The Press.
London, England, 1858-01-09 00:00:00

THE PRESS, JANUARY 9, 1858.

execrable may be the crime known as high treason, of
attempting their lives; however terrible and singular may
be the punishments justly invented to prevent that crime,
and to remove by their horror the most infamous from the
infernal resolution of committing it,—we cannot help
finding in the crime in question a plenitude not in the
other, however abominable it may be. Yes ! to overthrow
the most holy laws, that have existed ever since the estab•
lishment of monarchy; to extinguish a right the most
sacred—the most important—the most inherent in the
nation; to make succession to the throne, purely,
supremely, and despotically arbitrary; in a word, to make
of a bastard a crown prince,—is a crime more black, more
vast, more terrible, than that of high treason against the
chief of the State.

That passage (along with many others) shows
that St. Simon had strong feelings, and could
rise and fall with the importance of his sub-
ject. The honour paid by Louis XIV. to his
natural children was a calamity for France.
It was exactly the sort of error which would
have been fastened upon by a sensitive and
highspirited race like the French. We cannot
concur with the note that Mr. St. John ap-
pends:—

I have endeavoured to preserve the tone of majestic
indignation which St. Simon indulges in on this inadequate
occasion. After all, the King merely exercised the imperial
right of adoption ; and it is perfectly immaterial whether
the persons chosen were his natural children or not. The
Duo dn Maine was not a very estimable person, though we
must remember that St. Simon visits on him the sins of
his father ; but the Comte de Toulouse seems to have been
more respectable than any member of the Royal family
then living, legitimate or not.
We cannot understand, in such a case, " the
" right of adoption." That " right " may be
exercised in private families as to succession
of personal estates, or even the representation
of a particular family, but it is nothing to the
point to plead the merits of the individuals so
favoured. And the right by adoption claimed
by Louis XIV. gave vast offence to the aristo-
cracy of France, and shocked public opinion.
The evils of military favouritism, we sup-
pose, have existed in all countries. In our
previous notice of these memoirs we cited
some of them. Ia the present portion of them
we find it said :

The King taxed the infantry regiments, which bad risen
to an excessive price. This venality of the only path by
which the superior grades can be reached is a great blot
upon the military system, and stops the career of many a
man who would become an excellent soldier. It is a
gangrene which for a long time has eaten into all the
orders and all the parties of the State, and under which it
will be odd if all do not succumb. Happily it is unknown,
or little known, in all the other countries of Europe !
The " gangrene" spoken of by St. Simon was
well known to other countries. More than
half a century after St Simon wrote the above
censures, Cumberland, in his capital play of
The West Indian, put such :language as might
have come from an English St. Simon into the
mouth of Major O'Flaherty.
St. Simon thoroughly appreciated the merits
of Fenelon, and has paid a deserved tribute to
his character. The famous, or infamous,
Dubois is thus delineated by him :

This person has played such an important part in the
State since the death of the King, that it is fit that he should
be made known. The Abbe Dubois was a little, pitiful,
wizened, herring-gutted man, in a flaxen•wig, with a
weazel's face, brightened by some intellect. In familiar
terms, he was a regular scamp. All the vices unceasingly
fought with him for supremacy, so that a continual uproar
tilled his mind. Avarice, debauchery, ambition, were his
gods ; perfidy, flattery, foot-licking, his means of action ;
complete impiety was his repose; and he held the opinion
as a great principle, that probity and honesty are chimeras,
with which people deck themselves, but which have no
existence. In consequence. all means were good to him.
He excelled in low intrigues; he lived in them, and could
not do without them ; but they always had an aim, and he
followed thew with a patience terminated only by success,
or by firm conviction that he could not reach what he aimed
at, or unless, as he wandered thus in deep darkness, a
glimmer of light came to him from some other cranny.
He passed thus his (lays in sapping and counter-sapping.
The most impudent deceit had become natural to him, and
was concealed under an air that was simple, upright, sin-
cere, often bashful. He would have spoken with grace and
forcibly, if, fearful of saying more than he wished, he had
not accustomed himself to a fictitious hesitation, a stutter-
ring which disfigured his speech, and which, redoubled
when important things were in question, became insupport-
able and sometimes unintelligible. He had wit, learning,
knowledge of the world, much desire to please and in-
sinuate himself, butt all this was spoiled by an odour of
falsehood which escaped in spite of him through every pore
of his body—even in the midst of his gaiety, which made
whoever beheld it sail.

We have not space to extract the whole Of the
character, and we cite the foregoing to show
the exact fidelity with whieh St. Simon ad-
hered to the truth, undazzled by the station
of high personages. We know of no writer of

memoirs who has so often anticipated the im-
partial verdict of a remote posterity as St.
Simon. In this respect he differs vastly from
Horace Walpole, whose opinions on the Court
and courtiers of the time can never be trusted,
and always require corroborative testimony.
Neither was Walpole, like St. Simon, close by
the fountain head of knowledge. St. Simon
was in the Court, and of the Court; whereas
Walpole was indebted to second-hand infor-
mation. Walpole excelled as a writer of letters,
but his memoirs of George lll.'s reign are
deficient in weight, besides being disfigured
by caprice ; whereas St. Simon ever maintains
an equable air. Many parts of this third
volume in spirit and tone almost come up to
the moral level of what a French Tacitus
might have written. These recollections are
not so much memoirs pour tervir as history
itself. The death-bed of Louis XIV. occupies
several pages, and is described with affecting
solemnity. It thus commences :

Louis XIV. began, as I have before remarked, sensibly
to decline, and his appetite, which had always been good
and uniform, very considerably diminished. Even foreign
countries became aware of this. Bets were laid in London
that his life would not last beyond tLe first of September,
that is to say about three months, and although the King
wished toknow everything, it may be imagined that nobody
was very eager to make him acquainted with the news. He
used to have the Dutch papers read to hint in private by
Torcy, often after the Council of State. One day as Torcy
was reading, coming unexpectedly—for he had not ex-
amined the paper—upon the account of these bets, he
stopped, stammered, and skipped it. The King, who
easily perceived this, asked him the cause of his embarrass-
ment ; what he was passing over, and why? Torcy blushed
to the very whites of his eyes, and said that it was a piece
of impertinence unworthy of being read. The King
insisted ; Torcy also : but at last thoroughly confused, he
could not resist the reiterated command he received, and
read the whole account of the beta. The King pretended
not to be touched by it, but he was, and profoundly, so that
sitting down to table immediately afterwards, he could not
keep himself from speaking of it, though without mention-
ing the gazette.

The disease continued to progress, and St.
Simon details tho various changes. There is
much told in the following sentences :

He had not been able to quit his chamber for some
days; he could scarcely eat anything solid; his physician
slept in his chamber, and yet he reckoned upon being
cured, upon dressing himself again, and wished to choose
his dress 1 In like manner there was the same round of
councils, of work, of amusements. So trite it is, that men
do not wish to die, and dissimulate from themselves the
approach of death as long as possible. Meanwhile, let me
say, that the state of the King, which nobody was ignorant
of, had already Lchanged M. d'Orleana' desert into a
crowded city.