Gossip (7 page)

"Whom are you angry with today?" the Duc de Chevreuse once asked Saint-Simon.
Le petit
duc
was never without his causes, his rivals, his enemies. The King's mistress and later his second wife, Mme. de Maintenon, he despised, referring to her, "his greatest obstacle," as "the old bitch"; elsewhere he calls her and the Duc du Maine "the ancient whore and bastard." Père Le Tellier, the King's confessor, he loathed. The Duc de Vendôme he thought little more than an intriguer and a vile power merchant. Although he revered the monarchy, he felt less than full reverence for the reigning monarch, for the King "had a rooted dislike and suspicion of men who were intelligent and well-informed, and that to be so considered was rated a crime in me." But, then, his "enemies said I was too clever, too well-informed, and took advantage of the King's fear of such qualities to put me out of his favor."

Saint-Simon wasn't, as we would say today, paranoid, but his strong opinions, the verbal violence that he found it difficult to curb, turned Versailles into a snake pit for him, with every snake carrying the venom of gossip against him.

Le petit duc
was a species of busybody. Had you asked him, he would have said he was a busybody for the public good, for he had a strong sense of how the business of the nation of France, both within and without, ought to be conducted, and he did all he could to bring other people around to his way of thinking.

Saint-Simon felt that there were fights he couldn't get out of, intrigues he couldn't ignore, without losing his honor. It wasn't in him to "endure to swallow continual insults at the Court nor to adapt a servile pose which I despised." He knew, too, that his passionate nature gave him "the reputation of being a busybody, clever, experienced, full of malice."

One must possess an interesting, not to say strange, temperament to be able to spend the last decades of one's life polishing up a record of one's days that one chooses not to have published in one's lifetime. Why would anyone do that? To set the record straight, if only for posterity, is one possible reason. To have one's say—in many instances, in Saint-Simon's case, one's revengeful say—is another. Reading his
Memoirs
is like reading a sublimely fascinating gossip column. That the people being gossiped about are long dead scarcely deflects from the pleasure that such gossip provides, which is a tribute to the power of Saint-Simon's prose.

"Tact and prudence," Saint-Simon writes, "are not typically French virtues." Not to speak ill of the dead is a commonplace admonition that he obviously never considered, for he regularly speaks devastatingly ill of the dead. In the
Memoirs,
which are organized chronologically, whenever he announces at the top of a paragraph that a certain courtier has died, one knows one is in for brilliant, candid, and penetrating character analysis.

As one courtier after another dies, Saint-Simon sends him or her into the afterlife with a horseshoe floral arrangement of subtle criticism. The Duchesses de Villeroy was "honest, unaffected, frank, loyal and secret; despite her little wit, she succeeded in making herself redoubted at the Court, and ruled both her husband and father-in-law." Then there is Fenelon, the archbishop of Cambrai, "growing old beneath the weight of disappointed hopes"; La Chétardie, "the imbecile director, nay the master, of Mme. de Maintenon's conscience"; and let us not neglect La Fontaine, "who wrote the celebrated fables, yet was so boring in conversation."

Saint-Simon's best gossip, the dishiest of his dirt, is of course reserved for his enemies. He is relentlessly critical of the overreaching ambition of Mme. des Ursins, the supreme directress behind the ruler of Spain, Philip V, as Mme. de Maintenon was over the ruler of France, Louis XIV. Or consider the Duc de Noailles: "He is the very sink of iniquity, false-hearted and treacherous, making use of everyone. Scorning the commoner virtues, and serving only his own advantage, he is the most abandoned libertine and a bare-faced and unwavering hypocrite ... An adept at lies and slander, if he is cornered he twists snakelike, spitting venom, using the most abject shifts to entice one back and crush one in his coils." And here he is on the son of Pontchartrain, the King's chief minister:

 

He was of average height, his face long, with sagging cheeks and monstrous thick lips, was altogether disgusting, and deformed as well, since smallpox removed one of his eyes. The glass-eye that replaced it was perpetually a-weep, making his appearance alarming at first glance, but not nearly as frightening as it should have been. He had a sense of honour, but perverted; he was studious, well schooled in the work of his department, tolerably industrious and ever anxious to appear more so. His perversity, which no one had curbed or checked, permeated all that he did ... If ever he did a kind action he boasted of it to such an extent that it sounded like a reproach ... To cap all, he was mean and treacherous, and prided himself on being so.

 

This goes on for two more densely packed paragraphs, without any slackening in the intensity of Saint-Simon's lacerating, gossipy criticism. There are scores of such portraits scattered throughout the
Memoirs.

Saint-Simon wasn't a putdown artist merely. When a person met his high standards, he could be handsomely complimentary. On the wife of Chancellor Pontchartrain he wrote that she "had that exquisite politeness that measures and discriminates between degrees of age and rank, and thus puts everyone at ease," and then goes on to cite her many good works. Or at the death of the dowager Maréchale d'Estrées he writes:

 

People feared her; yet her company was much sought after. They said that she was spiteful; but if so, it was only through speaking her mind freely and frankly on every subject, often with much wit, and always with spirit and force, and by not having the temperament to suffer fools gladly. She could be dangerous at such times, when she let fly with an economy of words, speaking to people's faces such cruel home-truths that they felt like sinking through the floor; but truly, she did not enjoy quarrelling or scandal for its own sake; she simply wished to make herself redoubtable and a person to be reckoned with, and in that she succeeded, living the while very happily with her own family.

 

In some ways the Maréchale d'Estrées sounds like a female version of Saint-Simon, who of himself writes, "I was never noted for restraint."

A believing Christian, Saint-Simon was nevertheless not notable for the virtue of forgiveness. He felt that one of the staggering weaknesses of his friend the Duc d'Orléans was that he pardoned his enemies, and thereby turned a virtue into a vice. He himself said that "God bids us to forgive, but not surrender our self-respect." He was an excellent hater, was
le petit duc,
who could say about his enemy the Abbé Dubois that "all vices fought for mastery in him, each continually striving and clamoring to be the uppermost."

And yet, for all this, the Duc de Saint-Simon was a good man. His own politics were without the major element of self-promotion. He wished only a wise and just administration directed by a fair and honorable monarch. He was to be disappointed in his desire. His influence over the Dauphin, the Duc de Bourgogne, was of course dissipated at the death of the young Dauphin. The Duc d'Orléans attempted Saint-Simon's plan of government by councils, but the members of the councils argued among themselves, and the plan, not aided by the Regent's tergiversations, fell apart. Lecturing, at times hectoring, the Duc d'Orléans as he did, people began to think Saint-Simon, as the historian Emmanuel Ladurie has it, "a tiresome bore."

"My influence ceased after the death of M. Duc d'Orléans," in 1723, the final year covered in his
Memoirs.
Apart from a brief run as emissary to the court of Spain—the expenses of keeping a personal staff while there nearly bankrupted him—Saint-Simon was no longer at, or even near, the center of things. He had "a conviction of my complete uselessness [which] drove me further and further into retirement." Toward the end he reports that he "no longer held any offices, and was living in almost complete retirement." Plush retirement, to be sure, in an
hôtel,
or mansion, in Paris and at the castle on his estate in the country. Yet it was not an altogether voluntary retirement: he was told by Fleury, the tutor to Louis XV and later that youthful King's chief minister, that his presence was no longer wanted at Versailles. Nothing left for
le petit duc
but to write his
Memoirs.

All memoirs are, more or less, gossip. Hard to imagine a man so inquisitive, so critical, so penetrating, and with so many enemies as Saint-Simon not using gossip both as a means of self-justification and as a weapon against enemies. He wrote of his "passion for discovering, unraveling, and generally keeping up to date with intrigues that were always fascinating, and which it was often useful, and sometimes highly advantageous, to know." That he felt himself so embattled, with people against him on every side, left him always on the qui vive for an enemy's weakness, and gave him cause, as he himself put it, to "examine everyone with
my eyes and ears.
" The great nineteenth-century critic Sainte-Beuve called
le petit duc
"the spy of his century," and what is spying but a species of gossiping? Spies don't necessarily have to be in the pay of government; every first-class gossip is, when one comes right down to it, a spy in business for himself.

Saint-Simon claimed to write "the history of my own times, which, from the beginning, has been my sole purpose." He also reports that "you will find no scandals in these memoirs except where they are needed to explain the general situation," which is not true. He reports, to cite but one example of hundreds, of one Bentivoglio, a papal nuncio, that "he thought nothing of keeping an opera-singer, and of having two daughters by her, who were known to be such, and went by the nicknames of 'La Constitution' and 'La Legende.'"

In the end, it is the personal details, much more than the broad sweep of Saint-Simon's political or religious views or his general narrative, that make the
Memoirs
so enticing. Much of our pleasure in reading him derives from such items as learning that, when Peter the Great visited Paris and Versailles, "it did not suit the Czar or his staff to restrain himself in any way." Or in his telling us about a fellow named Arouet who "was sent to the Bastille for writing scurrilous verses," who was "the son of my father's notary," and that "nothing could be done with this dissolute son, whose rake's progress ended by his making a fortune under the name of Voltaire, which he took in order to conceal his true name." Or of the miser Pecoil, who dies locked in his own vault, contemplating his money. Or of the thoroughly unpleasant Marquis de Thury, felled by a leg of mutton wielded by the Duc d'Elbeuf at table, "leaving a permanent scar on his most unpleasing countenance, though at the time he did not retaliate."

Saint-Simon claimed his
Memoirs
were "authoritative and first-hand," which is so. He did not claim impartiality, for, as he puts it, "one is attracted by honorable and truthful persons; provoked by the rogues who swarm at Court, and made still more angry by those who do one harm." He was correct, too, in writing of his
Memoirs
that "none heretofore has contained so wide a range of subjects, treated more thoroughly, in greater detail, or combined to form so instructive and curious a whole." Gossip was never practiced with a surer hand or at a higher power than it was by
le petit duc,
who turned it into literature.

Men are children. They must be pardoned for everything, except malice.

—
JOSEPH JOUBERT

 

I
N TURGENEV'S NOVEL
Virgin Soil,
a character named Valentina Mihalovna Sipyagina reports in a letter to her brother "an 'amusing' piece of news": she discovered that his friend Nezhdanov is in love with Marianna, her niece and the object of her brother's love, and that Marianna, moreover, is in love with Nezhdanov. "She was not repeating gossip," Turgenev recounts Valentina Mihalovna adding, "but had seen it all with her own eyes and heard it with her own ears. Markelova's [her brother's] face grew dark as night." What Valentina Mihalovna writes to her brother is factually true; and it is true, too, that she really did witness what she reports. Does the truth factor, then, justify Valentina Mihalovna's claim that she is not indulging in gossip?

Is truth a defense in gossip as it is in libel cases in the United States? If one is telling something that, though it has all the other components of gossip, is true, does it cease to be gossip and instead become that more dignified phenomenon, information? Things would be much less complicated if it were, but it isn't. Just because something is true does not indemnify the person who passes it along from the charge of gossiping; just because it is true doesn't mean it isn't also gossip. In gossip, intent counts for a great deal—sometimes for everything.

In the example from Turgenev's novel, Valentina Mihalovna dislikes her niece Marianna and has not had her own usual success in charming Nezhdanov, her son's tutor. She is, strictly speaking, telling the truth, but she obviously takes much more pleasure in the truth she has to tell than simply passing along information normally brings: by telling her brother this sad news, she is also diminishing in his eyes his friend Nezhdanov and the woman he loves, thus scoring points off both. Valentina Mihalovna is, in a game she is entirely aware of, happily throwing the darts of gossip. Malice here is aforethought and brings her genuine pleasure; and it is this mixture of malice and the pleasure she takes in it that is behind the gossip she brings her brother. Pure gossip it is, malevolent division.

When Tina Brown's book about Princess Diana,
The Diana Chronicles,
was published in 2007 more than one reviewer mentioned the romance novelist Barbara Cartland's speculation, reported in Brown's book, on the breakup of Diana's marriage to Prince Charles: "Of course," Miss Cartland said, "you know where it all went wrong. She [Diana] wouldn't do oral sex." The old admirable English reticence is apparently done for; in England fellatio, or the absence thereof, is being spoken about openly, and by the upper classes. But more to the point, is what Barbara Cartland reported true?