that the passions which often lit up the truth sometimes
obscured it; any gossip discreditable to those whom he hated was
welcome to him; he confesses that he did not pique himself on his
impartiality, and it is certain that he did not always verify details.
Nevertheless he did not consciously falsify facts; he had a sense
of the honour of a gentleman; his spirit was serious, and his feeling
of duty and of religion was sincere. Without his impetuosity, his
violence, his exaggerations, we might not have had his vividness,
like that of life itself, his incomparable portraits, more often
inspired by hatred than by love, his minuteness and his breadth of
style, the phrases which ineffaceably brand his victims, the lyrical
outcry of triumph over enemies of his order. His style is the large
style of seventeenth-century prose, but alive with words that sparkle
and gleam, words sometimes created by himself to express the intensity
of his imagination.

The _Memoires_, the final preparation of which was the work of his
elder years, cover the period from 1691 to 1723. His manuscripts were
bequeathed to his cousin, the Bishop of Metz; a lawsuit arose with
Saint-Simon's creditors, and in the end the papers were buried among
the public archives. Considerable fragments saw the light before the
close of the eighteenth century, but it was not until 1829-31 that
a true _editio princeps_, substantially correct, was published. The
violences and irregularities of Saint-Simon's style offered no
obstacle to the admiration of readers at a time when the romantic
movement was dominant. He was hailed as the Tacitus of French history,
and had his manner something more of habitual concentration the
comparison would not be unjust.

The eighteenth century may be said to have begun before the year 1701
with the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. If we can speak
of any one idea as dominant during the age of the philosophers, it
is the idea of human progress. Through an academic disputation that
idea emerged to the light. At first a religious question was
complicated with a question relating to art; afterwards the religious
question was replaced by one of philosophy. As early as 1657,
Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, turned pietist after a youth of licence,
maintained in theory, as well as by the examples of his unreadable
epic poems, that Christian heroism and Christian faith afforded
material for imaginative handling more suitable to a Christian poe