The death of the Dauphin, the pupil of Fénelon, destroyed the hopes that were opening up before Saint-Simon of becoming the chief minister of the next reign. Under the regency he continued to be the intimate and sometimes confidential adviser of the Duke of Orleans, although supplanted in state affairs by Cardinal Dubois. His embassy to Madrid to negotiate the marriage of the young king, Louis XV., with the Infanta of Spain, is well known. After the death of the regent he retired to his château of La Ferté-Vidame, where chiefly he continued henceforward to live in retirement, composing his immortal Memoirs. He died in Paris in 1755. Having known the subtle sway of a Maintenon, he lived to see the audacious empire of the Pompadour; and having served in his first campaigns under Luxembourg, he witnessed before his death the Great Frederick launch his thunderbolts of war, and the rise of Prussia among the great powers of Europe.
To attempt, in these few concluding remarks, to give any criticism of Saint-Simon’s great work would be a hopeless task. Its character is so many-sided, even contradictory, that any single judgment about it would be deceptive. We were impelled to connect the author’s name with that of the later memoir-writer by the contrasts which irresistibly suggested themselves.
Stated broadly, the main distinction between Saint-Simon and such writers as Greville and his kind is this: that Saint-Simon presents a connected narrative, flowing on largely, fully, evenly, abundantly, like a majestic river sweeping slowly past many varieties of scenery; while Greville gives nothing more than a hodge-podge diary, with no connection except the illusory one of dates, a jumble of short stories, petty details, and ill-natured remarks, bubbling like a noisy brook over stones and shingle, often half lost in the mud and sand, and not unlikely to end in a common sewer. It follows that, while it is difficult to remember particular events or conversations in Greville’s journal, many scenes from Saint-Simon remain for ever fixed in the memory. Take, for instance, one—not the most striking—that of the death of Monseigneur. Who can forget the picture of the old king, in tears, only half-dressed, hastening to the bedside of his son; the sudden terror of the prince’s household; the flight of La Choin, hastily gathering up her jewelry; the row of officers on their knees in the long avenue, crying out to the king to save them from dying of hunger; the well-managed eyes of the courtiers at Marly!
Greville is cynical or satirical by dint of the child’s art of using hard words. Saint-Simon seldom, comparatively speaking, puts on the garb of a cynic; but his narrative, with scarcely any obtrusion of the writer, often becomes a satire as terrible as that of some passages of Tacitus, or, in another vein, of Juvenal.
Many of the historical characters introduced into these works are no favorites of ours; but our purpose in this article has been, not to discuss them, but rather the capacity and good taste, or otherwise, of their critics.
Sainte-Beuve, in one of his felicitous periods, expresses the wish that every age might have a Saint-Simon to chronicle it. As a paraphrase of this remark, it might be said that it is to be wished no other age may have a Greville to slander it.