Cesar Vichard de Saint-Real
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Cesar Vichard de Saint-Real (1639 - 1692), was a French historian.
He was born in Savoy, but educated in Paris by the Jesuits. Antoine Varillas was his model; he wrote hardly anything but historical novels. The best thing about his Don Carlos (1673) is that it furnished Friedrich Schiller with several of the speeches in his drama. In the following year Saint-Real produced the Conjuration des Espagnols contre la Republique de Venise en 1618, which had phenomenal success, but is 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 Saint-Real, but without reason. Among his authentic works is a short treatise De la critique (1691), directed against Andry de Boisregard's Réflexions sur la langue française. 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-Real was a fashionable writer of his period; the demand for him in the book-market was similar to that for Saint-Evremond, to whom he was inferior. He wrote in an easy and pleasant, but mediocre style.
See Pére Lelong, Bibliothèque historique de la France, No. 48, 122; Barolo, Memorie spettanti ella vita di Saint-Rial (1780; Saint-Real was an associate of the Academy of Turin).
Reference
- This entry incorporates public domain text originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.