Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon

Peerage of France

Men of the noblest blood (in Saint-Simon's view) might not be, and in most cases were not, peers in France. Derived at least traditionally and imaginatively from the douze pairs (twelve peers) of Charlemagne, the peerage of France was supposed to be, literally, the chosen of the noblesse, deemed thereafter to incarnate the French nobility par excellence. Their legal pre-eminence derived from hereditary membership in the Parlement of Paris, the highest of France's judicial and quasi-legislative assemblies. Strictly speaking, a French peerage (usually attached to a dukedom) was granted in favour of a designated fief rather than upon the titleholder per se. His lifelong ambition was the conversion of France's peers into a Great Council of the Nation.

The family's principal seat, where Saint-Simon's Mémoires was written, was at La Ferté-Vidame, bought by his father shortly after his elevation to the dukedom. The castle brought with it the ancient, entailed title, Vidame de Chartres, borne as a courtesy style by the Duke's only son until he was eighteen. As it had been attributed to an elderly character in the well-known court novel La Princesse de Clèves, published in 1678, just three years after Saint-Simon's birth, his arrival at court as a young man may have been less inconspicuous than otherwise.

Life

His father, Claude, the first duke, was a tall and taciturn man who was keen on hunting. Louis de Saint-Simon was the opposite; garrulous, much shorter, and preferring life indoors. His father had been a favourite hunting companion of Louis XIII. King Louis had appointed his father as Master of Wolfhounds before granting him a dukedom in 1635 at a relatively young age; he was 68 when Louis was born. Saint-Simon ranked thirteenth in the order of precedence among France's eighteen dukes. His mother, Charlotte de L'Aubespine, daughter of François, Marquis de Hauterive by his wife, Eléonore de Volvire, marquise de Ruffec, descended from a distinguished family, noble since at least the time of Francis I.

She was a formidable woman whose word was law in the family, and became more so in extreme old age. Her son Louis, of whom Louis XIV and Queen Marie-Thérèse were godparents, was well-educated, largely by her. After further tuition from the Jesuits, he joined the Mousquetaires gris in 1692, serving at the Siege of Namur and at the Battle of Neerwinden. Then he embarked upon his life's mission by pronouncing upon the precedence among French peers, much against the orders and interests of François-Henri de Montmorency, duc de Luxembourg, his victorious general.

In 1695, he married Marie-Gabrielle de Durfort, daughter of Guy Aldonce Durfort, Duke of Lorges, a marshal of France, later serving under the Duke's command. He seems to have regarded her with a respect and affection unusual between husband and wife in that era; and she sometimes succeeded in suppressing his pompous ideals. As he did not receive further promotion in the army, he resigned his commission in 1702, thereby incurring Louis XIV's displeasure. He kept his position at court but only with difficulty, and then immersed himself in court intrigue at Versailles, tapping a collection of informants, the likes of dukes as well as servants, which later yielded him the benefit of an extraordinary amount of privileged information.

Saint-Simon, for his own part, appears to have played only an intermediate role in court life. He was nominated as ambassador to Rome in 1705, but the appointment was cancelled before he departed. At last, he attached himself to Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, Louis XIV's nephew and the future regent. Though this was hardly likely to ingratiate him with Louis, it at least gave him the status of belonging to a definite party and it eventually placed him in the position of a friend to the acting chief of state. He also allied himself with Louis, Duke of Burgundy, the Dauphin's son and next heir to the French throne.

Fame as a writer

Posthumously, he acquired great literary fame. He was an indefatigable writer, and he began very early to record all the gossip he collected, all his interminable legal disputes over precedence, and a vast mass of unclassified material. Most of his manuscripts were retrieved by the Crown and it was long before their contents were fully published: partly in the form of notes in the marquis de Dangeau's Journal, partly in both original and independent memoirs, partly in scattered and multifarious extracts; he had committed to paper an immense amount of material.

Saint-Simon believed he could improve upon Dangeau's dry chronicling of events with his own vivid narrative style. According to Charles Henry Conrad Wright, "taking Dangeau as foundation, he goes over the same ground, sometimes copying, more often developing or inserting additional information, the result of more acute observation."

Saint-Simon's Mémoires strike a most realistic note. On the one hand, he is petty, and unjust to private enemies and to those who espoused public views contrary to his as well as being an incessant gossip. Yet he shows a great skill for narrative and for character-drawing. He has been compared to the historians Livy and Tacitus. He is not a writer who can be sampled easily, inasmuch as his most characteristic passages sometimes occur in the midst of long stretches of quite uninteresting diatribe. His vocabulary was extreme and inventive. He is deemed to have first used the word "intellectual" as a noun. "Patriot" and "publicity" are also accredited as being introduced by him in their current usage.

Questions concerning the historical accuracy of his portraits remains a topic of interest for historians and critics, including Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. While it has been indicated that Saint-Simon's accounts are often dominated by his personal prejudice, such as in his famous account of the death of the Dauphin, or of the Bed of Justice in which his personal enemy, Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine, was degraded, his writing is celebrated for immortalizing vibrant portraits of the French nobility. His narrative style and methods of characterization profoundly impacted many French writers, notably Proust who published a pastiche of Saint-Simon in 1908.

The bishops are "cuistres violets" (purple pedants). "(M. de Caumartin) porte sous son manteau toute la faculté que M. de Villeroy étale sur son baudrier" (Caumartin holds under his cloak all the power that Villeroy displays on his scabbard). Another politician has a "mine de chat fâché" (appearance of a disgruntled cat). In short, the interest of his Mémoires is in the novel and adroit use of words and phrases.

Family

Saint-Simon married Marie-Gabrielle de Durfort (daughter of Guy Aldonce de Durfort, duc de Lorges), on 8 April 1695, at the Hôtel de Lorges in Paris.

They had three children:

Charlotte de Rouvroy (8 September 1696 – 29 September 1763) married Charles-Louis de Henin-Liétard d'Alsace, "Prince of Chimay"; they had no children. He was the brother of Cardinal d'Alsace.

Jacques Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Ruffec (29 July 1698 – 15 July 1746) married, in 1727, Cathérine Charlotte Thérèse de Gramont (died 1755), daughter of the Duke of Gramont (widow of Philippe Alexandre, Duke of Bournonville), leaving no children;

Armand-Jean de Rouvroy (12 April 1699 – 20 May 1754) married Marie Jeanne Louise, daughter of Nicolas Prosper Bauyn d'Angervilliers; they had one daughter.

His granddaughter Marie Christine de Rouvroy, Mademoiselle de Ruffec (daughter of Jacques Louis) married a son of the Princess Louise Hippolyte of Monaco, Charles-Maurice, in 1749, becoming the "Countess of Valentinois".