At twenty he was made a captain in the cavalry; and the same year he married the beautiful daughter of the Marechal de Larges.

This marriage, which was purely political in its inception, finally turned into a genuine love match--a pleasant exception to the majority of such affairs.

He became devoted to his wife, saying: "she exceeded all that was promised of her, and all that I myself had hoped." Partly because of this marriage, and also because he felt himself slighted in certain army appointments, he resigned his commissim after five years' service, and retired for a time to private life.
Upon his return to Court, taking up apartments which the royal favour had reserved for him at Versailles, Saint-Simon secretly entered upon the self-appointed task for which he is now known to fame--a task which the proud King of a vainglorious Court would have lost no time in terminating had it been discovered--the task of judge, spy, critic, portraitist, and historian, rolled into one.

Day by day, henceforth for many years, he was to set down upon his private "Memoirs" the results of his personal observations, supplemented by the gossip brought to him by his unsuspecting friends; for neither courtier, statesman, minister, nor friend ever looked upon those notes which this "little Duke with his cruel, piercing, unsatisfied eyes" was so busily penning.

Says Vallee: "He filled a unique position at Court, being accepted by all, even by the King himself, as a cynic, personally liked for his disposition, enjoying consideration on account of the prestige of his social connections, inspiring fear in the more timid by the severity and fearlessness of his criticism." Yet Louis XIV.