he twists snakelike, spitting venom, using the most abject shifts to entice one back and crush one in his coils." And here he is on the son of Pontchartrain, the King's chief minister:
Â
He was of average height, his face long, with sagging cheeks and monstrous thick lips, was altogether disgusting, and deformed as well, since smallpox removed one of his eyes. The glass-eye that replaced it was perpetually a-weep, making his appearance alarming at first glance, but not nearly as frightening as it should have been. He had a sense of honour, but perverted; he was studious, well schooled in the work of his department, tolerably industrious and ever anxious to appear more so. His perversity, which no one had curbed or checked, permeated all that he did ... If ever he did a kind action he boasted of it to such an extent that it sounded like a reproach ... To cap all, he was mean and treacherous, and prided himself on being so.
Â
This goes on for two more densely packed paragraphs, without any slackening in the intensity of Saint-Simon's lacerating, gossipy criticism. There are scores of such portraits scattered throughout the
Memoirs.
Saint-Simon wasn't a putdown artist merely. When a person met his high standards, he could be handsomely complimentary. On the wife of Chancellor Pontchartrain he wrote that she "had that exquisite politeness that measures and discriminates between degrees of age and rank, and thus puts everyone at ease," and then goes on to cite her many good works. Or at the death of the dowager Maréchale d'Estrées he writes:
Â
People feared her; yet her company was much sought after. They said that she was spiteful; but if so, it was only through speaking her mind freely and frankly on every subject, often with much wit, and always with spirit and force, and by not having the temperament to suffer fools gladly. She could be dangerous at such times, when she let fly with an economy of words, speaking to people's faces such cruel home-truths that they felt like sinking through the floor; but truly, she did not enjoy quarrelling or scandal for its own sake; she simply wished to make herself redoubtable and a person to be reckoned with, and in that she succeeded, living the while very happily with her own family.
Â
In some ways the Maréchale d'Estrées sounds like a female version of Saint-Simon, who of himself writes, "I was never noted for restraint."
A believing Christian, Saint-Simon was nevertheless not notable for the virtue of forgiveness. He felt that one of the staggering weaknesses of his friend the Duc d'Orléans was that he pardoned his enemies, and thereby turned a virtue into a vice. He himself said that "God bids us to forgive, but not surrender our self-respect." He was an excellent hater, was
le petit duc,
who could say about his enemy the Abbé Dubois that "all vices fought for mastery in him, each continually striving and clamoring to be the uppermost."
And yet, for all this, the Duc de Saint-Simon was a good man. His own politics were without the major element of self-promotion. He wished only a wise and just administration directed by a fair and honorable monarch. He was to be disappointed in his desire. His influence over the Dauphin, the Duc de Bourgogne, was of course dissipated at the death of the young Dauphin. The Duc d'Orléans attempted Saint-Simon's plan of government by councils, but the members of the councils argued among themselves, and the plan, not aided by the Regent's tergiversations, fell apart. Lecturing, at times hectoring, the Duc d'Orléans as he did, people began to think Saint-Simon, as the historian Emmanuel Ladurie has it, "a tiresome bore."
"My influence ceased after the death of M. Duc d'Orléans," in 1723, the final year covered in his
Memoirs.
Apart from a brief run as emissary to the court of Spainâthe expenses of keeping a personal staff while there nearly bankrupted himâSaint-Simon was no longer at, or even near,
Â
He was of average height, his face long, with sagging cheeks and monstrous thick lips, was altogether disgusting, and deformed as well, since smallpox removed one of his eyes. The glass-eye that replaced it was perpetually a-weep, making his appearance alarming at first glance, but not nearly as frightening as it should have been. He had a sense of honour, but perverted; he was studious, well schooled in the work of his department, tolerably industrious and ever anxious to appear more so. His perversity, which no one had curbed or checked, permeated all that he did ... If ever he did a kind action he boasted of it to such an extent that it sounded like a reproach ... To cap all, he was mean and treacherous, and prided himself on being so.
Â
This goes on for two more densely packed paragraphs, without any slackening in the intensity of Saint-Simon's lacerating, gossipy criticism. There are scores of such portraits scattered throughout the
Memoirs.
Saint-Simon wasn't a putdown artist merely. When a person met his high standards, he could be handsomely complimentary. On the wife of Chancellor Pontchartrain he wrote that she "had that exquisite politeness that measures and discriminates between degrees of age and rank, and thus puts everyone at ease," and then goes on to cite her many good works. Or at the death of the dowager Maréchale d'Estrées he writes:
Â
People feared her; yet her company was much sought after. They said that she was spiteful; but if so, it was only through speaking her mind freely and frankly on every subject, often with much wit, and always with spirit and force, and by not having the temperament to suffer fools gladly. She could be dangerous at such times, when she let fly with an economy of words, speaking to people's faces such cruel home-truths that they felt like sinking through the floor; but truly, she did not enjoy quarrelling or scandal for its own sake; she simply wished to make herself redoubtable and a person to be reckoned with, and in that she succeeded, living the while very happily with her own family.
Â
In some ways the Maréchale d'Estrées sounds like a female version of Saint-Simon, who of himself writes, "I was never noted for restraint."
A believing Christian, Saint-Simon was nevertheless not notable for the virtue of forgiveness. He felt that one of the staggering weaknesses of his friend the Duc d'Orléans was that he pardoned his enemies, and thereby turned a virtue into a vice. He himself said that "God bids us to forgive, but not surrender our self-respect." He was an excellent hater, was
le petit duc,
who could say about his enemy the Abbé Dubois that "all vices fought for mastery in him, each continually striving and clamoring to be the uppermost."
And yet, for all this, the Duc de Saint-Simon was a good man. His own politics were without the major element of self-promotion. He wished only a wise and just administration directed by a fair and honorable monarch. He was to be disappointed in his desire. His influence over the Dauphin, the Duc de Bourgogne, was of course dissipated at the death of the young Dauphin. The Duc d'Orléans attempted Saint-Simon's plan of government by councils, but the members of the councils argued among themselves, and the plan, not aided by the Regent's tergiversations, fell apart. Lecturing, at times hectoring, the Duc d'Orléans as he did, people began to think Saint-Simon, as the historian Emmanuel Ladurie has it, "a tiresome bore."
"My influence ceased after the death of M. Duc d'Orléans," in 1723, the final year covered in his
Memoirs.
Apart from a brief run as emissary to the court of Spainâthe expenses of keeping a personal staff while there nearly bankrupted himâSaint-Simon was no longer at, or even near,
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