The family's ducal peerage (duché-pairie), granted in 1635 to his father Claude de Rouvroy (1608–1693), served as both perspective and theme in Saint-Simon's life and writings.

Derived at least traditionally and imaginatively from the douze pairs (twelve peers) of Charlemagne, the peerage of France was supposed to be, literally, the chosen of the noblesse, deemed thereafter to incarnate the French nobility par excellence.

Strictly speaking, a French peerage (usually attached to a dukedom) was granted in favour of a designated fief rather than upon the titleholder per se.

[1] The family's principal seat, where Saint-Simon's Mémoires was written, was at La Ferté-Vidame, bought by his father shortly after his elevation to the dukedom.

The castle brought with it the ancient, entailed title, Vidame de Chartres, borne as a courtesy style by the Duke's only son until he was eighteen.

Though this was hardly likely to ingratiate him with Louis, it at least gave him the status of belonging to a definite party and it eventually placed him in the position of a friend to the acting chief of state.

[1] Saint-Simon loathed "the bastards", Louis XIV's illegitimate children, and not, apparently, entirely because they were accorded ceremonial precedence above France's peers.

However, it should be remembered that these reminiscences were written 30 years after the facts, by a disappointed man, and that Saint-Simon had maintained congenial or at least courteous relations with the majority of his fellow courtiers.

But no steps were taken to carry out his "preferred vision" of a France ruled by the noble élite, exposing how little real influence he had with the Regent.

Saint-Simon was not eager, unlike most other nobility, to acquire profitable functions, and he did not use his influence to repair his finances, which were even further diminished by the extravagance of his embassy.

He was an indefatigable writer, and he began very early to record all the gossip he collected, all his interminable legal disputes over precedence, and a vast mass of unclassified material.

According to Charles Henry Conrad Wright, "taking Dangeau as foundation, he goes over the same ground, sometimes copying, more often developing or inserting additional information, the result of more acute observation.

His most famous passages, such as the account of the death of the Dauphin, or of the Bed of Justice where his enemy, Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine, was degraded, do not give a fair idea of his talent.

[1] In A Short History of French Literature, the Mémoires are described as "vast and rambling...one of the least-read masterpieces of the age" which "provide us not only with a picture of the squalor and pettiness which often lay behind the glittering façade of the court, but also with the precise angle of perception of a senior courtier.

This is prose narrative on a monumental scale; how much of it is fiction is hard to tell, but in this area the distinction is not paramount, since what matters is the imaginative reconstruction of a lost world (Proust owes not a little to Saint-Simon)".

[8] He had a profound influence on writers including Tolstoy, Barbey d' Aurevilly, Flaubert, Valle-Inclán, Proust, Mujica Láinez and many others.