SAINT-ÉVREMOND, Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis, Seigneur de ( 1613-1703), was born at Saint-Denis-le-Guast near Coutances, the seat of his family in Normandy, on 1st April 1613. He was a younger son, but took his designation from one of the smaller estates of the family and appears to have had a sufficient portion. He was a pupil of the Jesuits at the Collége de Clermont, Paris, then a student at Caen. For a time he followed the law at the Collége d’Harcourt. He soon, however, took to arms and in 1629 went with Bassompierre to Italy. He served through great part of the Thirty Years’ War, chiefly in Germany, and, meeting Gassendi at Paris, became strongly imbued with his doctrines. He was present at Rocroy, at Nordlingen, and at Lens. For a time he was attached to Condé, but is said to have offended him by some satirical speech or speeches. During the Fronde, Saint-Évremond, unlike most of his contemporaries, never changed sides, but was a steady royalist. The duke of Candale (of whom he has left a very severe portrait) gave him some appointments in Guienne, and Saint-Évremond is said to have saved 50,000 livres in less than three years. He was one of the numerous victims of the fate of Fouquet. His letter to Créqui on the peace of the Pyrenees, which is said to have been discovered by Colbert’s agents at the seizure of the superintendent’s papers, seems a very inadequate cause for exile, and it has been supposed that there was more behind; but nothing is known certainly. Saint-Évremond went to Holland and England, where he was received with open arms by Charles IL, and was pensioned. He found himself very much at home in England, and though after James II.’s flight to France Saint-Évremond was invited to return he declined. Hortense Mancini, the ...most attractive of Mazarin’s strangely attractive group of nieces, came to England and set up a salon for love-making, gambling, and witty conversation, and here Saint-Évremond was for many years at home. He died on Michaelmas Day 1703, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, where his monument still is in Poet’s Corner close to that of Prior.
Saint-Évremond is perhaps the most remarkable instance of the curious 17th-century fancy for circulating literary work in manuscript or clandestinely. He never himself authorized the printing of any of his works during his long lifetime, though Barbin in 1668 published an unauthorized collection. But he empowered Des Maizeaux to publish his works after his death, and they duly appeared, the earliest form and date being 3 vols. 4to, 1705. They were often reprinted in various forms during the first half of the 18th century. Saint-Évremond, however, had made his mark and established his influence long before the earliest of these books appeared. He was an older man than Pascal, a very much older man than Anthony Hamilton, and he probably preceded the first, as he certainly long preceded the second, in the employment for literary purposes of a singularly light, polished, and graceful irony, which taught a great deal to Voltaire, but which Voltaire was never able to imitate with quite the air of good company which distinguishes his teacher. The masterpiece of Saint-Évremond’s style in this respect is the so-called Conversation du Maréchal d'Hocquincourt avec le Père Canaye (the latter a Jesuit and Saint-Évremond’s master at school), which has been frequently classed with the Lettres Provinciales, but which with less of moral purpose and of cutting reproof even excels those famous compositions in dramatic power and in subtle good-humoured irony. The remainder of Saint-Évremond’s works are desultory in the extreme. Some elaborate letters contain the exposition of an Epicurean philosophy of life which had a very great influence on the polite society of his day. others, and the most important of all, exhibit the writer as a literary critic of singular discrimination and taste. His comparisons of Corneille and Racine, his remarks on English drama (chiefly that of Ben Jonson), his sketches of criticism on Roman character and literature, all show a remarkable union of acute and orderly generalization with freedom from the merely academic spirit which had in his time already begun to beset France. Altogether, Saint-Evremond may be said with greater right to deserve the phrase which used to be applied to Sir William Temple. He is the first master of the genteel style in French literature, and the lively poignancy of his irony prevents this gentility from ever becoming insipid. His influence indeed was hardly less in his adopted than in his native country, and it may be traced in the Queen Anne essayists to a not much less degree than in Hamilton and Voltaire.
Saint-Évremond’s complete works have not recently been reprinted, but there are selections by Hippeau, Giraud, and others.
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