Saint-Simon

When I’ve taken students to Versailles, I’ve noticed that as much as they admire the size and ambitiousness of the château that Louis XIV declared the center of French government, they nonetheless agree with the caustic assessment of the Duke de Saint-Simon, Louis XIV’s greatest critic: It’s “a masterpiece of bad taste.”

This evokes the absolutist rhetoric of Louis XIV’s worst sycophants, which Saint-Simon despised.

One can almost hear the echoes of the Versailles courtiers in the Trump Cabinet’s paeans to the president’s leadership, and Saint-Simon’s description of the Sun King’s appetite for adulation, found in the writer’s secret ��é���Ǿ������, published after his death, surely suggests our own leader’s vulnerability to such praise: “The self-effacement, the self-abasement, the look of admiration, subjugation, supplication, most of all the look of negation except through him, were the sole means of pleasing him.”

Saint-Simon knew that when kings embrace their own flattery, they open themselves to manipulation, and the writer viewed Louis XIV as an illusory absolutist who was in fact controlled by fawning scoundrels.

While the twins played cards at one end of the table, and Henry worked at the other, Francis sat curled in the window seat with a plate of little sandwiches in his lap, reading, in French, the ��é���Ǿ������ of the Duc de Saint-Simon, which for some reason he was determined to get through.