Француз сардары және дипломаты: Сен-Симон герцогінің өмірі мен естеліктері

French soldier and diplomat

Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint Simon, GE (lwi də ʁuvʁwa; 16 January 16752 March 1755), was a French soldier, diplomat, and memoirist. He was born in Paris at the Hôtel Selvois, 6 rue Taranne (demolished in 1876 to make way for the Boulevard Saint Germain). The family's ducal peerage (duché pairie), granted in 1635 to his father Claude de Rouvroy (1608–1693), served as both perspective and theme in Saint Simon's life and writings. He was the second and last Duke of Saint Simon. His enormous memoirs are a classic of French literature, giving the fullest and most lively account of the court at Versailles of Louis XIV and the Régence at the start of Louis XV's reign.

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.

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. While its appendices and supporting documents were dispersed, this sequestration was ultimately credited for the preservation of his memoirs.

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 Tacitus and Livy. 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, and "patriot" and "publicity" are also accredited as being introduced by him in their current usage. A few critical studies of him, especially those of Charles Augustin Sainte Beuve, are the basis of much that has been written about him. His most famous passages, such as the account of the death of the Dauphin, or of the Bed of Justice where his enemy, Louis Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine, was degraded, do not give a fair idea of his talent. These are his celebrated pieces, his great "engines", as French art slang calls them. Much more noteworthy as well as more frequent are the sudden touches which he gives. 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. In A Short History of French Literature, the memoirs are described as "vast and rambling one of the least read masterpieces of the age" which "provide us not only with a picture of the squalor and pettiness which often lay behind the glittering façade of the court, but also with the precise angle of perception of a senior courtier. This is prose narrative on a monumental scale; how much of it is fiction is hard to tell, but in this area the distinction is not paramount, since what matters is the imaginative reconstruction of a lost world (Proust owes not a little to Saint Simon)." He had a profound influence on writers including Tolstoy, Barbey d' Aurevilly, Flaubert, Valle Inclán, Proust, Mujica Láinez, and many others.

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:
Armand Jean de Rouvroy (12 April 169920 May 1754) married Marie Jeanne Louise, daughter of Nicolas Prosper Bauyn d'Angervilliers; they had one daughter. His granddaughter Marie Christine, Mademoiselle de Ruffec (daughter of Jacques Louis) married a son of the Princess Louise Hippolyte of Monaco in 1749 becoming the "Countess of Valentinois".

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. (Chapter 16, "The Interrupted Supper")
Cioran, Emil Michel. "Drawn and Quartered". New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998. (Section II)
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Saint Simon and the Court of Louis XIV. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. De Ley, Herbert. Saint Simon Memorialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Ruas, Charles. The Intellectual Development of the Duc de Saint Simon. Princeton University, 1970.