One of the most curious figures at the Court was Mme de La Chausseraye, at one time lady-in-waiting to Madame. Thanks to her _esprit_ and her talent for intrigue, she acquired great influence with various ministers and became very rich, losing large sums at cards, but recouping herself by the good things which the King and the Controller-General put in her way. The King was much diverted by her amusing conversation, and she declared that she had won and kept his favour by the sole method of hiding her intelligence and leaving him with a sense of his intellectual superiority. When it is added that she had also great credit with the royal valets, it may be imagined how useful she was to Saint-Simon, and how eagerly he cultivated her society. “J’étois sur elle sur un pied d’amitié et de recherche[3].” One can also imagine his feelings when many years after her death he learnt from her confessor that she had written “very curious” memoirs, but that by his advice she had committed them to the flames. [3] See _Mémoires_, IV. 222-224; XIII. 90-97. Saint-Simon’s curiosity was unbounded and he left no channel of information untapped. “Je me suis toujours instruit journellement de toutes choses par des canaux purs, directs et certains, et de toutes choses grandes et petites[4].” And among his more lowly channels were the royal valets. For, as he says, “le hasard apprend souvent par les valets les choses qu’on croit bien cachées.” He was on excellent terms with Bontemps, the King’s chief valet, who died in 1701 at the age of eighty, a man of high character, thoroughly honest and disinterested, and with Bloin, who was in the King’s service at the time of his death. Another serviceable informant, in a somewhat higher position, was Georges Maréchal, who was appointed first royal surgeon in 1703, “l’honneur et la probité même.” [4] _Mémoires_, VII. 19. The page and a half which precedes this throws considerable light on Saint-Simon’s sources of information. Whenever any chance occasion offered of obtaining special information Saint-Simon pounced upon it with eager avidity. He describes, for instance, how he travelled from Fontainebleau to Paris with the Marquis de Louville, head of the French household of the King of Spain, and how he put so many questions to him that the poor man arrived _sans voix et ne pouvant plus parler_. Later he records a conversation with the Princesse des Ursins, who had also just returned from Spain. It lasted eight hours, “which seemed to him eight minutes.” In the concluding chapter of his _Memoirs_ he claims for them accuracy and veracity. He says that the greater part is based on his own personal experience, and that the rest comes to him at first hand from the actors in the events that he narrates. “I give their names, which, as well as my intimacy with them, are beyond all suspicion. When my information comes from a less sure source I call attention to it, and when I am ignorant, I am not ashamed to avow it.”