Gossip (6 page)

I have told this story about Arthur Miller's conduct to seven or eight people. In doing so, I am not reporting a falsehood—
Vanity Fair,
if only out of fear of a lawsuit, would surely not run so damaging an article without thoroughly checking its facts—but am I nonetheless gossiping? I suppose I am, with the motive behind this particular piece of gossip little more than sweet Schadenfreude, the pleasure in catching the famous or the mighty in blatant hypocrisy. And hypocrisy, as Nick Denton, the founder of the gossipy website Gawker.com, likes to say, "is the only modern sin."

Another piece of gossip I have purveyed, though this one with some guilt, has to do with the drinking habits of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The gossip here comes in the form of a joke. The joke is that, when people phoned for Senator Moynihan, a drinking man, during one of his binges, one of his staff would say, with suppressed mirth, "The senator can't come to the phone. He's on the floor right now." I have told this story, too, a number of times, because I think it amusing. The guilt I feel at doing so is owing to my belief that Pat Moynihan was the most intelligent man in the United States Senate over the past half century, and the only one I can think of I would care to meet for lunch.

I never did meet Moynihan for lunch, but he is someone who contributed a few articles to a magazine I once edited, and who used to call me from time to time to chat about unpolitical subjects. The day I departed that magazine, he had a flag flown over the Senate in my honor—a flag that he subsequently sent to me and that is now in my son's possession. Yet I persist in telling that "He's on the floor right now" story. Why? Because, as I say, I think it amusing, and because I expect the people to whom I tell it will think me charming for passing it along to them. Such are sometimes the pathetic motives, and the even more pathetic rewards, of gossiping.

Along with showing one is in the know, another motive for passing along gossip is the assertion of superiority it sometimes allows. If someone tells you about the alcoholism of another man, isn't he also implying that he is himself without such a problem? If I report on the hypocrisy of another writer, writing one way and living another, as I did in my anecdote about Arthur Miller, am I not suggesting that my own life shows no such divide? If I recount another person's pathetic vanity, am I not also asserting my own common sense, levelheadedness, and refreshing absence of vanity? Behind much gossip, in other words, is often to be found, implicit though it may be, the claim of the superior virtuousness of its propagator. To seem both in the know and morally superior, all through the agency of gossip—not at all a bad deal, I'd say.

One day I had a call from a youngish man, a poet of middling-high reputation and achievement, who told me that he was about to be offered the job of chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Since I had been a member of the National Council of the NEA, he called to ask me what I thought of his taking the job. He prefaced his call by saying that he knew he should probably not take it, should instead continue working at his literary career. But, he added, he had long been afflicted with "a certain Jeffersonian sense of public service," which made the job tempting.

When he mentioned that "Jeffersonian sense of public service," I knew I was dealing with someone being less than straight with himself, so I strongly advised him not to take the job. "You know," I said, "a car and chauffeur come with the chairman's job. And my guess is that once you leave the job, you will miss the services of the chauffeur so badly that your life will never again seem as good."

Odd, but, ignoring my advice, he took the job anyway.

We know a vast amount of what went on in Versailles at the court of Louis XIV, especially between the years 1691 and 1723, when the French monarchy, having reached the apogee of its power, was descending and slowly wending its way to the murderous French Revolution. Much of what we know comes from a little man with a perhaps exaggerated sense of amour-propre named Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon. From his coign of vantage at the middle distance from power, he sedulously took careful notes. In his retirement years, he turned these notes into the most extensive, richly amusing, gossip-ridden, and impressive memoirs ever written.

Some 1,500 people (servants included) lived within the walls of the grand palace Louis XIV built for himself and his courtiers, who were housed in 250 apartments of various sizes, many of them small and airless, but no less valued for that. Everything at the Versailles court was carefully ordered by rank, which was awarded by birth, an order that the King himself frequently subverted by placing power in the hands of the secondary nobility, the
noblesse de robe,
who became his mandarin bureaucrats, and in those of his mistresses.

Whatever one's position at court, all sought the favor of the King and those closest to him. Louis XIV was appropriately called the Sun King, for all the other planets and satellites of power revolved around him. Rivaling ambitions, with cabals forming everywhere, flourished. Jockeying for position at Versailles was as natural as breathing.

In his
Memoirs,
the Duc de Saint-Simon reports, in a spirit of candor and not less frequently spite, a great many things we couldn't have known without him; he goes into private matters about which he makes pointed judgments, rarely neglecting to provide interesting speculation about low motives. Even when they are wrong, the
Memoirs
are never stupid; even when they are angry, they are amusing.

Saint-Simon was barely five feet tall and walked the halls of Versailles perched upon red shoes with high heels and spoke in a squeaky voice. He frequently strikes a note of disapproval in his
Memoirs,
and took, it seems, only strong positions. He stood for purity of blood and seniority, loathed ruptures in tradition, especially when these entailed violations of the elaborate etiquette of privilege that was still for the most part in place under Louis XIV, though beginning to fall away under the regency that followed the King's death.

Saint-Simon complained, for example, about Te Deums being sung for people of lesser rank than the King and Queen, noting that "nothing now was sacred." He became exercised when mere members of the
Parlement,
an assembly of judges, were permitted to remove their hats in the presence of dukes and peers, of whom he was of course one. Those who in any way attempted to diminish or otherwise trample over his status became his enemies for life. (Saint-Simon's family peerage dated only from 1635, conferred on his father by Louis XIII; at the death of Louis XIV in 1715, he was himself the eleventh duke and peer in order of seniority.) Birth and rank were to him as sun and sustenance. Punctilious to a fault, a pedant of privilege, he everywhere made a great nuisance of himself by insisting on his full prerogatives as a duke.

One of the Duc de Saint-Simon's relentless complaints throughout the
Memoirs
is about the disreputable private life of his friend, subsequently the Regent, the Duc d'Orléans, who kept, and hugely enjoyed, company with courtesans and roués. SaintSimon was always trying to shape up the Duc d'Orléans, while never failing to record his lapses. Saint-Simon wasn't the only gossip at Versailles. Suppers the Regent gave for his cronies, the Duc notes, were wild gossip fests: "Everyone was discussed, ministers and friends alike, with a license that knew no bounds. The past and present love-affairs of the court and Paris were examined without regard for the victims' feelings; old scandals were retold, ancient jests and absurdities revived, nothing and nobody was sacred. M. le Duc d'Orléans played an active part in all this, but it must honestly be said that he seldom took much account of the talk."

The Duc de Saint-Simon deplored raucous, scattershot, motiveless gossip, or so he claimed. His own gossip tended to be subtle, well aimed, and (he would assure you) never out of line because of the purity of his own motives. No one was more
parti pris
than he. His never claiming otherwise is one of his attractive qualities. "Stoicism is a beautiful and noble chimera," he wrote. "It would be useless priding myself on being impartial."

The
Memoirs
provide much useful fodder for historians, but Saint-Simon was a grander writer than he was a historian. The greatest French novelists—Stendhal, Balzac, Proust—admired him, Proust even artfully lifting material from the Duc's memoirs for his own novel. Stendhal claimed that, along with eating spinach, reading the
Memoirs
was among his greatest passions. Saint-Simon was an original stylist—he apparently invented the words "publicity" and "patriot"—strong on invective, and especially fine on the analysis of character, much of the material for which he acquired by being attentive to gossip.

The Duc de Saint-Simon arrived at Versailles in 1691, at the age of sixteen, and in 1694 began keeping the notebooks that would result in his
Memoirs.
In his retirement he assembled and reworked these notes into the great book that he intended to be published posthumously. (The
Memoirs
were first published, in a poor edition, in 1788.) Whether he knew he was creating a considerable work of art is not known. What is unmistakable is that he intended his more than three-thousand-page work, forty-plus volumes in the standard edition, to be read by a posterity that would be sympathetic to his attacks on his many enemies and his self-justifications.

In his
Memoirs,
Saint-Simon claimed never to set down things he hadn't seen or heard at first hand or been told by what he took to be reliable witnesses. No one would view these
Memoirs
as in any sense objective, which doesn't mean that they aren't for the most part truthful. Saint-Simon had his positions—a grander name, perhaps, for prejudices—and they were manifold: his penchant for established hierarchy, rank, and tradition; his reverence for religion and genuine piety yet loathing of ambitious Jesuits, and his preference for those bishops who remained in their dioceses and took care of business and those who valued the contemplative more than the social or political life; his distaste for adultery, especially double adultery, where both parties were married; his contempt for homosexuality, seeing it as an effect of weak character and poor breeding (Louis XIV's brother, known as Monsieur, was homosexual); his impatience with stupidity; his dislike of greed; his respect for those who lived with a sense of their own achievements while recognizing their limitations; his unrelenting view of the comic preposterousness of men and women, never more so than when it came to their amours, many of which he learned about from Versailles' rich gossip grapevine.

"I resolved to let nothing escape me," Saint-Simon writes early in his
Memoirs,
and not too much did. His curiosity about how things happened at court was unquenchable, his search for motives unrelenting. At times he seems to operate as the ethnographer, the Malinowski, of Versailles, studying the strange habits of the natives residing there. At other times he is as caught up in the madness of life at the court of the Sun King as anyone else, as when, for example, he and his wife spent the astounding sum of 20,000 livres on their clothes for the wedding of the Duc du Boulogne, grandson of Louis XIV.

The Duchesse de Saint-Simon is perhaps the only figure in the
Memoirs
who is neither criticized nor gossiped about. She is repeatedly credited for her kind heart, her loyalty, the generosity of her sentiments. She was his one reliable confidante, and he often praises her sagacity. "What a great treasure," he wrote, "is a virtuous and sensible wife!" She frequently takes it upon herself to rein in this husband who, a bit of a hothead, is ready to desert Versailles and its many intrigues, or to calm him in his propensity for the rash act he is determined upon but she doesn't permit him to commit. They had three children: two dullish, disappointing sons, known at court behind their backs as "the dachshunds," and a daughter badly deformed by a crooked spine who had a taste for quarrels and made a bad marriage to a man interested only in her money.

The Duc de Saint-Simon was a gossip-historian. Gossip, the word and the act, comes into play throughout the
Memoirs.
"In the event everything becomes known at Court," he wrote, and the reason was that in the atmosphere of Versailles all knowledge was useful, especially against rivals. Ears and eyes were everywhere. A large number of people at court had a well-developed taste for gossip as sheer entertainment. Mme. de Clerambault, the daughter of the King's secretary of state, along with gambling "loved private and confidential gossip, and cared for nothing else." Attending physicians, priests, servants, everyone close to the King with the exception only of his horses, was a potential—and more often an actual—purveyor of gossip.

Perhaps the most avid recipient of gossip at Versailles was Louis XIV himself. The King, Saint-Simon notes, "was becoming more and more avid for information regarding everything that went on, and was even more interested in gossip than people imagined, although he was known to be vastly inquisitive." Gossip was the only way Louis XIV had of understanding all the intrigue around him. As the sole lever for raising or lowering the status of his subjects, the King depended on gossip to offset the persistent flattery that he also welcomed. Meanwhile everyone gossiped about the King. From Saint-Simon we learn, among a great many items about Louis XIV, that he slept with his mistresses in the afternoon and the Queen at night.

The extent to which Saint-Simon contributed directly to this fund of the gossip made available to the King we cannot know. The two men met in private audience only twice. Louis XIV thought well of the Duchesse de Saint-Simon, and often invited her and her husband to Marly, his country retreat. But he thought the Duc de Saint-Simon an argumentative man, difficult, altogether too obsessed with his rank, too critical of those who did not come up to his standard, too eccentric for his taste.