This morning, Monsieur Henri Beyle, French consul in Civitavecchia, has gone out for a stroll around Rome. We have grown used to calling him Stendhal. Stendhal wrote books; Monsieur Henri Beyle took walks around Rome, Milan, or Paris; Monsieur Beyle went to the opera; Monsieur Beyle had stormy love affairs. From the imagination and the disquiet and the pain of Monsieur Beyle, the art of Stendhal was born: precise, inalterable, terse. Beneath the radiant and precise tension of words, we feel the heat of flames.
For example, in this note from one Sunday in 1834, when Monsieur Beyle, at evening, takes another of his promenades through Rome. We are on the cusp of spring, 6 April to be exact. Some months before, Monsieur Beyle embarked on an interesting journey. On 15 December, on his way through to Italy, he met a noteworthy couple, two writers from his homeland: the poet Alfred de Musset and the novelist Aurore Dupin, who went by the name of George Sand. Together, the three of them traveled on along the Rhone, with its deep, ample waters, toward the serenity of the Italian sky. If you care to, you may see in Venice, like an immutable chamber amid the sumptuous storm of marble, the room in the Hotel Royal Danielli Excelsior where the poet and his muse lodged. But Beyle’s eyes, in that Roman spring, were filled with another, very different splendor. Because, with fervor, those eyes seek a note of richer colour in the placid clarity of the day.
And it is richer, this colour: from afar, it seems to flicker like flames. Monsieur Henri Beyle runs through the people toward that swatch of red. Already he is in the middle of the street; there is a girl who has fallen to the ground. She has just been murdered before the eyes of all. Next to the girl’s head, a red pool of spilt blood has formed, as if in an instant. Death, in France, is most often the corollary of violent political passion or financial resentments: a tribute paid to power or to hatred. In Italy, as in the days of the Renaissance, death may still appear in light of an excess of splendor: immoderate luxury of passion and energy, theatrical, sublime, and exalting, like the architecture that distinguishes the country’s streets. Or so, at least, it seems so to Monsieur Beyle.
Monsieur Beyle, when he writes, becomes Stendhal. Stendhal is perhaps fascinating, above all else, for his capacity to establish an equilibrium between acuity of vision and the internal dramaturgy that orders and compels his writing. Returned from his walk, that same afternoon, Monsieur Beyle – Stendhal – writes of the event in the margins of a book, even noting the approximate dimensions of the puddle of blood. He appends a lone commentary: ‘This is what Monsieur Hugo calls being bathed in one’s own blood.’
Is this insensitivity, sarcasm? No: it is sensitivity in the extreme. It is respect for the real and tangible pool of blood, respect for lived pain, which imposes a moral corrective on rhetoric. To decapitate a cliché is to come close and observe something: the concrete suffering of a girl murdered on a Roman street. Hugo’s respect for the word took a different form: magnifying it into monumentality. Thus words maintain a complex moral relation with things lived.
27 June 1980