Duc de Saint-Simon

Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755), was a French soldier, courtier and memoirist. The son of a favorite of Louis XIII, he inherited his dukedom at eighteen, left the army in 1702 after being passed over for promotion, and spent the next twenty years at Versailles, where he had little influence and watched everything. Under the Regency he sat on the council and served as ambassador to Spain. In retirement he wrote his enormous Memoirs, not published in full until the nineteenth century, which remain the most vivid portrait of the court of Louis XIV and the model for every writer on the vanity of power.