master darkens the deepest shadows and throws the most glaring deformities into still bolder relief; then disgust, horror, pity, and ridicule finish the work which scorn and indignation had begun. Nor, in spite of the virulence of his method, do his portraits ever sink to the level of caricatures. His most malevolent exaggerations are yet so realistic that they carry conviction. When he had fashioned to his liking his terrific images--his Vendôme, his Noailles, his Pontchartrain, his Duchesse de Berry, and a hundred more--he never forgot, in the extremity of his ferocity, to commit the last insult, and to breathe into their nostrils the fatal breath of life. And it is not simply in detached portraits that Saint-Simon's descriptive powers show themselves; they are no less remarkable in the evocation of crowded and elaborate scenes. He is a master of movement; he can make great groups of persons flow and dispose themselves and disperse again; he can produce the effect of a multitude under the dominion of some common agitation, the waves of excitement spreading in widening circles, amid the conflicting currents of curiosity and suspicion, fear and hope. He is assiduous in his descriptions of the details of places, and invariably heightens the effect of his emotional climaxes by his dramatic management of the physical _décor._ Thus his readers get to know the Versailles of that age as if they had lived in it; they are familiar with the great rooms and the long gallery; they can tell the way to the king's bedchamber, or wait by the mysterious door of Madame de Maintenon; or remember which prince had rooms opening out on to the Terrace near the Orangery, and which great family had apartments in the new wing. More than this, Saint-Simon has the art of conjuring up--often in a phrase or two--those curious intimate visions which seem to reveal the very soul of a place. How much more one knows about the extraordinary palace--how one feels the very pulse of the machine--when Saint-Simon has shown one in a flash a door opening, on a sudden, at dead of night, in an unlighted corridor, and the haughty Duc d'Harcourt stepping out among a blaze of torches, to vanish again, as swiftly as he had come, into the mysterious darkness!--Or when one has seen, amid the cold and snow of a cruel winter, the white faces of the courtiers pressed against the window-panes of the palace, as the messengers ride in from the seat of war with their dreadful catalogues of disasters and deaths!