Mimesis (71 page)

A Madame Necker.
Ferney, 19 juin 1770

Quand les gens de mon village ont vu Pigalle déployer quelques instruments de son art: Tiens, tiens, disaient-ils, on va le disséquer; cela sera drôle. C’est ainsi, madame, vous le savez, que tout spectacle amuse les hommes; on va également aux marionnettes, au feu de la Saint-Jean, à l’Opéra-Comique, à la grand’messe, à un enterrement. Ma statue fera sourire quelques philosophes, et renfrognera les sourcils éprouvés de quelque coquin d’hypocrite ou de quelque polisson de folliculaire: vanité des vanités!

Mais tout n’est pas vanité; ma tendre reconnaissance pour mes amis et surtout pour vous, madame, n’est pas vanité.

Mille tendres obéissances à M. Necker.

(When the people of my village saw Pigalle lay out some of the instruments of his art: “Why, look,” said they, “he’s going to be dissected; that will be curious.” So it is, Madame, as you well know, that any spectacle amuses mankind; people go indifferently to a marionette-show, to a Midsummer Eve bonfire, to high mass, to a funeral. My statue will make a few philosophers smile, and knit the practiced brows of some villainous hypocrite or some depraved hack: vanity of vanities! But all is not vanity; my fond gratitude for my friends and above all for you, Madame, is not vanity. A thousand fond homages to Monsieur Necker.)

I refer the reader to Spitzer’s excellent analysis, which pursues and interprets every shade of expression throughout the text, and shall limit myself to adding or summarizing what is essential for the problem of style here under discussion. The realistic anecdote which serves as point of departure is either invented or at least rearranged for the purpose. It is not at all likely that peasants about the year 1770 should have been more familiar with anatomical dissection than with the sculptor’s craft. Who Pigalle was must have been widely discussed; and that portraits should be made of the famous châtelain who had lived among them for a decade must have seemed more natural to them than the idea of dissecting a person who had quite recently still been seen alive. That some half-educated wit among them could have made a remark of this sort is of course not entirely impossible, but I imagine most readers confronted with this question will find it much more probable that Voltaire himself was the wit. However that may
be, whether he arranged the setting himself (as I suppose he did) or whether chance supplied him with it exactly as he describes it, in either case, it is an extraordinary, much too pat, theatrical piece of reality, admirably and exclusively suited to what he appends to it: the trite bit of worldly wisdom, charmingly and amiably presented, the fireworks display of examples in which the sacred and profane are mixed together with the characteristic impertinence of the Enlightenment, the irony in regard to his own fame, the polemic allusions to his enemies, the summing up of the whole in the basic theme from Solomon, and finally the recourse to the word
vanité
to find the turn of expression which concludes the letter and which radiates all the charm of the still amiable and still lively old man, all the charm of the entire century in the formation of which he played so prominent a part. The whole thing is, as Spitzer puts it, a unique phenomenon, the
billet
of the Rococo Enlightenment. It is so much the more unique in that the texture of worldly wisdom and amiable wit is here linked to an anecdote which conjures up the creaturality of the old man’s decrepit body, but a step from the grave. Yet even with such a subject Voltaire remains witty and pleasing. How many different elements this text contains: there is the artfully arranged realism; there is the perfection of charm in social relations, which combine great warmth of expression with a high degree of reserve; there is the superficiality of a creatural self-confrontation which is at the same time the exalted amiability which refuses to let one’s own somber emotions become a burden to anyone else; there is the didactic ethos which characterized the great men of the Enlightenment and which made them able to use their last breath to formulate some new idea wittily and pleasingly.

I hope that the examples from Prévost and Voltaire have yielded us all the important characteristics of the peculiarly charming and peculiarly superficial intermediate level upon which realism and seriousness, after having been so strictly separated during the era of Louis XIV, began to approach each other again from the first years of the eighteenth century on. Some points will grow clearer as we look back and make comparisons in the course of discussing later texts.

But I still have to speak of a literary genre which, by its very nature, cannot separate realism and a serious approach, and which hence does not submit unconditionally to the aesthetic principle of the separation of styles, even during the French seventeenth century. I refer to the genre of memoirs and diaries. From the Renaissance on, interesting and significant works of this type are to be found in several countries
of Europe. During the period of absolutism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their authors—especially in France and the countries strongly influenced by French example—come almost exclusively from court circles; they are often men of princely blood, and their subject matter is drawn from politics, court intrigues, and the life of the highest classes of society. It is a fact worthy of note (cf. Sainte-Beuve,
Causeries du Lundi
, 15, 425) that among the most gifted, individual, and famous writers of memoirs in France, not one belongs to the generation of Louis XIV. They belong either to the immediately preceding period (as Retz, La Rochefoucauld, Tallemant des Réaux) or to the following. During the King’s own reign, and under the uncontested dominance of the taste represented by his name, the moralism to the influence of which French memoir writing had previously been subject turned to more general forms and themes and avoided the rendering of specific contemporary events.

If we have not treated of memoirs until now, in connection with the first half of the eighteenth century, it is simply because by far the most important author in this genre in our opinion, Louis, duc de Saint-Simon, seems to belong rather to the eighteenth century than to the seventeenth. He was born in 1675. He goes to court in 1691 and begins his record at the early age of nineteen, in July 1694, as he tells us himself. However the real work of putting together the book cannot have begun until much later, until after the death of the Regent in 1723, when Saint-Simon retired from the court. He lived on and continued writing for another 32 years. Occasional allusions to events in the thirties and forties show that he was at work in the middle of the eighteenth century. Thus, for example, in his memoirs for the year 1700, where he discusses the establishment of the Prussian kingdom, he refers to the death of Frederick William I and the coronation of his successor as very recent events, which proves that he wrote the passage shortly after May 1740. The editors of the critical edition (in the
Collection des Grands Ecrivains
) have come to the conclusion that the
Mémoires
were written between 1739 and 1749 (
Notes sur l’édition des Mémoires
, vol. 41, pp. 442ff.). Chronologically, then, the work undoubtedly belongs to the eighteenth century. It is more difficult to determine the Duke’s position in terms of the history of ideas and his inner affinities. For he is really not to be compared with anything else, and the one thing which is obvious upon even the most superficial acquaintance is that, in any case, neither his manner of writing nor his views place him in the age of Louis XIV. His manner
of writing shows no trace of the well-balanced
bienséance
, of the classical striving for harmony, of the exalted aloofness from things, which characterized the great decades. It suggests, if it can be compared with anything at all, the pre-classical prose of the beginning of the seventeenth century. In his views he is a vigorous opponent of centralizing absolutism. He would like to see the kingdom given an organization by estates, with much greater freedom for the estates and especially with the high nobility as the directing class. In religious matters—despite his great and undoubtedly genuine piety—he is quite free from prejudice and disapproves of all persecution and suppression of faiths. He sees the reign of Louis XIII as ideal—undoubtedly a misapprehension caused by his perspective, for it was Richelieu under Louis XIII who laid the foundation for complete absolutism and the political ruin of the nobility. What deceives him in this matter is the tradition of his family, for his father, who had reached the age of seventy when Saint-Simon was born, had in his youth been a favorite of Louis XIII, who raised him to the rank of
duc et pair
.

Saint-Simon may thus be called an anti-absolutistic reactionary; and when he talks about the dignity and importance of the highest nobility, of the
ducs et pairs
, his views are at times somewhat anachronistic and maniacal. Nevertheless, in political matters he displays a great deal of common sense, sound judgment, and keen perception. We must not forget that the opposition which began to crystallize, during Louis XIV’s last decades, in the minds of several important men at court, was almost always concerned with the restoration of older institutions involving the hierarchy of the estates. These, and especially the reestablishment of the high nobility in its earlier position, were regarded as an effective device against absolutism and its tools, the royal ministers who were unqualifiedly the King’s creatures. Ideas of this kind were combined with practical and comparatively liberalistic plans for a policy of peace, for the reorganization of the country’s administration, its finances, and church affairs. The views of the opposition group at court might be described as estate-conscious, patriarchal, and liberalistic; its influence is still to be detected in Montesquieu. Saint-Simon was close to this group; its most important members were his friends; he shared many of their ideas and developed them further in his own fashion. In his political attitudes there is a mixture of reactionary trends rooted in the era before Louis XIV, with liberalistic trends of the kind fostered by the early eighteenth century. Politically too he is outside of the style of Louis XIV. From his youth he had
been a friend of the Duc d’Orléans, who became Regent after the King’s death. As a member of the Council of Regency, Saint-Simon acquired a position of great influence, but he never succeeded in making much of it. Apparently he was no statesman; he was too arrogant, too honorable, too temperamental, and too nervous for that; perhaps too his life at court and his secret literary activity had spoiled him for practical political work. And here again he did not fit into his age, whose easy and elegant nonchalance was something he could neither share nor master. Still, it was during the decades from about 1694 to 1723—the period, that is, of his secret opposition during the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV, and then of his participation in the administration of the Duc d’Orléans—that his personality reached full development. It is these decades too that form the subject matter of the most important portions of his memoirs, which he edited during the subsequent decades. In view of all this, I believe that he can best be classed as a man of the early eighteenth century, as a special and idiosyncratic case of the anti-absolutistic, aristocratic, estate-conscious, and liberalizing reformist attitude which immediately preceded the beginnings of the Enlightenment.

Much has been written about his literary activity and his style, but to my mind the most cogent observations are to be found in the fourth section of an essay by Taine, who precedes them by a brilliant but one-sided and essentially inadequate description of the seventeenth century (
Essais de Critique d’Histoire
, 1, 188ff.). All critics are agreed in their admiration for Saint-Simon’s mastery in the representation of living individuals. The best and most famous portraits from earlier memoirs pale beside his, and in all European literature there have probably been only a very few writers capable of giving their readers such an abundance of human characters, each so patently specific and homogeneous, and each so fully revealing the very basis of the individual’s life. Saint-Simon does not invent; he works with the random unselected material which his life presents to him. One might call it everyday material, although it comes exclusively from the sphere of the French court. The setting is so vast and so richly peopled that it contains a whole world of human beings; and Saint-Simon rejects nothing and no one. His literary activity, which has almost the hold of a vice over him, eagerly applies the tools of verbal expression to every subject. This fact alone represents a point of departure for a review of his style in the light of our present approach. But in this case again we prefer to build on the basis of textual analysis, though
choosing examples from such an abundance is not easy. Let us begin something comparatively superficial.

One night in April 1711, the King’s only legitimate son, Monseigneur or le grand Dauphin, as he was called at court, died of smallpox at his castle of Meudon. In the afternoon the reports on his condition had been favorable, and at Versailles it was believed that the danger was past. That night the news came that he was dying. The entire court was affected by the excitement; no one could think of sleep. The ladies and gentlemen, most of them already in night apparel, came from their apartments and gathered about the dying Dauphin’s two sons, the Dukes of Burgundy and Berry, and their wives. Very soon the Duchess of Burgundy, who had absented herself for a few moments to meet the King’s carriage upon his return from Meudon, brings the news that Monseigneur is dead. The various emotions mirrored in the faces and attitudes of the numerous assembly, whom the unexpected occurrence affects in the most varied ways, provide a rich and significant spectacle, dramatically emphasized by the nocturnal and as it were improvised setting. Saint-Simon, who in any case is in an elated mood (which his conscience and sense of decorum make him try hard to repress) because he considers the disappearance of Monseigneur a piece of good luck for France, his friends, and himself, enjoys the occasion to the full and draws from it an abundance of scenes, portrait sketches, self-analyses, and reflections. In these the contradictory and confused elements of such a moment, the mixture of awe, despair, embarrassment, stupefaction, and suppressed delight, the dignity of death and the grotesque details which contrast with it, are brought together to produce an impression which is, on the whole, completely unified. From the description, which fills many pages, we shall choose one little scene. It concerns Madame, the King’s sister-in-law, dowager duchess of Orléans, the Palatine Elizabeth Charlotte, famous for her letters. After describing the group of weeping young princes and princesses and the Duc de Beauvilliers calmly and circumspectly pursuing his court function and trying to comfort them, Saint-Simon continues (21, 35):