coquetries he never loses sight for a moment of the clear truth of the
heart.


While Marivaux, to use Voltaire's phrase for him, was 'weighing nothings
in scales of gossamer', a writer of a very different calibre was engaged
upon one of the most forcible, one of the most actual, and one of the
hugest compositions that has ever come from pen of man. The DUC DE
SAINT-SIMON had spent his youth and middle life in the thick of the
Court during the closing years of Louis XIV and the succeeding period of
the Regency; and he occupied his old age with the compilation of his
_Mémoires_. This great book offers so many points of striking contrast
with the mass of French literature that it falls into a category of its
own; no other work of the same outstanding merit can quite be compared
to it; for it was the product of what has always been, in France, an
extremely rare phenomenon--an amateur in literature who was also a
genius. Saint-Simon was so far from being a professional man of letters
that he would have been shocked to hear himself described as a man of
letters at all; indeed, it might be said with justice that his only
profession was that of a duke. It was as a duke--or, more correctly, as
a _Duc et Pair_--that, in his own eyes at any rate, he lived and moved
and had his being. It was round his position as a duke that the whole of
his active existence had revolved; it was with the consciousness of his
dukedom dominating his mind that he sat down in his retirement to write
his memoirs. It might seem that no book produced in such circumstances
and by such a man could possibly be valuable or interesting. But,
fortunately for the world, the merit of books does not depend upon the
enlightenment of authors. Saint-Simon was a man of small intellect, with
medieval ideas as to the structure of society, with an absurd belief in
the fundamental importance of the minutest class distinctions, and with