, Paris Posthumously, he acquired great literary fame. He was an indefatigable writer, and he began very early to record all the gossip he collected, all his interminable legal disputes over precedence, and a vast mass of unclassified material. Most of his manuscripts were retrieved by the Crown and it was long before their contents were fully published: partly in the form of notes in the
marquis de Dangeau's
Journal, partly in both original and independent memoirs, partly in scattered and multifarious extracts; he had committed to paper an immense amount of material. Saint-Simon believed he could improve upon Dangeau's dry chronicling of events with his own vivid narrative style. According to
Charles Henry Conrad Wright, "taking Dangeau as foundation, he goes over the same ground, sometimes copying, more often developing or inserting additional information, the result of more acute observation." Saint-Simon's
Mémoires strike a most realistic note. On the one hand, he is petty, and unjust to private enemies and to those who espoused public views contrary to his as well as being an incessant gossip. Yet he shows a great skill for narrative and for character-drawing. He has been compared to the historians
Livy and
Tacitus. He is not a writer who can be sampled easily, inasmuch as his most characteristic passages sometimes occur in the midst of long stretches of quite uninteresting diatribe. His vocabulary was extreme and inventive. He is deemed to have first used the word "intellectual" as a noun. "Patriot" and "publicity" are also accredited as being introduced by him in their current usage. Questions concerning the historical accuracy of his portraits remains a topic of interest for historians and critics, including
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. While it has been indicated that Saint-Simon's accounts are often dominated by his personal prejudice, such as in his famous account of the death of the Dauphin, or of the
Bed of Justice in which his personal enemy,
Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine, was degraded, his writing is celebrated for immortalizing vibrant portraits of the French nobility. His narrative style and methods of characterization profoundly impacted many French writers, notably
Proust who published a
pastiche of Saint-Simon in 1908. The bishops are "
cuistres violets" (purple
pedants). "(
M. de Caumartin)
porte sous son manteau toute la faculté que M. de Villeroy étale sur son baudrier" (Caumartin holds under his cloak all the power that Villeroy displays on his scabbard). Another politician has a "
mine de chat fâché" (appearance of a disgruntled cat). In short, the interest of his
Mémoires is in the novel and adroit use of words and phrases. In
A Short History of French Literature, the
Mémoires are described as "vast and rambling...one of the least-read masterpieces of the age" which "provide us not only with a picture of the squalor and pettiness which often lay behind the glittering façade of the court, but also with the precise angle of perception of a senior courtier. This is prose narrative on a monumental scale; how much of it is fiction is hard to tell, but in this area the distinction is not paramount, since what matters is the imaginative reconstruction of a lost world (
Proust owes not a little to Saint-Simon)". ==Family==