The Duc de Saint-Simon was at the very center of Louis XIV's court at Versailles, a hotbed of intrigue, passion, jealousy, and political skullduggery. He was a genuinely pious and honest man whose unblinking record of the court-his eye-witness testimony of wars, intrigues, and royal visits-make this a supreme work of art. These memoirs were the literary inspiration for Marcel Proust's own masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past.