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Stendhal (1783-1842) - Pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle |
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One of the most original French writers of the first half of the 19th century, who played a major role in the development of the modern novel. Stendhal is best known for his masterpieces Le rouge et le noir: chronique du XIXe siècle (1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), sharp and passionate chronicles of the intellectual and moral climate of France after Napoleon's defeat. Stendhal also wrote travel books, literature and art reviews, and biographies about such composers as W.A. Mozart and Joseph Haydn. Stendhal's subjects are often melodramatic, but they form a fascinating frame for his psychologically deep stories of selfishness and different paths towards self-discovery. "Yes, monsieur, a novel is a mirror which goes out on a highway. Sometimes it reflects the azure of the heavens, sometimes the mire of the pools of mud on the way, and the man who carries this mirror in his knapsack is forsooth to be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shows the mire, and you accuse the mirror! Rather accuse the main road where the mud is, or rather the inspector of roads who allows the water to accumulate and the mud to form." (The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830 by Stendhal, translated by Horace B. Samuel, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1916, p. 366; original title: Le rouge et le noir: chronique du XIXe siècle, 1830) Stendhal was born Marie-Henri Beyle in Grenoble, a district of
France, which he disliked. His father was a well-to-do lawyer and
landowner. Stendhal's mother died when he was seven, and his pious aunt
took care of his education with a Jesuit priest; he hated them both. At
the age of 16 Stendhal moved to Paris to study and to become a
playwright. One of his relatives, Pierre Daru, was an influential
adherent of the First Consul. In May 1800 Stendhal joined the French
Army, under the command of Napoleon, and served as a lieutenant of
dragoons for some 18 months. Stendhal fought in Italy, Germany, and
Russia. After resigning, he worked in civil and military
administration. When the French empire fell in 1814, Stendhal was placed on half-pay. He applied for a new position but couldn't even get a job as a low-paid librarian. In this situation Stendhal decided to leave France and settle in Italy, the scene of his several love affairs. His travel book, Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817, came out in 1817. It was the first publication for which he used the pen name Stendhal; he derived it from a German town, through which he had passed in Napoleon's army. While in Florense he visited Santa Croce. Overwhelmed by Giotto's famous frescoes he wrote in his diary: "My soul, affected by the very notion of being in Florence, and by the proximity of those great men whose tombs I had just beheld, was already in a state of trance. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its very essence close at hand; I could, as it were, feel the stuff of it beneath my fingertips. I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground." (Rome, Naples, and Florence by Stendhal, translated by Richard N. Coe, London: John Calder, 1959, p. 302) His psychosomatic reaction to the overdose of beautiful art, disorientation, powerful emotions from confusion to hallucinations, is nowadays called 'Stendhal syndrome'. Stendhal was exiled from Milan by Metternich's police. In 1821
he
settled again in Paris, trying to make his name in the salons. During
this period he had an affair with countess Clémentine Curial, who wrote
215 letters in two years to her lover. In Milan he had an unhappy love
affair with Matilde Dembowski. In 1822 Stendhal published De
l'Amour (On Love). He approached the subject with an analytic eye. According to Ford Madox Ford it is "the
dryest book about love that was ever written". (The March of Literature: From Confucius to
Modern Times by Ford
Madox Ford, London: George Allen and Unwin, second impression 1947, p.
711) But this was what he aimed at: "I make every possible effort to be dry,"
he said in the
chapter IX. "I would impose silence upon my heart, which feels that it
has much to say. When I think that I have noted a truth, I always
tremble lest I have written only a sigh. (On Love,
translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Philip
Sidney Woolf and Cecil N. Sidney Woolf, New York: Bretano's, 1920, p.
39) The work was based on the psychology of Destutt de Tracy. Stendhal regarded himself as a disciple, and perhaps borrowed from him the classificatory, cataloguing spirit with which he started the book. On Love he distinguished four species of love – the physical, the tasteful, love from vanity, and love from passion, which is the source of the highest happiness. The Italian writer Italo Calvino said that the chapter 'Des fiasco' (=temporal sexual impotence) was "the sole reason for writing the book which the author subsequently did not dare publish and which only appeared posthumously." (Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin, New York: Pantheon Books 1999, p. 122) Les Souvenirs d'égotisme (Memoirs of an Egoist) was an autobiographical fragment, in which Stendhal depicted the salons, theatres, and museums of Paris, but also his personal disappointments. In London he failed to duel with an arrogant English captain, but found a tiny but elegant house of three prostitutes. Armance (1827), Stendhal's first novel, was
about a secret never told – the protagonist, Octave, commits suicide
because of an inability to perform sexually. The theme of Oedipus
complex is in the background of the narrative; Octave's problem arises
from his overattachment to his mother. Stendhal's work was based on Mme
de Duras' epistolary tale Olivier ou le Secret
that the dutchess read out aloud in her salon. It did not appear in print. His own version, told in third-person narration, was ignored. Prosper Mérimée, whom Stendhal showed the manuscript, thought that the subject was too peculiar and some details struck him as implausible. (A Lion for Fove: A Critical Biography of Stendhal by Robert Alter, New York: Basic Books, 1979, p. 175) The Red and the Black appeared when the author was 47. It examined political and social conditions of France during the period 1815-30 through the experiences of Julien Sorel, a hero and villain. As often in Stendhal's novels, the central character is in search of himself. Julien is a carpenter's son, who can memorize everything and anything. He tries to achieve greatness and establish his place in the world by the force of his will, and by using seduction as a tool for social climbing. He shoots at his first employer, Mme de Rênal, in a church. She is the only woman he loves, but she is an obstacle in his projected marriage to the aristocratic Mathilde de la Mole. Mathilde loves Julien passionately, but Julien is bored. Finally he reveals his true self in his speech to his judges: "Gentlemen of the jury! I am induced to speak by my fear of that contempt which I thought, at the very moment of my death, I should be able to defy. Gentlemen, I have not the honour of belonging to your class. You behold in me a peasant who has rebelled against the meanness of his fortune. . . . But even if I were not so guilty, I see among you men who, without a thought for any pity that may be due to my youth, would like to use me as a means for punishing and discouraging for ever that class of young man who, though born in an inferior class, and to some extent oppressed by poverty, have none the less been fortunate enough to obtain a good education, and bold enough to mix with what the pride of the rich calls Society." (Ibid., pp. 498-499) de Rênal tries to save Julien and dies after he has been taken to the guillotine. The title of the book refers to Julien's character and choices of career: the army, symbolized by the color red, and the church, symbolized by the color black. Behind the story was a newspaper account which Stendhal had read in 1827. It told of the trial of a young man charged with the attempted murder of a married woman. "Indeed, love has always been for me the most important thing, or rather the only thing that mattered. I have never been afraid of anything save seeing the woman I love exchange an intimate look with a rival." (The Life of Henry Brulard, translated and with an introduction by Jean Stewart and B. C. J. G. Knight, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973, p. 224; La Vie d'Henry Brulard, 1890) After the 1830 revolution King Louis-Philippe came to power. Stendhal was appointed consul at Trieste, but the Austrians refused to accept him. Eventually he found a post in the small port of Cività Vecchia in the Papal States. There he wrote Memoirs of an Egoist, the self-searching Vie de Henry Brulard (The Life of Henry Brulard), and Lucien Leuwen, dealing with the corruption under Louis-Philippe. All these were unfinished works. "So my confessions will hve ceased to exist thirty years after being printed if the I's and me's prove too boring for the readers," Stendhal wrote in Henry Brulard, "nevertheless I shall have had the pleasure of writing them and of searching my conscience throughly. Moreover, if they should succeed, I've chance of being read in 1900 by the kind of people I love, the Mme Rolands, the Mélanie Guilberts, the . . . " (Ibid., p. 25) The executor of the will published part of Lucien Leuwen, the first 18 chapters, under the title Le Chasseur vert (1855). Stendhal's political views were full of contradictions: he was
loyal
to the ideals of the Enlightenment and an individualist with strong
opinions but a sceptic at the same time, his lack of success fueled his
embitterment toward the Restoration and Orleanist France, but after
achieving fame, he became a moderate conservative. However, he never
found his place in the post-Napoleonic world. Stendhal was "an
aristocratic son of the ancien régime grande bourgeoisie,"
Erich Auerbach said in Mimesis
(1946) – he had inherited "aristocratic instincts". (Mimesis: The Presentation of Reality in Western Literature, translated from the German by Willard Trask, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957, p. 409) During a prolonged leave in Paris from 1836 to 1839, Stendhal composed his second masterpiece The Charterhouse of Parma. It was a chronicle of the adventures of Fabrizio del Dongo, a projection of the author's personality in his youth, who search for himself from the battlefield of Waterloo to a Carthusian monastery. Italo Calvino especially praised its opening chapters, "in which history with the rumble of its cannons marches side by side with and at the same pace as the rhythm of the individual life." (Why Read the Classics?, p. 132) The book opens with the fall of the old ideas: "risking one's life became fashionable; happiness depended, after centuries of insipidity, upon loving one's country with a passion, upon seeking out heroic actions to perform." Fabrizio is loved by his uncle’s wife, Gina Pietranera, the Duchess Sanseverina, but Fabrizio himself is in love with Clélia. And there is the Machiavellian Mosca, who loves Gina. Clélia's son by Fabrizio dies, the grieving mother also expires. Fabrizio dies in the Charterhouse of the title in the novel's final pages, and Gina, who has married Mosca, dies unhappy and without Fabrizio. The Charterhouse of Parma was published to Balzac's acclaim in 1839. The great author himself, celebrating the work, said that it "often contains a whole book in a single page." (quoted in How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001, p. 151) From 1841 Stendhal was on sick leave from his post, living in Paris. He died on March 23, 1842 in Paris, smitten by apoplexy in the street. His work was rediscovered in the 1870s. It has influenced among others George Gissing, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson. For further reading: Stendhal et la voie oblique by Victor Brombert (1954); Stendhal: A Study of His Novels by F. W. J. Hemmings (1964); Stendhal: Fiction and the Themes of Freedom by Victor Brombert (1968); The Problematic Self : Approaches to Identity in Stendhal, D. H. Lawrence, and Malraux by Elizabeth Brody (1978); A Lion for Love by Robert Alter (1979); Stendhal et le roman by Hans Boll-Johansen (1979); Stendhal's Paper Mirror by James T. Day (1987); Reading Realism in Stendhal by Ann Jefferson (1988); Stendhal's Violin by Roger Pearson (1988); Stendhal by Stirling Haig (1989); Le Desir De La Voix Vive: Etude Du Ton Chez Stendhal by Francoise Coulont-Henderson (1990); Stendhal Revisited by Emile J. Talbot (1993); The Feminization of Dr. Faustus: Female Identity Quests from Stendhal to Morgner by Helga Druxes (1993); Approaches to Teaching Stendhal's the Red and the Black, ed. by Dean De La Motte, Stirling Haig (1999); Stendhal, edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom (2002); Stendhal: Fiction and the Themes of Freedom: With a New Introduction by Victor Brombert (2017) Stendhal Secret: To The Happy Few by Anne-Aurore Inquimbert (2018); Stendhal, le primitif de la modernité by Michel Guérin (2024) - See also: Francois La Rochefoucauld Selected works:
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