Mimesis (73 page)

An intermingling of body and spirit which sometimes grasps the inmost essence of the whole; in conjunction with this—or rather, equally indissolubly intermingled with it—the political and social situation of the person under discussion (
son siège, sa pourpre, sa faveur, sa douceur, ses mœurs, sa piété et son savoir
, all these things presented on a par with one another); and finally each person as an entity fused into the unity of the political and historical climate of the French court so that each is perpetually involved in a complex tissue of relationships—all this is mastered by Saint-Simon’s style. With it all, the author’s personal attitude toward the persons described appears most accurately nuanced. The non-fictitious, non-precogitated quality of his material, its being drawn from immediate appearances, gives Saint-Simon a depth of life which even the great decades’ most important portrayers of character, Molière for example or La Bruyère, could not achieve. Let us read a less well-known portrait, that of one of Saint-Simon’s sisters-in-law, the duchesse de Lorge, the daughter of a once powerful minister who fell into disfavor,
ma grande biche
, as he once called her in a letter (24, 275-277):

La duchesse de Lorge, troisième fille de Chamillart, mourut à Paris en couche de son second fils, le dernier mai, jour de la Fête-Dieu, dans sa vingt-huitième année. C’était une grande créature, très bien faite, d’un visage agréable, avec de l’esprit, et un naturel si simple, si vrai, si surnageant à tout, qu’il en était ravissant; la meilleure femme du monde et la plus folle de tout plaisir, surtout
du gros jeu. Elle n’avait quoi que ce soit des sottises de gloire et d’importances des enfants des ministres; mais, tout le reste, elle le possédait en plein. Gâtée dès sa première jeunesse par une cour prostituée à la faveur de son père, avec une mère incapable d’aucune éducation, elle ne crut jamais que la France ni le Roi pût se passer de son père. Elle ne connut aucun devoir, pas même de bienséance. La chute de son père ne put lui en apprendre aucun, ni émousser la passion du jeu et des plaisirs. Elle l’avouait tout le plus ingénuement du monde, et ajoutait après qu’elle ne pouvait se contraindre. Jamais personne si peu soigneuse d’elle-même, si dégingandée: coiffure de travers, habits qui traînaient d’un côté, et tout le reste de même, et tout cela avec une grâce qui réparait tout. Sa santé, elle n’en faisait aucun compte, et pour sa dépénse, elle ne croyait que terre pût jamais lui manquer. Elle était délicate, et sa poitrine s’altérait. On le lui disait; elle le sentait; mais, de se retenir sur rien, elle en était incapable. Elle acheva de se pousser à bout de jeu, de courses, de veilles en sa dernière grossesse. Toutes les nuits, elle revenait couchée en travers de son carrosse. On lui demandait en cet état quel plaisir elle prenait; elle répondait, d’une voix qui, de faiblesse, avait peine à se faire entendre, qu’elle avait bien du plaisir. Aussi finit-elle bientôt. Elle avait été fort bien avec Madame la Dauphine, et dans la plupart de ses confidences. J’étais fort bien avec elle; mais je lui disais toujours que, pour rien, je n’eusse voulu être son mari. Elle était très douce, et, pour qui n’avait que faire à elle, fort aimable. Son père et sa mère en furent fort affligés.

(The duchesse de Lorge, third daughter of Chamillart, died at Paris in childbed of her second son, the last of May, Corpus Christi day, in her twenty-eighth year. She was a big creature, very well built, with an agreeable face, with wit and a nature so simple, so true, so floating over everything, that it made it ravishing; the best woman in the world and the maddest after all pleasure, especially high play. She had nothing at all of the stupid glory-seeking and self-importance of ministers’ children; but all the rest she had in full measure. Spoiled from her earliest youth by a court prostituted to her father’s favor, with a mother incapable of any education, she never thought that France or the King could do without her father. She knew no duty, not even of decorum. Her father’s fall did not succeed in teaching her any, nor in blunting
her passion for gambling and pleasures. She admitted it with all the ingenuousness in the world, and added afterward that she could not restrain herself. Never anyone so little careful of herself, so slovenly: headdress awry, clothes dragging to one side, and all the rest likewise, and all this with a grace which made up for everything. Her health she regarded not at all, and as for her expenditure, she thought there would always be ground under her feet. She was delicate, and her chest went from bad to worse. She was told so; she felt it; but, as for restraining herself in anything, she could not. She finally drove herself to the breaking-point with gambling, running about, and staying up late, during her last pregnancy. Every night she came home lying crosswise in her carriage. In this state, someone asked her what pleasure she found; she answered, in a voice which, for weakness, could hardly make itself heard, that she had a great deal of pleasure. So it was soon over with her. She had been on very good terms with Madame la Dauphine and in her confidence in most things. I was on very good terms with her; but I always told her that I would not have wanted to be her husband for anything. She was very gentle, and, toward anyone who had no business with her, extremely amiable. Her father and mother were very much afflicted by it.)

In this portrait of
ma grande biche
there is the most heartfelt affection, indeed one almost senses that tears come to his eyes as he remembers her. What writer of Saint-Simon’s time, let alone of the preceding period, would have been able to describe such a lady simply as a poor young thing, to introduce his description with the words
c’était une grande créature
, to invent the crescendo
si simple, si vrai, si surnageant à tout
, to append to the trite phrase
c’était la meilleure femme du monde
the incisive accent
et la plus folle de tout plaisir
, to take her carelessness in dress, in her manner of life, and of her health, and put them together to make so charming a picture of self-abandonment, and finally to preserve for us the scene where, stretched out in her carriage, she says, in a dying voice,
qu’elle avait bien du plaisir
? For all this, the passage is pervaded by a clear, calm objectivity which describes the social and general environmental climate in which so unique a plant could grow. We must wait until the late nineteenth century and indeed actually until the twentieth, before we again find in European literature a similar level of tone, a synthesis of a human being which is so entirely free from traditional harmonizing, which
presses so unswervingly on from the random data of the phenomenon itself to the ultimate depths of existence.

We should like to cite a few more examples, which will go further than those we have as yet considered in casting light on matters of politics and history. In 1714 began the long-drawn-out struggle over the anti-Jansenist papal bull Unigenitus. Saint-Simon opposes the bull, in part because he detests every kind of intolerance and the use of force in matters of faith, and in part also because the bull contains provisions for excommunication which seem to him politically dangerous. The Jesuit priest Tellier, the King’s confessor, who is trying all means to get the bull accepted, would like to win over Saint-Simon and finally asks him for a private meeting. Circumstances bring it about that the meeting takes place in a windowless back room lit only by candles (Saint-Simon’s “boutique”), while in the adjoining salon visitors are expected who must not be allowed to know what is going on in this study. The conversation becomes animated; with astonishing frankness the old Jesuit reveals the plan, a mixture of deceit and brutality, which he has concocted to force the issue. He tries by all sorts of sophisms to overcome Saint-Simon’s scruples and, as he senses his opposition, grows more and more excited. In an earlier passage Saint-Simon had already sketched a portrait of Père Tellier. Here are a few sentences from it (17, 60):

Sa tête et sa santé étaient de fer, sa conduite en était aussi, son naturel cruel et farouche … il était profondément faux, trompeur, caché sous mille plis et replis, et quand il put se montrer et se faire craindre, exigeant tout, ne donnant rien, se moquant des paroles les plus expressément données lorsqu’il ne lui importait plus de les tenir, et poursuivant avec fureur ceux qui les avaient reçues. C’était un homme terrible. … Le prodigieux de cette fureur jamais interrompue d’un seul instant par rien, c’est qu’il ne se proposa jamais rien pour lui-même, qu’il n’avait ni parents ni amis, qu’il était né malfaisant, sans être touché d’aucun plaisir d’obliger, et qu’il était de la lie du peuple et ne s’en cachait pas; violent jusqu’à faire peur aux jésuites les plus sages. … Son extérieur ne promettait rien moins, et tint exactement parole; il eût fait peur au coin d’un bois. Sa physionomie était ténébreuse, fausse, terrible; les yeux ardents, méchants, extrêmement de travers; on était frappé en le voyant.

(His head and his health were of iron, so was his conduct, his
nature cruel and fierce … he was profoundly false, deceitful, concealed under a thousand turns and twists, and, when he could show himself and make himself feared, demanding everything, giving nothing, caring nothing for the most express promises when it was no longer important to him to keep them, and furiously pursuing those which he had received. He was a terrible man. … The prodigious thing about this fury, never interrupted for an instant by anything, was that he never projected anything for himself, that he had neither relatives nor friends, that he was born maleficent, without ever being touched by any pleasure in being obliging, and that he came from the dregs of the people and did not conceal it; violent to the point of making the wisest Jesuits afraid. … His exterior promised no less, and kept its word precisely; he would have aroused fear at the corner of a wood. His physiognomy was somber, false, terrible; the eyes burning, malicious, extremely squinted; one was struck when one saw him.)

Now the two sit face to face in the “boutique” (24, 117):

Je le voyais bec à bec entre deux bougies, n’y ayant du tout que la largeur de la table entre deux. J’ai décrit ailleurs son horrible physionomie. Eperdu tout à coup par l’ouïe et par la vue, je fus saisi, tandis qu’il parlait, de ce que c’était qu’un jésuite, qui, par son néant personnel et avoué, ne pouvait rien espérer pour sa famille, ni, par son état et par ses vœux, pour soi-même, pas même une pomme ni un coup de vin plus que les autres; qui par son âge touchait au moment de rendre compte à Dieu, et qui, de propos délibéré et amené avec grand artifice, allait mettre l’Etat et la religion dans la plus terrible combustion, et ouvrir la persécution la plus affreuse pour des questions qui ne lui faisaient rien, et qui ne touchaient que l’honneur de leur école de Molina. Ses profondeurs, les violences qu’il me montra, tout cela me jeta en un tel (sic) extase, que tout à coup je me pris à lui dire en l’interrompant: “Mon Père, quel âge avez-vous?” Son extrême surprise, car je le regardais de tous mes yeux, qui la virent se peindre sur son visage, rappela mes sens. …

(I saw him face to face between two candles, having nothing but the width of the table between the two of us. I have elsewhere described his horrible physiognomy. Bewildered suddenly by hearing
and sight, I was seized, while he talked, with what a Jesuit was, who, through his personal and avowed nothingness, could hope nothing for his family, nor, through his condition and his vows, for himself, not even an apple or a drink of wine more than the others; who, through his age, was close to the moment of rendering his account to God, and who, of deliberate purpose, and brought about with great artifice, was going to put the State and religion into the most terrible combustion, and inaugurate the most frightful persecution for questions which meant nothing to him and which affected only the honor of their school of Molina. His depths, the violences which he showed me, all this threw me into such an ecstasy that I suddenly found myself saying, interrupting him: “Father, how old are you?” His extreme surprise, for I was looking at him with all my eyes, which saw it painted on his face, called back my senses. …)

Saint-Simon succeeds in neutralizing the effect of his tactless question, and he learns that Père Tellier is 73 years old. The scene shows with the greatest clarity how Saint-Simon reacts to phenomena confronting him. He instinctively sees the individual whom he has
bec à bec
before him, as an entity comprising body, mind, station in life, and personal history. This gives him a power of penetration which goes through the individual into the political subject matter—so deeply, indeed, that at times, as in this instance, he loses sight of its pressing aspect of the moment, and much deeper and more general insights are revealed beneath it. As he looks at his interlocutor
de tous ses yeux
, he forgets about the present occasion, their disagreement over a specific article of the Constitutio Unigenitus, and sees, with the utmost vividness, the essential nature of the Jesuit Order and, beyond that, the essential nature of any strictly organized solidaritarian community. This is a manner of perception which his interlocutor, for all his acumen, was hardly capable of divining. Neither the seventeenth nor the eighteenth century furnishes other examples of it. People were too reasonably superficial, too discreet themselves, too respectful of the other man’s personality, too intent upon maintaining their distance, so that they shrank from such a disclosure. At the same time the passage shows that Saint-Simon obtains his most profound insights not by rationally analyzing ideas and problems but by an empiricism applied to whatever sensory phenomenon happens to confront him and pursued to the point of penetrating to the existential. In contrast (to mention an obvious
example) the Jesuit priest of the first
Lettres provinciales
was quite clearly stylized on the basis of a preceding rational study.

I shall take up one more passage. Saint-Simon knew the duc d’Orléans, the later Regent, from his early childhood. He knew him very well and had a very high opinion of his intelligence and abilities. He shows that only the duke’s uncomfortable and as it were oblique position in respect to his uncle Louis XIV ruined his character and his powers, making him the indecisive, unreliable, cynically indifferent, and dissipated man he finally became. Not long before the Regent’s death Saint-Simon realized that the end was not far off, and he describes how he reached his conclusion. The Regent had bestowed an important office on the duc d’Humières: