1. Balzac issued an explicit challenge to historians of his day; Stendhal, an implicit one to future historians. The first of these is known; the second is not. This is an attempt to examine an aspect of the latter.
Erich Auerbach devoted one of the central chapters in his Mimesis to the relationships of both Stendhal and Balzac with historians.1 To evaluate this properly we need first to point out a fact strangely neglected by critics: in the long series of passages that have been studied in Mimesis, poets and novelists—Homer, Dante, Stendhal, Balzac, Proust, and many others—alternate with such historians as Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Gregory of Tours, or with a memorialist such as Saint-Simon.
Today, a coexistence of this sort may seem unremarkable. Many readers assume without question that all the texts discussed by Auerbach are to a greater or lesser degree works of fiction. This interpretation of Mimesis, which undoubtedly has contributed to his continuing fame in American universities, would have horrified Auerbach himself.2 After all, the subtitle of his book is The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur).3 Auerbach had a strong sense of reality and especially of social reality. His approach, inspired by Giambattista Vico (even if its nucleus was, in my opinion, a secularized version of an idea belonging to St. Augustine), was based on the notion that historical development tends to generate multiple approaches to reality.4 But Auerbach was not a relativist. When he commented on the descriptions of the military revolts which we read in Tacitus and Ammianus, Auerbach stressed that these historians were not concerned with “objective problems” such as the “condition of the Roman populace,” and he remarked that “. . . a modern historian would have taken up the question of how such a state of affairs had come about, he would have discussed the problem of the mob’s corruption, or at the very least have touched upon it. But this does not interest Ammianus at all; and in this attitude he goes much further than Tacitus.”5
Thus, Auerbach reaches the point of characterizing the specific nature of passages in Tacitus and Ammianus, opposing their points of view to some that are more modern and truthful. It is not a matter of just one isolated instance. Even when he is studying fictional works Auerbach always considers, explicitly or implicitly, historical reality as it has been perceived by the modern conscience. He writes, for example, in the chapter on Stendhal, “. . . the element of time perspective is evident everywhere.. . . Insofar as the serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise than as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic which is concrete and constantly evolving—as is the case today in any novel or film—Stendhal is its founder.”6
But, according to Auerbach, Stendhal’s serious, “modern” realism was not, after all, fully modern: “However, the attitude from which Stendhal apprehends the world of events and attempts to reproduce it with all its interconnections is as yet hardly influenced by historicism [Historismus] . . . his representation of events is oriented, wholly in the spirit of classic ethical psychology, upon an analyse du cœur humain, not upon discovery or premonitions of historical forces; we find rationalistic, empirical, sensual motifs in him, but hardly those of romantic Historicism.”7
To discover an authentic historicist point of view, Auerbach notes, we must turn to Balzac. In him novelist and historian converge, demonstrating the truth of the romantic notion that the many cultural forms of a period are joined by a hidden coherence: “Atmospheric Historism and atmospheric realism are closely connected; Michelet and Balzac are borne on the same stream.. . . It is needless to cite historical motifs, for the spirit of Historism with its emphasis upon ambient and individual atmospheres is the spirit of his [Balzac’s] entire work.”8 At this point we might be tempted to equate Auerbach’s position with German Historismus, a category which should not be confused either with Italian historicism or with the American New Historicism.9 To be sure, many passages in Mimesis point in this direction. But just before it ends, the book takes another tack. Auerbach actually states what the reader had already come to suspect—namely, that the protagonists of the final chapter in Mimesis, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, also inspired the formal principles on which the book was constructed. From To the Lighthouse and from the Recherche Auerbach took the idea, totally foreign to traditional literature, that through an accidental event, an ordinary life, a random passage, we can attain a deeper understanding of the whole.10
How can we reconcile this historical perspective with the qualities of the passages from history and fiction examined in Mimesis? Auerbach, who was suspicious of explicit theoretical formulations, did not ask himself the question.11 We, instead, can try to answer it by putting Auerbach himself, a master of the art, into perspective. The starting point for this game of Chinese boxes or mise en abîme will be the passage in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black which launched Auerbach into one of his more celebrated analyses.12 But first it may be useful to establish the context.
2. On the flyleaf of the copy of The Red and the Black housed in the Bucci collection of the Sormani Municipal Library in Milan, Stendhal scribbled a few words: “Rome, 24 May 1834. When I was young I wrote a few biographies (Mozart, Michelangelo) which in some way were histories. I regret having written them. I believe that the truth in small as in large things, is almost unattainable—at least a truth that is somewhat circumstantial. Monsieur de Tracy used to say to me: truth can be found only in novels. With every passing day I can see more clearly that everywhere else we encounter only ostentation.”13
The inscriptions at the opening of each of the two volumes of The Red and the Black shed some light on these words. The first is attributed to Danton: “Truth, the bitter truth.” The second, to Sainte-Beuve: “She’s not pretty, she’s not wearing rouge.” For Stendhal, “truth” meant, above all, rejection of every sort of ornamentation. My book, he proudly declared, is not pretty: it is immediate, direct, harsh. A harsh chronicle: the subtitle of the first edition of the novel (1831) reads “Chronicle of the 19th Century,” altered a few pages later into “Chronicle of 1830.” More recent editions occasionally eliminate one of the two subtitles.14
Naturally, no reader has ever taken the word chronicle seriously. The Red and the Black has always been read as a novel. But Stendhal’s intentions are clear. Through a story based on fictional persons and events he hoped to reach a deeper historical truth. This was an aspiration shared by other early nineteenth-century novelists, and principally by Balzac—”that great historian,” as Baudelaire called him.15 But Stendhal had different objectives and went in another direction.
3. In that passage of The Red and the Black which Auerbach selected as the starting point for his examination, the protagonist of the novel, Julien Sorel, and his protector, the Jansenist abbé Pirard, are conversing in the chateau of the Marquis de la Mole. Julien is now working for the nobleman, who had invited him to join him in his meals. Julien asks the abbé to arrange for him to be excused from this obligation; he found the meals too boring. Pirard, “a true snob,” is scandalized by the insolence of this son of peasants. “A slight noise” reveals that the daughter of the marquis, Made moi selle de la Mole, has overheard the conversation: “She had come to fetch a book and had heard everything. She began to entertain some respect for Julien. He has not been born servile, she thought, like that old abbé. Heavens! how ugly he is.”16
We shall return to this passage, but, meanwhile, here is Auerbach’s comment:
What interests us in the scene is this: it would be almost incomprehensible without a most accurate and detailed knowledge of the political situation, the social stratification, and the economic circumstances of a perfectly definite historical moment, namely, that in which France found itself just before the July Revolution; accordingly, the novel bears the subtitle, Chronique de 1830. Even the boredom which reigns in the dining room and salon of this noble house is no ordinary boredom. It does not arise from the fortuitous personal dullness of the people who are brought together there; among them there are highly educated, witty, and sometimes important people, and the master of the house is intelligent and amiable. Rather, we are confronted, in their boredom, by a phenomenon politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period. In the seventeenth century and even more in the eighteenth, the corresponding salons were anything but boring.17
Auerbach’s are astute observations, but his conclusions are debatable. It can be demonstrated that Stendhal considered boredom not only a phenomenon of the past, associated with French society during the Restoration, but a phenomenon that characterized both the present—in other words, the society that succeeded the July (1830) Revolution—and the foreseeable future. We can add to support this interpretation Stendhal’s own review of his The Red and the Black prepared for the journal L’Antologia in 1832. The review, as well as Vincenzo Salvagnoli’s article based on information gleaned from Stendhal, appeared posthumously.18 Auerbach wrote Mimesis in exile, at Istanbul, where access to secondary sources was precluded and primary sources were limited. The selection of the passage in question from The Red and the Black and Auerbach’s comment might have been influenced by a vague recollection of Stendhal’s review of his own work.
It is an extraordinary document, an undoubted exercise in estrangement. In addressing a foreign audience under the veil of a pseudonym, Stendhal reflected, from the vantage points of geography and culture, on the novel he had published two years earlier. The customs and moral attitudes described in The Red and the Black had taken root in France, Stendhal observed, “between 1806 and 1832.” Provincial life before the Revolution was lighthearted, as emerges from that “charming, little novel” by Pierre Victor Besenval entitled Spleen. Today, Stendhal continues, “in a city numbering between sixand eight-thousand inhabitants everything is sad and correct. The foreign visitor does not know how to get through an evening, just like in England.”19
Stendhal’s readers will find it worthwhile to peruse Besenval’s Spleen. The novel takes place at Besançon, one of the places where the events of The Red and the Black unfold; the name of the protagonist, Madame de Rennon, recalls that of Madame de Rênal; the protagonist hates her father, just like Julien Sorel (and, for that matter, Stendhal himself).20 But even more notable is the fact that Stendhal starts from Besenval’s Spleen in making boredom the central theme of The Red and the Black. As Auerbach correctly notes, boredom for Stendhal is a historical phenomenon, tied to specific space and time. But the period indicated—between 1806, shortly after the inauguration of Napoleon’s empire, and 1832, the year of Stendhal’s review of his own work—and also the parallel with England cannot be reconciled with Auerbach’s idea that the boredom described by Stendhal should be placed in “France just prior to the July Revolution.”
What, then, is boredom? It is the product (explains Stendhal’s self-review) of morality, of a “moral France” still unknown to foreigners, but which is getting ready to become the model for all of Europe:
Moral France is unknown abroad. That is why before beginning to speak of the novel by M. de S[tendhal] it has been necessary that the gay, amusing, somewhat libertine France, which from 1715 to 1789 was the model for Europe, no longer exists: nothing resembles it less than the France, serious, moral, gloomy, which the Jesuits have bequeathed to us, the congregations and the government of the Bourbons from 1814 to 1830. Since it is extremely difficult, where novels are concerned, to depict what is true and not copy from books, no one, before M. de S[tendahl] had dared to describe those so unattractive customs, which, nevertheless, since Europe is populated by sheep, will spread quickly from Naples to St. Petersburg.21
That is how Stendhal perceived himself in 1832. Could he possibly retrospectively have distorted the significance of his own work? This immediately raises a long-standing question: when was The Red and the Black written? In his self-review Stendhal wrote that because he focused on “the society of 1829 (the time when the novel was written),” the author had risked imprisonment.22 In the “Editor’s Note” which precedes the book it is suggested that Stendhal had indicated a different date: “We have reason to believe that the following pages were written in 1827.”23
These two slightly divergent dates are both incorrect. We know from Stendhal himself that the idea for The Red and the Black had come to him in Marseilles, the night between 25 and 26 October 1829. He worked on the novel during the winter of 1829–1830 and signed a contract with the publisher Levavasseur on 8 April 1830. In May he corrected the first proofs, but on 1 June of that year he was still “dictating” the scene in the Besançon Cathedral which appears in chapter 28 of book 1. The importance of these final additions did not escape Victor Del Litto.24 Clearly, Stendhal kept returning to the novel while he was correcting the proofs. An enigmatic footnote dated “11 August 1830” reveals that the correction of the proofs (perhaps accompanied by moments of writing or rewriting) was still in progress after the July Revolution. Michel Crouzet has suggested that The Red and the Black was “written entirely before July 1830, and thus is intrinsically connected to the agony of the Restoration.” This is not convincing. Crouzet himself in a footnote mentions a fact which clashes with his own chronology: Louis Lablache, the singer portrayed by Stendhal under the name of Géronimo, Julien Sorel’s friend, performed to great acclaim the role of Géronimo in Cimarosa’s Matrimonio segreto in Paris on 4 November 1830.25 This fact supposes, as Henri Martineau suggests, that Stendhal “continued to work editing and revising the novel until November.” He could have dictated the passage mentioning Géronimo’s triumph on 6 November, the eve of his own departure from Paris for Trieste, where he had been named consul. The publication of The Red and the Black was announced on 15 November.26
This minute chronological excursus may seem pedantic and even irrelevant. But the evidence which we have just reviewed explains why Stendhal dated the writing of the novel as 1827 in the editorial note and as 1829 in his own review of the work. The two dates, both incorrect, intended to suggest to readers—and even Auerbach was misled—that The Red and the Black accurately portrayed French society during the Restoration. Accurate it undoubtedly was; but the characteristics described were destined to endure much beyond their original setting, as Stendhal suggested indirectly in one of the two subtitles to the work: “Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century.” In a footnote at the end of the novel, which seemingly intended to signal the purely arbitrary value of the places where the events unfold (Verrières, Besançon), Stendhal alluded to the more general historical implications of the story: “The inconvenience of the reign of public opinion is that though, of course, it secures liberty, it meddles with what it has nothing to do with—private life, for example. Hence the gloominess of America and England.”27
By using such terms as opinion and liberty, which evoked the political atmosphere of the 1830 revolution, Stendhal was suggesting the importance of the novel for the France of the period following the Restoration. The mention of England and America was equally significant. For Stendhal, the two countries symbolized the future—a somber future in which all passions would disappear except one: the passion for wealth.28 Boredom and melancholy, produced by the intrusion of morality into private life, were the characteristics of modern industrial societies, among which France was about to be numbered.29
4. Auerbach wrote that Balzac “far outdoes the former [Stendhal] in organically connecting man and history.”30 The remark does not do justice to Stendhal. Auerbach, misled by Historismus, had not noticed that in Stendhal’s novels the absence of an organic connection between man and history results from a deliberate choice, expressed through a specific formal procedure. The isolation of Stendhal’s heroes is underlined and strengthened by their internal reflections, which, alternating with the description of their actions, create a sort of counterpoint. This procedure, which has been called “free direct discourse,” usually presents itself in this way: a narration in the third person is interrupted brusquely by a series of brief sentences attributed to one of the protagonists of the narration.31 Free direct discourse, while more highly structured than the formless flow of the internal monologue, places the reader in a close, almost intimate, relationship with the principal characters in the novel: Julien Sorel, Madame de Rênal, Mademoiselle de la Mole. Let us return to the passage which describes the reaction of Mademoiselle de la Mole to the conversation between Julien and the abbé Pirard: “She had come to fetch a book and had heard everything; she began to entertain some respect for Julien. He has not been born servile, she thought, like that old abbé. Heavens! how ugly he is.”32
We can see that Stendhal does not overpunctuate.33 No quotation marks introduce the last two sentences, even if both are characterized by direct sentences or by interjections: “thought” in the first, the cry “Heavens!” followed by an exclamation mark in the next. When there are no quotation marks, the shift from the third to the first person—whether this occurs in a single sentence or in two contiguous sentences—is more abrupt and startling. Here are two more examples, referring respectively to Julien Sorel and to Mathilde de la Mole, quoted first in the original French, and then in an English translation: “A force d’examiner le comte Norbert, Julien remarqua qu’il était en bottes et en éperons; [semicolon] et moi je dois être en souliers, apparemment comme inférieur.” And: “Ce Sorel a quelque chose de l’air que mon père prend quand il fait si bien Napoléon au bal. [period] Elle avait tout à fait oublié Danton. [period] Décidément, ce soir, je m’ennuie. [period] Elle saisit le bras de son frère.. . .”34
In the M. R. B. Shaw English translation the two passages become more conventional: “After taking a good look at Count Norbert, Julien noticed that he was booted and spurred; and I, he thought [my italics], am obliged to wear shoes, apparently as an inferior.” “This man Sorel has something of the air my father adopts when he gives such a good imitation of Napoleon, at a ball. She had completely forgotten Danton. I’m certainly feeling bored to-night, she thought [my italics]. She caught hold of her brother’s arms.”35
The translator must have feared that the reader could feel lost, if only for a fraction of a second: hence the addition of “he thought,” “she thought.” But this was precisely Stendhal’s aim: to give his narrative a feverish, dizzy pace by using broken punctuation, which introduces a sudden change of viewpoints.36
5. In the passage analyzed by Auerbach, Julien uses Mathilde to justify the boredom he feels at the dinners of the marquis: “Sometimes I see even Mademoiselle de la Mole yawn.” A few chapters later Mathilde reappears, yawning and fixing on Julien “these fine eyes, which were the home of the deepest ennui.”37 Mathilde asks Julien to accompany her to a ball. Julien realizes that he must accept; but as soon as the dancing begins, his interest in her ceases. At this point the scene, one of the most extraordinary in the entire novel, is seen through the eyes of Mathilde. The only thoughts to which we have access are hers: “Yes, I am decidedly bored tonight” and so forth. Julien enters into an impassioned discussion with Count Altamira, an exile from Naples who had fled (as Domenico Fiore, a friend of Stendhal’s, had done) to escape from a death sentence imposed for political motives. The two men draw near. Mathilde “did not lose a syllable of their conversation. Her ennui had vanished.”38
Both Mathilde and Julien are fascinated by Altamira. His impassioned political commitment is the true antithesis to boredom. Altamira tells Julien: “There are no longer any real passions in the nineteenth century; that’s why one is so bored in France.”39
Altamira talks of the nineteenth century as if Restoration France was a particular case confirming a more general law. In this sense he is only echoing the two different subtitles of the novel: “A Chronicle of 1830,” “Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century.” Altamira is speaking for Stendhal. Someone could object that the first readers of The Red and the Black might have read these pages—in fact, the entire novel—in the context of the July Revolution. The passage in which Altamira expresses the wish that the experiences of the South American countries might transmit to Europe their ideals of liberty is accompanied by a footnote from the publisher (undoubtedly written by Stendhal himself) in which it is laconically stated that this section of the novel, “sent to press 25 July 1830,” “was printed 4 August.” This has made Michel Crouzet argue that the scene at the ball and Altamira’s remarks “agree in every detail with the [July] Revolution, of which they are both the augury and the announcement. Stendhal is telling the reader that his novel leads to the barricades, although without mentioning them.”40 But the footnote and the novel have completely different meanings. Julien Sorel is not a liberal, he is a Jacobin, a throwback to another age; The Red and the Black relates the story of a tragic individual defeat, not of a victorious revolution. Stendhal thought that politics, as he had lived it under Napoleon during the Russian campaign, was a thing of the past, which the tiresome age of industry and commerce had rendered obsolete. And historiography, traditionally identified with the history of public life, was by this point surpassed by novels, as Destutt de Tracy had explained to Stendhal. Historical events were destined to repeat themselves, but in diminished and distorted form. Mathilde distractedly is aware of this as she gazes pensively at Altamira: “I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction,” said Mathilde. “It is the only thing which cannot be bought.”41
Here—a frequent recurrence in Stendhal’s novels—future events are anticipated, obscurely and symbolically. Mathilde will bury Julien’s decapitated head, just as Queen Marguerite of Navarre had buried the head of her lover, Boniface de la Motte, at the time of the Wars of Religion. Julien will die not for a political cause but for attempting to murder his lover, Madame de Rênal. He will die not as a hero but as a criminal. In “a degenerate and tedious age,” in the words of Mathilde, everything can be bought and heroism is impossible.42
6. Let us return to the scene at the ball. Mathilde is listening to the conversation between Julien and Altamira: “Mademoiselle de la Mole, who was leaning her head forward with keenest interest, was so near him that her beautiful hair almost touched his shoulder.”43
Once again, Mathilde is portrayed in the act of listening, of eavesdropping—just as Stendhal was all ears to the conversations of his characters, compelling his readers to do the same. For Stendhal, the “I” is synonymous with multiplicity. On some occasions he scrutinized with an amused, perplexed, or annoyed air, as when he wrote in a copy of Armance: “Tedious Sunday, I walked along the Corso with Mister Sten[dhal] and so shall it be for my entire life, till the death.”44
Over half a century ago in a brilliant essay Jean Starobinski investigated Stendhal’s passion for pseudonyms, of which we know almost two hundred, used on both public and private occasions. Starobinski, a critic and psychoanalyst, stresses the voyeuristic side of Stendhal, supporting his interpretation with a passage from the diaries in which Stendhal speaks of his romantic longings. In that essay Starobinski does not discuss Stendhal’s writings. The connection between the literary work and the psychology of the author is obscure; the critic, observed Starobinski, should investigate the space that separates them.45 Stendhal’s novels are imbued with eroticism, but the amorous encounters between his personages are always left to the reader’s imagination.46 As a writer, Stendhal always abstained from voyeurism in a strict sense: but acoustic voyeurism, instead, as we have seen, was crucial to his narrative.47 Free, direct discourse had been used, occasionally, by Goethe in his Elective Affinities, a novel which Stendhal read and loved, and to which he paid homage by making it the title of a chapter in The Red and the Black (book 1, chapter 7). But an element of psychology may have contributed to Stendhal’s systematic use of the process.
7. Stendhal reread The Red and the Black in 1834–1835 with mixed feelings. He scrawled some comments on the manuscript of Lucien Leuwen. Among other things, he criticized “certain broken sentences, and the lack of those small words which assist the imagination of the benevolent reader to imagine what is happening.”48 The novel appeared to him “truthful, but dry”; the style, “too brusque, too disconnected”; “when I was writing it,” he remarked, “I was only concerned with the substance of things.”49
Stendhal, who usually wrote in a state of excitement, was incapable of revising his text.50 His dissatisfaction with the dryness of The Red and the Black seems to anticipate the more lavish style of The Charterhouse of Parma. But that “dryness” was the very point of an intellectual project which went back to Stendhal’s youth. On 29 March 1805, when he was in his twenties, he wrote in his diary:
I feel the urge to show everyone a decorticated figure. Like a painter who wants to attempt the style of Albani, and properly begins by studying anatomy, but then this, from useful instrument[,] becomes so satisfying that, instead of painting a beautiful bosom for men’s pleasure, [he] depicts the exposed and bloody muscles in the breasts of a lovely woman; and so much more horrible is the result when one, instead, expected an agreeable object. A new disgust results from the veracity of the subjects presented. If they were not real it would be possible to ignore them, but they are real and they haunt the imagination.51
Twenty-five years later Prosper Mérimée wrote to Stendhal, who was one of his closest friends, to tell him what he thought of the recently published The Red and the Black. Mérimée repeated the metaphor used by the youthful Stendhal, which he may have heard during one of their conversations; but instead of identifying himself with the painter, he put himself in the place of the horrified public. In the first part of the letter, now lost, Mérimée stated that someone had accused Stendhal of the most serious crimes: “that of having bared and exposed to the light of day certain sores of the human heart which are too disgusting to behold.”
“This observation seemed fair to me,” Mérimée wrote. “Juliens character possesses some atrocious traits; they are undoubtedly real, but they are horrible just the same. It is not the purpose of art to shed light on these aspects of human nature.” And Mérimée compared The Red and the Black to Swift’s The Lady’s Dressing Room, remarking: “You are full of these intolerable truths.”52
8. Mérimée’s comparison of Stendhal to Swift should not be taken literally. There is nothing eschatological about The Red and the Black. What irritated Mérimée was Stendhal’s independent views about social conventions, and the impulse to lay them bare. But the juxtaposition with Swift needs to be examined further. In a marginal note on the manuscript of Mina de Vanghel, left unfinished, Stendhal remarked that “in a novel, the description of uses and customs leaves us cold. We get the impression of an attempt to moralize. Description has to provoke astonishment, introduce a foreign woman who feels amazement, and transform the description into a sentiment.”53 Stendhal had already made use of this device. Julien Sorel, the son of a peasant, moves bewilderingly between the home of Madame de Rênal, the seminary, and the palace of the Marquis de la Mole. Stendhal was looking at contemporary French society from afar, through the eyes of a young man lacking experience and socially out of his depth. Mérimée shared Stendhal’s attraction for concrete, ethnographic details: but the “bitter truth” of The Red and the Black was too much for him.
The two friends differed greatly, as writers and as people. In an ironically affectionate sketch which appeared a few years after Stendhal’s death, Mérimée wrote: “For his entire life he was enslaved by his imagination; he did everything without premeditation, with enthusiasm. He claimed he did everything without reason. ‘In every thing one should let himself be guided by LO-GIC’ he used to say pausing between the first syllable and the rest of the word. But he suffered impatiently when the logic of others was not the same as his.”54
In this psychological trait, picked up intuitively by Mérimée, we see Stendhal’s twofold, contradictory connection with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, with rationality and with the emotions, with logic and with beliefs. This interlacing, as we perceive in the Vie d’Henry Brulard, was already present in the fourteen-year-old Stendhal. He had begun to study mathematics, and he was unable to understand how, multiplying negative numbers, one obtained a positive number. But the worst was yet to come:
At the beginning of geometry it is said: “We give the name parallel to two lines which extended to infinity, would never meet.” And from the very beginning of Statics, that beast of a Louis Monge more or less tells us this: “Two parallel lines can be considered as meeting, if we extend them to infinity.” I thought I was reading a catechism, and, in fact, one of the most pointless. I asked M. Chabert [another mathematics instructor] for an explanation: Son, he said, assuming that paternal tone which does not well suit that foxy heir apparent, the air of Edouard Mounier [peer of France in 1836]—son, you shall know later. And the monster, drawing near the blackboard of waxed cloth, drew two parallel contiguous lines. See, he told me, that at the point of infinity we can say that they meet. I was on the point of dropping everything. A confessor, a good and able Jesuit that moment could have converted me by commenting this maxim: See everything is in error, or, better, there is nothing which is false, nothing that is true, everything is convention. Adopt the convention which will make you more acceptable in this world. The populace is patriotic and will always soil this aspect of the question; turn yourself into an aristocrat like the members of your family and we shall find the way to send you to Paris and recommend you to influential ladies. To say this with élan, I would have become a rogue and today, in 1836, I would be very rich.55
Looking back at this episode, Stendhal connected his own precocious passion for logic to his hate for the conventional. But what kept that scene alive for almost forty years in Stendhal’s memory must have been the discovery of a flaw in Euclid’s geometry which had seemed to him as solid as a rock. This finding may have contributed to his enduring fascination with irrational phenomena—the passions, for instance—which reason must learn to analyze. The young Stendhal nurtured a great admiration for Pascal, whom he compared not only to Shakespeare but to himself: “When I read Pascal,” he wrote, “I have the impression I am reading myself.. . . I believe that among all the writers he is the one closest to my soul.”56 This claim (which seems to have passed unobserved) is less startling than it may appear at first glance. To the simple provincials who inquired what his profession might be, Stendhal usually replied, “Observer of the human heart.”57 He may have had in mind Pascal’s famous dictum “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” In a letter to his sister Pauline, to whom he was very close, Stendhal translated Pascal’s words in Montaigne’s Que sais-je: “I reread the Logique by de Tracy with great pleasure; I try to reason correctly to find the right answer to this question: ‘What do I desire?’ ”58
In his Souvenirs d’égotisme Stendhal wrote: “We can know everything except ourselves.”59
9. Free direct discourse gives a voice to the isolation of Stendhal’s characters, to their ingenuous vitality defeated by a historical process which overturns and humiliates their illusions.60 It is a process which seems to be unavailable to historians because free direct discourse by definition leaves no documentary traces. We are in territory that lies beyond historical knowledge, and is inaccessible to it. But narrative processes act like magnetic fields: they provoke questions and potentially attract documents.61 In this sense, a procedure such as free direct discourse, which came into being to respond, on the terrain of fiction, to a number of historical questions, may be considered as an indirect challenge to historians. One day they may be able to confront it in ways which at this moment we cannot even imagine.