The great days of Versailles; studies from court life in the later years of Louis xiv

Preface

The following pages do not profess to be history ; still less do they pretend to throw any new light upon a period which is already so exhaustively known through its memoirs and its letters. All that I have attempted to do is to reconstruct from familiar materials a picture of Court life at Versailles in the later years of Louis XIV — the manners, customs, and interests of a unique society which has no counterpart in modern Europe — and to give a brief account of the private life and character of some of the people who figured most prominently in the events of the time. My hope is that such a compilation may be of use to those who intend to study the French eighteenth-century memoirs, by making them familiar with some of the personal questions which counted for so much at the French Court ; and, also, that it may not be without interest for that large class of people who have neither time nor opportunity to study the period in detail, and who are forced to be content with the summaries of others. Such a work as I have contemplated is almost necessarily based on Saint-Simon; but no writer needs to be read in a more critical spirit than Saint-Simon. Not only is he inclined to colour his canvas with a wealth

Vi THE GREAT DAYS OF VERSAILLES

of picturesque detail which is often more dramatically appropriate than historically true, but, also, he is not always careful to distinguish between what he knew and what he only surmised. Moreover, he writes with a strong personal and political bias, and, with all his acumen, he could never see life except through the eyes of a privileged caste. For him, the welfare of France was bound up with the maintenance of the ducal prerogatives ; and to assert the privileges of his order was the most sacred of the duties that he imposed on himself. Sympathy with his aims covered a multitude of sins ; open antagonism was the unpardonable offence, and connoted a number of other undesirable qualities which set his pen * dipping for the hottest ink.' To the Due du Maine he is manifestly and flagrantly unjust ; Madame de Maintenon, whom he did not know personally, becomes in his excited imagination the incarnation of all that is most unlovely in human nature; and he will not allow that Vendome possessed a single military talent or won a solitary victory on his own initiative.

Fortunately, we do not depend on Saint- Simon alone for our knowledge of the secret history of the times ; the memoirs of Dangeau, the Grande Mademoiselle, Madame de Caylus, Madame de Staal, and, above all, the letters of Madame de Maintenon, provide a useful and necessary corrective to the animus of his brilliant pages. Madame, the Princess Palatine, who poured out her soul in voluminous letters, is a storehouse of information; but she was as good a hater as Saint-Simon, and, when she is criticising individuals, her judgments need to be taken

PREFACE Vll

-with as many grains of salt as those of the great memoir-writer himself.

Besides drawing freely from the above-mentioned sources I have pillaged Arvede Barine's ' Louis XIV et la Grande Mademoiselle,' Pierre de Nolhac's works on Versailles, and Druon's *Histoire de I'J&ducation des Princes dans la Maison des Bourbons de France ' — one of the most interesting and suggestive works on education extant ; and, while I am acknowledging my obligations, I should like to add that I am indebted to my friend Mr. C. P. Hastings for much valuable advice and criticism, and to Mr. H. Chitty and Miss E. D. Bradby for help in seeing the volume through the press.

Nobody is more conscious than myself of its shortcomings, but for two of the most obvious I should like to plead extenuating circumstances. In the first place, I know that I have been guilty, more than once, of * vain repetition.' The plan I have adopted of treating my principal characters in separate compartments made a certain amount of overlapping almost inevitable ; and, on the whole, I have thought it better to lay myself open to the charge of being redundant than to risk being obscure. In the second place, when quoting Saint-Simon at any length, I have ventured to paraphrase rather than translate. I feel the enormity of the crime : but few writers lose so much by translation as Saint-Simon. His rapid fire of words, his carelessness of construction, and his habit of producing a cumulative impression by piling phrase on phrase, are singularly effective in the French, but do not lend themselves to our English idiom ; and

Vlll THE GEEAT DAYS OF VEESAILLES

any attempt to reproduce the originality and vigour of his style is certain to fail of its object, unless it is undertaken by an abler pen than mine.

For the inaccuracies which, I feel sure, will have crept into these pages, as well as for a habit of dogmatising on insufficient data, I must throw myself on the indulgence of the reader, with the frank admission that the latter of the two faults, at all events, is almost inseparable from the pedagogue.

G. F. B.

Eugby.