Volume 48, Number 18 · November 15, 2001
The Art of Malice
By P.N. Furbank
Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, with Jean-François Fitou, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer
University of Chicago Press, 432 pp., $35.00
In his Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV (originally published in French in 1997) Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie aspires, he says, to provide 'a systematic and comprehensive interpretation of Saint-Simon's thought and work (but not of his writing or style).' The 'work' referred to is the Duc de Saint-Simon's vast and posthumously published Memoirs, and Ladurie wants to insist (for reasons I shall come to later) that the man himself, chronicler of the court of the roi soleil and of the Regency, was an 'archaic specimen,' an 'archaeological artifact in the most fundamental sense,' 'a ruin, ripe for excavation.'
Review, 4284 words
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