It was inevitable that Saint-Simon’s irascibility, intractability, and aristocratic pretensions should arouse considerable enmity, and in the songs and satires of the day he is attacked under the name of _boudrillon_ (_bout d’homme_) and _petit furibond_. Mme de Maintenon declared that he was “glorieux, frondeur et plein de vues,” and we have an interesting commentary on this remark in his report of a conversation which took place between the Duchesse de Bourgogne and his wife. The Duchess told her that he had many powerful enemies and that the King had conceived a strong prejudice against him. His intelligence, she said, and his knowledge and capacity for ideas were recognised as far above the ordinary, but everybody was afraid of him, and they could not endure his arrogance and his outspoken criticisms on persons and institutions. These criticisms would have been more valuable if they had been less concerned with futilities, and less biased by aristocratic prejudices. But Saint-Simon was at heart a true patriot, and was keenly alive to the evils which were sapping the forces of his country. He agreed with reformers like Fénelon and Chevreuse and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre in regarding the absolutism of the King as the chief source of danger, and he shared their dislike of the Controller-General and the four Secretaries of State as the agents of this absolutism. He strongly reprobated the King’s love of war and glory, and the boundless extravagance, which he not only practised himself but encouraged in others. Like La Bruyère and Fénelon, Saint-Simon saw with a compassionate eye the wide-spread misery by which all this glory and magnificence was purchased. He has drawn a moving picture of the terrible winter of 1708-1709, when famine stalked through the land and crushing taxation on the top of high prices “completed the devastation of France.”