Lectures de Saint-Simon: autour de l’‘Intrigue du mariage de M. le duc de Berry’ (review)

François Raviez brings together twelve essays, organized in four sections, that discuss a particularly complex episode in Saint-Simon’s Mémoires: the court manoeuvres around the 1710 marriage of Louis XIV’s youngest grandson, the duc de Berry. This portion of Saint-Simon’s voluminous text has the twin advantage of being relatively brief and showcasing the writer’s political passion, since the selection of the duc de Berry’s wife would determine the balance of power at court. Yet one must agree with Raviez that ‘l’Intrigue ne compte pas parmi les textes les plus spectaculaires des Mémoires’(p. 11); the juggling of cabals, personalities, and interests is too intricate for the average reader’s comprehension, and the volume is hampered by the lack of a genealogical chart. The virtue of the essays, therefore, lies less in their analysis of the Intrigue than in their illuminating remarks on Saint-Simon’s political and social views, as well as his art of verbal portraiture. The first section situates the marriage within the shifting alliances of the court (Philippe Hourcade, Christophe Blanquie) and describes the different physical spaces in which the scheming takes place (Myriam Tsimbidy). The second section, which is the strongest, focuses on individual actors within the Intrigue: the powerful women whom Saint-Simon both admires and fears (Jean Garapon, in an especially elegant contribution), the dissolute duchesse d’Orléans, who wins the hand of the duc de Berry only to disgrace him through her libertine behaviour (Raviez), and the pathetic duc de Berry himself, whose timidity and poor education leave him with a feeling of uselessness and Pascalian misère (Malina Stefanovska). The third section takes a more anthropological, and thus well-worn, approach towards Saint-Simon to discuss the constraints that court life places on the body and emotions (Raviez, Francesco Pigozzo) and the danger of satiric wit (Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge); the conclusions here are largely unoriginal, but the analysis of individual textual moments is gratifyingly rich. The final section explores Saint-Simon’s self-portrait as a man of deliberation (Emmanuèle Lesne-Jaffro), melancholy (Delphine de Garidel), and self-conscious verbal bravura (Georges Kliebenstein). By their many references to other parts of the Mémoires, the volume’s contributors indicate the difficulty of studying the Intrigue as a self-contained text. Indeed, as several essays point out, the enormous energy put into arranging the marriage was ultimately futile, since the duc de Berry died a mere four years later, followed by his wife in 1719. What emerges from the collection is an appreciation for Saint-Simon’s acute observation of individual behaviour; as Raviez says, ‘derrière la comédie des masques, il laisse entrevoir la profondeur et la complexité des individus’ (p. 123).