Volume 13, Number 1 · July 10, 1969
Blue Blood and Divine Right
By John Weightman
Historical Memoirs, 1691-1709
by Duc de Saint-Simon, edited and translated by Lucy Norton
McGraw-Hill, 2 vols, Vol. I, 535, Vol. II, 525 pp., $20.00 the set
As far as I know, there has never been a complete translation of Saint-Simon's Memoirs into the English language, and there probably never will be, unless some American foundation is especially established for that purpose. What publisher would face the uneconomic prospect of bringing out an adequately annotated edition of those hundreds of thousands of words about the court of Louis XIV? What translator would devote the major part of a lifetime to unraveling, then re-raveling, all that racy, knotty, idiosyncratic French, full of unexplained allusions to the details of a vanished world? The most that has been achieved until now has been the quarrying out of certain fragments under such titles as 'The Age of Magnificence' or 'Saint-Simon at Versailles,' in the hope that the picturesqueness of the anecdotes will make up for the disjointed nature of the text.
Review, 3170 words
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