INTRODUCTION

Stendhal as Autobiographer

ALL OF STENDHAL’S LIFE WOULD SEEM TO HAVE BEEN a preparation for the writing of his autobiography. Surely no man brought to such a task more aptitude, more interest, or more passion. His novels themselves, it has often been remarked (like many other great novels) were but concealed autobiographies, or, at any rate, variations upon the theme of his own life. No Jean-Jacques Rousseau, indeed no Marcel Proust ever ransacked his memories more vigorously in search of times past, or interrogated his ego more earnestly, more constantly than he.

Once at a salon in Paris a man, made curious by reports of M. Henri Beyle’s somewhat mystifying private character, asked him directly what his business was. The self-styled “Baron de Stendhal” fixed his sharp eye upon his interlocutor and said: “Sir, I am an observer of the human heart.” The man, thinking he was a spy of some sort, was frightened and retreated abruptly. But the observation, the analysis of the human heart and its passions had truly been his business in life. And where could one better study this subject than in oneself? Since his boyhood Stendhal had reveled in introspection; he had the faculty of surrendering himself to some emotional experience, then recording it afterward with complete self-consciousness. A great forerunner of modern psychology, he tried to examine himself, and others, with the experimental and dispassionate attitude typified by the new scientists of the time, much as his friend Cuvier, the biologist, dissected animals in his laboratory. Such a method, eschewing all bombast, or sentiment, or self-apology, he believed, had not yet been tried in the medium of literature; certainly not by Rousseau, whose Confessions were written in self-defense, nor by Chateaubriand, who had sought to glorify his own character.

Stendhal had a profound sense of history: did he not declare that he had once (toward 1821) postponed committing suicide out of “political curiosity” about what was going to happen next? Born in Grenoble in 1783, in the time of Louis XVI, he was a child of the eighteenth century and also a product of the great French Revolution whose doctrines he ardently embraced. During the span of history that was his lifetime by fifty, surely approaching the most turbulent eras of ancient Rome, he had seen a half dozen dynasties come and go. He had been an officer of Napoleon’s army, present at his court and at many of the climactic scenes of the First Empire, including the retreat from Moscow. He had lived through “an ocean of sensations.” Indeed he had lived many lives, in different lands, under many different guises: as a soldier, an administrator, a diplomat, a traveler, a gallant, a man of society, and an author. But wherever or whatever he had been, he had never accepted the appearances of things without examination; his had been a detached spirit, ever skeptical, even rebellious at ideas that were à la mode.

He had no religion, no home, no wife. All other obligations had been rejected by him in favor of the perpetual research for personal freedom and self-knowledge. And for those morally conservative times that came after Waterloo, during the Bourbon Restoration in France, this was tantamount to being “a monster of immorality.” M. Beyle’s books, it was pointed out, were full of scandalous matter and published under a nom de plume. This godless philosopher lived with actresses, and perhaps even took money from them, it was whispered. “The fat Mephistopheles,” he was sometimes called.

What few knew was that he was a man of infinite sensibility, for he was noticeably reserved, or in society wore various masks, including that of a wit. His wit concealed a heart that had suffered sorely, a nature that had known great ecstasy and prayer—after its own fashion—not only for women, but for painting, music and literature. In the privacy of his memoirs he would have much to tell us about the real Henri Beyle who had concealed himself from the world.

Like a youth, or rather like a man who continued in the illusion of eternal youth, he was obsessed by the notion that he was misunderstood by his age. (He insisted also that his times were out of touch with realities.) Others, after the restoration of the legitimate monarchy, might turn Royalist in politics, orthodox in religion, or they might “sell out” by merely pretending to be both. He would continue an unbeliever, a liberal, a Jacobin, devoted to the idea of democracy that was now out of favor in Europe. When the Romantic movement in literature (which he had helped to launch) began to embody excesses of style and an intellectual fuzziness that he could not abide, he stood forth as an anti-Romantic, addicted to dryness and factual precision. This was enough to earn him anew the opprobrium of critics who were in fashion. In any case they had long had the habit of slating his books, especially The Red and the Black, for alleged bad taste and subversive ideas. His books were little read by the public, and he was being forgotten in his own time—as he was to be forgotten for fifty years after his death. But what of the future?

The future generations, Stendhal guessed shrewdly, would be different. The reader of tomorrow would be republican and equalitarian in his outlook, more concerned with scientific truth than with religious authority. Hence he decided to do what few writers have ever done: to address himself to posterity. Though he was ignored in the 1830s, he predicted: “I shall be read in 1900.”

He said to himself cheeringly:

I can see clearly that many writers who enjoy a great reputation today [1832] are detestable. What would be a blasphemy to say of M. de Chateaubriand now, however, will be a truism in 1880.

This was an apt prophecy, as were so many of his others. The glamorous author of René and Le Génie du Christianisme was read mainly by schoolboys in the heyday of Zola. Stendhal, on the other hand, was “revived,” or rather resuscitated, like Shakespeare, Blake and Herman Melville. He would appear astonishingly “modern” not only in 1890, but in 1950, so that the veriest scraps of his notebooks and letters would be held precious by his devotees of later times.1

As an author he had had, in his own time, few friends who approved of his works. The excuse for his memoirs, he tells us, would be that they might be read one day “by some soul like those I admired, such as Mme. Roland, or the mathematician, Gros.” The last named was his inspirational teacher in his boyhood in Grenoble. The thought of the unborn generations who would read him was almost a fixation. “I regard my works as lottery tickets,” he remarks more than once, “and count only on being reprinted in 1900.”

To the readers of 1900, and after, he would tell some fine truths about his times, as about himself. What a great thing it might be, he exclaims, to have an account of the period written by “a man who was no dupe.” He would be unsparing of his contemporaries, as he would be unsparing of himself—this was his justification.

It is therefore a great pity that Stendhal, with such rich equipment for the task, did not live to carry out his grand design of a complete autobiography, perhaps in several large volumes. Two sections of this projected work, fortunately, have been left to us, magnificent fragments of his story, such as none other could have written. They were unearthed among his posthumous papers, and published during the Stendhal “revival” that came in France, circa 1890, some fifty years after his decease, or almost exactly at the time he had prophesied. The volume of his memoirs called La Vie d’Henri Brulard, recording his boyhood and youth, was the first to be published, in 1890; it is already known to English readers. The present work, Souvenirs d’égotisme, dealing entirely with his life in Paris from 1821 to 1830, was also found among the Stendhal papers stored in Grenoble, and was published in 1892 by Casimir Striyenski. It is now translated into English for the first time, the translation being based, however, on more recent editions prepared by modern scholars.

Stendhal’s Souvenirs d’égotisme was actually his first attempt at autobiography, written in 1832, some three years before he returned to an earlier phase of the same subject in the Henri Brulard. It was written with much secretiveness; for reasons of discretion the names of friends or acquaintances still living were altered, in some cases. The mystification was further increased when he referred to some of these same characters by their real names in another connection, or bestowed a resounding title on someone of obviously humble origins. He also used his characteristic device of concealing words or ideas that might have compromised him with the police-spies who, he believed, were forever shadowing him—in acrostics made by inverted spelling, or in a none too secret code of foreign terms, English, Italian, etc. Religion would be written as gionreli, prêtres (priests) as tréprés, and Roi as K—(after the English word king).²

The manuscript has the character of a highly private transaction between Stendhal and his unborn public, for he stored it away among his private papers with instructions that it not be published until at least ten years after his death, which came in 1842.

When Stendhal began his Souvenirs d’égotisme, the circumstances in which he found himself, serving the French Government again as consul at Civita Vecchia, also made him disposed to write his memoirs without thought of publication save in the distant future. After the Revolution of 1830 had brought the self-declared “liberal” Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans, to the throne of France, Stendhal, through the influence of friends at the new court, had at last been given a place in the government service. For more than fifteen years after the downfall of Napoleon there had been no sinecures for him. Like General de Lafayette (of whom he gives such an unconventional portrait in these pages) and other leaders of the anti-Bourbon party, he had hoped that the Orleans dynasty would be a truly constitutional and democratic monarchy, but soon found himself entirely disillusioned. Yet, as he was “eating off the Budget,” he felt that he could not at present publish novels such as The Red and the Black, or articles whose tendency would surely irritate a home government showing itself more and more reactionary with every year that passed. His seat was uneasy enough: Metternich’s complaints to Paris had driven him from his first assignment at Trieste, in 1831, and at Civita Vecchia he was held in suspicion by the Vatican as a possible Jacobin “conspirator.” Now in recent years Henri Beyle, a scion of the haute bourgeoisie of Grenoble, had known real poverty: at first during the long period of his voluntary “exile” in Italy, after Waterloo; and then in Paris, where he had returned in 1821 and tried to earn his living by writing, much of it in the nature of pot-boiling.

But as French consul at Civita Vecchia, furnished with some 10,000 francs a year, he could once more live like a gentleman of taste, buying books, objects of art or old furniture, as his heart desired—provided that he wrote nothing censurable. This for Stendhal was an impossibility; even in a travel-book, like Rome, Naples et Florence, he had shown himself unable to be “right-thinking” or conformist. Therefore, he must write no more. Or if he wrote at all—and to write every day had become a form of relief for him—it must be only privately, for publication at a time when he would no longer be embarrassed by serving the “chief” whom he called “the crookedest of kings.” In his notes at this period we find the statement, in English: “I will print no more.” He also resolved now to be as discreet as possible in his personal connections. “I have not spoken to any man’s sister,” he says in a letter to a friend in Paris. It was a sacrifice that could only have been temporary with him.

He had longed to be in his beloved Italy again, where he had lived the formative years of his youth and learned that the “pursuit of happiness” could be carried on there upon more advantageous terms than in his native France. But the consular post, for all its good pay, proved to be a trap. Instead of living in Milan, the city of his most memorable love adventures, or in Florence, he was imprisoned by his petty consular duties in dreary Civita Vecchia, six hours’ carriage-ride from Rome, and many days’ journey from Paris.

Formerly he had been the harshest critic of French “vanity” and of the emptiness or superficiality of Parisian society. He had been that rare thing, a Frenchman who in earlier years had preferred Italy, or even, sometimes, England, to France. But in Civita Vecchia the italianate Beyle recognized that the last years in Paris, during the 1820s, had been a period of high interest, even of brilliant achievement so far as the republic of letters was concerned, and perhaps for himself. Only in the salons of Paris, he now said, was there conversation worth the name. And once a week there were the literary dinners at the Café Anglais, where he joined men like Prosper Mérimée, Victor Jaquemorit, the explorer, Sainte-Beuve, Eugène Delacroix, and sometimes the boyish-looking Alfred de Musset. In table talk Stendhal excelled most of his contemporaries, according to Sainte-Beuve.

A quarter of a century of revolution and world war, with its violence and insecurity, is discouraging to artistic production. The stabilized 1820s, however, ushered in a revival of culture: The Romantic School made its belated arrival with the appearance of Lamartine, Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny; Balzac was writing in a garret; and Stendhal himself completed his first novels.

In contrast, Civita Vecchia proved to be a “desert,” with no news, no books, no opera, no conversation—nothing, in short, that for Stendhal constituted civilization. And he was beginning to feel his age: it was one of the saddest periods of his life. The writing of his memoirs was undertaken, then, as a form of catharsis. In the silence of his room he talked to himself, unburdened himself without any pretense or affectation. (“Often I lost track of the time: I thought it was two A.M. and saw that it was six-thirty.”)

For him it was the time of the crisis of middle-age, sometimes called by the French “la crise des quarantines,” but as likely to arrive in the fifties as in the forties. Stendhal, in the summer of 1832, was nearing fifty, more lonely and introspective than ever, in a mood to look back at his own life and take stock.

“What have I been?” he asked himself repeatedly. “Have I made the best use of the circumstances in which chance has placed me?” Had he been a sensible man, a deep man, a fool? Perhaps he had spent too much of his time in “unhappy love affairs,” for whose sake he had often sacrificed every worldly advantage. What was the lesson of such a life? Ecce homo?

“I ought to write the story of my life, then perhaps I will know what I have been,” he observes. His autobiography would be a search for the truth about himself. But this immediately posed the problem of self-interest and indeed of self-love. There would be so many “I’s” and “me’s” in the book that it would doubtless bore the reader as well as himself. On reading Chateaubriand’s Voyage to Jerusalem he had noted the wonderful arrogance with which that great man alluded to all that he had been and done. “I have never seen such stinking egotism in anyone,” Stendhal noted at the time. What, then, would be the justification for his own variety of self-interest? How could his own memoirs avoid becoming a work of “abominable egotism?”

Well, he for his part would approach the problem quite differently from Chateaubriand. The study of the human heart was a worthwhile venture in itself; it was becoming virtually a science. (The word “psychology” was not yet much in usage then in the sense in which we now understand it.) Our knowledge of such matters, he declared, had made giant strides since the days of the admirable Montesquieu a century earlier, and Stendhal felt that he had much that was new to reveal. He would apply himself to the study of his own case “without sparing this animal,” as he said. He would expose all his own weaknesses and errors. Thus his would be an “egotism that was sincere”; that is, it would represent a new way of picturing human emotions. Hence the title he chose for his autobiography was Souvenirs d’égotisme, literally “Memoirs of Egotism.” The word “egotism,” however, a new word in French, was not at all intended in the pejorative sense, denoting a narrow self-interest, which it now has, but rather to define the process of concentrated self-examination which Stendhal proposed to carry out.

To his admirers of later generations, to men like Taine and Nietzsche, Stendhal possessed the psychologist’s eye to a remarkable degree; he had the faculty of recording all the inward, unexpressed emotions that accompanied an experience. For instance, in the account here of his meeting with a man he profoundly admired, the philosopher Destutt de Tracy, he remembers not only what he said, but that which he had felt and left unsaid: his embarrassment in the presence of the great man, his exaggerated gratitude, his awkwardness, his incoherence. He was aware of the “irrational” or unconscious elements of the mind long before the later nineteenth century psychologists and the men of the Freudian school arrived on the scene. And nowhere in his writings is this faculty of psychological observation more marked than in his autobiographical pieces. In the study of his childhood, which he wrote somewhat later (Henri Brulard) appeared certainly one of the first clinical observations of the Oedipus Complex, based on his own relations with his parents.

In addition, he shows himself in his memoirs as one of the most painstaking of witnesses. Frequently he pauses to differentiate between that which he himself remembers, by naming the time and the place, and that which may have come to him by hearsay. He girds himself also to recount the most painful or humiliating experiences that have befallen him, without glossing them over. “Will I have the courage to tell the truth?” he exclaims more than once. The theme of his adventures in love was to have loomed large in his memoirs. However, he begins his account not with some easy triumph, but with a fiasco, an unaccountable failure of nerve in the arms of a handsome courtesan. Such honesty cost him clearly, both in the pleasantries of his friends and the misrepresentations of later commentators. There was quite evidently nothing wrong with him—judging from the letters of Mme. de Curial—beyond an occasional attack of overwrought nerves.

He used various special devices to achieve the highest degree of objectiveness and accuracy, by his own standards. It was not the mot juste, but the exact communication of thought that he desired; hence he schooled himself to set forth his observations as soberly as possible, as though he were a botanist studying curious plants. To be “literary,” or to indulge in bombast, was to lie. On the other hand, the unfeigned candor, the simplicity with which he describes some deep-felt emotion, as in parting from a woman he loved, have an effect that is all the more convincing.

He must write his memoirs like letters to an intimate friend, he tells himself. The test is to be whether he is enjoying the process; on one night it may seem boring to him, on another: “I have enjoyed writing this . . .” he remarks at the end of the session. Plainly enough he gropes toward that confessional therapy that was to be used by psychiatrists so extensively a hundred years after his time.

Finally, he strove for speed, for a sort of automatic writing of the impressions that crowded into his mind, whether they seemed connected or disassociated. Thus he hoped to come “close to Nature” in her most unforeseen (imprévu) or unconscious aspects. In these memoirs there are moments when he floats on the stream of consciousness, apparently at random. He would sit down for three hours or so and write some twenty pages of manuscript, three or four thousand or more words at a session—for he was a rapid worker—without stopping for an instant to correct, to alter, or to arrange his thoughts. On one occasion, after having worked in this manner, he concluded with the remark: “Written without revision in order not to lie.”

With a form of attack so novel, it is not surprising that Stendhal, as the late Paul Valéry said, achieved the most individual tone of his age. It is always that of informal conversation, for he wore his curious erudition lightly. One must grow accustomed to the rapid, sometimes elliptical character of his thought, to his oddities of reservation and punctilio, his precise way of measuring feelings or experiences, his fetish for “logic” above all; then the intellectual humor, the freshness of his discourse grows upon one, much as his dinner talk and his “improvisations” used to entertain his contemporaries. For he constantly warns himself that he must be interesting or amusing to his future readers; no writing was worth the paper it was written on, in his belief, unless its author had some ideas to communicate. The Souvenirs, brief and incomplete though they are, are full of authentically Stendhalian reflections on the art of life, letters, politics, love and even crime. Although he himself was law-abiding, Stendhal greatly enjoyed accounts of crimes, not of the habitual or mercenary variety, but unpremeditated, that is, deriving from “unexpected” or unconscious motives.

The reader must recall that before Stendhal, as for a considerable period after him, the novel was not distinguished for its psychological finesse. The characters presented by Fielding and Richardson, even by Rousseau and Benjamin Constant in their autobiography-novels, had relatively simple appetites and reactions. (Stendhal considered all of these recent writers far beneath Shakespeare in discernment of the range of human motives.) But in Stendhal’s memoirs, as in his novels, you have the portraits of complex, nervous characters, embodying deep contradictions or ambivalence of motives. And of these none is more complex and contradictory than the observer of the human heart himself.

In the opening pages of the Souvenirs he wishes to convey something of the boundless grief he feels at having been rejected by Metilda Viscontini of Milan after three years of courtship. He does not attempt any tragic tirades, but relates simply that he considered suicide, by falling off a horse while climbing the Alps. Yet he only succeeded in making himself ridiculous, for the guide accompanying him told him unfeelingly that his death would be bad for business. He wants to die, but at the same time remarks jestingly that he is “afraid he might hurt himself,” though he is known for his hardiness and physical courage. His plans to kill himself went no further than drawing a picture of a pistol on the pages of letters or manuscripts.

The stunning effect of an immense grief shows itself not in loud lamentations, but in a mood of torpor. But he is also a man of pride. He desires to shun his friends on returning to Paris, yet on the other hand fears terribly that they may divine his state of melancholy and its cause. That he should be weeping over a woman whom he “had never had” would seem to them the height of the ridiculous. And in France, he points out, all men are ruled by their fear of appearing ridiculous. Therefore he plays the gay dog with more abandon than ever; to hide his sorrow he becomes a madcap; he runs off with his old bachelor cronies to a bordello. You do not find such human complexity, at once diverting and disturbing, in Balzac, or even in Flaubert or Zola, in fact, not until the appearance of the great Russian novelists, Dostoevski, and Tolstoy, who studied the forgotten Stendhal with profit.

These memoirs then take up his life at the time of his reluctant return to Paris in 1821, after seven years of happy “exile” in Milan. He had just suffered his greatest “defeat,” the final rejection of his proposals by Metilda, who was to his mind the noblest woman he had ever met. Life in Milan had become inconvenient for other reasons as well: because of his friendly connections with the Italian Carbonari who were plotting against the Austrian rulers of Italy, M. Beyle had been invited by the police to leave the city.

To clarify some of Stendhal’s mystifying allusions to persons and incidents not fully described in his Souvenirs, unfinished as they are, perhaps some added details about his life at this period need to be introduced here. In Paris in 1821 his heart to be sure is all in splinters; he is reading proofs of his treatise On Love, which is a tribute to his long passion for Metilda; but he also renews a few of his old, pre-Waterloo friendships and prepares to enter into the controversy between the Classicists and the Romanticists with his pamphlet “Racine and Shakespeare,” which contributes to his reputation among the people of the salons. After several years of brooding over his lost love—Metilda was fated to die young of a sudden illness—he seems at last willing and ready to be “cured.” The agency of recovery appears in the person of the Countess Clémentine de Curial, a handsome woman of about thirty-five, with fine eyes and an aquiline nose. She is the daughter of his patroness of Napoleonic days, the Countess Beugnot, and Beyle had known her since her girlhood. When they meet again she is married, but very unhappy because of her husband’s brutalities to her, and her eyes often rest affectionately upon the amusing Beyle. In one of the passages of the Souvenirs we recognize as referring to Clémentine, her mother twits her about this.

Though Beyle’s observations upon his private conduct and his frailties are often brutally frank, he shows a gentlemanly reserve in approaching the subject of the women he greatly loved. It must be remembered that the Countess de Curial was still living when he wrote this memoir. She was moreover a well-known social figure in Paris and at the court, and he feared that some intruder (the secret police?) might pry into his papers. Her story was to have been the dominant theme of these recollections of the 1820s in Paris; yet Beyle can scarcely bring himself to speak of her openly before his narrative breaks off, during the burning days of summer at Civita Vecchia. Nor did he revert to the subject before his death in 1842, though her letters, with his explanatory remarks in the margins, were carefully preserved among his private papers.

To clear up the confusion deliberately introduced by Stendhal’s references to this person under different names and unlikely connections, it should be said that he needed little more encouragement than her friendly glances to come to the point of offering her consolation for her unhappy marriage. On May 22, 1824, his proposals were accepted, and with delight he records himself as “cured,” cured, that is, of his passion for Metilda. But after a liaison lasting two years, rather long for Stendhal, we find that his battered old heart is smashed to pieces again.

The high-spirited Clémentine, whom her lover described as the most intelligent of his women friends, understood Beyle well, and yet their secret attachment was marked by repeated quarrels and storms. “Your love is the most fearful misfortune that may befall a woman,” she charged in one of her letters, adding that he had robbed her of health and happiness, and had tortured her with his famous “system” of love, as developed in his treatise on that subject. “And yet I love you, I love you, I still love you,” she closed. It was for Clémentine that Stendhal hid for three days in a cellar at her chateau in the country—when her husband suddenly arrived—while she stealthily brought him food and wine at night and attended to all his wants herself. It was for her he once prepared to fight a duel with a presumed rival—said to have been General de Caulaincourt—a meeting that fortunately never came off, for it would have caused scandal ruinous to a woman in Clémentine’s position.

Following one of their recurrent lovers’ quarrels in 1826, Stendhal suddenly ran off to England (a trip whose details he sometimes confuses in the Souvenirs with an earlier one, in 1821) under the impression that Clémentine was deceiving him. Whether this was true or false, she now determined that he was not to return to her and be forgiven as usual. This break, he noted in his quaint English, was “the most sensitive misfortune of his life.” Ten years later Prosper Mérimée saw him in tears because Clémentine still would not take him back. She was then forty-eight, and he well on in his sixth decade, but to him she was eternally young. At the age of fifty the Countess de Curial, deserted by her latest lover, and embittered at the thought of growing old, committed suicide. There is reason to believe that Clémentine inspired the remarkable portrait in the second volume of The Red and the Black of Mathilde de la Mole, the rebellious daughter of a Royalist minister who threw herself at the head of Julien Sorel.

In his memoirs, however, Stendhal shields the Countess de Curial by giving her three different aliases: “Mme. Doligny,” “Countess Dulong,” and “Fanny Berthois.” Her mother he calls “Countess Doligny,” and also, either by design or forgetfulness, by her true name, Countess Beugnot. The names of his personal friends are also disguised: Prosper Mérimée, whose first published work was Le Théatre de Clara Gazul, appears under the rather transparent nom de guerre of “Count Gazul.” Mérimée was the only writer among his contemporaries in France whom Stendhal approved of, particularly for his dry, clear style and artistic restraint. In his youth the author of Carmen was heavily indebted to his older friend and mentor, who, to be sure, leaves us a portrait of Mérimée touched with a bit of acid. But Mérimée, after Stendhal’s death, wrote of him with far greater cruelty.

Among the other friends in the bachelor circle described in the Souvenirs, there is Baron Adolphe de Mareste, here called “Lussinge,” who was known as a man of taste and wit, and also as the disciple of the “fat Mephistopheles,” Beyle. Mareste was for many years the administrative chief of the Prefecture of Police in Paris. Through him and through Joseph Lingay, described under the pseudonym of “Maisonnette,” who was a ghostwriter for one Prime Minister after another, Stendhal had access to all the backstage gossip of the Bourbon and Orleans dynasties. Somewhat confusing is his use of the alias “Barot” for his Gargantuan friend Lolot, the businessman who usually organized their revels. For at the period there existed a real Barot, Odilon Barot, whom Stendhal also mentions, and who later became a cabinet minister under Louis-Philippe. These and other disguised names, where it has been possible to trace them, have been indicated in footnotes accompanying the text.

Aside from their very particular literary qualities these Souvenirs form a unique historical document of the social life in Paris not only in the 1820s, but also, through some lengthy digressions, of the Napoleonic era, when the young Henri Beyle held the sinecure of Inspector of the Imperial Furnishings. He was an inveterate theatre-goer, and students of the history of the theatre will enjoy his precise account of the most celebrated French actor of the age, Talma, who was Napoleon’s favorite. Also that of the great prima donna Mme. Pasta, internationally famous for her part in spreading the taste for Italian opera to France, England, and indeed all over Europe. Now Giuditta Pasta was for years Stendhal’s good friend. But being a professional actress, for all her world fame and wealth she could not appear at the salons of conservative Restoration society. Hence Stendhal, after making his round of visits to the respectable salons he frequented, late at night, toward twelve, always repaired to Mme. Pasta’s for a game of cards in an Italian circle that brought back to him cherished memories of Milan. This habit gave rise to some sly talk that mortified him deeply, and which he took pains, in these memoirs, to denounce.

Yet he himself, like many other gifted writers and moralists, was an impassioned gossip, and he patently shows an all-too-human pleasure in setting down “little true facts” about the great persons or the stuffed shirts he met, especially if they were aristocrats.

The figure that M. Beyle presented to his contemporaries in the 1820s and 1830s must have been oddly at variance with the morbidly sensitive “youth” of the self-portrait in these memoirs. To offset his “head of an Italian butcher” and his short, stout body, he wore a wig, dyed his whiskers, and dressed always in the height of fashion, often in a coat of a bronze shade with cream-colored trousers and waistcoat and the richest of cravats. A stovepipe or fine beaver tilted upon his head, a cigar and a cane, completed the bizarre picture.

“Tuesday at Mme. Ancelot’s, Wednesday at M. Gérard’s, Saturday at M. Cuvier’s, and three suppers a week at the Café Anglais, and I am in touch with everything going on in Paris!” he remarks. Mme. Ancelot was the rich wife of a poet and Academician, whose salon all of literary Paris frequented; Baron Gérard was the most highly paid and one of the worst portrait painters of the time; and Cuvier, the friend of Ampère, was one of the leading scientists. In addition, Stendhal went regularly on Sundays to the home of Count de Tracy, a fine specimen of the old noblesse, who had also been the friend of Thomas Jefferson and a powerful supporter of the French Republic. The Tracy salon was one of the chief gathering places of the Liberal opposition leaders, and General de Lafayette was of course its lion. At this period Stendhal did much anonymous hack-writing to supplement his tiny private income, and depended upon his social connections for news of books, music, or art-salons to be reviewed.

You see him teasing and provoking people as he moves about. At the Tracys’ he makes proposals for the liquidation of the ultra-Royalists and the nobility, proposals so cruel that the genteel liberals present are deeply shocked. At the literary salons he mocks Chateaubriand as “the Grand Lama,” the distinguished Victor Cousin as “humbug that takes itself seriously,” and Lamartine as a little “Byron in French paint.” At Mme. Ancelot’s he appears one day in disguise, pretending to be a fat merchant who provisions the French army with stockings and underwear. Literature and art, he warns the company present in a mad tirade, are dreamy and useless things; the great future is for those who make woolen nightcaps or stockings! But besides playing the wit he could be courageous too, as when he told his hearers that “only the lower orders of people possess energy”; or when he ridiculed contemporary writers for their conformity and right-thinking, saying: “When it comes to base conduct, one should leave that to the Prime Minister.” At another salon you see him disputing so vehemently with the romantic historian Augustin Thierry that he leaves the house, never to return. But everywhere he sings for his supper, or as he phrased it, “paid for his ticket of admission,” by helping to drive away boredom. “He used to conceal his sadder feelings under cover of his jests,” wrote Mme. Virginia Ancelot in her Salons de Paris. And another admiring hostess of the period said discerningly that the “fat Mephistopheles” was “really an angel who pretended to be a demon.”

At any rate he is himself in these brief, crowded Souvenirs, bubbling with wit or malicious fun at night, but showing his acquaintances a face of stone when he takes his morning walk in the streets of Paris, his thoughts concentrated on his books, his memories, or his unrequited loves.

These memoirs were written in haste, to distract his own mind; they remained unrevised. But Stendhal indicates here his desire that they be published, if at all, in the spontaneous form they originally assumed. Defects of style they have indeed, yet they possess the rare, the inestimable merit of helping us to know Stendhal.

MATTHEW JOSEPHSON