Mimesis (72 page)

Madame, rhabillée en grand habit, arriva hurlante, ne sachant bonnement pourquoi ni l’un ni l’autre, les inonda tous de ses larmes en les embrassant, fit retentir le château d’un renouvellement de cris, et fournit le spectacle bizarre d’une princesse qui se remet en cérémonie, en pleine nuit, pour venir pleurer et crier parmi une foule de femmes en déshabillé de nuit, presque en mascarades.

(Madame, reclothed in full dress, arrived howling, not really knowing the reason for either, flooded them all with tears as she embraced them, made the castle echo with a renewed outbreak of cries, and provided the singular spectacle of a princess who resumes court dress, in the middle of the night, in order to weep and scream among a crowd of women in nocturnal undress, almost in masquerade costume.)

The sentence is built up of four coordinate members with their verbs in the past tense (
arriva, inonda, fit retentir
, and
fournit
), of which the first three represent the stages of a progressive action, which is summarized and interpreted in the drawn-out sweep of the fourth. However, the interpretation, which emphasizes the contrast between the intended and the actual effect of the action, insinuates itself into the first members too. At the very start, after the words
Madame, rhabillée en grand habit
, one expects something solemn and ceremonious, but this expectation gets a rude shock from
arriva hurlante
; the participial insert (
ne sachant
…) follows, and, in the subsequent members,
inonda
… and
fit retentir
…; so that this continuous and coordinated periodic structure, which includes no single syntactic device of contrast or concession, embraces a whole series of antitheses of meaning. Madame has no good reason either to dress up or to howl. It is ludicrous to do the former for the purpose of the latter. And for the latter she has no reason, since Monseigneur and his followers were hostile to her son’s and her own interests and since no friendly relations whatever existed between the two groups. On the other hand, her behavior exhibits all the contradictory elements which make up her character: her tactless, noisy, and temperamental goodheartedness, which at such a moment forgets all personal grudges and feels only the terror of death and sympathy with the grieving; and, in contrast to this, her somewhat awkward and German sense (after a residence of decades still basically different from that of the French court) of what she owes to her princely dignity, so that, although genuinely shaken and sincerely sobbing, she yet has herself laced into a robe of state before she comes on for her great scene. All this admirably supplements the information which Saint-Simon elsewhere supplies about her: the slap in the face which she administers to her son in the presence of the assembled court because he has agreed, against her wish and against his own, to marry one of the King’s illegitimate daughters; her clumsy and unsociable disapproval of what goes on at her husband’s
court; her no less clumsy and crude hostility toward Madame de Maintenon, which eventually led to her being dreadfully humiliated herself; and finally it agrees admirably with the general picture of her which Saint-Simon presents at the time of her death (41, 117):

… Elle était forte, courageuse, allemande au dernier point, franche, droite, bonne et bienfaisante, noble et grande en toutes ses manières, et petite au dernier point sur tout ce qui regardait ce qui lui était dû. Elle était sauvage, toujours enfermée à écrire, hors les courts temps de cour chez elle; du reste, seule avec ses dames; dure, rude, se prenant aisément d’aversion, et redoutable par ses sorties qu’elle faisait quelquefois, et sur quiconque; nulle complaisance, nul tour dans l’esprit, quoiqu’elle (ne) manquât pas d’esprit; nulle flexibilité, jalouse, comme on l’a dit, jusqu’à la dernière petitesse de tout ce qui lui était dû; la figure et le rustre d’un Suisse, capable avec cela d’une amitié tendre et inviolable.

(… She was strong, brave, German to the last degree, frank, upright, good and beneficent, noble and great in all her ways, and small to the last degree about everything concerning what was due to her. She was unsociable, always shut up writing, except for the brief periods of court at her establishment; otherwise, alone with her ladies; hard, rough, easily conceiving aversions, and to be feared for the attacks which she sometimes made, and upon anyone at all; no complaisance, no subtlety in wit, though she was not without wit; no flexibility, jealous, as has been said, to the last degree of pettiness, concerning everything that was due to her; the face and loutishness of a Swiss guard, withal capable of tender and inviolable friendship. …)

This passage, with its disorganized accumulation, its repetitions and syntactic short cuts, will serve to show that it is not the rule but rather the exception when Saint-Simon writes such long-drawn-out and eventoned periods as the one describing the nocturnal entrance of the Duchess. His sentence patterns change in keeping with the hold the subject matter has on him: as he puts it himself (41, 335),
emporté toujours par la matière, et peu attentif à la manière de la rendre, sinon pour la bien expliquer
. In the night piece we have quoted, his memory of the stormy incident carries him into the current of it, but not to such a degree that his critical observation and his emphasis on the
grotesque suffer from it. He fits these things into the current of his sentence. However different the two passages may be—the nocturnal entrance of the Duchess and the portrait of her—they have many things in common, and above all the denseness and as it were overcrowding of their content. As Saint-Simon writes, memories of people and scenes come to him so urgently and with such an abundance of details that his pen seems hardly able to keep up with it all; and he is apparently quite convinced that everything that occurs to him is indispensable for the whole and that it will find its proper place there without his having to prepare for it in advance. He does not take the time to finish dealing with Madame’s entrance first, and then go on, in new sentences, to say (1) that she has little cause to mourn and (2) that her court dress was out of place—which are really two quite unrelated things. Instead, since they both come to him simultaneously with his memory image of the princess’s precipitate arrival, and since he feels too beset by ideas and inspirations, too afraid that, if he attempts a less hectic arrangement, postponing certain things for later treatment, something may escape him or be crowded out by new images and ideas, he has to put everything in at once. And then the necessity turns out to be a virtue; he discovers that the two things can be combined because they are equally inappropriate, instinctive, and touching, and because they both illuminate the depths of Madame’s character. And so he quickly puts it down, and there it stands, not quite symmetrically related to what went before, but that only makes it the more striking:
ne sachant bonnement pourquoi ni l’un ni l’autre
. This overhasty and impatient procedure is responsible for the syntactic hybrids and short cuts which occur everywhere in his work and which almost always result in new syntheses; as for example the inspired
jamais à son aise ni nul avec lui
with reference to le Président Harlay, or
sachant de tout, parlant de tout, l’esprit orné, mais d’écorce
, with reference to the Duc de Noailles; or such logically absurd but, in point of meaning, perfectly clear formulations as these: …
pour la faire connaître et en donner l’idée qu’on doit avoir pour s’en former une qui soit véritable
(Madame des Ursins), or …
divers traits de ce portrait, plus fidèle que la gloire qu’il a dérobée et qu’à l’exemple du roi il a transmise à la postérité
(on Maréchal Villars; the rest of the sentence is also characteristic of his short-cut method of condensation). The same urgent haste prevails in the enumeration of Madame’s characteristics in his portrait of her. Quite evidently Saint-Simon did not take the time to arrange them beforehand; he has not even the patience
to eliminate repetitions in thought, expression, and sound (
courts-cour
); he starts out twice with
elle était
, and if he does not go on doing so, the reason is simply that he has not the time. He twice uses
au dernier point
as a means of emphasis, and thus unwittingly produces a rhetorical effect. He combines two short adjectives in the absolute position (
dure, rude
) with a nine-syllabled adjectival phrase, proceeds with another adjective, which he substantiates in detail (14 syllables), and appends to it the condensed, abrupt, and four-syllabled
et sur quiconque
, which falls completely out of the construction. From the next clause on, he simply piles up nouns. And the most astounding feature of the entire thing is, to my mind, the conclusion, in which one no longer knows where the physical ends and the moral begins, and in which, for the most striking and, because of its inner truth, the most affecting of all these contrasts he does not trouble to find any other connective than the
avec cela
which every reader of Saint-Simon knows so well and which is unforgettable by reason of its inexpressiveness in the midst of so much that is expressive. What a monument for a woman:
la figure et le rustre d’un Suisse, capable avec cela d’une amitié tendre et inviolable!

This brings us to another peculiar characteristic, which is to be found in both of our texts and in Saint-Simon generally: just as he makes no effort to construct his sentences harmoniously, so it also does not occur to him to harmonize their content. He has no idea of organizing his material in accordance with any ethical or aesthetic conception of order, with some predetermined idea of what is proper to beauty and to ugliness, to virtue and to vice, to the body and to the soul. Everything that occurs to him in connection with his subject, he throws into his sentences just as it happens to come to mind, in full confidence that it will somehow fit together in unity and clearness. For has he not in his consciousness a homogeneous conception of the individual he is describing, a total picture of the scene he is depicting? He has no objection to coupling
la figure et le rustre d’un Suisse
(where
rustre
is beginning to shift from the physical into the ethical) with
amitié tendre et inviolable
; other and even more extreme instances are to be found everywhere in his work. Of Monseigneur he says:
L’épaisseur d’une part, la crainte de l’autre formaient en ce prince une retenue qui a peu d’exemples
. His wonderful description of the Duchess of Burgundy (whom, like almost everyone who knew her, he found enchanting) begins with the words:
Régulièrement laide, les joues pendantes, le front trop avancé, un nez qui ne disait rien, de
grosses lèvres mordantes. …
One might suppose that he intentionally begins with her ugly features and will then give her beauties; perhaps for a moment this was his plan; but he does not adhere to it, for after
des yeux les plus parlants et les plus beaux du monde
comes
peu de dents et toutes pourries dont elle parlait et se moquait la première
. After all that we get, among other things: …
peu de gorge mais admirable, le cou long avec un soupçon de goître qui ne lui seyait point mal … une taille longue, ronde, menue, aisée, parfaitement coupée, une marche de déesse sur les nuées: elle plaisait au dernier point
(22, 280)—and even that is not the end. Of Villars he says:
C’était un assez grand homme, brun, bien fait, devenu gros en vieillissant, sans en être appesanti, avec une physionomie vive, ouverte, sortante, et véritablement un peu folle
. Who would be prepared for such a conclusion? This passage, which Proust cites admiringly, and similar passages, which can be found in great numbers, must not be judged by our modern literary experiences; unexpected combinations (though hardly of this cast) are nowadays within the reach of any halfway gifted journalist and even many an advertising copywriter. They are to be judged in terms of the ethical and aesthetic conceptions of French classicism and post-classicism, when crystallized categories had come to exist for things that do and things that do not go together, categories of
vraisemblance
and
bienséance
which did not tolerate even the merest reference to anything which deviated from them. Only on this basis can one appreciate the peculiar character, the incomparability, of Saint-Simon’s perception and expression.

The most important point in connection with this lack of every kind of prearranged harmony (from which, however, the harmony of the
individuum ineffable
in its breathing reality is then built up) is the constant medley of physical and moral, outer and inner characteristics. The external characteristic is always expressive of character; the inner being is never or at least very seldom described without its sensory manifestations; and often the two are fused in a single word or image, as is the case in the example discussed above (
la figure et
)
le rustre d’un Suisse
. This intermingling persists even when it is Saint-Simon’s purpose to present externals and internals as in contrast. Such a contrast can only be deceptive, can only rest upon a misinterpretation of externals. In connection with the Church Council of 1700, Saint-Simon describes the surprise of the clergy when the cardinal archbishop of Paris, Noailles, little known to most of them, is unexpectedly called upon to preside and, though his outer appearance seemed to justify no
great expectations, proves to be an extremely erudite, capable, and clear-headed man:
un air de béatitude que sa physionomie présentait, avec un parler gras, lent, et nasillard, la faisait volontiers prendre pour niaise, et sa simplicité en tout pour bêtise
[note the short cuts];
la surprise était grande quand
. … He does not oppose outer to inner characteristics; instead, he presents a misinterpretation (
la faisait volontiers prendre
) of the whole, a misinterpretation which is itself interlarded with moral elements (
air de béatitude, simplicité
). And when he gives the correct interpretation, it is done in such a way that the traits misread by superficial observers fall admirably into the whole. And the correct interpretation likewise mingles corporeal and spiritual, outer and inner elements:
avec son siège, sa pourpre, sa faveur, sa douceur, ses mœurs, sa piété et son savoir, il gouverna toute l’assemblée sans peine
. … By way of conclusion there is a description of his eating habits.