1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Saint-Réal, César Vichard de

SAINT-RÉAL, CÉSAR VICHARD DE (1639–1692), French historian, was born in Savoy, but educated in Paris by the Jesuits. Varillas gave him his taste for history and served as his model; he wrote hardly anything but historical novels. The only merit of his Don Carlos (1673) is that of having furnished Schiller with several of the speeches in his drama. In the following year he produced the Conjuration des Espagnols contre la République de Venise en 1618, which had a phenomenal success, but is all the same merely a literary pastiche in the style of Sallust. This work and his reputation as a free-thinker brought him to the notice of Hortense Mancini, duchesse de Mazarin, whose reader and friend he became, and who took him with her to England (1675). The authorship of the duchess’s Mémoires has been ascribed to him, but without reason. Among his authentic works is included a short treatise De la critique (1691), directed against Andry de Boisregard’s Réflexions sur la langue françoise. His Œuvres complètes were published in 3 volumes (1745); a second edition (1757) reached 8 volumes, but this is due to the inclusion of some works falsely attributed to him. Saint-Réal was, in fact, a fashionable writer of his period; the demand for him in the book-market was similar to that for Saint-Évremond, to whom he was inferior. He wrote in an easy and pleasant, but mediocre style.

See Père Lelong; Bibliothèque historique de la France, No. 48, 122; Barolo, Memorie spettanti alla vita di Saint-Réal (1780; Saint-Réal was an associate of the Academy of Turin); Sayous, Histoire de la littérature française à l’étranger.