Villemain declared their author to be “the most original of geniuses in French literature, the foremost of prose satirists; inexhaustible in details of manners and customs, a word-painter like Tacitus; the author of a language of his own, lacking in accuracy, system, and art, yet an admirable writer.”  Leon Vallee reinforces this by saying:  “Saint-Simon can not be compared to any of his contemporaries.  He has an individuality, a style, and a language solely his own....  Language he treated like an abject slave.  When he had gone to its farthest limit, when it failed to express his ideas or feelings, he forced it—­the result was a new term, or a change in the ordinary meaning of words sprang forth from has pen.  With this was joined a vigour and breadth of style, very pronounced, which makes up the originality of the works of Saint-Simon and contributes toward placing their author in the foremost rank of French writers.”

Louis de Rouvroy, who later became the Duc de Saint-Simon, was born in Paris, January 16, 1675.  He claimed descent from Charlemagne, but the story goes that his father, as a young page of Louis XIII., gained favour with his royal master by his skill in holding the stirrup, and was finally made a duke and peer of France.  The boy Louis had no lesser persons than the King and Queen Marie Therese as godparents, and made his first formal appearance at Court when seventeen.  He tells us that he was not a studious boy, but was fond of reading history; and that if he had been given rein to read all he desired of it, he might have made “some figure in the world.”  At nineteen, like D’Artagnan, he entered the King’s Musketeers.  At twenty he was made a captain in the cavalry; and the same year he married the beautiful daughter of the Marechal de Larges.  This marriage, which was purely political in its inception, finally turned into a genuine love match—­a pleasant exception to the majority of such affairs.  He became devoted to his wife, saying:  “she exceeded all that was promised of her, and all that I myself had hoped.”  Partly because of this marriage, and also because he felt himself slighted in certain army appointments, he resigned his commissim after five years’ service, and retired for a time to private life.

Upon his return to Court, taking up apartments which the royal favour had reserved for him at Versailles, Saint-Simon secretly entered upon the self-appointed task for which he is now known to fame—­a task which the proud King of a vainglorious Court would have lost no time in terminating had it been discovered—­the task of judge, spy, critic, portraitist, and historian, rolled into one.  Day by day, henceforth for many years, he was to set down upon his private “Memoirs” the results of his personal observations, supplemented by the gossip brought to him by his unsuspecting friends; for neither courtier, statesman, minister, nor friend ever looked upon those notes which this “little