartial estimate. One of the finest of these is the Prince de Conti; less elaborate but hardly less skilful is the Cardinal de Rohan. But the palm for this class of portrait must be awarded to that of the Duke of Orleans. As one of the protagonists in Saint-Simon’s drama he is naturally a prominent figure and the general impression that we get of his character is deepened by numerous touches. But just before the close of Louis XIV’s reign he is presented in a long and leisurely digression, which forms one of the great chapters in Saint-Simon’s narrative. At the other end of the scale to this full-length and elaborately drawn portrait are the little miniatures of minor personages with which the work is interspersed. Among the most notable are Mme de Castries, the Duchesse de Gesvres, M. du Guet, Le Haquais, Toussaint Rose, one of the King’s secretaries, and Bontemps, his chief valet.
But whether the portraits are finished works of art or mere sketches, whether they are inspired by hatred or by admiration, whether they are partial or impartial, they all alike have this virtue that they are intensely alive. We know the originals both in their outward semblance and in their inmost being. While Racine is concerned only with souls, while La Bruyère’s main interest is in habits and manners as an index to character, Saint-Simon, who began his survey of humanity just before his two older contemporaries finished theirs, gives us body and soul alike. In this he resembles Balzac, but he has this advantage over the great novelist that dealing with real men and women, and not with the creatures of his imagination, he is never tempted to make the outward appearance match the inner character. Nor, as superficial judges are apt to do in real life, does he hastily infer the character from the outward appearance. He deals with both on their merits; he first calls up before us the outward man, and then he gives us his character from an independent study of his idiosyncrasies and actions. “The features of the portrait,” to borrow Montaigne’s phrase, “may go astray,” but we have before us a living man, drawn by a supreme artist. Thus the whole work, if not like Balzac’s, a complete comédie humaine, may be fitly called the Comédie de Versailles.
For Saint-Simon does not merely give us living men and women, he shews them to us in action, he reproduces their movements, their gestures, their tricks of speech. There is nothing more wonderful in the whole of French literature than his account of the spectacle de Versailles after the death of Monseigneur. It is not in the literal sense a drama, for it lacks a plot to give it unity, but it is a superb dramatic tableau, glowing with life and throbbing with a passionate intensity.
The best commentary on this comedy is La Bruyère’s chapter On the Court, the essence of which is distilled in the following passage:
Il y a un pays où les joies sont visibles, mais fausses; et les chagrins cachés, mais réels. Qui croirait que l’empressement pour les spectacles, que les éclats et les applaudissements aux théâtres de Molière et d’Arlequin, les repas, la chasse, les ballets, les carrousels, couvrissent tant d’inquiétudes, de soins et de divers intérêts, tant de craintes et d’espérances, de passions si vives et des affaires si sérieuses?
When La Bruyère printed this remarque in the first edition of Les Caractères (1688), the Court of Louis XIV, partly under the influence of Mme de Maintenon and partly as the result of the King’s serious illness in 1686, had begun to wear that aspect of seriousness and gloom which overshadowed it during the remaining years of the reign. The conversion of the King to the regular observance of Catholic practices, and the general atmosphere of piety which this conversion diffused shewed itself in various ways, and amongst others in the repression of pleasures to which with advancing years he was becoming less inclined. In the very year 1694 in which Saint-Simon began to make notes for his Memoirs Bossuet attacked the stage in his well-known Maximes et Réflexions sur la Comédie. In 1696 the police made a sudden descent on the Hôtel de Bourgogne and summarily suppressed the Italian actors. From this time for many years the only theatre in Paris was the Comédie Française.
Versailles became more and more serious and gloomy. “La vie de la cour est un jeu sérieux, mélancolique,” says La Bruyère in the remarque which follows that quoted above. A far worse feature was the inevitable growth of hypocrisy. “Un (faux) dévot est celui qui, sous un roi athée, serait athée.” A good story in illustration of this hypocrisy is told by Saint-Simon. On Thursday and Sunday evenings during the winter it was the King’s habit to attend the service of benediction in the chapel at Versailles, which in consequence was always filled with the ladies of the Court. But, if it became known that the King was not going to attend, the chapel was nearly empty. One evening M. de Brissac, major of the body-guard, an honest man who hated shams, came into the chapel just before the service and announced that His Majesty was not coming, whereupon all the ladies except three or four quietly withdrew, and when the King arrived he was much surprised to find the chapel empty. On Brissac’s telling him after the service what had happened, he laughed heartily, but the ladies, says Saint-Simon, would gladly have strangled Brissac. This anecdote well illustrates the hypocrisy of the age. Beneath the outward veneer of piety free thought and immorality reigned unchecked. Memoirs, letters, and sermons all confirm the truth of Saint-Simon’s picture. In his funeral oration on the Prince de Conti, who died in 1707, Massillon speaks of “un siècle, où la religion est devenue le jouet, ou de la débauche, ou d’une fausse science.” In a well-known letter written by Mme de Maintenon to the Princesse des Ursins in the same year she says, “Je vous avoue, Madame, que les femmes de ce temps-ci me sont insupportables: leur habillement insensé et immodeste, leur tabac, leur vin, leur gourmandise, leur grossièreté, leur paresse, tout cela est si opposé à mon goût, et, ce me semble, à la raison, que je ne puis le souffrir.” There was no worse specimen of her sex than the Duchesse de Berry, whose marriage Saint-Simon had done so much to promote, and of whom he says in his portrait of her, drawn at the close of Louis XIV’s reign, that "except for avarice, she was a model of all the vices[7]."
The men were naturally no better than the women, and at the hôtel in the Temple of the Grand Prior of Vendôme he and his brother, the Duc de Vendôme, especially during the years between the Peace of Ryswick (1697) and the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701), gave cynical displays of drunkenness and debauchery.
A less vicious characteristic of the society of Versailles, but one greatly at variance with the refinement which we associate with the age of Louis XIV, was the love of brutal and even cruel horse-play. We read in Saint-Simon of a poor old woman named Mme Panache, whose pockets the princes and princesses used to fill with roast and stewed meat, till the sauce ran down her petticoats. Or they would fillip her face and laugh at her fury, at not being able to tell who had struck her—for she could not see beyond the end of her nose. Another butt was the Princesse d’Harcourt, ugly, dirty, greedy, malicious, dishonest. She never missed a religious service, and was a constant communicant, generally after having played at cards—and openly cheated—till four in the morning. She certainly did not deserve much consideration, but her character hardly justified the Duchess of Burgundy and her ladies in making their way into her bedroom and pelting her with snowballs for half-an-hour[8].
Practical joking, even when it was more or less friendly, often took a brutal or disgusting form. Louis XIV himself, that model of dignity and high-breeding, used to amuse himself with putting hair into the butter and tarts destined for Mlle de Montpensier and Mme de Thianges (the sister of Mme de Montespan), both of whom were very particular about their food. The Duc de Bourbon, La Bruyère’s pupil, and his Duchess especially distinguished themselves in this unpleasant fashion. The Duchess once flung a glass of water in the face of Santeul, the distinguished Latin poet, who was their habitual guest at Chantilly, and the Duke nearly killed him by emptying his snuff-box into his glass of champagne. On a par with these elementary notions of social merriment was the complete want of privacy and the lack of even ordinary decency. It is not too much to say that the standard of comfort at the Court of Versailles in the days of the grand monarque was lower than that of an English labourer at the present day.