For Saint-Simon does not merely give us living men and women, he shews them to us in action, he reproduces their movements, their gestures, their tricks of speech. There is nothing more wonderful in the whole of French literature than his account of the _spectacle de Versailles_ after the death of Monseigneur. It is not in the literal sense a drama, for it lacks a plot to give it unity, but it is a superb dramatic _tableau_, glowing with life and throbbing with a passionate intensity. The best commentary on this comedy is La Bruyère’s chapter _On the Court_, the essence of which is distilled in the following passage: Il y a un pays où les joies sont visibles, mais fausses; et les chagrins cachés, mais réels. Qui croirait que l’empressement pour les spectacles, que les éclats et les applaudissements aux théâtres de _Molière_ et d’_Arlequin_, les repas, la chasse, les ballets, les carrousels, couvrissent tant d’inquiétudes, de soins et de divers intérêts, tant de craintes et d’espérances, de passions si vives et des affaires si sérieuses? When La Bruyère printed this _remarque_ in the first edition of _Les Caractères_ (1688), the Court of Louis XIV, partly under the influence of Mme de Maintenon and partly as the result of the King’s serious illness in 1686, had begun to wear that aspect of seriousness and gloom which overshadowed it during the remaining years of the reign. The conversion of the King to the regular observance of Catholic practices, and the general atmosphere of piety which this conversion diffused shewed itself in various ways, and amongst others in the repression of pleasures to which with advancing years he was becoming less inclined. In the very year 1694 in which Saint-Simon began to make notes for his _Memoirs_ Bossuet attacked the stage in his well-known _Maximes et Réflexions sur la Comédie_. In 1696 the police made a sudden descent on the Hôtel de Bourgogne and summarily suppressed the Italian actors. From this time for many years the only theatre in Paris was the _Comédie Française_.