Gossip Page 5

  Some 1,500 people (servants included) lived within the walls of the grand palace Louis XIV built for himself and his courtiers, who were housed in 250 apartments of various sizes, many of them small and airless, but no less valued for that. Everything at the Versailles court was carefully ordered by rank, which was awarded by birth, an order that the King himself frequently subverted by placing power in the hands of the secondary nobility, the noblesse de robe, who became his mandarin bureaucrats, and in those of his mistresses.

  Whatever one's position at court, all sought the favor of the King and those closest to him. Louis XIV was appropriately called the Sun King, for all the other planets and satellites of power revolved around him. Rivaling ambitions, with cabals forming everywhere, flourished. Jockeying for position at Versailles was as natural as breathing.

  In his Memoirs, the Duc de Saint-Simon reports, in a spirit of candor and not less frequently spite, a great many things we couldn't have known without him; he goes into private matters about which he makes pointed judgments, rarely neglecting to provide interesting speculation about low motives. Even when they are wrong, the Memoirs are never stupid; even when they are angry, they are amusing.

  Saint-Simon was barely five feet tall and walked the halls of Versailles perched upon red shoes with high heels and spoke in a squeaky voice. He frequently strikes a note of disapproval in his Memoirs, and took, it seems, only strong positions. He stood for purity of blood and seniority, loathed ruptures in tradition, especially when these entailed violations of the elaborate etiquette of privilege that was still for the most part in place under Louis XIV, though beginning to fall away under the regency that followed the King's death.

  Saint-Simon complained, for example, about Te Deums being sung for people of lesser rank than the King and Queen, noting that "nothing now was sacred." He became exercised when mere members of the Parlement, an assembly of judges, were permitted to remove their hats in the presence of dukes and peers, of whom he was of course one. Those who in any way attempted to diminish or otherwise trample over his status became his enemies for life. (Saint-Simon's family peerage dated only from 1635, conferred on his father by Louis XIII; at the death of Louis XIV in 1715, he was himself the eleventh duke and peer in order of seniority.) Birth and rank were to him as sun and sustenance. Punctilious to a fault, a pedant of privilege, he everywhere made a great nuisance of himself by insisting on his full prerogatives as a duke.

  One of the Duc de Saint-Simon's relentless complaints throughout the Memoirs is about the disreputable private life of his friend, subsequently the Regent, the Duc d'Orléans, who kept, and hugely enjoyed, company with courtesans and roués. SaintSimon was always trying to shape up the Duc d'Orléans, while never failing to record his lapses. Saint-Simon wasn't the only gossip at Versailles. Suppers the Regent gave for his cronies, the Duc notes, were wild gossip fests: "Everyone was discussed, ministers and friends alike, with a license that knew no bounds. The past and present love-affairs of the court and Paris were examined without regard for the victims' feelings; old scandals were retold, ancient jests and absurdities revived, nothing and nobody was sacred. M. le Duc d'Orléans played an active part in all this, but it must honestly be said that he seldom took much account of the talk."

  The Duc de Saint-Simon deplored raucous, scattershot, motiveless gossip, or so he claimed. His own gossip tended to be subtle, well aimed, and (he would assure you) never out of line because of the purity of his own motives. No one was more parti pris than he. His never claiming otherwise is one of his attractive qualities. "Stoicism is a beautiful and noble chimera," he wrote. "It would be useless priding myself on being impartial."

  The Memoirs provide much useful fodder for historians, but Saint-Simon was a grander writer than he was a historian. The greatest French novelists—Stendhal, Balzac, Proust—admired him, Proust even artfully lifting material from the Duc's memoirs for his own novel. Stendhal claimed that, along with eating spinach, reading the Memoirs was among his greatest passions. Saint-Simon was an original stylist—he apparently invented the words "publicity" and "patriot"—strong on invective, and especially fine on the analysis of character, much of the material for which he acquired by being attentive to gossip.

  The Duc de Saint-Simon arrived at Versailles in 1691, at the age of sixteen, and in 1694 began keeping the notebooks that would result in his Memoirs. In his retirement he assembled and reworked these notes into the great book that he intended to be published posthumously. (The Memoirs were first published, in a poor edition, in 1788.) Whether he knew he was creating a considerable work of art is not known. What is unmistakable is that he intended his more than three-thousand-page work, forty-plus volumes in the standard edition, to be read by a posterity that would be sympathetic to his attacks on his many enemies and his self-justifications.

  In his Memoirs, Saint-Simon claimed never to set down things he hadn't seen or heard at first hand or been told by what he took to be reliable witnesses. No one would view these Memoirs as in any sense objective, which doesn't mean that they aren't for the most part truthful. Saint-Simon had his positions—a grander name, perhaps, for prejudices—and they were manifold: his penchant for established hierarchy, rank, and tradition; his reverence for religion and genuine piety yet loathing of ambitious Jesuits, and his preference for those bishops who remained in their dioceses and took care of business and those who valued the contemplative more than the social or political life; his distaste for adultery, especially double adultery, where both parties were married; his contempt for homosexuality, seeing it as an effect of weak character and poor breeding (Louis XIV's brother, known as Monsieur, was homosexual); his impatience with stupidity; his dislike of greed; his respect for those who lived with a sense of their own achievements while recognizing their limitations; his unrelenting view of the comic preposterousness of men and women, never more so than when it came to their amours, many of which he learned about from Versailles' rich gossip grapevine.

  "I resolved to let nothing escape me," Saint-Simon writes early in his Memoirs, and not too much did. His curiosity about how things happened at court was unquenchable, his search for motives unrelenting. At times he seems to operate as the ethnographer, the Malinowski, of Versailles, studying the strange habits of the natives residing there. At other times he is as caught up in the madness of life at the court of the Sun King as anyone else, as when, for example, he and his wife spent the astounding sum of 20,000 livres on their clothes for the wedding of the Duc du Boulogne, grandson of Louis XIV.

  The Duchesse de Saint-Simon is perhaps the only figure in the Memoirs who is neither criticized nor gossiped about. She is repeatedly credited for her kind heart, her loyalty, the generosity of her sentiments. She was his one reliable confidante, and he often praises her sagacity. "What a great treasure," he wrote, "is a virtuous and sensible wife!" She frequently takes it upon herself to rein in this husband who, a bit of a hothead, is ready to desert Versailles and its many intrigues, or to calm him in his propensity for the rash act he is determined upon but she doesn't permit him to commit. They had three children: two dullish, disappointing sons, known at court behind their backs as "the dachshunds," and a daughter badly deformed by a crooked spine who had a taste for quarrels and made a bad marriage to a man interested only in her money.

  The Duc de Saint-Simon was a gossip-historian. Gossip, the word and the act, comes into play throughout the Memoirs. "In the event everything becomes known at Court," he wrote, and the reason was that in the atmosphere of Versailles all knowledge was useful, especially against rivals. Ears and eyes were everywhere. A large number of people at court had a well-developed taste for gossip as sheer entertainment. Mme. de Clerambault, the daughter of the King's secretary of state, along with gambling "loved private and confidential gossip, and cared for nothing else." Attending physicians, priests, servants, everyone close to the King with the exception only of his horses, was a potential—and more often an actual—purveyor of gossip.

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p; Perhaps the most avid recipient of gossip at Versailles was Louis XIV himself. The King, Saint-Simon notes, "was becoming more and more avid for information regarding everything that went on, and was even more interested in gossip than people imagined, although he was known to be vastly inquisitive." Gossip was the only way Louis XIV had of understanding all the intrigue around him. As the sole lever for raising or lowering the status of his subjects, the King depended on gossip to offset the persistent flattery that he also welcomed. Meanwhile everyone gossiped about the King. From Saint-Simon we learn, among a great many items about Louis XIV, that he slept with his mistresses in the afternoon and the Queen at night.

  The extent to which Saint-Simon contributed directly to this fund of the gossip made available to the King we cannot know. The two men met in private audience only twice. Louis XIV thought well of the Duchesse de Saint-Simon, and often invited her and her husband to Marly, his country retreat. But he thought the Duc de Saint-Simon an argumentative man, difficult, altogether too obsessed with his rank, too critical of those who did not come up to his standard, too eccentric for his taste.

  "Whom are you angry with today?" the Duc de Chevreuse once asked Saint-Simon. Le petit duc was never without his causes, his rivals, his enemies. The King's mistress and later his second wife, Mme. de Maintenon, he despised, referring to her, "his greatest obstacle," as "the old bitch"; elsewhere he calls her and the Duc du Maine "the ancient whore and bastard." Père Le Tellier, the King's confessor, he loathed. The Duc de Vendôme he thought little more than an intriguer and a vile power merchant. Although he revered the monarchy, he felt less than full reverence for the reigning monarch, for the King "had a rooted dislike and suspicion of men who were intelligent and well-informed, and that to be so considered was rated a crime in me." But, then, his "enemies said I was too clever, too well-informed, and took advantage of the King's fear of such qualities to put me out of his favor."

  Saint-Simon wasn't, as we would say today, paranoid, but his strong opinions, the verbal violence that he found it difficult to curb, turned Versailles into a snake pit for him, with every snake carrying the venom of gossip against him.

  Le petit duc was a species of busybody. Had you asked him, he would have said he was a busybody for the public good, for he had a strong sense of how the business of the nation of France, both within and without, ought to be conducted, and he did all he could to bring other people around to his way of thinking.

  Saint-Simon felt that there were fights he couldn't get out of, intrigues he couldn't ignore, without losing his honor. It wasn't in him to "endure to swallow continual insults at the Court nor to adapt a servile pose which I despised." He knew, too, that his passionate nature gave him "the reputation of being a busybody, clever, experienced, full of malice."

  One must possess an interesting, not to say strange, temperament to be able to spend the last decades of one's life polishing up a record of one's days that one chooses not to have published in one's lifetime. Why would anyone do that? To set the record straight, if only for posterity, is one possible reason. To have one's say—in many instances, in Saint-Simon's case, one's revengeful say—is another. Reading his Memoirs is like reading a sublimely fascinating gossip column. That the people being gossiped about are long dead scarcely deflects from the pleasure that such gossip provides, which is a tribute to the power of Saint-Simon's prose.

  "Tact and prudence," Saint-Simon writes, "are not typically French virtues." Not to speak ill of the dead is a commonplace admonition that he obviously never considered, for he regularly speaks devastatingly ill of the dead. In the Memoirs, which are organized chronologically, whenever he announces at the top of a paragraph that a certain courtier has died, one knows one is in for brilliant, candid, and penetrating character analysis.

  As one courtier after another dies, Saint-Simon sends him or her into the afterlife with a horseshoe floral arrangement of subtle criticism. The Duchesses de Villeroy was "honest, unaffected, frank, loyal and secret; despite her little wit, she succeeded in making herself redoubted at the Court, and ruled both her husband and father-in-law." Then there is Fenelon, the archbishop of Cambrai, "growing old beneath the weight of disappointed hopes"; La Chétardie, "the imbecile director, nay the master, of Mme. de Maintenon's conscience"; and let us not neglect La Fontaine, "who wrote the celebrated fables, yet was so boring in conversation."

  Saint-Simon's best gossip, the dishiest of his dirt, is of course reserved for his enemies. He is relentlessly critical of the overreaching ambition of Mme. des Ursins, the supreme directress behind the ruler of Spain, Philip V, as Mme. de Maintenon was over the ruler of France, Louis XIV. Or consider the Duc de Noailles: "He is the very sink of iniquity, false-hearted and treacherous, making use of everyone. Scorning the commoner virtues, and serving only his own advantage, he is the most abandoned libertine and a bare-faced and unwavering hypocrite ... An adept at lies and slander, if he is cornered 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:

  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.

  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:

  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.

  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'O
rléans 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 Spain—the expenses of keeping a personal staff while there nearly bankrupted him—Saint-Simon was no longer at, or even near, the center of things. He had "a conviction of my complete uselessness [which] drove me further and further into retirement." Toward the end he reports that he "no longer held any offices, and was living in almost complete retirement." Plush retirement, to be sure, in an hôtel, or mansion, in Paris and at the castle on his estate in the country. Yet it was not an altogether voluntary retirement: he was told by Fleury, the tutor to Louis XV and later that youthful King's chief minister, that his presence was no longer wanted at Versailles. Nothing left for le petit duc but to write his Memoirs.

  All memoirs are, more or less, gossip. Hard to imagine a man so inquisitive, so critical, so penetrating, and with so many enemies as Saint-Simon not using gossip both as a means of self-justification and as a weapon against enemies. He wrote of his "passion for discovering, unraveling, and generally keeping up to date with intrigues that were always fascinating, and which it was often useful, and sometimes highly advantageous, to know." That he felt himself so embattled, with people against him on every side, left him always on the qui vive for an enemy's weakness, and gave him cause, as he himself put it, to "examine everyone with my eyes and ears." The great nineteenth-century critic Sainte-Beuve called le petit duc "the spy of his century," and what is spying but a species of gossiping? Spies don't necessarily have to be in the pay of government; every first-class gossip is, when one comes right down to it, a spy in business for himself.