Some people are fascinated by facts; others by the world of ideas, of thought – not by facts themselves, but by their moral significance. There are writers, even admirable ones, who limit themselves to matters of fact. Of the thousands upon thousands of pages of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, it may be said that they contain only the details of external events; there is thought, but only of a kind required to emphasise the materiality, the graphical force, the visual weight of facts. Saint-Simon does nothing more than describe, with the greatest possible intensity and precision, what he has seen or what others have told him. Things seen and things heard, that is all; like those spies who were the eyes and ears of bygone sovereigns, Saint-Simon becomes the reader’s eyes and ears. We see, we feel, the cold of stone and brilliancy of the torches in the corridors of Versailles, the game meat served after dinner, almost at midnight, with harp and lute music and the flicker of candles in the grand candelabra; in a courtyard, bare and soft beneath the sky, a horse’s whinny, the transient flash of spurs; far off, the thread of the horizon, the dust cloud of the troops retiring to their winter quarters. There are characters, too: grotesque or vain, brutishly lascivious, or truculent and embittered: marshals, dukes, surgeons, bishops, actors. To read Saint-Simon is to live all of that.
Other writers, more severe, are only interested in the sharp outlines of moral life. This may even be true of narrators devoted to the facts, provided their subject is not an indifferent one. Stendhal’s sensuality, his feeling for beauty, his capacity for suggesting, in a genuine and deeply discriminating way, the most fragile of sentiments and – moreover – the precise and implacable facts, should not blind us to a certain purposive opacity in the surface of his novels. Everything in The Red and the Black, and particularly in The Charterhouse of Parma, would constitute a crowded, motley, captivating spectacle, had Stendhal observed it with the eyes of Saint-Simon; and, as a good reader of Saint-Simon, he undoubtedly possessed the necessary instincts, the requisite aptitudes, for compositions of this sort. But more pressing for him was the need to evaluate all that he noted down in moral terms. He was was not of the race of chroniclers and memorialists, but of the race of men of ideas.
Open, at random, any volume of Saint-Simon, to whatever page you see fit; you will undoubtedly have there everything you need; the fragment you read will be self-sustaining, will not refer in any essential way to anything beyond itself; isolated, it will possess an adequate power of seduction, because every line of Saint-Simon is a vehicle transmitting, with unusual vigor, his extraordinary receptive and retentive genius vis-à-vis external events. Now try the same experiment with Stendhal: true, you will admire the precision of style, but you will not manage to escape the impression that this fragment, taken on its own, is inert, or almost insert, because the author’s attention clings not to the immediate plastic qualities of the scene described, but to a moral examination of the aggregate, of the broadest portion of experience of which these things are components.
Sanseverina, or Julien Sorel, or Fabrizio del Dongo, or Count Mosca, are unforgettable thanks to an accumulation of details, a residue they leave behind – the famed détails exacts – thanks to a sediment of acquaintance built up in the course of the book, an almost unconscious progression of a kind that characterises many people we come across in life; whereas any character from Saint-Simon – be he omnipresent and formidable as Louis XIV or some flunky viewed askance in a courtesan’s bedchamber – leaps to the eye as if drawn on the page, like a springloaded jester popping out of its box. This is Saint-Simon’s subject: the present, the irreducible present, lived and preserved in memory. It demands nothing more, and in this lies its vigor. Stendhal, on the other hand, through small, subtle touches, wishes to show the gears, the threads that connect one event to the other, and generate, in the process, an ethical mechanism. If you prefer it put simply, Saint-Simon is the extravert, Stendhal the introvert.
The synthesis will come later: in Proust, the intensity of perception of isolated things is as powerful as in Saint-Simon; at the same time, the moral tension is as acute, as closely observed, as in Stendhal.
2 January 1980