Mimesis (74 page)

Le duc d’Humières voulut que je le menasse à Versailles remercier M. le duc d’Orléans le matin. Nous le trouvâmes qu’il allait s’habiller, et qu’il était encore dans son caveau [a basement room which is often mentioned], dont il avait fait sa garderobe. Il y était sur sa chaise percée parmi ses valets et deux ou trois de ses premiers officiers. J’en fus effrayé. Je vis un homme la tête basse, d’un rouge pourpre, avec un air hébété, qui ne me vit seulement pas approcher. Ses gens le lui dirent. Il tourna la tête lentement vers moi, sans presque la lever, et me demanda d’une langue épaisse ce qui m’amenait. Je le luis dis. J’étais entré là pour le presser de venir dans le lieu où il s’habillait, pour ne pas faire attendre le duc d’Humières; mais je demeurai si étonné que je restai court. Je pris Simiane, premier gentilhomme de sa chambre, dans une fenêtre, à qui je témoignai ma surprise et ma crainte de l’état où je voyais M. le duc d’Orléans. Simiane me répondit qu’il était depuis fort longtemps ainsi les matins, qu’il n’y avait ce jour-là rien d’extraordinaire en lui, et que je n’en étais surpris que parce que je ne le voyais jamais à ces heures-là; qu’il n’y paraîtrait plus tant quand il se serait secoué en s’habillant. Il ne laissa pas d’y paraître encore beaucoup lorsqu’il vint s’habiller. Il reçut le remerciement du duc d’Humières d’un air étonné et pesant; et lui, qui était toujours gracieux et poli envers tout le monde, et qui savait si bien dire à propos et à point, à peine lui répondit-il. … Cet état de M. le duc d’Orléans me fit faire beaucoup de réflexions. … C’était le fruit de ses soupers … (41, 229).

(The duc d’Humières wanted me to take him to Versailles to thank M. le duc d’Orléans in the morning. We found him about to
dress and that he was still in his basement, which he had made his wardrobe. He was on his close-stool among his valets and two or three of his principal officers. He terrified me. I saw a man with his head down, a purplish red, with a vacant look, who did not even see me approach. His attendants told him. He turned his head toward me slowly, almost without raising it, and asked me thickly what brought me. I told him. I had gone there to urge him to come to the place where he dressed, so as not to make the due d’Humières wait; but I remained so astonished that I stopped short. I took Simiane, first gentleman of his bedchamber, into a window, to whom I expressed my surprise and my fear over the state in which I found M. le duc d’Orléans. Simiane answered that he had been like this in the morning for some time past, that there was nothing unusual about him that morning, and that I was only surprised because I never saw him at those hours; that it would not show so much when he had shaken himself up getting dressed. Nevertheless it still showed a good deal when he came to dress. He received the duc d’Humières’ thanks with an astonished and heavy air; and he, who was always gracious and polite toward everyone, and who knew so well how to speak pertinently and pointedly, hardly answered him. … This state of M. le duc d’Orléans caused me to make many reflections. … It was the fruit of his suppers. …)

One should not be surprised to learn that the Regent is surrounded by servants and court officials while sitting on his
chaise percée
and that he even receives a high dignitary in that position. The princes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were almost never alone. When Louvois, in a dramatic scene, rushes into the King’s apartment to prevent him from publicly acknowledging his marriage to Madame de Maintenon, he finds him just risen from his
chaise percée
and in the act of arranging his clothes. And of the duchesse de Burgogne Saint-Simon relates that it was her custom to carry on the most intimate conversations with her ladies in waiting under the same circumstances. But none of these scenes has the gripping power of the one quoted above. I suppose that in all known literature, especially in earlier literature, there is hardly a text that treats such a topic dramatically and tragically. This one does. Saint-Simon’s terror in the face of the picture of decline and imminent death before him has tragic weight. The picture is developed, slowly, gradually, and in precise detail, in
two fairly long sentences (
Je vis un homme …
and
Il tourna la tête
…) set between three very brief ones (
j’en fus effrayé, ses gens le luí dirent, je le lui dis
), all of which refer to the surroundings and, in their abruptness and sharpness, give the effect of thrusts vainly trying to pierce the Regent’s apathy. The picture itself Saint-Simon begins with the words, “I saw a man” (not, “I saw the Duke”)—which expresses two things: that in the first moment he does not recognize, or refuses to believe, who the man before him is; secondly, that the unfortunate creature is hardly Monsieur le duc d’Orléans any longer but “only” a man. And the slow precision of the second sentence, with the laborious turning of the head and the heavy tongue, is on a level of style which is hardly to be found anywhere else in the eighteenth century, and even in the nineteenth not much before the Goncourts and Zola.

The point is not simply that we have here a ruthless representation of everyday events, of things that are ugly and, in terms of classical aesthetics, undignified. Such a radical realism occurs elsewhere too, even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The point is rather that these things are made to serve a completely serious character portrayal which explores the problematic and even transcends the purely moralistic in order to penetrate into the
profondeurs opaques
of our nature. Every reader is constrained to feel that the entire destiny, the entire tragedy, of the duc d’Orléans is contained in this scene on the
chaise percée
. In his level of style Saint-Simon is a precursor of modern and ultramodern forms of conceiving and representing life. He takes human beings in the midst of their everyday environment, with their background, their multifarious relations, their possessions, every particle of their bodies, their gestures, every nuance of their speech, their hopes, and their fears. Very often he expresses what we would nowadays call their inheritance, and here too he expresses both the physical and the spiritual factors. He notes the peculiarities of the milieu with absolute precision, scorning nothing. What author of his age could and would have emphasized a thing like the peculiar mentality and manner of speech of the Mortemart family, as he does time and again (in connection with Mme. de Montespan; her daughter, the duchesse d’Orléans; Mme. de Castries; etc.). And all this serves the portrayal of the
condition de l’homme
. The sphere of his experiences is certainly limited, for he is always dealing only with the French court. But in compensation it is a sphere of great homogeneity; as such it practically predetermines that the whole work will have unity of action. And the
scene is vast enough to furnish a world of characters and the possibility of random, unselected, everyday occurrences.

We said earlier that, in other instances too, the memoir literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not conform with the aesthetic rule that the everyday and low should be kept apart from the sublime and serious; on the contrary, it in many cases reveals and unmasks what is elsewhere represented in an exalted manner—princes and their courts. But with Saint-Simon all this is carried much further than with any other author; it is different in substance and degree. With the others, even when they are talented writers, the very fact that their material is personal, everyday, unselected, and rarely permitting a general view of a situation in its entirety, leads to their being valued chiefly because of their documentary and local-color content, while their literary qualities, if any, are enjoyed as a pleasant makeweight. Anecdotes, intrigues, apologies, in short, the purely personal, is far too predominant; political events, presented as it were on a minute-to-minute basis and selected on that of a limited horizon and interest, lay no claim to the highest human sympathy. Nobody reads Retz with the same readiness for sympathy and participation with which one reads Shakespeare or Montaigne. Saint-Simon has also, in my opinion, too often been judged by the same standards as these others, that is to say, he has too often been treated as mere documentation in the history of culture. To be sure, he is that, and he is so more perfectly than the others. But he is something more and something else as well. Precisely the factors which account for the limited human and aesthetic effect of the others—the anecdotal, the personal, the idiosyncratic, the frequent insignificance of their themes—are his strength, simply because he alone knows how to use the random and idiosyncratic, the unselected, the at times absurdly personal and prejudiced, as points of departure for sudden descents into the depths of human existence.

What a distance from the charming and superficial intermediate level of the texts from the first half of the eighteenth century discussed at the beginning of this chapter! What a contrast to their display of a pleasantly stylized reality designed for the reader’s enjoyment or as propaganda for some enlightened ideology! And yet, Saint-Simon belongs far more to the period during which he composed his work than to the seventeenth century, where he has been placed time and again because he treats of Louis XIV’s court. Yet it is not even the court of the sixties and seventies, but that of the last decades! And
those last decades, into whose life he penetrated, were, at the time he wrote, already the distant past. The first half of the eighteenth century affords not a few other instances of individuals, ideas, and movements which seem to be harbingers of much later developments and are unique in their own epoch. Who would put Giambattista Vico in the seventeenth century? And Vico was born seven years before Saint-Simon and wrote his principal work a little earlier too. Vico was an anti-Cartesian; in the same way Saint-Simon was against the great King; and they both admired their opponents and were deeply impressed by them. But there are further, and less external, similarities between these so very different contemporaries. In their predilections and mentality they both hark back to a past which had ceased to be modern by their day. They both wrote works which at first sight seem amorphously chaotic in contrast to the elegantly polished and limited style of their contemporaries. In both the urgency of an inner impulse gives their language something unusual, at times something violent and immoderately expressive, which runs counter to the ease and pleasantness which appealed to the taste of the time; and above all, they both regard man—the one wholly instinctively, in the process of portraying his fellows; the other speculatively, in a vision of the course of history—as being profoundly embedded in the historical data of his existence, and in this they are both in complete contradiction to the rationalistic and ahistorical attitude of their age. Of a basic historical theory of the kind postulated by Historism, whose first faint manifestation began to be perceptible just at the time Saint-Simon was writing his memoirs, there is yet no trace in him. The individualism of his representation is limited to individual human beings; historical forces in a superindividual and yet personalized sense are not within his range of vision. What he means by living history (he explains this in his impressive
Considérations préliminaires
, 1, 5f.), is exclusively an insight into the distinctive psychologies of the acting individuals and into the resulting connections and oppositions. The purpose of the historian, as he formulates it, is entirely moralizing and didactic in the pre-historistic sense. But the multifariousness of the reality in which he lived and which inspired his genius made him go far beyond it.

17

MILLER THE MUSICIAN

Miller
(schnell auf- und abgehend). Einmal für allemal! Der Handel wird ernsthaft. Meine Tochter kommt mit dem Baron ins Geschrei. Mein Haus wird verrufen. Der Präsident bekommt Wind, und kurz und gut, ich biete dem Junker aus.

Frau
Du hast ihn nicht in dein Haus geschwatzt—hast ihm deine Tochter nicht nachgeworfen.

Miller
Hab’ ihn nicht in mein Haus geschwatzt—hab’ ihm’s Mädel nicht nachgeworfen; wer nimmt Notiz davon?—Ich war Herr im Haus. Ich hätt’ meine Tochter mehr koram nehmen sollen. Ich hätt’ dem Major besser auftrumpfen sollen—oder hätt’ gleich alles Seiner Excellenz, dem Herrn Papa stecken sollen. Der junge Baron bringt’s mit einem Wischer hinaus, das muss ich wissen, und alles Wetter kommt über den Geiger.

Frau
(schlürft eine Tasse aus). Possen! Geschwätz! Was kann über dich kommen? Wer kann dir was anhaben? Du gehst deiner Profession nach und raffst Scholaren zusammen, wo sie zu kriegen sind.

Miller
Aber, sag mir doch, was wird bei dem ganzen Commerz auch herauskommen?—Nehmen kann er das Mädel nicht—Vom Nehmen ist gar die Rede nicht, und zu einer—dass Gott erbarm?—Guten Morgen!—Gelt, wenn so ein Musje von sich da und dort, und dort und hier schon herumbeholfen hat, wenn er, der Henker weiss! was als? gelöst hat, schmeckt’s meinem guten Schlucker freilich, einmal auf süss Wasser zu graben. Gib du Acht! Gib du Acht! und wenn du aus jedem Astloch ein Auge strecktest und vor jedem Blutstropfen Schildwache ständest, er wird sie, dir auf der Nase, beschwatzen, dem Mädel eins hinsetzen, und führt sich ab, und das Mädel ist verschimpfiert auf ihr Lebenlang, bleibt sitzen, oder hat’s Handwerk verschmeckt, treibt’s fort, (die Faust vor die Stirn) Jesus Christus!

Frau
Gott behüt’ uns in Gnaden!

Miller
Es hat sich zu behüten. Worauf kann so ein Windfuss wohl sonst sein Absehen richten?—Das Mädel ist schön—schlank—führt seinen netten Fuss. Unterm Dach mag’s aussehen, wie’s will. Darüber guckt man bei euch Weibsleuten weg, wenn’s nur der liebe Gott par terre nicht hat fehlen lassen—Stöbert mein Springinsfeld erst noch dieses Capitel aus—he da! geht ihm ein Licht auf, wie meinem Rodney, wenn er die Witterung eines Franzosen kriegt, und nun müssen alle Segel dran und drauf los,—und ich verdenk’s ihm gar nicht. Mensch ist Mensch. Das muss ich wissen.

Frau …

(
Miller
(walking rapidly to and fro). Once and for all! This business is getting serious. They will start talking about my daughter and the Baron. Our home will lose its reputation. The President is bound to hear about it and—well and good, I am going to forbid the young man to come here any more.