scriptions of the
details of places, and invariably heightens the effect of his emotional
climaxes by his dramatic management of the physical _decor._ Thus his
readers get to know the Versailles of that age as if they had lived in
it; they are familiar with the great rooms and the long gallery; they
can tell the way to the king's bedchamber, or wait by the mysterious
door of Madame de Maintenon; or remember which prince had rooms opening
out on to the Terrace near the Orangery, and which great family had
apartments in the new wing. More than this, Saint-Simon has the art of
conjuring up--often in a phrase or two--those curious intimate visions
which seem to reveal the very soul of a place. How much more one knows
about the extraordinary palace--how one feels the very pulse of the
machine--when Saint-Simon has shown one in a flash a door opening, on a
sudden, at dead of night, in an unlighted corridor, and the haughty Duc
d'Harcourt stepping out among a blaze of torches, to vanish again, as
swiftly as he had come, into the mysterious darkness!--Or when one has
seen, amid the cold and snow of a cruel winter, the white faces of the
courtiers pressed against the window-panes of the palace, as the
messengers ride in from the seat of war with their dreadful catalogues
of disasters and deaths!

Saint-Simon's style is the precise counterpart of his matter. It is
coloured and vital to the highest degree. It is the style of a writer
who does not care how many solecisms he commits--how disordered his
sentences may be, how incorrect his grammar, how forced or undignified
his expressions--so long as he can put on to paper in black and white
the passionate vision that is in his mind. The result is something
unique in French literature. If Saint-Simon had tried to write with
academic correctness--and even if he had succeeded--he certainly would
have spoilt his book. Fortunately, academic correctness did not interest
him, while the exact delineament of his observations did. He is not
afraid of using colloquialisms which every critic of the time would have
shuddered at, and which, by their raciness and flavour, add enormously
to his effects. His writing is also extremely metaphorical; technical
terms are thrown in helter-skelter whenever the meaning would benefit;
and the boldest constructions at every turn are suddenly brought into
being. In describing the subtle spiritual sympathy which existed
between Fenelon and Madame de Guyon he s