He carried this sincerity into his religion. D’Argenson may sneer at him as a _petit dévot_, but his piety was at any rate perfectly genuine. It was the fruit, partly of a careful religious education, and partly of the influence of the Abbé de Rancé. For the monastery of La Trappe was only fifteen miles from La Ferté-Vidame and Saint-Simon often visited it as a child in company with his father. When he came to man’s estate he regarded his father’s friend with that deep and whole-hearted admiration which was one of the finer traits of his character. Every year during the Abbé’s life-time--he died in 1700--Saint-Simon went into retreat at the monastery during Passion-week, and he often consulted the Abbé on matters of conscience. From the Abbé he learnt to look with disfavour on Jansenism, but, as he came to judge more for himself, he was impressed by the noble lives of “Les Messieurs de Port-Royal,” and he declared that recent centuries had produced nothing more saintly, more pure, more learned, more practical, and more elevated, than that famous society. With the Jesuits he was on good terms all his life, and his portrait of Père La Chaise is kindly and appreciative. But in his later volumes he often speaks of them in a hostile spirit, and though he was outwardly on good terms with Père Tellier he cordially disliked him, and his portrait of him is one of the most unflattering in his gallery. In questions of ecclesiastical policy he was, as might be expected from one who was a patriot before he was a Churchman and who did not pretend to theological learning, a convinced Gallican. It was as such, and not as an upholder of Jansenism, that he was strongly opposed to the bull _Unigenitus_. We have seen that Saint-Simon began to make notes for his _Memoirs_ in July, 1694. Probably these took more or less the form of a diary and consisted of personal impressions, information that he had picked up from various sources, and so forth. Then in 1729 his friend the Duc de Luynes procured for him the journal which the Duke’s grandfather, the Marquis de Dangeau, had kept with extraordinary regularity and accuracy from 1684 down to his death in 1720. Philippe de Courcillon, Marquis de Dangeau, had come to the Court of Louis XIV with no particular advantages of birth, or wealth, or interest. But by his readiness to oblige, his adaptability, and his honesty he made himself indispensable. Among his accomplishments was that of writing _vers de société_ with great facility, which procured his election to the _Académie française_ at the age of thirty. But his chief passport to favour and fortune was his skill and success, coupled with perfect probity, in all kinds of card-games. This is Mme de Sévigné’s account of a game of _reversi_ at Versailles in 1676, in which the King, the Queen, Mme de Montespan, Mme de Soubise, Dangeau, and others took part: