an extract from

Saint-Evremond: A Voice from Exile

Newly Discovered Letters to

Madame de Gouville and the
Abb de Hautefeuille (-)

D P

European Humanities Research Centre

University of Oxford
Research Monographs in French Studies

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements xi
Introduction
The Letters
Concordance
Bibliographical Note
Select Bibliography
Index
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INTRODUCTION

Most of Saint-Evremonds works were written in exile, in Holland

and England, where he could give free expression to the inde-
pendence of mind and temperament that had been the cause of his
flight from France in , when he was still only in his mid-s.
Although his name has never been absent from the history and
criticism of seventeenth-century French literature, he remains an
imperfectly understood figure. He refused to sanction the publication
of his writings; in consequence an authoritative text has not been
available until very recently. His preference for the shorter forms
of literature has meant that he has been overshadowed by
contemporaries who cultivated the longer and traditionally more
prestigious genres, while his reputation as a libertin, as is often the case
with authors on whom that unsatisfactory label has been pinned, has
obscured rather than clarified his real place in the movement of ideas
in the period leading up to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

The Pre-Exile Years and Flight to England ()

Saint-Evremond was born in January at Saint-Denis-le-Gast
near Coutances in Normandy, of one of the more modest branches of
a well-connected aristocratic family (Mme de Svign and Bussy-
Rabutin were among his cousins). He was educated in Paris at the
Jesuit Collge de Clermont and briefly at the University of Caen. The
only one of six sons to have made his career outside his native
province (he once described a member of his own family who was
content to remain on his Normandy estates, as a farm-hand), he
began by setting out to make his fortune as a soldier. He served as a
staff officer under the Prince de Cond before transferring his
allegiance to the more pliable Duc de Candale with whom there were
greater opportunities for self-advancement. A poem by his fellow
Norman Boisrobert, written in after Saint-Evremond, wounded
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in the knee at the battle of Nordlingen, had returned to Normandy

to convalesce, paints a graphic picture of the man who, in his early
s, already stood out for his courage as a soldier, his keen theatre-
going, his literary culture and an active social life devoted to gaming,
the pleasures of the table and conversation. Interestingly, in view of
later controversy about his sexual orientation, Boisrobert refers to his
successes with women. After the end of the Fronde, in which he
sided with the monarchy, he set about establishing himself at court.
He took part in diplomatic missions, first to Saint-Jean de Luz in
on the occasion of the negotiations for a peace treaty with Spain, and
then to England in to congratulate Charles II on his restoration
to the throne. In , at the age of , following the arrest of the
Surintendant des Finances, Nicolas Fouquet, he went into hiding and
subsequently fled to England where he already had contacts. The most
often cited, and most likely, reason for his sudden flight was his
suspected complicity with Fouquet, who was conspiring to fill the
power gap left by the death of the first minister Cardinal Mazarin.
Colour was given to this explanation by the discovery among the
papers of Fouquets mistress Madame du Plessis-Bellire of a copy
of Saint-Evremonds Lettre sur la Paix des Pyrnes, a satire of
Mazarins negotiations with Spain, which the author had given to her
son-in-law, the Marchal de Crqui. A late-comer to the court, Saint-
Evremond lacked the protection of a more powerful figure; this made
him an easy victim of a situation in which it was not only the most
obviously compromised members of the Surintendants circle but also
those with the least outside support who paid the price of his
downfall. Allied to this was the fact that he outshone most of his peers
in intelligence, wit and the sharpness of his tongue and pen; as one
contemporary noted: Il ny avait personne la cour quil ne raillt,
mais de railleries piquantes qui emportaient la pice. These are
qualities that are more likely to win admiration than to earn favour.
Castiglione had said that to succeed at court the nobleman should
dominate experience in everything he undertook. Saint-Evremonds
taste for living dangerously (he confessed in one of his earliest essays
that jai toujours vcu laventure) meant that this was not a
criterion he was likely to meet.

From early in his career Saint-Evremond had found himself in

intellectually stimulating companyCond, his first commander, was
also a man of considerable literary cultureand it was no doubt
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conversations in Conds circle that gave him the incentive to treat the
classical themes that are the subject of several of his early writings.
Some, like the Jugement sur Snque, Plutarque et Ptrone (c.),
in which Petronius is given the palm as both thinker and writer, show
that in his literary criticism Saint-Evremond was no more a respecter
of established positions than he was in his dealings with those around
him. Others, including the essay Sur Alexandre et Csar (c.),
display his admiration for outstanding figures who were not only
doers of deeds, but speakers of words, intellectuals as well as men of
action. In the event, it was to be as an intellectual, a speaker of words
who also committed them to writing, that he eventually found fame.
His writings from before the exile, which range from satires of topical
events to moraliste essays, all reflect the experience of a nobleman and
a man of action. The satires display a gift for fictionalizing historical
events, in which the author himself figures as both participant
and ironic commentator. The moraliste pieces offer an acute explo-
ration and interpretation of an aristocratic ethic which combined
idealism with pragmatism in a way that seemed incoherent to some
contemporary writers, notably those influenced by Augustinianism.
For Saint-Evremond, however, these are simply two facets of the life
any ambitious nobleman is called upon to live. He does not
experience inner conflicts, but weighs alternatives, even if this should
sometimes mean steering a precarious course between complacency
and cynicism. While Saint-Evremond acknowledges that the heroic
values can be counterfeited, he does not call them in question. Instead
he makes finely balanced distinctions. The true hero is plus sensible
la gloire quambitieux du pouvoir and subordinates self-interest to
the noble imperatives of courage and liberality. But if the nobleman is
to succeed in practice in a world in which corruption is the norm,
self-interest rules and true friendships are rare, he should behave
honourably if possible but practise dissimulation and employ cunning
if not: il faut avoir de lhabilet sans finesse, de la dextrit sans
fourberie et de la complaisance sans flatterie (OP II, ). In this
light great generals like Cond and Turenne are proposed as models
to be admired, and their shortcomings are glossed over, whereas
hollow men like the Duc de Longueville and the Duc de Beaufort are
mercilessly ridiculed.
In this moral climate it is not surprising that Saint-Evremonds
intellectual curiosity should have turned to Epicureanism, which was
the philosophy of choice of the thinking nobleman. One of his most
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important pre-exile writings, the essay Sur les plaisirs (), is in

effect an Epicurean treatise. Saint-Evremond had had discussions with
Gassendi, the most famous Epicurean scholar of the day, but he
approached Epicureanism in a very different way. He set aside
Gassendis exposition of Epicurean atomism, as he did physical science
generally, on the (Epicurean) grounds that nous avons plus dintrt
jour du monde qu le connatre (OP II, ). Instead, he focused on
Epicurean moral philosophy and the analysis of human psychology in
which it is rooted. The text of Sur les plaisirs as we have it is an
imperfect amalgam of two different interpretations of Epicureanism
and gives the impression that the author worked on the piece with
two different objectives in mind. At one time he seems to have been
thinking of the man for whom life and action are inseparable, at
another of one who has been cut off from a life of action by a period
of banishment from court such as noblemen of the period, including
the author himself, frequently experienced. While the latter approach,
had he taken it to a conclusion, would have followed Epicurus own
Letter to Menoeceus, which submits the pleasures to a hedonistic
calculus that requires reason and will to put into practice, the former
would have led to the position taken by Epicurus Cyrenaic opponent
Aristippus, who advocated living for the moment and for whom
prudence was a matter not of reason but of instinct. Gassendi, intent
on making Epicurus acceptable to current religious orthodoxy, had
insisted on the incompatibility of these two points of view. Even in
the state in which it has come down to us, Sur les plaisirs suggests
that Saint-Evremond already disputed Gassendis argument, though,
as we shall see, it was not until thirty years later, when he wrote the
essay Sur la morale dEpicure, that he finally succeeded in showing
how the apparent contradiction could be resolved.
Sur les plaisirs is the work of a moral optimist and an enthusiastic
advocate of divertissement. It is therefore not surprising that it should
have been dubbed, albeit anachronistically, Saint-Evremonds anti-
Pascal. But it only makes sense to compare the two authors if we ask,
not did Saint-Evremond refute Pascal in advance? but would Pascal
have convinced him?. In fact theirs could only have been a dialogue
of the deaf. For Saint-Evremond la misre de lhomme is not a
pathological state of the psyche; rather, les misres de lhomme are
simply a recurrent, but transitory, effect of the alternation of pleasures
and pains that it is in the nature of human beings to experience
and for which le divertissement provides the only sensible remedy.
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Sur les plaisirs is also the work of a radical sceptic who, going much
further than Gassendi, remained truer to the spirit of the Apologie de
Raimond Sebond. In Que lhomme qui veut connatre toutes choses
ne se connat pas soi-mme (), the third of three early essays on
maxims, he exercised his scepticism on religion, a subject which was
to assume increasing importance in his writings as time went on. Like
many of his contemporaries, his way of escaping the sceptical impasse
was to advocate an unquestioning fideism. However, the peremptory
manner in which he proclaims his preference for la foi du plus stupide
paysan (OP II, ) over discursive reasoning has led to the suspicion
that his fideism was only an ironic cover for disbelief. A more
plausible interpretation is that he was impatient with the whole faith-
reason argument and the philosophical abstractions in which it dealt.
Saint-Evremond uses scepticism not to provoke doubt about religion,
as Voltaire would do, but to cast doubt on the adequacy of the way it
was traditionally defended. There is irritation here, not corrosive
irony.
When Saint-Evremond arrived in England, early in , he
renewed his acquaintance with English courtiers and politicians,
notable among them Buckingham, Arlington and the diplomat and
writer Sir William Temple, and was made welcome at the Restoration
court. He did not, however, expect to stay. It is clear from his letters
that he did not appreciate how great a threat an unreconstructed
nonconformist, always ready to satirize those in high places, might
seem to the authority of the newly emerging absolute monarchy in
France. Nor, apparently, did he realize that the Lettre sur la paix des
Pyrnes, in which he had openly enunciated the maxim that the
ruler belongs to the State rather than the State to the ruler, would
inevitably appear subversive despite its authors loyalty to the
monarchy during the Fronde. After four years in London, much of
that time spent in frequent and constantly frustrated attempts to
obtain permission to return to France, Saint-Evremonds morale was
low and his health poor. His financial situation was also uncertain.
Ralph Montagu gave him an annuity in exchange for money he had
brought out of France, and he was granted a pension by Charles II,
but much of his capital remained in France. In April , on the eve
of the declaration of the Anglo-Dutch War, he left England for
Holland, presumably because, since France and Holland were allies, it
provided a more favourable base for his efforts to obtain a pardon, but
no doubt also in order to be closer to his French assets.
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Holland () and the Influence of Spinoza

It has become something of a commonplace to stress how bored
Saint-Evremond was during the five years he spent in Holland. His
own statements were less categorical, and he acknowledged that he
often painted a blacker picture than the facts warranted. As he wrote
to his young friend Anne dHervart: Je parle toujours comme un
malheureux, et je vis, en effet, come un homme assez content (L I,
). In other letters that he wrote to friends in France, we see him
applying his Epicurean philosophy to his new life: Epicurean
indolence, he wrote to the Marchal de Crqui, is not passive
resignation to ones ills but le secret de rendre heureux ltat le plus
ordinaire de la vie (OP IV, ). And while it is true that the passage
from the society of the French court to life in a bourgeois republic
peu savante dans les plaisirs dlicats et les moeurs polies (L I, )
caused him a degree of culture shock, he found compensation in the
society of the diplomatic corps, in visits from French friends and in
reading, music and the theatre. One of the plays he saw when a
French company visited The Hague in was Le Tartuffe on which
the five-year ban had only just been lifted. His comment that la
dvotion est si raisonnable dans la bouche de Clante, quelle me fera
renoncer toute ma philosophie is typical of the kind of teasing irony
that has often disconcerted his commentators (L I, ).
With fewer opportunities to take part in the conversation des
honntes gens, the occupation he always preferred, Saint-Evremond
spent more time on his writings, into which he often incorporated
fictional conversations with the friends from whom he was separated.
When one of them, Joachim de Lionne, visited him at The Hague
towards the end of , Saint-Evremond gave him copies of some of
his manuscripts and, despite an inveterate hostility to publication,
allowed Lionne to persuade him that if printed they could be used to
help promote his case for a pardon. An edition was brought out at
Paris by Barbin. Some copies (only two are extant) had the authors
name in full in the privilege and a title-page entirely taken up by a
dedication to the Marquis de Berny, son of the Foreign Minister
Hugues de Lionne and a cousin of Joachim; these were evidently
meant for Berny to distribute among influential members of the
French court. Other copies had the authors name in the privilege
only as M. de S.E. and carried a list of the contents on the title-page,
while in some places a censored text had been inserted on cancel
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leaves. This version was clearly intended for sale to the public. When
Lionnes initiative came to nothing, Saint-Evremond, still apparently
unable to break with old habits, once more compromised himself
politically by dining at The Hague with a perceived friend of the anti-
French party there, the Grand Duke Cosimo of Tuscany, only a day
after Cosimos arrival in June . Meanwhile the success of the
uvres mesles had sparked a demand for more of Saint-Evremonds
writings, which Barbin met by a long series of further editions with
the same title. These continued to appear under his imprint
throughout the remainder of the authors lifetime, often in pirated
editions. When Barbin could not obtain enough authentic copy to
satisfy his customers, he filled out the volumes with suppositious
attributions.
Some of Saint-Evremonds writings from this period, notably a
triptych of complementary monologues on virtue and self-interest in
a court setting, still belong in subject matter and spirit to his pre-exile
days. The standpoint of the French aristocrat is also evident in the
Rflexions sur les divers gnies du peuple romain dans le temps de leur
Rpublique (?). This work, which occupied the author during
much of his stay in Holland, is unlike his other writings in being an
ambitious book-length project. A series of close-ups of the lives of
outstanding personalities (notably Scipio, Augustus and Tiberius) is
combined with an interpretation of the popular Roman mentality in
a number of different and memorable epochs. The lives perpetuate
Saint-Evremonds preoccupation with the aristocratic culture (Scipio
is described as being de parfaite naissance) and assume the same
dichotomy of idealistic aspiration and pragmatic realism as his moraliste
writings: Augustus is both sincere and hypocritical, Scipio both
homme de bien and corrompu. The history of the Roman
mentality traces its variations from the origins of the republic to the
period of heureuse sujtion under Augustus. The two elements are
never completely integrated: the great figures are studied as
individuals, not as representatives of the gnie of the period; rather,
they have a superior awareness of the popular mentality, which they
turn to their own advantage. Long stretches of history are reduced to
a few decades and large swathes are omitted (several chapters, though
planned, were never written). Saint-Evremonds definition of le
peuple romain, as the works most recent student has pointed out,
oscillates between the Roman community as a whole, and le peuple
in the sense of all those who are not aristocrats. Coming as it does
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between Machiavellis Discorsi and Montesquieus Considrations sur les

causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur dcadence, Saint-Evremonds
work has been overshadowed by both, unfairly inasmuch as its virtues
far outweigh its undoubted flaws. In particular, the authors concept
of a national gnie or collective mentality that both creates and
responds to change over the course of time was not only original, but
was also to play a significant part in his literary criticism.
At the time that Saint-Evremond abandoned work on the
Rflexions, his religious thought underwent a radical change of
direction. He drew attention to this by categorically rejecting both
fideism and Cartesian rationalism, which had seemed to be its only
remotely plausible alternative. The Conversation du marchal
dHocquincourt avec le pre Canaye () is a biting satire of the
fideism of Que lhomme qui veut connatre toutes choses, while
in the Considration sur la religion of c. Saint-Evremond
expressed his disillusionment with the rationalist apologetics of
Descartess Mditations mtaphysiques. Neither now seemed to him to
be a relevant response to the real problems raised by religion. Instead,
turning from une Etude de Mtaphysique lExamen des Religions
(OD IV, ), he signalled his intention to focus on the social impact
of religion. This announcement is followed by a close comparison
of Catholicism and Calvinism, ending with an invitation to both
confessions to return to their true role as agencies of an inclusive,
tolerant Christianity. The concluding paragraph of the contemporary
Conversation de M. dAubigny avec M. de Saint-Evremond sums
this up succinctly: Cest Dieu de faire des catholiques ou des
protestants; cest nous de vivre paisiblement en sujets fidles. Dieu
nous a fait sociables, et nous nous sommes assembls. Quiconque
travaille nous diviser choque lintention de Dieu et les droits de la
socit publique (OP IV, ).
That Saint-Evremonds religious thought took this turn was in the
first place the result of his first-hand observation of Dutch religious
life. Had he remained in France and continued to move in aristocratic
circles, in which the outward profession of Christianity was viewed
largely as a necessary social practice, and Catholicism and Calvinism
had their spheres of operation marked out by the State, the social
dimension of religion would probably not have attracted his attention.
In bourgeois Holland, on the other hand, where in principle, and to
a considerable degree in practice, everyone was free to chercher le
Ciel par ses voies (OP II, ), and the multiplicity of beliefs even
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exceeded the multiplicity of sects, the importance of religion in the

day-to-day life of the citizen could not be missed. When Saint-
Evremond arrived at The Hague in , the Grand Pensionary Johan
de Wits policy of using the States authority in matters of religion as
a bulwark against the intolerance of the majority Calvinist party had
resulted in a period of peaceful coexistence amongst the different
confessions. By , however, this had once again broken down.
In a passage of the Considration sur la religion () that
encapsulates what the whole post-Reformation experience meant in
social terms, Saint-Evremond reacted to this turn of events with a
show of feeling that is unusual in his writings:
Il a pri cent mille hommes contester de quelle manire on prenait au
sacrement ce quon demeurait daccord dy prendre. Cest un mal qui dure
encore et qui durera toujours, jusqu ce que la religion repasse de la curiosit
de nos esprits la tendresse de nos coeurs, et que rebute de la folle
prsomption de nos lumires, elle aille retrouver les doux mouvements de
notre amour. (OP IV, )
It would have been perfectly conceivable for Saint-Evremond, a
committed Epicurean, to denounce religion as a permanent source of
social ills, as Lucretius had notoriously done. In fact, although other
passages from De rerum natura are quoted or alluded to in his writings,
the famous line Tantum potuit religio suadere malorum is not
among them. Instead, Saint-Evremond argues that if the Churches
were to re-examine their relationship to the Christianity they claimed
to represent, they would find in its teaching a condemnation of
violence and an incentive to reconciliation. He argues, in summary,
that the true object of religion is to persuade the heart to obey the
Christian moral law. While the actual content of the moral law is
universal and in accordance with reason and nature, men do not truly
observe it so long as they think of it as a quasi-legalistic obligation, but
only when they do so willingly out of love of God. Faith itself does
not mean assent to abstract propositions, nor does it involve a quest
for inner illumination: it is enough to commit oneself to loving God,
and to express this love in action through the willing practice of
justice and charity.
Almost every detail of this argument can be traced to Saint-
Evremonds meetings with Spinoza (). Spinozas influence on
Saint-Evremond has never been properly assessed. For many, still
wedded to the image of Saint-Evremond as an picurien lger, any
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contacts between them can only have been, as one critic puts it,
probably casual and rather slight. In fact the excommunicate Jewish
scholar and the educated French gentleman who styled himself a
cavalier franais catholique had a great deal in common. Both
frequented the same liberal and heterodox circles of Dutch intellectual
society. Both had bypassed the faithreason argument and made the
social repercussions of religion the focus of their inquiries. Both
reacted in the same way to the recrudescence of intolerance in their
adopted countryit was this that, at the time of their first meeting,
had led Spinoza to set aside work on the Ethics in order to write the
Tractatus theologico-politicus. Finally, both spoke fluent Latin, which was
not only the language in which they held their conversations, but also
that of the Christian tradition, which was their subject.
Saint-Evremonds writings on religion from this time on are full
of parallels with the as yet unpublished Tractatus, which can only have
originated in his meetings with Spinoza. One means of assessing
Spinozas influence is to compare Saint-Evremonds ideas with those
of a long line of eirenic writers from Erasmus to the Socinians, with
which he was undoubtedly familiar: wherever he departs from this
tradition, a parallel can be found in Spinoza. Whereas these writers
gave ethics only priority over dogma, Saint-Evremond, like Spinoza,
gives it primacy; where they held that harmony between the rival
confessions could be found only through agreement on a minimal
number of beliefs to be established by reasoning, Saint-Evremond,
like Spinoza, does not simply separate but divorces religion from
philosophy. Finally, and most conclusively, his statement Soyons
justes, charitables, patients, par le principe de notre religion: nous
confesserons Dieu et lui obirons tout ensemble (OP IV, ) not
only has no equivalent even in the most heterodox of the writers in
the eirenic tradition, it is also a virtual paraphrase of Spinozas
definition of true faith in chapter of the Tractatus.
When Saint-Evremond asserts that ce que nous appellons
aujourdhui les Religions nest le bien prendre que diffrence dans
la Religion et non pas religion diffrente (OP IV, ), he shows that
his ideal was a multi-faith community, in which the individual
Christian could fulfil the prime ethical directive of his faith while at
the same time retaining his membership of any one of a number of
mutually tolerant confessions, all of which would look upon the
Christian ethic as fundamental, and the role of dogma as subsidiary
and pragmatic. Taking his cue from another strand of Spinozas
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argument in the Tractatus, he sees dogma as a post facto accretion to the

Christian message. The doctrines of the Christian confessions differ
because they are culturally held beliefs whose origins lay in the need
to spread the message in different ways according to different
circumstances. Their intellectual credibility is unimportant provided
that they give support to the practice of an ethic that necessarily
excludes intolerance. It should be evident from this that Saint-
Evremond was not, as has often been alleged, a subversive opponent
of religion, nor were his expressions of fidelity to Catholicism simply
a prudent form of words. Neither did he, as has sometimes been
said, take an Erastian or Machiavellian view of institutionalized
religion as simply a useful political instrument. This is clear from
a remarkable passage of a Discours sur la Religion dating from
the same period (it was later included in a letter of to Mme
Mazarin), in which he criticized the soldier of fortune Baron Wurtz,
who took the Erastian view to its logical conclusion by changing his
own religion to match that of each of the sovereigns under whom he
served, in the belief that what was essential about Christianity was the
purity of its ethic. In Saint-Evremonds view (in which, paradoxical as
it may seem, he is at one with the Pascal of the seventeenth Provinciale)
Wurtzs attitude, by separating the ethic from love of God, could lead
only to deism or to having no religion at all.
Saint-Evremond was thus a sympathetic, if critical, observer whose
aim was to convince Christians of whatever denomination that they
should reorientate their beliefs, not abandon them. Like Bayle, Saint-
Evremond judged les christianismes de fait by the yardstick of le
christianisme de droit. There is, however, a crucial difference
between the two writers, in that for Saint-Evremond le christianisme
de droit was identical with the true catholic religion of Spinoza,
whom Bayle anathematized. In this light, we should reassess Saint-
Evremonds role in the crise de la conscience europenne. His writings
were not, as those of Fontenelle and (less plausibly) Bayle have been
said to be, part of a developing attack on Christianity from the
outside. Rather, they contributed to the secularization of authentic
Christian values that steadily gained momentum throughout Europe
during the latter half of the seventeenth century and constituted a
quite different, and often neglected, source of the Enlightenment
attitude to religion. From this perspective, the crise de la conscience
europenne, as has been well said, can more appropriately be described
as a fermentation within a Christian intellectual milieu than a
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corroding attack from without. Saint-Evremonds claim to speak as

a Catholic was not, as has sometimes been claimed, a disguise for a
declaration of unbelief. On the contrary, by speaking from within the
tradition in which he had been brought up, he was ensuring that his
words would reach the Christian audience to which he addressed
them.

Return to England and the Salon of the Duchesse Mazarin

()
Saint-Evremond had made short visits to London while living in
Holland, staying with Arlington to whom he passed on diplomatic
gossip that may have been marginally useful to his host country.
In , having made his finances more secure, he went back there
for what proved to be the rest of his life. London was, he said,
comme un milieu entre les courtisans franais et les bourgmestres de
Hollande (OP I, ), a place where one could enjoy civilized
pleasures in the company of other honntes gens. He threw himself
into a busy social life, making the most of his friendships with leading
politicians and courtiers, staying at their stately homes and enjoying
their food and wine (he had been a celebrated oenophile since the
days when he served under Cond). The arrival in of Hortense
Mancini, Duchesse Mazarin, the Cardinals niece, fleeing from an
impossible husband, provided him with the kind of setting for the
display of his social gifts and graces that he might have enjoyed in
France had he not had to leave. Although no intellectual, Mme
Mazarin had a talent for gathering round her statesmen, ambassadors,
clerics, scholars and wits, all of whom spoke French either because
they were Frenchmen, many of them also out of favour at the French
court, or because they were English subjects who had lived in France
during the Commonwealth. Saint-Evremond became the oracle of
her salon, and also her licensed fool, a self-styled Don Quixote to her
Dulcinea. However, despite the ridiculous postures he often adopted
to express it, his devotion to the Duchesse was real and constant and
endured until the day of her death in June . Unlike that of his
idol, originally encouraged to come to England to be the mistress of
Charles II, Saint-Evremonds own sexuality was ambiguous. From
occasional clues in his correspondence, it would seem that, like many
of those in Conds entourage, he was bisexual in his younger days and
became a confirmed bachelor in later years. As one of his critics has
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noted, the women he liked were independent and liberated, like the
Duchesse herself, and like Ninon de Lenclos, his friendship with
whom survived the long years of exile and was actually strengthened
by the common friends and acquaintances they made in later life.
When not composing ephemeral verses for his hostess and writing
trivial notes to her despite the fact that he saw her almost every day,
Saint-Evremond found in the Duchesses salon an opportunity to
delight in the kind of conversation with men of his own stamp that
he had missed in Holland. Their company also encouraged him to
write about literature. Although he categorically rejected the title of
critic Saint-Evremond was, by his own standards at least, a prolific
writer on the subject of books and their authors. Reading took
second place only to conversation in the list of his favourite occu-
pations. An entire section of the retrospective Discours M. le
Marchal de Crqui (), his longest work after the Rflexions sur
les Romains, is devoted to the subject, and gives a comprehensive
account of his own taste at the time which constitutes one of his most
appealing pieces of criticism (OP IV, ). Many of his most
pertinent observations occur in his letters, where he is more relaxed
and spontaneous than in the more extended essays that he began to
write in Holland, and completed after returning to England; these,
though cogently argued, are more abstract and less engaging. An
unpublished critique of Fnelons Tlmaque in one of the letters
printed in this volume is a particularly good example of his wit and
lightness of touch, as well as of his critical acumen even at the age of
(Letter XXI).
Saint-Evremonds literary criticism divides into three main areas:
the Ancients, who were his first love; a mixed bag of English and
other foreign authors; and Corneille and Racine whom, directly or
implicitly, he constantly lined up for comparison. He saw literature as
a cultural artefact, both its production and its reception being shaped
by the gnie of the age and nation; at one point, he even suggested
that a literary trend might be seen as foreshadowing historical circum-
stances, as well as reflecting them. This approach, which ran counter
to the current tendency to think of literature in terms of absolute
aesthetic standards, also allowed him to adopt an independent position
when discussing the issues in the long-standing and increasingly
polarized dispute which divided those who regarded the Ancients as
timeless and unsurpassable models, and those for whom they had
already been equalled, if not surpassed, by their successors in the age
 P: S E L ()

of that second Augustus, Louis XIV. Saint-Evremond, who was not

impressed by the analogy, was neither an undiscriminating admirer of
the Ancients, nor an uncritical enthusiast for everything modern. The
standards of the Ancients were different from those of today, not
better. In a letter to the Duchesse Mazarin, he speaks with the same
voice of enlightened common sense as the poets of the Pliade: Je
veux que lesprit des Anciens nous en [le bon sens] inspire, mais je ne
veux pas que nous prenions le leur mme. Je veux quils nous
apprennent bien penser, mais je naime pas me servir de leurs
penses (L I, ). Unserviceable as models for imitation in the
modern age, the abiding value of the ancient authors lies in their
capacity to stimulate creativity.
In his treatment of foreign literatures Saint-Evremond has
sometimes been called a pioneering comparatist who anticipated
Mme de Stal. In practice, his criticism remains at the level of
generalization because of the paucity of specific examples (in his essay
on Spanish comedy there are none at all). Although he took a great
deal of interest in English drama, and sat in while Buckingham tried
out parts of his satirical comedy The Rehearsal, the gallocentric
nature of English Restoration culture, especially in circles like that of
the Duchesse Mazarin, meant that he was given a greater incentive to
write about French than about English culture. Finally, he was
severely handicapped by the fact that he never troubled to learn the
language of the country in which he spent the last forty years of his
life. His own Jonsonian comedy, Sir Politick would-be, designed to
illustrate the English taste, is decidedly French in style and structure.
As a critic, Saint-Evremond is perhaps best known for his
comparison of Corneille and Racine, which runs through his
correspondence of the late s and early s, as well as giving rise
to more formal compositions such as the Dissertation sur le Grand
Alexandre (, but originally a letter of ) and the Dfense de
quelques pices de thatre de Monsieur Corneille (). It is not so
much the notion of gnie that predominates here, as that of taste.
Taste is a key word in Saint-Evremonds lexicon; it is a moral as
well as an aesthetic faculty, and facilitates social ambition as well
as underwriting artistic discrimination. The man of taste is a
nobleman who has acquired his capacity for good judgement through
positive engagement in a life of responsible public action and the
pursuit of refined pleasures (OP III, ). Saint-Evremond equates
this definition with the taste exemplified by the Romans, which he
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calls le bon got de lantiquit. Corneille alone among tragic

dramatists, he asserts, has shown himself capable of understanding this,
even to the point of being able to faire mieux parler les Romains que
les Romains eux-mmes (OP II, ). How the bourgeois and
sedentary Corneille can possess a capacity that is in every other respect
the prerogative of an lite of noblemen and men of action, Saint-
Evremond does not even try to explain; it is, he says, Corneilles
secret. In sharp contrast to his judgement on Corneille, that on
Racine is categorically negative. Racine does not have le bon got
de lantiquit and so ne conoit bien ce que les hros taient
apparemment (OP II, ); nor does he realize that tragedy is the
representation of an experience, not the realization of an idea and that
ce nest pas tant la nature humaine quil faut expliquer que la
condition humaine quil faut reprsenter (OP IV, ).
All this constitutes an arguable point of view, and Saint-Evremond
argues it vigorously. But it is the point of view of a man who had left
France at a moment that was a watershed not only in his own career
but also in the culture with which he had grown up and the notion
of taste that was integral to it. The reversal of the court noblemans
situation from self-determined man of action, who sat lightly to the
claims of royal authority, to domesticated suitor of a sovereign to
whom he was prepared to cede the sole right to be called glorieux,
was more easily acceptable to those living through the changes than
to a man like Saint-Evremond who, from his place of exile, still
hankered after the days of aristocratic independence. In contrast
Bussy-Rabutin, whose own experience of exile had taken him no
farther from the court than an occasional spell on his country estates,
was able to write, as Saint-Evremond could never have done, that
Nous avons t ravis de nous dlasser [...] des grands sentiments de
Corneille; on est si fch en le lisant de ntre pas Romain et dtre
forc dadmirer ce quon nest plus capable de faire, quon sort tout
abattu de cette lecture. Though writing in , Bussy here sums
up succinctly a cultural change that had in fact taken place within a
relatively short time of his cousins flight from France almost thirty
years earlier. Exile may have radically broadened Saint-Evremonds
intellectual horizons; paradoxically, however, it also ensured that his
appreciation of the literature of his native country never developed
beyond the days when cultural values were the property of an age as
well as a class. It is this that accounts for his continued praise of
Corneille in the face of the dramatists declining reputation in France.
 P: S E L ()

He can say, without falling into contradiction, both that Corneilles

art is conforme au got et au gnie du sicle o nous sommes, and
that il a eu le malheur de ne pas plaire notre sicle (OP II, ),
because in the latter case notre sicle is pejorative and signifies this
benighted epoch, whereas in the former it expresses the belief that
Corneilles supremacy extends over the whole modern age. It also
explains why Saint-Evremonds praise of Racine is so lukewarm.
While he acknowledges that Corneilles conception of tragedy
evolved, he grants Racine only improvement in technique. He was
never able to acknowledge the validity of Racines use of his source
materials to expliquer la nature humaine, in other words to disclose
hidden depths and contradictions in the human psyche that the noble
psychology of an earlier generation did not recognize. Nor could he
have approved of Racines recourse to Greek sources which brought
with it the introduction of a merveilleux that deprived the tragic
hero of the human initiative to which a man of Saint-Evremonds
birth and generation attached so much value. It is significant that his
only really serious criticism of Corneille is of the title figure in
Polyeucte, on the grounds that his decision to embrace martyrdom is
not truly heroic because it comes not from within but from above.
Other topics continued to engage Saint-Evremonds interest. In
, after a visit from the traveller Franois Bernier, the leading
disciple of Gassendi and the author of a French abridgement of his
works, and after Barbin had falsely attributed to him a Discours sur
Epicure by Sarasin, which had also taken Gassendis line, Saint-
Evremond wrote the essay Sur la morale dEpicure (), in which
he refuted both Sarasin and Gassendi. Saint-Evremond argued that as
Epicurus grew older, his ideal of happiness progressed from voluptas in
motu to voluptas in stabilitate: in effect, he was an Aristippus when
young, and only became an Epicurus when he was no longer able to
lead the life of a man of action. Saint-Evremonds argument drew on
his own experience of an Epicurean life, whose patterns had changed
as he himself became older and less active. At the same time, he finally
succeeded in doing what he had not managed to do in Sur les
plaisirs: to abolish the traditional opposition between Cyrenaicism
and classic Epicureanism and so refute the image of a quasi-Stoic
Epicurus by which Gassendi and his disciples had managed to make
the philosopher acceptable to orthodox Christian opinion throughout
the previous fifty years.
Throughout this period Saint-Evremond maintained his interest in
 P: S E L ()

religious questions, partly through discussions with men like the

Canon of Windsor, Isaac Vossius (of whom Bayle said that he had read
all the books in the world except the Bible), and the latitudinarian
divine and later bishop Gilbert Burnet, both of whom he
encountered in Mme Mazarins salon. There is one major writing
from this period that has always troubled his critics. In he wrote
a so-called letter of advice to an old Calvinist friend, the scholar
Henri Justel, who had come to London two years earlier, fleeing the
increasing harassment of his co-religionists in France. Entitled, in a
contemporary manuscript copy, Lettre crite par un cavalier franais
catholique un cavalier franais rform au sujet de la religion, au
mois daot , the work is also a more general essay which reveals
for the first time the strains on Saint-Evremonds own religious
outlook at a particularly fraught historical moment. Its original
pretext is well documented. Justel had been unable to settle in
England where, despite trying them all, he had been unable to find a
Protestant church to satisfy him, and where he missed the material
comforts of life in France as much as he feared the edicts which
threatened to deprive him of them if he returned. By July , only
a month before the date of the letter, Justels morale had reached its
lowest point. By offering him the stark choice ou vivez heureux en
Angleterre par une pleine libert de conscience, ou accommodez-
vous de petites rigueurs sur la Religion en votre pays pour y jour
de toutes les commodits de la vie, Saint-Evremond has appeared to
some critics to renege on his earlier enthusiasm for the policy of
toleration he had observed in Holland. However, his own religious
outlook, with its categorical distinction between doctrinal beliefs,
which have only a pragmatic justification, and faith, which requires
the believers relationship with God to be wholly manifest in his
ethical practice, made it impossible for him to be sympathetic towards
someone like Justel, who had quarrelled with the ministers of his
Church even before he left France, and had spent his time in England
wandering from one dissenting sect to another. In the perspective of
Saint-Evremonds conception of Christianity, in which salvation was
possible in all confessions, Justels only realistic alternative was to apply
the hedonistic calculus to his predicament and adopt the course which
offered him the greatest temporal advantage.
Saint-Evremond could in any case still have found many reasons to
be optimistic about the religious situation in France. The possibility
of an ecumenical solution was being widely canvassed; the dragonnades
 P: S E L ()

had been suspended in February and repressive measures against

the Calvinists put on hold; and the Dclaration des Quatre Articles of
March had raised serious hopes of reunion. It was not in fact
until July , almost a year after Saint-Evremonds letter, that Pope
Innocent XI turned against the project, thus giving Louis XIV the
signal to revoke the Edict of Nantes and begin a full-scale programme
of persecution. For Saint-Evremond this was a shattering blow.
In arguing for reconciliation, he had also articulated, firmly and
repeatedly, most of the classic arguments for religious toleration: the
right to err in good faith, the fact that forced conversions only make
hypocrites, the charity commanded by the Gospel. Like virtually all
writers of the period, however, he regarded it as axiomatic that the
civil power should have supreme authority in matters of religion,
given its overriding duty to maintain civic order against the threat of
sedition. The question was: how should that supremacy be exercised?
An increasing majority believed that the way to ensure civic peace was
to impose a uniform mode of belief and worship on all subjects. This
was expressed in the Hobbesian doctrine of the jus in sacra, which
provided a theoretical justification for Louis XIVs revocation of the
Edict of Nantes in and the persecution of the French Huguenots
that followed. For others, of whom Saint-Evremond, pace many of his
critics, was always one, the State should use its right of intervention
in religious affairs only when outward demonstrations of religious
belief posed a positive threat to its security. This was the doctrine of
the jus circa sacra that had been promulgated by the Dutch jurisconsult
Grotius; it was also a lynchpin of Spinozas argument in the Tractatus
theologico-politicus. In the Lettre Justel Saint-Evremond continues to
argue, as he had in the Lettre crite de La Haye fifteen years earlier,
that the State has the power to close places of worship if they threaten
to be focal points for sedition; what he does not argue is that it has
the right to impose a single form of religion on its subjects.
The Revocation marked the beginning of Saint-Evremonds
alienation from his native country. When in an influential fellow
Norman, Daniel Huet, offered to try to help him obtain permission
to return to France, his response showed in the first place how much
the circumstances of his exile still rankled: he let it be known through
the intermediary of Justel (who had by now settled in London and
kept up a massive correspondence with his contacts in France) that he
would only go back if the King were to acknowledge that les
mauvaises impressions quon lui a donnes de lui taient mal fondes,
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et quil ne resterait plus rien dans son esprit contre lui. In any case,
Justel reported, the old man had now lost interest in the prospect:
most of his old friends in France were dead, he would only be seen as
a relic from the past and a figure of ridicule if he returned, and he was
too well settled in London to leave without very good reason. Saint-
Evremond would also have known that France was now a very
different place from the one he had left twenty-five years earlier. As
well as the climate of persecution, on which he continued to
comment bitterly, he would have found an atmosphere in which an
austere show of piety (genuine or feigned) had replaced courtly
magnificence and, as one historian has described it, even les plaisirs
had lost their savour.
The English Revolution of , which had immediately been
denounced by the French government, brought demonstrations of
hostility against French Catholics in London, among whom Saint-
Evremond, despite his indifference to the specific teachings of the
Church, but with no intention of changing his allegiance in the
manner of Wurtz, continued to count himself. The belated official
offer of a pardon in , following the outbreak of war between the
two countries, was no doubt designed to prise him away from the
arms of Frances enemies. However, once William III had offered him
his protection (and a pension) he seems to have had no doubt where
his true allegiance lay. He now writes as if he were a subject of the
English monarch, whose rule he celebrates as an example of the
puissance tempre he had admired in the Augustus of the Rflexions
sur les Romains (and was to admire again in Father Couplets account
of the Chinese Emperors!). Once war had broken out, Saint-
Evremonds stance began to attract hostile comment from some of his
fellow countrymen. A spoof catalogue of anti-French books allegedly
to be found in his library was published in a periodical. Even the
Duchesse Mazarin, whose sympathies lay with the deposed James II,
did not disguise her dissatisfaction that while Saint-Evremond
eulogized William, he never thought of praising any of the French
successes in the war. His bitterness at the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes was certainly one of the causes: when on the outbreak of war
he rewrote a much earlier verse eulogy of Turenne under a new title,
he included a passage criticizing Louis XIV for compromising
Frances chances of victory by making the Huguenots his enemies. In
his reply to Mme Mazarins strictures, he was categorical in his
expression of his attachement inviolable au pays o je suis (L II, ),
 P: S E L ()

and it is evident that he now regarded England as his real home and
William, as he wrote in verses to celebrate the signing of the Treaty
of Ryswick in , as his sovereign. Ninon de Lencloss choice of
adjective when she began a letter to him soon afterwards with the
words A cette heure que nos rois sont amis shows that this point had
been taken by his friends in France as well (L II, ).

Last Years ()
Traditional accounts of Saint-Evremonds last years, based mainly on
evidence supplied by his first biographer, the young Huguenot refugee
Pierre Des Maizeaux, who knew him only during the last two years of
his life, give the impression of a restricted and somewhat gloomy
existence. Although he still had some close friends in London, notably
the ever faithful Ralph (now Lord) Montagu, the francophile Lady
Sandwich and the Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin, many of his French
friends had returned to France and no longer kept in touch with him.
Moreover, Mme Mazarins salon had been invaded by earnest refugee
scholars whose attempts to persuade him to give his opinion on weighty
theological issues he acknowledged politely, but without enthusiasm.
Her death in , by which time she was an alcoholic bankrupted by
gambling debts, not only robbed him of someone to whom he had
been unconditionally devoted, but disrupted his habits of a quarter of
a century and deprived him of a social centre. For visitors from abroad,
his status became increasingly that of a tourist attraction. In this light,
Ren Ternoiss conclusion that sous lenjouement ou la galanterie
dsute de ses lettres on sent la tristesse dtre un vieillard, qui aime la
socit, quon reoit encore, mais que lon recherche moins seems,
on the face of it, to be plausible. But the exiles letters to Mme de
Gouville and the Abb de Hautefeuille, printed here for the first time,
and of which Des Maizeaux knew nothing, paint a very different picture.
On one level, they unfold a saga of financial dealings, agents and inter-
mediaries, contracts and negotiations, promises made and broken, and
lawsuits about which the author blows hot and cold, that have a quasi-
Balzacian fascination of their own. On another, and increasingly as the
correspondence goes on, they reveal aspects of the authors temperament
and sensibility rarely to be glimpsed in his other writings, in particular
a deeply felt nostalgia for the France of his youth which shows that his
heart was still in his native country, but in which he also found, as a
true Epicurean, a source of enjoyment in the present.
 P: S E L ()

Saint-Evremonds pleasure in being alive had a counterpart in a

cheerful lack of concern about his fate after death, which amazed and
sometimes troubled those who knew him. The moment itself was
vigilantly anticipated by figures as widely different in background and
motive as the heterodox Calvinist Pierre Bayle, who was anxious lest
Saint-Evremonds last moments contradict his image of him as the
model of a virtuous atheist, and the devout Catholic Lorenzo
Magalotti, Florentine polymath and influential member of the court
of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who authorized the Florentine
ambassador in London to see that Saint-Evremond was supplied with
wine from the Grand Dukes cellar, but at the same time asked him to
send back regular reports on the state of the exiles soul. Saint-
Evremond expressed gratitude for the wine which, he claimed, was
keeping him alive, but declined to answer questions about his soul,
affirming, as he did to others at the time, that he wanted to be
reconciled only with his appetite. Ultimately, all that mattered to him
was the here and now. In a letter to the Abb du Bos, he had praised
Mme Mazarins indiffrence chrtienne pour la vie; now it was his
own Epicurean indifference to death that he expressed when he wrote
to Ninon de Lenclos: je regarde une chose plus essentielle; cest la vie
dont huit jours valent mieux que huit sicles de gloire aprs la mort
(L II, ). Gassendi and Bernier had told him that man has a natural
desire to enjoy not just life, but a better life, after death. Saint-
Evremond, a much more authentic Epicurean than they, expected
nothing after death but nothingness. Shortly before his death he wrote
Lucretius line Quod procul a nobis flectat natura gubernans on the
flyleaf of a manuscript that he gave to Sidney Godolphin, significantly
changing fortuna to natura. The evil which he asked nature to turn
away from him was that his final disintegration should take him by
surprise. It is, however, worth pointing out, if only to underline that
with Saint-Evremond such things are never simple, that he had been
perfectly serious when only a few years earlier he had added a few
lines to a manuscript copy of his early essay Sur les plaisirs in which
he argued that the true Christian, who can be sure that a righteous
life in this world will be followed by eternal bliss in the next, is a
thousand times more fortunate than the disciples of either Aristippus
or Epicurus. There are echoes of Erasmus here (notably of the
Christian spin the latter had placed on Epicureanism in the
Colloquies), as there are in other writings of Saint-Evremond, whose
scepticism about many aspects of religious belief, if it was never
 P: S E L ()

disturbed by metaphysical anxiety, can on some occasions at least be

said, as one critic has well expressed it, to have been nuanc de
regret.
Saint-Evremond died on September (OS) after a short final
illness, without benefit of priest or pastor, and sans dmentir son
caractre Epicurien quil a soutenu jusquau bout, in the words of the
doctor who attended him. The posture seems to have satisfied Bayle,
but it continued to worry Magalotti and his Florentine friends,
including a Vatican Cardinal. In his will, made only two weeks
earlier, Saint-Evremond avoided the usual elaborate professions of
faith and used the shortest admissible form of preamble: I beg the
mercy of God, and do remit my soul into his hands. Among other
bequests he left part of his estate to be divided equally between the
poor French refugees and the poor French Catholics or of any other
denomination whatsoever. Despite the protests of the Dean, he was
buried in Westminster Abbey, where he is commemorated by a plaque
in Poets Corner. This is a far cry from his birthplace in the hamlet of
Saint-Denis-le-Gast, where until very recently his name lived on only
in an inscription above a drinking fountain, of which the present-day
inhabitants believe him to have been the nineteenth-century donor.

The Writer
By the end of his life, the reputation of Saint-Evremond as a writer,
which for many was inseparable from their image of a man whom no
one had seen in France for forty years, had been growing steadily. For
more than a decade before his death, not only editors (who might have
been accused of self-interest) but also reviewers of the uvres mesles
had been going out of their way to assure their readers that they were
aware that criticism of his writings would be regarded as impertinence
bordering on lse-majest. This is ironical, since he never thought of
himself as an author or of writing as a profession. What other people
called his works were only bagatelles, intended to be read at the most
by a select group of friends. The phrase ce quon appelle mes ouvrages
implies refusal of contact with an arriviste literary public which had by
now become sure of its critical power. La multitude, he complained,
touffe le petit nombre de connoisseurs (OP III, ). When he spoke
of his writings as bagatelles he may have been intentionally misleading:
Erasmus had used the same term for works of his own which, while
unpedantic in manner and not cast in a form traditionally associated
 P: S E L ()

with serious discourse, nevertheless had a serious argument to convey.

In fact, Saint-Evremond paid particular attention to the art dcrire
which, with a remarkably modern self-consciousness, he defined as a
heuristic process through which the writer could discover une image
plus nette of the object of his thinking and, ultimately, of himself as
the writing subject: Je me sens en ce que je dis, et me connais mieux
par lexpression du sentiment que je forme de moi-mme, que je ne
ferais par des penses secrtes et des rflexions intrieures. Lide quon
a de soi par la simple attention se considrer au dedans est toujours
un peu confuse; limage qui sexprime au dehors est beaucoup plus
nette, et fait juger de nous plus sainement, quand elle se repasse
lexamen de lesprit aprs stre prsente nos yeux (OP IV, ).
Saint-Evremond gave as much thought to the role of the reader as
he did to that of the writer. There is an art de lire which is a heuristic
activity that mirrors that of writing: the experience of reading is most
rewarding if the writer adopts a style that gives the reader space to
discover meaning for himself. This is not catered for by the most
admired (if opposite) stylistic ideals of the time, namely the periodic
style of Cicero which is fine for persuasion but not for provoking
thought, and the phrases coupes of Seneca which give a specious air
of authority to unconnected pronouncements. Both writer and reader
are faced with the same problem of the inherent inadequacy of words
to give voice and form to thought: Nous pensons toujours plus
fortement que nous ne nous exprimons. Il y a toujours une partie de
notre pense qui nous demeure; nous ne la communiquons presque
jamais pleinement, et cest par lesprit de pntration plus que par
lintelligence des paroles que nous entrons tout fait dans la
conception des auteurs (OP III, ). This statement brings us once
again into contact with Saint-Evremonds idea of an active faculty of
taste that is the privileged attribute of an aristocratic lite. Had he
known, for example, the pastor Jacques Lenfants criticism that il y a
quelque chose dans son style de trop recherch et qui ne peut tre
got que par les gens de prtention, he would doubtless have
dismissed it as evidence of the defective taste of a pedantic bourgeois
whom he had not invited to read his writings in the first place.
In any case, and however much he might deplore it, Saint-
Evremond could not prevent his works from being printed and their
contents taken as tangible evidence of his personal convictions, which
readers could then either reject or make their own. In this way a
 P: S E L ()

public he never sought became open to his ideas and able to

incorporate them into their own discourse, even if they gave the same
weight to censored as to authentic texts and sometimes found
themselves attributing to him works he had not written. The series of
uvres mesles that began with Barbins edition met with huge
success despite its manifest deficiencies, of which spurious attribution
was only one. Many of what, in the light of the manuscripts, can be
seen to be alterations and omissions, are almost certainly the work of
the ultra-conservative publisher who was known to be careful to avoid
printing anything he thought might offend orthodox religious sus-
ceptibilities. The omissions were occasionally made good by the
Dutch publishers who pirated every edition as it appeared, or those
at Lyon who, having taken over Barbins privilege, surreptitiously
introduced new material into his text. The authors popularity
touched fresh heights in with the publication of the uvres
mesles in a quarto edition; in the same year Dominique Bouhours
made him an exception to his policy of not naming living authors in
his Penses ingnieuses des anciens et des modernes. (Spending so long
away from France, Bouhours said, was tantamount to being dead.)
More significantly, however, he linked Saint-Evremonds success as a
writer with the opportunity exile gave him to express himself freely,
describing him as un homme desprit qui crit avec autant de libert
que de finesse, nayant plus rien craindre ni esprer de la fortune.
In Saint-Evremonds final years attempts were made, notably by
Des Maizeaux, to persuade him to revise his writings with a view to
the publication of an authorized edition. These met with only limited
success. Saint-Evremond turned down approaches from Barbin and
his widow, and Des Maizeaux only managed to gain access to the
author eighteen months before the latters death; even so Saint-
Evremond, who had kept few manuscripts, did little more than
retouch points of style in the copies of printed versions that the young
Huguenot had had made. Not only was he too old and infirm to be
able to reconstruct with any degree of success the original text of
works that had been abridged or censored when Barbin printed them,
but he was unwilling to seek out the manuscripts in which they could
be found. After Saint-Evremonds death Des Maizeaux finally
obtained access to some of this material and went ahead with his
project. His version of the text, which first appeared in , had the
great merit of including passages that revealed to the public at large,
for the first time, many aspects of the authors thought which had so
 P: S E L ()

far been known only to the privileged few whom he had allowed to
see his manuscripts. Even Barbins clearly truncated and most likely
censored text had led to attacks on Saint-Evremonds religious views.
The new material could only aggravate this, though among his critics
his old teachers the Jesuits were notably more lenient than others. Des
Maizeaux himself occasionally altered Saint-Evremonds text in order
to accommodate it to his own Protestant prejudices; otherwise he was
in the main a conscientious editor, though his editorial methods were
defective by modern standards. His edition (apart from the pieces in
verse) has now been superseded by Ren Ternoiss richly annotated
critical edition of the uvres en prose () and Lettres ()
which makes full use of the extant manuscripts.

The Letters to Madame de Gouville and the Abb de

Hautefeuille
The letters printed in this volume constitute the major part of an
interlocking correspondence, most of it previously unpublished,
between Saint-Evremond in London and two French correspondents,
the Abb de Hautefeuille and the Marquise de Gouville, dating from
the exiles last years. The first of the letters was written just before
the official bi-weekly postal service between England and France,
suspended since because of the war between the two countries,
was resumed in September . The last, dated December ,
was written less than two years before Saint-Evremonds death. The
twenty-three unpublished letters form the largest single group to have
come to light during the years since Saint-Evremonds death. I
have also included four others. Three of these are printed in the
critical edition of Saint-Evremonds Lettres, but only in inaccurate
versions which I have corrected with reference to the autographs; the
fourth, an accurate version of which was already in print, was
unaccountably not included in that edition.
Lucie de Cotentin de Tourville (??) was, like Saint-Evremond,
a member of an aristocratic Norman family. Saint-Evremond had first
met her half a century earlier in , when he was on leave after
being wounded in the knee at the battle of Nordlingen. He was then
and she perhaps as young as (the biographical information is
contradictory). She was to marry Michel dArouges, Baron (later
Marquis) de Gouville, who died in . Both before and after her
marriage she attracted a crowd of suitors and gained a reputation for
 P: S E L ()

loose morals that earned her the disapproval of Mme de Svign among
others. Her well-advertised turn to piety in did not convince even
sincere admirers like Bussy-Rabutin, who found it premature. Thirty
years later Saint-Evremond treats it with a characteristic mix of respect
and amusement.
Initially Saint-Evremonds reason for contacting Mme de Gouville
was to enlist her help in recovering money that was due to him from
France, which he urgently needed to keep up his style of life
(including acting as a bottomless well from which Mme Mazarin
could draw money to subsidize her mania for gambling) in a London
only just beginning to recover from the privations of war. By , as
the war began to draw to an end (informal negotiations began in May
, although the peace treaty was not formally signed until Sep-
tember), his financial affairs had reached a point of crisis. Payments
which had been made regularly up to the late s had, over the next
nine years, become erratic or ceased altogether. By the summer of
, when Saint-Evremond first approached Mme de Gouville for
help, he was owed , livres by his nephew Jean-Franois de Saint-
Denis and cus ( francs or livresthe terms are inter-
changeable) by the Marchale de Crqui.
The origin of these debts, as well as the progressor otherwiseof
Saint-Evremonds attempts to recover them, is recorded in detail in the
letters. The exile has a habit of giving out vital information a little at a
time, which did not always satisfy his correspondents, and some
preliminary explanation is needed if it is not to have the same effect on
the modern reader. From the time of his return to England in April
Saint-Evremond had received a regular income from France. This
came indirectly from the family estates, and directly from money he
had left with the Marchal de Crqui for safe keeping when he fled
from France in . The income from the family estates arose out of
a transfer of property by his elder brother the abb Jean de Saint-Denis
to Saint-Evremond and to a younger brother, Philippe de la Neufville.
Saint-Evremonds share of this had a capital value of , livres which
La Neufville undertook to use as security for an annuity of livres
(the interest au denier quatorze, i.e. at livres for every ), on
condition that, if the annuity was not paid regularly, Saint-Evremond
would recover his right to the capital. At a later stage the annuity was
converted into a pension for life of livres. When La Neufville died,
in or , the eldest brother and head of the family, Franois de
Saint-Denis, took over responsibility for the debt, and persuaded Saint-
 P: S E L ()

Evremond to agree to a new arrangement by which he would receive

a pension for life of francs. When Franois himself died in ,
legal responsibility for the debt passed to his son Jean-Franois, Saint-
Evremonds nephew, who ceased payment. The background to the
Crqui debt is more straightforward. When he left France in ,
Saint-Evremond had deposited livres with the Marchal. In March
, he signed a contract with the Marchal and his wife, binding on
both, whereby this would be used to provide him with an annuity of
cus ( francs). Although the Marchale was later to dispute her
share of the responsibility (see letters XXIII and XXIV), the provisions
of the contract, now in the Archives Nationales and unpublished, are
categorical: trs hault et trs puissant seigneur Messire Franois, sire
de Crequy, Mareschal de France [...] et trs haulte et puissante dame
Catherine de Roug, espouze dudict Mareschal et de lui suffisament
autorise agree to assign par donation irrevocable faicte entre vifs to
Messire Charles de Saint Denis du Gast, seigneur de Sainct Evremond,
absent, six cens livres de rentes viagres, chacun an pendant la vie
dudict sieur de Sainct Evremond, que lesdicts seigneur et dame de
Crequy sobligent, solidairement comme dessus, de lui bailler ou payer.
A concluding clause which exempts the Marchal, his wife and leurs
hoirs et ayants causes from payments only after Saint-Evremonds
death, underlines the fact of their continuing liability during his life-
time. When Crqui died in the Marchale thus incurred a legally
binding obligation. This she fulfilled only intermittently.
While the recovery of these debts was Saint-Evremonds initial
motive for resuming his friendship with Mme de Gouville, it soon
becomes evident that the appeal of the letters and the quality of the
writing far transcend this narrow if, for the author, vital concern.
Unlike almost all other surviving correspondences from this period,
these are real letters, private communications from one individual to
another written with no thought of a wider audience and unaltered
by editorial interference; they express (to borrow what Roger
Duchne says of the letters of Mme de Svign) le rapport singulier
dun tre son correspondant. At the same time, even in cases
where he is clearly writing under pressure, the letters are fine
examples of the epistolary art. Saint-Evremonds mastery of the art of
rhetoric, which people of his standing naturally brought into play
even when writing private letters, is used to pursue what he believed
should be the aim of any person-to-person communication, to give
pleasure to both himself and his correspondent.
 P: S E L ()

Above all, the letters give us a remarkable and rare insight into
Saint-Evremonds inner life and his often volatile emotions. They
evoke vivid memories of his life and friendships in the days before his
exile in a way that makes one aware that at heart, and despite his long
familiarity with the country and the many friends he had made there,
he had never really acclimatized himself to life in England and
remained emotionally dependent on contact with France (the end of
letter XX is poignant testimony to this). From the very beginning,
when he acknowledges Mme de Gouvilles reply to his initial enquiry,
the reader is struck by the spontaneity and enthusiasm with which the
ageing exile revives memories of their first meeting at Coutances
some sixty years earlier. Time and distance seem to have been
abolished: had he a Pegasus at his disposal, he says in another letter, he
would fly across the Channel to see an opera with her. All but the
shortest of the letters are filled with nostalgic memories, peppered
with shared cultural allusions, diversified by humorous sketches and
shot through with the writers characteristic irony. At times, he even
seems to enjoy dramatizing the business side of the correspondence,
as he paints graphic pictures of the way things are developing, weaves
fantasies around the name of his nephews steward, caricatures his
litigious niece who he at first thinks might take on his case, but then
changes his mind in the light of the portrait he has sketched. Despite
the depth of his nostalgia, the delight he finds in the renewal of his
friendship with someone with whom he can communicate so
spontaneously gives a fresh impetus to his enjoyment of life in the
present. While the death of his constant companion, the Duchesse
Mazarin, inspires him to real and moving eloquence, it does not
prevent him from returning, in the same letter and with only the
briefest of transitions, from death to life and to the need for money if
he was to go on enjoying it. Saint-Evremonds firm control over his
emotions is reflected in the rhetorical structure of this letter, which
parallels the one that opened the correspondence, with sorrow
substituted for joy. Not all the letters show such control. In the very
last letter to Mme de Gouville, one sentence strikes a startling note:
Je nai jamais song prendre une femme, et si javais t femme je
naurais jamais pris dhomme; naura-t-on jamais le courage pour
laisser finir le genre humain afin quil vienne quelquautre genre
moins mchant que celui des hommes (letter XXVII). This sentence,
which is unlike anything else he wrote, shows how his lack of anxiety
 P: S E L ()

about his own destiny was shadowed by a pessimism about the future
of the human race that many others, at many different times, must also
have felt.
When writing to Mme de Gouville, Saint-Evremond, as we have
seen, makes the lettre daffaires into a source of mutual pleasure and
entertainment, as well as of business. His letters to the Abb de
Hautefeuille, on the other hand, might at first sight seem to be no more
than business letters. Ren Ternois, who has printed some of Saint-
Evremonds other letters to Hautefeuille, calls them just that. Jean de
Hautefeuille () held the post of secretary to Mme Mazarins
sister the Duchesse de Bouillon. Saint-Evremond had first met him
when the Duchesse had come to visit her sister in London in .
He was also an inventor who, from onwards, had published a
stream of pamphlets describing his discoveries in physics and mechanics.
Read in conjunction with the correspondence with Mme de Gouville,
however, Saint-Evremonds letters to him take on a much greater
interest. At first the Abb and the Marquise are given separate roles in
the recovery of money: his is to find people who will put pressure on
the Marchale de Crqui in Paris, hers to find intermediaries in
Normandy who will revive negotiations with his nephew. Once his
affair with the nephew is settled, however, he treats his two correspon-
dents as allies. His letters to Hautefeuille are still primarily concerned
with money, but their tone becomes noticeably warmer and more
relaxed and the social distance between the two men, while still
maintained, becomes less obvious. He speaks freely to one correspon-
dent about the other and on one occasion writes to both on the same
piece of paper. The same kind of badinage is employed with both. The
Marchale is devout, so Mme de Gouvilles principal weapon will be
confessors, while Hautefeuille, whose fascination with anything
mechanical is well known, will pull all the levers he can lay his hands
on. About the loss of Mme Mazarin, who died in , he speaks
perhaps even more emotionally to Hautefeuille, who had known her
personally, than to Mme de Gouville; once again, however, this does
not prevent him, after a decent interval of mourning, from detailing
the steps to be taken in order to bring legal action against the Duchesses
estate for the return of money he had never been able to refuse her.
Thanks to Mme de Gouvilles efforts, and despite some moments
of frustration, a definitive agreement was reached with the nephew by
early (see letter XII), leaving only the Marchale de Crqui to
 P: S E L ()

be brought round. Saint-Evremond frequently, and with biting irony,

points the contrast between the Marchales ostentatious piety and her
lack of Christian charity when repaying debts is at issue. The letters
show that she was occasionally prevailed upon to pay off some of the
arrears. However, at the time of Saint-Evremonds last known letter to
Mme de Gouville (there may have been later letters that are now lost)
the Marchale had apparently even threatened to renege on the
contract altogether. Saint-Evremond was hurt as well as outraged by
this, but the Marchale may well have persuaded herself that, since the
original capital had already been paid off three times over, it was
inconsiderate of Saint-Evremond to go on living. That, at least, seems
to be the implication of a bitter remark in one letter: Je vis long-
temps, il est vrai, mais Monsieur le Marchal, sil vivait, ne trouverait
pas ma vie trop longue (letter XVII). Once again, as elsewhere in
these letters, we find, conveyed in the minimum of words, a depth and
intensity of feeling that is rarely to be met with in his other writings.
We do not know whether, when Saint-Evremond died almost two
years later, he had received any further payments from the Marchale.
He had certainly not received anything from the estate of Mme
Mazarin. The sum still owing was considerable, already amounting to
the equivalent of more than livres in French currency when a
certified declaration of her debts was drawn up ten years earlier (see
letter XIX), and more than anything he could hope to recover from
the Marchale. In any case, he did not disclose everything about his
finances in his letters. In July , shortly after the affair with the
nephew was settled, but while that with the Marchale was still
ongoing, he told the Abb du Bos, then on a visit to London, that he
had been offered the Keepership of the Ducks of the Decoy in St
Jamess Park, a sinecure post which would, Du Bos says, have brought
him in an income of or livres but could perhaps return more.
But there was a problem: Saint-Evremond would have to swear the
oath of allegiance to the English monarchy and subscribe to a
declaration against transubstantiation, as required by the Test Act of
. In the end, nothing seems to have come of the offer, of which
there is no record in the Public Record Office. Although personally
devoted to William III, Saint-Evremond was still a French national;
moreover, it is unlikely that he would have publicly professed to
believe or disbelieve in a doctrine which, as he had once written, even
the angels could not prove, and of which he held that both the real
and the symbolic interpretations were compatible with salvation (L I,
 P: S E L ()

). In some verses dated September , which Des Maizeaux

copied into a notebook but did not print, Saint-Evremond com-
plained that he had barely enough to live onbut we should note
that he is addressing someone (the young singer Mme de la Perrine)
who was trying to insinuate herself into the place of Mme Mazarin
and to persuade him to subsidize her gambling debts just as he had the
Duchesss. It was, however, as he wryly remarked, enough to support
a valet, a maidand a dog.
Saint-Evremond dates his letters by the (old style) Julian calendar,
occasionally adding stile dang or stile dangleterre. He indicates the
date and month, but not the year, and never (except in one instance)
gives the day of the week. The chronology I have established is based
on internal evidence (repetition of topics from one letter to another,
cross-reference to other letters) and references to external events. I have
used old style dates throughout except where NS (new style) is
indicated. Saint-Evremonds spelling is erratic and inconsistent, and his
punctuation capricious. For instance, he will write a simple word such
as rente correctly in one letter and as rent in another, and omit accents
where seventeenth-century usage calls for them while putting them in
where it does not. I have modernized the spelling, for example changing
-oit to -ait, and -ez in plural past participles to -s. However, in
view of the number of erroneous spellings of Saint-Evremonds name
that continue to circulate, I have left his signature as Saint-Euremond,
the form in which he always wrote it. I have altered or added
punctuation where necessary in the interests of intelligibility, and
regularized the accents. For the notes my principal sources have been
the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), the French biographical
dictionaries of Michaut and Hoefer, Lebretons Bibliographie normande,
the Dictionnaire de la noblesse of La Chesnaye-Desbois, and the Dictionnaire
de biographie franaise (DBF), together with the most recent editions of
the Mmoires of Dangeau and Saint-Simon, the Historiettes of Tallemant
des Raux and the correspondence of Mme de Svign. Other sources
are cited in the relevant notes.

Notes to the Introduction

. Boisrobert, Eptres en vers, ed. Maurice Cauchie (Paris: Hachette, ), i. .
On Saint-Evremonds sexuality see n. below.
. Bibliothque nationale, MS Nouvelles acquisitions franaises fo. v.
According to this note of a conversation c. at the Htel de Liancourt, one
 P: S E L ()

of the reasons for Saint-Evremonds flight from France was the failure of the
Comte de Puyguilhen (the future Duc de Lauzun) to support him. On this see
also letter IV, n. , below.
. Cited by Ronald S. Berman, Heroic Action in the Later Renaissance,
Symposium / (Summer ), .
. References in the body of the text are to Saint-Evremond, uvres en prose, ed.
R. Ternois (Paris: Didier, , vols.), cited as OP, and to Saint-Evremond,
Lettres, ed. R. Ternois (Paris: Didier, , vols.), cited as L.
. Jacques de Callires, La Fortune des gens de qualit et des gentils-hommes particuliers
(Paris: F. Loyson, ), . See on this D. C. Potts, Pascals contemporaries and
Le Divertissement, Modern Language Review / (Jan. ), , and compare
Jean Lafonds comment that Epicureanism ne peut que se ractiver toutes les
poques o il y a divorce entre un idalisme moral proclam et une pratique qui
lui est trangre (Augustinisme et picurisme au XVIIe sicle, in his LHomme
et son image (Paris: Champion, ), ).
. Jean-Charles Darmon, Philosophie picurienne et littrature au XVII e sicle. Etudes sur
Gassendi, Cyrano de Bergerac, La Fontaine, Saint-Evremond (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, ), .
. Ternois (OP I, ) wrongly refers to this as a contrefaon. See my article Saint-
Evremonds Exile and the First Edition of his uvres mesles, French Studies
(), .
. Patrick Andrivet, Saint-Evremond et lhistoire romaine (Orleans: Paradigme, ).
. Quentin M. Hope, Saint-Evremond and His Friends (Geneva: Droz, ) .
R. Ternois, Saint-Evremond et Spinoza, Revue dHistoire Littraire de la France
(), , takes the question seriously but misinterprets both authors.
. In particular, this disproves the claim that Isaac DHuisseaus La Runion
du Christianisme (Saumur: R. Pan, s.d.) was a more important influence.
DHuisseaus argument that knowledge of the truth of specific doctrines is the
first link in the chain of salvation is totally incompatible with the position of
either Saint-Evremond or Spinoza.
. See Ternoiss comments in OP III, , and IV, . Ternois consistently takes
the view that any apparently favourable observation about religion by Saint-
Evremond must be a disguised declaration of unbelief.
. Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle (The Hague: Nijhof, ), ii. .
. J. McManners, Paul Hazard and the crisis of the European conscience, Arts.
The Proceedings of the Sydney University Arts Association / (), . See also
Albert Chrel, Histoire de lide de tolrance, Revue dhistoire de lglise
(), .
. The question has been thoroughly explored by Ren Ternois, Saint-Evremond
et la politique anglaise, XVII e sicle ().
. The only serious discussion so far of Saint-Evremonds interest in sex, as well as
of the question of his own sexuality, is to be found in Hope, Saint-Evremond and
his Friends, . See Hopes index under sexual activity.
. See my article, Saint-Evremond and Buckingham, An Answer . . . and a
Question, French Studies Bulletin (Autumn ), .
. See especially Michael Moriarty, Saint-Evremonds taste and cultural
hegemony, in his Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ), ch. , and David Bensoussan, Le got selon
 P: S E L ()

Saint-Evremond, in Du got, de la conversation, des femmes, ed. Alain Montandon

(Universit de Clermont-Ferrand, ), .
. Letter of July to Mme de Toulongeon. Bussy-Rabutin, Correspondance,
ed. L. Lalanne (Paris: Charpentier, ), ii. .
. J. Dally, Les Justel, Bulletin de la Socit de lHistoire du Protestantisme Franais
(), .
. The literature on this subject is considerable. See J. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les
Protestants (Paris: Vrin, ). On the efforts at reconciliation between gallican
clergy and liberal pastors, see the capital work of Elisabeth Labrousse, Une foi, un
roi, essai sur la rvocation de ldit de Nantes (Paris: Labor et Fides, ).
. A Hobbesian view of the relationship between State and Church is often
equally erroneously attributed to Spinoza. For a refutation, see Alexandre
Matheron, Individu et communaut chez Spinoza (Paris: Minuit, ), .
. Quoted from Ren Ternois, La vieillesse de Saint-Evremond, Saggi e ricerche di
letteratura francese (), . The question was first discussed by Quentin M.
Hope, Huet and Saint-Evremond, Modern Language Notes (), .
. Anne Green, Privileged Anonymity: The Writings of Madame de Lafayette (Oxford:
Legenda, ), .
. Catalogue de quelques livres curieux qui se trouvent dans la bibliothque de Mr.
de S.E. Londres, Mercure galant (Oct. ).
. Ren Ternois, Saint-Evremond devant la mort, Saggi e ricerche di letteratura
francese (), .
. Anna-Maria Crini, Saint-Evremond e la corte di Toscana, English Miscellany
(), .
. Hayward Archive, Kings College, Cambridge. Lucretius, De rerum natura, V, .
The same misquotation occurs in the essay Sur les Anciens (OP III, ) and is
clearly deliberate.
. Jean M. Lanniel, Un scepticisme nuanc de regret: Saint-Evremond et la
dvotion, XVII e Sicle (), .
. Commentarii de rebus pertinentibus ad Ang. Mar. S.R.E. cardinalem Quirinum, Brescia
(), i. .
. Somerset House, P. C. Degg (unpublished). Quoted from the original
document, translated from French for the record by the notary Anthony Wright
(see letter XXIV). The bequest reflects Saint-Evremonds stance on religious
tolerance. It was intended to benefit all French paupers in London, whether
refugee Protestants or Catholics who had settled there and would, like himself,
have been disbarred from public office by the provisions of the Test Act (see
Introduction pp. ).
. A public statue of Saint-Evremond was eventually dedicated by the Mayor of
Saint-Denis-le-Gast in . I am grateful to Quentin Hope for this
information.
. Jacques Lenfant, letter to Bayle, Aug. , in Lettres indites de divers savants,
ed. P. Gigas (Copenhagen: C. F. C. Gad, ), i. .
. G. E. Reed, Claude Barbin, libraire de Paris sous le rgne de Louis XIV (Geneva:
Droz, ), .
. Pre Dominique Bouhours, Penses ingnieuses des anciens et des modernes (Paris:
Veuve Mabre-Cramoisy, ), Avertissement and .
 P: S E L ()

. On the postal services at this time, see Eugne Vaill, Histoire gnrale des postes
franaises (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), iii. ; iv. , ;
v. .
. Cf. Boisrobert, Eptres en vers, i. .
. Unpublished. Archives Nationales, Insinuations au Chtelet Y (Etude IX,
Bizet et Auvray), liasse , dated Mar. .
. Roger Duchne, Ralit vcue et russite littraire: le statut de la lettre, Revue
dHistoire Littraire de la France (), .
. Dom Paul Denis, Lettres autographes de la collection Troussures (Paris: Champion,
), , . According to Des Maizeaux, Saint-Evremond was first given this
post in . If this was so, he would in any case have forfeited it when the Test
Act came into force in .
. Quoted in Ternois, Saint-Evremond devant la mort, .