In one of those half historical and half biographical papers for which the Revue des Deuse Mendes is famous, M. Gaston Boissier, who has done as much as any man living to popularize intimate knowledge of the most important epochs of ancient and modern history, introduces his readers to the second Due de Saint-Simon, whose memoirs furnish the most graphic pictures of court and military lifo under Louis KIV and the Regent Duke of Orleans. The first Duke had as a boy attracted the attention and capricious favour of Louis XIII, and having been rapidly elevated to the rank of Duke and Peer of France, and invested with the highest dignities of the State, he sought to embellish his respectable, though by no means brilliant pedigree, by tracing it from Charlemagne. Impressed with this imaginary importance, which in turn betrayed itself in his son, and more curiously in his great grand-nephew, the revolutionary Comte de Saint-Simon, he made himself, it is true, somewhat ridicule ous in the eyes of the Montmorencies and Chitillons, but he indirectly and unintentionally rendered a marked service to the advance of those ideas which, though still in embryo, were destined three generations Inter to upset and re-constitute the civilised world. For in France, under Louis XIU, the theory was that the nobility was a mere fringe and decoration to the Throne, and that its members, and still more the classes beneath, existed onlybyroyal favour, Careless enough about the ultimate results of such a theory, the first Duede Saint-Simon held his own before the Sovereign, and when in later life he was brought into contact with Louis XIV, he insisted to such good purpose on his rights as to bring down on him the wrath and permanent displeasure of that monarch. The article before us deals only with the first two volumes of the Mémoires as recently published in Hachetto's magnificent series of Les Grands Eerivains de la France, and as the new edition will run to about twenty volumes, the reviewer has as yet only broken the ground. He applies himself chiefly to the consideration of the abilities which Saint-Simon brought to his task, and to the peculiarities of the language in which he wrote. We find, however, a few anecdotes which only make us long for more, as for instance a whimsical account of the admission of the Bishop of Noyon, ridiculous pedant, to the Academy, and the story of Madame's rage and violence over the marriage of the Due de Chartres with Mile. de Blois, a natural daughter of the King.—A few weeks ago we gave a sketch of M, Charles Richet's interesting article (Les Démoniagues d'aujourdhui) on the hysterical and epileptic patients who are now tenderly cared for in the Salpétribre hospital. This he supplements in the number before us by a paper on Les Démoniaques
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.