Louis de Rouvroy (1675 – 1755) commonly known as Saint-Simon was a French soldier, diplomat and writer of memoirs,was born in Paris. The dukedom-peerage granted to his father, Claude de Rouvroy (1608–1693), is a central fact in his history. Strictly speaking, Saint-Simon was not made a peer, but his estate was raised to the rank of a duché-pairie. The peers were, in a way, representative of the entire body of the Nobility, and it was Saint-Simon's lifelong ideal to convert them into a sort of great council of the nation.
Saint-Simon's memoirs display a striking voice. On the one hand, he is petty, unjust to private enemies and to those who espoused public parties with which he did not agree, and an omnivorous gossip. Yet he shows a great skill for narrative and for character-drawing. He has been compared to Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, and to historians such as Livy. He is at the same time not a writer who can be "sampled" easily,inasmuch as his most characteristic passages sometimes occur in the midst of long stretches of quite uninteresting matter. His vocabulary was extreme and inventive; among other words he is supposed to provide the first use of "intellectual" as a noun, and to have invented "patriot" and "publicity".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Rouvroy,_duc_de_Saint-Simon
This work was translated and abridged by Bayle St. John, an English biographer and travel writer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayle_St._John
