Saint-Simon, LOUIS DE ROUVROY, DUC DE, a great French writer, was born at Paris, January 16, 1675. His father, who was sixty-eight at his birth, had been a page and favourite of Louis XIII., and had risen rapidly at court, becoming First Equey in 1627, and finally duke and peer in 1636, but soon after fell into disgrace, and passed much of his time thereafter at the castle of Blaye on the Gironde, which as governor he kept for the crown throughout the Fronde. The boy was given the title of Vidame of Chartres, as those of marquis and count had become too common. He received a careful education at home and at the academy of Rochefort, entered the service in the king's household troops in 1691, and behaved with spirit at Neerwinden (1693) under the eye of Luxembourg. He succeeded his father in the title, as well as in all his appointments, in 1693, married in 1695, and served in the army of the Rhine under his father-in-law, the Marshal de Lorges, from 1694 till the peace of Ryswick, having offended Luxembourg by championing the action of the dukes in Parlement against his claim in a question of privilege. Dissatisfied with his promotion, he left the service in 1702, and repaired to Versailles, where he studied the 'insects of the court,' and conformed to all the tedious etiquette of Louis XIV., without for some years enjoying any measure of the royal favour. He embroiled himself in an endless series of disputes with members of the peerage about points of precedence and privilege, such as the carrying round the alms-plate in the chapel, which the ladies of the ducal family of Lorraine had refused to do. He made bitter enemies of the powerful Marquis d'Antin, as well as the Duc de Maine, the eldest of the king's bastards by Madame de Montespan, who had been, to his great displeasure, given in 1694 a special rank below the princes but above the other peers; and he was disliked by the Dauphin and the whole 'cabal of Meudon' which surrounded him. Indeed he left Versailles for a time, and passed most of the year 1709 in the country at La Ferté. But he recovered the king's favour by his efforts to bring his friend Orleans to a more reputable life, and by his successful intriguing in the project to marry the Dauphin's favourite son, the Duc de Berry, to the daughter of Orleans. The marriage took place in July 1710, and the Duchess de Saint-Simon was, to his great regret, made lady-in-waiting to the young Duchess de Berry, and passed nine uncomfortable years of attendance upon her half-maniac mistress. The death of the Dauphin (April 1711) relieved him of all anxiety for the future, for his son, the Duke of Burgundy, Fénelon's pupil, was his warm friend. But his joy was short-lived, for the virtuous young Dauphin and Dauphiness were both carried off by fever in February 1712. Another mortification was the elevation of the two bastards in 1714 to be princes of the blood. The king's death on 1st September 1714 opened up a bitter struggle between Orleans and Maine, in which Saint-Simon supported his friend with equal warmth and boldness. It ended in the complete triumph of Orleans; but, though Saint-Simon had a seat on the council of the regency, he found Orleans indifferent to his schemes of financial reform, and the restoration to the peers of a paramount position in the work of government; and he failed to prevail upon him even to decide the momentous 'Affaire du Bonnet,' as to whether the president should keep his cap on his head or before him on the table when addressing the peers in Parlement. But he had at least the gratification of seeing 'the bastards' degraded from the princely rank, and the proudest day of his life was that of the Bed of Justice (August 26, 1718), in which his hated enemies, the members of the Parlement, were called in to hear the decree and witness the fall of their patron Maine—to this day alone he devotes seventy-seven pages of his Mémoires. His influence decreased as that of Dubois rose; but he was sent to Spain in 1721 on a splendid special embassy to demand the hand of the Infanta for the young king, Louis XV. The death of Orleans in December 1723 closed his public career, and he spent the next thirty years in calm retirement at his château of La Ferté Vidaime near Chartres, 77 miles distant from Paris. He lost his much-loved wife in 1743; three years later, his eldest son, who left only a daughter behind him. His second son died childless in 1754; his only remaining child, a daughter, was ugly and deformed, yet married the Prince of Chimay in 1722, although she never left her father's house. Saint-Simon died in his house at Paris, 2d March 1755. He had struggled all his days with colossal debts, and he sank at last into sheer insolvency.
Saint-Simon amused himself, between the years 1734 and 1738, in making notes in an interleaved copy of Dangeau's dry and servile Journal (written 1684-1720); but he seems to have begun his own journal before 1699. Finally, about 1739, he began to prepare the Mémoires in their final form, and this task he completed about 1752. This precious MS. was claimed by his cousin, the Bishop of Metz, but it was finally impounded in 1761 by the Duc de Choiseul for the Foreign Office. It was read to furnish amusement for Madame de Pompadour; Madame du Deffand speaks of it in a letter to Horace Walpole; and it had undoubtedly been seen by Duclos, Marmontel, and Voltaire. A volume of garbled extracts appeared at Brussels in 1780, but it was not till 1830 that the first authentic edition appeared, the MS. having been given to General de Saint-Simon by Louis XVIII. The first adequate edition was that in 20 volumes, edited by Chéruel in 1856, which at once attained an extraordinary popularity. But the final edition of the inimitable Mémoires is that in Les Grands Écrivains, by M. de Boislisle (30 vols.—vol. i. 1871; vol. viii. 1891). There is an abridged English translation by Bayle St John (4 vols. 1857). The additions to Dangeau had been published along with the Journal in 19 volumes, 1854. The rest of Saint-Simon's voluminous MSS. were locked up till 1880, when M. de Freycinet opened them up. M. Prosper Faugère published the Écrits Inédits (8 vols. 1880-92). The Lettres et Dépêches of the Spanish embassy were edited by M. E. Drumont (1880); the Projets de Gouvernement du Duc de Bourgogne in 1860.
Saint-Simon's Memorials on Precedent and Privilege are not interesting, nor yet his Letters, but his Mémoires remains a consummate masterpiece of literary art, in its kind absolutely alone. His knowledge of military affairs was inadequate; his fondness for a striking story was a standing snare to him; and other inaccuracies are plentiful enough; while his narrative is constantly marred by defective information and by prejudice, never by deliberate falsehood. In the introduction he claims himself, and with justice, as 'straight-forward, truthful, candid, and inspired with honour and integrity.' He was an honest hater—'all my life,' he says, 'I have known only too well how to love and how to hate'—but if he heaps his hatred upon Vendôme, Villars, Madame de Maintenon, Maine, Noailles, and Dubois, he has no less intense a love for Beauvilliers, for his spiritual adviser the Abbot Ranée of La Trappe, and for his young hero the Duke of Burgundy. His life was pure in an impure age; he had an un-French dislike to all such frivolities as cards and frequenting playhouses; there is but one instance even of his taking part in a hunt. He describes with pity the horrors of hunger among the peasantry during the winter of 1709; and his heart was hot within him at the inhuman persecutions of the Jansenists and the Huguenots, which he ascribes directly to Madame de Maintenon, herself 'the dupe of her own hypocrisy'—a mere tool in the hands of the Jesuits. He loved the old Gallicanism of the French Church, and abhorred the infamy of the Revocation, and he describes the military disasters and humiliation of the king's later years with a remorseless truth that does not impair his patriotism, although it has cost him the favour of Chauvinist editors, and even of M. Chéruel. 'A reign of blood and brigandage and perpetual wars against all Europe continually allied against him and armed by the necessity of defending itself'—so he described the epoch of the Grand Monarque. He does ample justice to the dignity and kingly deportment of Louis, who 'never considered that any one but himself had been king of France.' He was an admirable observer, and he has left us an inimitable gallery of the portraits of a whole court, all distinct and individual, vivid and real, snatched securely from forgetfulness and the night of time. He usually sketches the physical aspect first, with a few firm graphic strokes, and he gives colour, fire, life, to everything he touches, for he possesses that magical power of vision which enables the reader to divine and resuscitate a vanished past. His aim was to make his reader think 'not that he is reading a history or memoirs, but rather that he is himself in the secret of all that is represented to him, and spectator of all that is related,' and in his aim he succeeded as no other has done before or since. Yet his style is unstudied, slap-dash, full of confusions of construction—'il écrit à la diable pour l'immortalité,' said Chateaubriand. Villemain and Marmontel placed him above all contemporary writers; Taine ranks him with Pascal and La Fontaine, Sainte-Beuve with Molière and Bossuet. The last and greatest critic with these words sums up his judgment: 'Thanks to him—un Tacite au naturel et à bride abattue—we have nothing to envy in the earlier writer. And what is more, the vein of comedy, which he has so boldly scattered through his Memoirs, has given us in him truly a Tacitus à la Shakespeare.'
See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi (vols. iii. and xv.), and Nouveaux Lundis (vol. x.); Taine, in Essais de Critique et d'Histoire; Chéruel, Saint-Simon considéré comme Historien de Louis XIV. (1865); Clifton W. Collins, in 'Foreign Classics' (1880); Henry Reeve, Royal and Republican France (vol. i. 1872); and the admirable study by Edwin Cannan—the Lothian prize essay for 1885.