Henri Beyle, more commonly referred to as Stendhal (1783–1842), inspires a great deal of loyalty in his readers, in part because he is such wonderful company, in part also because he flatters us. We are forever being made to feel as though he is offering us his friendship and his esteem, so we tend to read his work not as the strangers from another time we in fact are, but as co-opted members of what feels like an exclusive club: the closed circle of initiates referred to by Stendhal as ‘the happy few’, after a joke in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, in its turn a reference to Shakespeare’s Henry V. Certainly, whenever I meet a fellow Stendhalian, I immediately feel a kinship: we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, and sisters.
It seems revealing that the first major academic journal dedicated to the study of Stendhal’s work should have been given the title Stendhal Club. Transparently, this now-defunct fellowship and its flourishing successor, the no-less-revealingly named Association des amis de Stendhal, set about recreating the ideal society prospected by Stendhal, for example in a retrospective preface to De l’Amour (On Love, 1822) of 1834:
I write only for a hundred or so readers and, out of all these unfortunate, kind, charming, in no way hypocritical and in no way moral human beings whom I should so wish to please, there are only one or two I’ve actually met. (DA, p. 356)
Stendhal prizes warm and open communication with his privileged readers, conceived of as his friends, having learnt to hide his emotions and opinions from ordinary readers, conceived of as cold acquaintances or even potential enemies. It is for this reason that he claimed ‘one must make one’s choice and write either for a wide public or for the happy few. One cannot at the same time please both’ (VI, p. 705).
Stendhal is conscious of living in what he claims to have often heard Byron refer to as ‘This age of cant’ (ORC, II, p. 1123) – it is possible Stendhal didn’t know Byron quite as well as he said he did. As a result, Stendhal suspects most of the people he meets of striking hypocritical moralizing poses in an attempt to conform to social norms and thereby procure advancement: ‘they claim to be scandalized that one has dared to say this thing, dared to laugh at this other, and so on’ (ORC, II, p. 1123). It is very tiring always to censor oneself: what a privilege it would be to speak only with the friends one esteems and to whom one can say absolutely anything without fear of being misunderstood. Hence Stendhal’s concept of the ‘benevolent reader’ (OI, II, p. 533), for whom he writes in a kind of code, for want of a more perfect expressive medium: ‘There are no doubt some noble and tender souls among us who are like Mme Roland, Mlle de Lespinasse, Napoleon, the condemned man Lafargue, etc. Would that I could write in a sacred language understood by them alone!’ (VI, p. 880) Even more than as some ideal contemporary, this benevolent reader is imagined as the reader of the future: ‘I confess that the courage to write would desert me if I didn’t think that one day these pages would appear in print and be read by some soul loved by me – by a being such as Mme Roland or M. Gros, the surveyor.’ (OI, II, p. 429) It is the unknowability of this future reader that particularly attracts Stendhal, for it is this negative quality that encourages him in his sincerity:
Not feeling up to anything, not even to writing official letters for my work, I had the fire lit and now write this, hopefully neither lying to my reader nor to myself, taking pleasure in doing so as though writing a letter to a friend. What ideas will that friend have in 1880? How different they will be to the ideas of my own time! [. . .] This is a new experience for me: conversing with people knowing neither the cast of their mind, nor the education they’ll have received, nor their prejudices, nor their religion! What an incentive to tell the truth, the simple truth, for nothing else lasts. [. . .]
But one must take so many precautions if one is not to catch oneself telling lies! (OI, II, pp. 536–7)
Stendhal’s fictions likewise set out to tell us the truth: ‘The truth, the bitter truth’, as the epigraph to the first book of Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) would have it (ORC, I, p. 351). That this epigraph should falsely be attributed to the French revolutionary Danton also tells us that Stendhal’s truths will often be wrapped up in lies the better to shield them from profane eyes, there, in fact, being no sacred language to convey them in their pure form. But we, his unknown friends, will understand what he is trying to say to us – recognize his sincerity – because we are noble in our sentiments, being just like Mme Roland or M. Gros, the surveyor, that is to say just like Stendhal, only different.
Stendhal’s fictions deftly encourage us, their readers, to identify with their narrator and with their author: often we conflate these two personae, but they are in fact quite distinct. Even more so, his fictions encourage us to identify with their hero(in)es, for these young men and women would remain forever baffling to us were we not to learn to see the world from their peculiar perspectives. It is not uncommon for Stendhal specialists to persuade themselves, however deludedly, that they possess a unique insight into his narratives thanks to their special bond with the author and/or their incarnation of one or more of his characters (for my part, I identify with Lucien Leuwen). As a result, it feels as though Stendhal has seen the world from our perspective, and this encourages us in the hope that we might be able to see the world from his – hence, no doubt, my decision to write this biography.
There is an irony, though. In his writings, Stendhal repeatedly makes the point that he doesn’t think much of academics: ‘poets possess courage, whereas scholars, properly speaking, are servile and craven’ (OI, II, p. 759). We’re the very last people likely to be able to embody one of his hero(in)es, for we’re all too often male, middle-aged and middle class, which makes us highly likely also to be self-important, conformist and easily cowed. In particular, we use far too many words and never really do anything. Our students are much more likely to incarnate Julien Sorel or Mathilde de La Mole, especially the autodidacts among them, for they (mis)read impatiently to find out about the world, with a view one day soon to doing something, anything, although they know not what. Stendhal approves of unpredictable characters and unpredictable readers, drawn to extremes of behaviour and eager to replicate these in their own erratic lives, which is another way of saying that he approves of characters and readers in their late teens and early twenties. All of this also tends to mean that any middle-aged academic willing to sit down and spend a summer or two writing a scholarly biography of Stendhal is highly unlikely to be the kind of person Stendhal would have wanted to tell the story of his life. I think I can see from Stendhal’s perspective sufficiently well to understand that he wouldn’t have wanted me as his biographer – mind you, at least I’m Italian – preferring instead a biographer in the image of his ideal reader: ‘Some young Madame Roland, the daughter of a watch engraver, secretly reading a book which she quickly hides, at the slightest sound, in one of the drawers of her father’s workbench.’ (DA, p. 69)
Anonymous artist, Madame Roland, 18th century, oil painting.
As you’ll have noticed, Stendhal repeatedly identifies Mme Roland as his ideal reader. A leading heroine of the French Revolution, he admired her as one of the founders of the Girondin party, as herself the author of an exalted and enthusiastic set of memoirs and as a wife bolder and more intelligent than her husband, for example in her performance of many of his duties as Minister of the Interior – Stendhal’s fictional wives tend mostly to be bolder and more intelligent than their husbands. In the above quotation, he alludes also to her principal literary exemplar, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was apprenticed as an engraver and whose father was a watchmaker. In one sense, Mme Roland is Rousseau’s daughter, just as, in that same sense, Mathilde de La Mole is Mme Roland’s.
One might conclude, then, that in writing for his ideal readers, Stendhal is, in fact, writing for long-dead exemplars, but actually he is writing for you: for a new generation of readers who might be thrilled and thrown off course in your own lives by the examples provided by Julien Sorel and Mathilde de La Mole in Le Rouge et le Noir, or by Fabrice del Dongo and Gina Sanseverina in La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839), or by Lucien Leuwen and Lamiel in the novels that bear their names (1834–5 and 1839–42, respectively), just as Mme Roland had been by Rousseau’s example and Stendhal by Mme Roland’s. We are all Rousseau’s children in this sense, but perhaps a better way of looking at it is that we are all potentially the children of Julien and Mathilde, Fabrice and Gina, Lucien and Lamiel. What is finally important is the affective impact of the text: Stendhal is hoping for exalted enthusiasm from his readers, not dry scholarly engagement. The former leads to action, providing often mad reasons for actually doing something, the latter only to caution and apathy. After all, as Mathilde rightly puts it, ‘What great action is not an extreme at the moment it is attempted? Only once it has been accomplished does it seem possible to ordinary people.’ (ORC, I, p. 629)
André Gide notes that ‘to write well about Stendhal, one would need something of his manner.’1 Stendhal in fact wrote numerous biographies, but as an enthusiast, looking for an opportunity to share his passions and otherwise to converse sincerely with the friends among his readers. In an autobiographical fragment of 6 January 1831, he tells us that this was a task he particularly enjoyed, even though he no longer has the patience for the hard work involved (OI, II, p. 970). But, in reality, he probably particularly enjoyed this task precisely because he never worked that hard at it. One of his two main approaches to writing biographies appears to have been simply to copy or otherwise appropriate extracts from existing sources: why bother redrafting what is already in the public domain? The other was to rely on his defective memory, or even to make stuff up, which comes to the same thing: isn’t that what we all do when we try, however sincerely, to make sense of ourselves and others, the present and the past, particularly when conversing with our friends? As Gide was to put it in his own – often quite self-consciously Stendhalian – autobiography, we might well come closest to the truth of our own lives in our fictions.2 He was perhaps thinking of the following passage from Stendhal’s journal:
In my youth, I wrote biographies (of Mozart, of Michelangelo) which served as kinds of histories. I regret this. The truth about the most important as well as the least important things seems almost impossible to establish, at least the somewhat detailed truth. Mme de Tracy used to say to me: ‘One cannot attain to truth except in a novel.’
Every day I see more clearly that, in all other contexts, it is a pretence. (OI, II, p. 198)
It was the thought of not having to do any actual research that lured Stendhal away from biography and towards autobiography:
I no longer have the patience to find sources, weigh up contradictory testimonies, etc. I’ve had the idea of writing a life very well known to me in all of its incidents. Unfortunately, my subject is quite unknown to the public: that subject is me. (OI, II, pp. 970–71)
Stendhal was easily bored and cared very little about detail, the somewhat detailed truth being, in any case, unattainable. He nevertheless also frequently acknowledged that truth in fact resides precisely in the detail. Predominantly, his aim was to talk freely and exaggeratedly – that is to say, honestly – with his friends, who hopefully would laugh, and not take him too literally or take too much offence, having recognized his underlying sincerity. In other words, he mostly refused to restrict himself to what bores and hypocrites are pleased to palm off as the truth, preferring his honest fictions. But at other times, he went out of his way to establish quite limited truths as painstakingly as possible – Stendhal was always very good at holding contradictory ideas in his mind and making little or no attempt to resolve them; in this respect, he was similar to Balzac, a friend in later years and another very funny man.
Stendhal’s various biographies and travel writings each contain a certain amount of inaccurate information, especially as this relates to places and dates: they often give a sense not just of fictionalization, but of systematic falsification as part of a broader deliberate strategy of misinformation, there being nothing quite so liberating as a lie – Stendhal thinks ‘all of the arts are founded on a certain degree of falsehood’ (AM, p. 119) and his conception of love similarly rests in large part on the privileging of falsehoods. Lies are useful, for without them we would be left facing only ‘the bitter truth’ (ORC, I, p. 351). Nevertheless, in his autobiographical writings, Stendhal’s ostensible quest is often for ‘the simple truth’ (OI, II, p. 537). Thus it is that, in the Vie de Henry Brulard (The Life of Henry Brulard, composed in 1834–6), he sets about sketching complicated maps to establish his exact location in the course of an event he is recounting, as a means of both reliving and explaining it.
The best way to locate Henri Beyle, though, is not on a map but in Stendhal’s fictions, including the fiction that is the Vie de Henry Brulard, his most developed (pseudo-)autobiography: Henri Beyle is to be found somewhere between Henry Brulard and Octave de Malivert (from Armance (1827)) and Roizand (from Une position sociale (A Social Position, composed in 1832–3)) and Lucien Leuwen on the one hand, and Mathilde de La Mole and Lamiel on the other, for he was none of these fictional characters, just as he was not Stendhal either, but rather all of these creations were, to varying degrees, proximate versions of himself.
To write in Stendhal’s manner, as advocated by Gide, is to write in a voice that would be distinctively one’s own and not to mind the inherent ridiculousness of such singular utterance; it would be not to bother saying the kinds of things that are usually said on any given topic, but instead to say other things that are personal and quite possibly odd; it would be to write with enthusiasm and sincerity, as well as generosity, by which Stendhal means taking the trouble to understand and accommodate the perspectives of others; it would be to write as though to one’s friends.
Stendhal is forever reminding us that the world looks very different to different people, depending on their perspective, for instance going out of his way to make this point at length in the preface to his first novel, Armance. As Flaubert would eventually also say, in a near paraphrase of Stendhal, ‘there is no such thing as reality, there are only ways of seeing.’3 More generally, Stendhal organizes all his fictions around competing perspectives that produce different readings and different sets of emotions, whether female or male; young, middle-aged or old; Parisian or provincial; French, Italian or German; working class, middle class or aristocratic; imaginative or logical; idealistic or ironic; naive or cynical. In the end we are left with no definitive reading or set of emotions that we can impose on characters or events, but rather with a set of more or less appealing (mis)understandings that help us to make sense of ourselves and of our friends as much as they help us to make sense of the text itself. Nevertheless, one of the curious sensations provided by Stendhal’s fictions is one of sudden apparent understanding. For example, it is never stated in the text of Armance that Octave de Malivert is sexually impotent, or gay, or mad, or a self-pitying Romantic – that is to say, simply deluded – but it is very easy to become convinced, as a reader, that one has made the certain discovery that he is indeed one or the other of these things. It is never stated in the text of La Chartreuse de Parme that Fabrice del Dongo is the biological son of the Lieutenant Robert, but arriving at this certainty was the most exciting moment of my own teenage reading life. The sensation was, and still is, one of suddenly floating through space as various narrative elements reorder themselves, suddenly to make a different and better kind of sense. But what faith, finally, can we place in these reordered narratives, however certain we might suddenly be of their truth? As Stendhal ironically puts it in his introductory remarks to La Duchesse de Palliano (The Duchess of Palliano, 1838), mostly the translation of an original Italian manuscript from the Renaissance:
Literary vanity tells me that it might perhaps have been possible for me to augment the interest of certain situations by developing them further, that is to say by guessing what these characters were thinking and giving a detailed account of those thoughts to the reader. But can I, a young Frenchman, born north of Paris, really be certain of my ability to guess what an Italian soul might have felt in 1559? The most I can hope for is to guess correctly what might be considered elegant and piquant by my French readers of 1838. (ORC, III, p. 15)
Already in 1817, Stendhal had expressed the same idea in the Histoire de la peinture en Italie (A History of Italian Painting):
When we read the chronicles and fictions of the Middle Ages with the sensibility of nineteenth-century men and women, we imagine what their protagonists must have felt, we impute to them a sensibility that would have been as impossible in them as it is natural to us. (HPI, p. 478)
By the same token, what certainty can we have as twenty-first-century readers that we can make sense of the ways of seeing – or understand the sensibility – of fictional young French and Italian men and women from the first half of the nineteenth century?
Our generosity may well lead us to the truth, whether simple or bitter: allow us to see the world from Julien’s perspective, or Mathilde’s, or Lucien’s, by feeling what we perhaps correctly take to be their same emotions. It might, therefore, allow us to understand their stories more accurately and more fully, and to pass judgement on them more equitably. But generosity is also associated by Stendhal with gullibility. As readers, we may well end up imputing our own thoughts and motivations to characters who turn out to be quite differently perceived by others. What matters, however, is what we persuade ourselves to be true, for truth itself, whether simple or bitter, is as inaccessible as the God that Stendhal liked to tell his friends does not exist, which is another way of saying that all of our human truths are no more than fictions. In De l’Amour, for example, Stendhal focuses on the illusion of beauty (beauty as a lie) and its related illusion of happiness that together go to produce the extended exercise in delusion that is love. We can never know for certain if what we see in others is true, but the fictions we create around them tell us something that is perhaps true about ourselves.
In his second abortive attempt at a biography of Napoleon, the Mémoires sur Napoléon (Memoirs of Napoleon), composed in 1834–6), Stendhal explicitly abandons the concept of writing a traditional Life of his subject, noting in his preface of 1836 that ‘the author is conceited enough to wish not to imitate anybody’ (N, p. 245). He tells us that, if asked to describe his manner, he would compare it to that of Michel de Montaigne or that of Charles de Brosses, writers whose distinctive voices particularly excited his respect and esteem; he also describes his manner as antithetical to that of Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy, a stuffed shirt recently elevated to the Académie française, whose narcissistic voice particularly excited his contempt – in the Vie de Henry Brulard, Salvandy is repeatedly cited alongside Chateaubriand as a literary example to be avoided. In a note to self, written a few months later in 1837, Stendhal goes on to define his new method in more detail:
Ordinary histories [. . .] set out a case for and against, making a great show of impartiality, in the manner of [the Roman historian] Sallust, leaving it to the reader to pronounce judgement.
As a result, such judgements can only be commonplace: X is a crook or a man of honour. As for me, I pronounce my own judgements, and they are based on a more intimate and above all a more delicate understanding of right and wrong: the judgements of a generous soul. (N, p. 247)
To be generous is to make the effort to understand the perspectives of others in all their complexity: to produce multiple, sometimes contradictory judgements, and never to moralize, that is, ‘lie in order to advance one’s career as a writer’ (DA, p. 340), or otherwise reduce one’s subject. Some people, moralizing liars like Salvandy, don’t deserve such consideration. As a stuffed shirt, he is just a waste of Stendhal’s time, although Vaize, a fictional stuffed shirt, reminds Lucien Leuwen that even ‘the vilest scoundrels are vain and possess a sense of honour after their own fashion’ (ORC, II, p. 419): even a Salvandy has a point of view worth considering, if only life weren’t too short. Other people, in this case Napoleon, do deserve such consideration, for they remain estimable despite their faults: they are neither in bad nor in good faith, but rather endlessly complicated and unpredictable in their thoughts and actions. ‘It’s that Napoleon wasn’t against all good ideas,’ Stendhal drily observes (VI, p. 799). Put another way, ‘it is not as a follower but as a moralist that Stendhal loves Napoleon.’4 Writing in 1836, Stendhal makes a similar point:
My aim is to reveal this extraordinary man, whom I loved while he was alive and whom I now esteem with all the contempt inspired by those who have come after him.
I believe such is the general feeling.
I make no claim to writing the history of France from 1794 to 1815 and I shall speak as little as possible of general historical events. (N, p. 249)
Esteem matters to Stendhal: I fear only those I esteem’ (DA, p. 337), he once revealed in a footnote, by which he, in part, meant that the first step on the path to freedom is not to care about the opinions of stuffed shirts – that is, ‘papier-mâché souls’ or ‘souls of mud’, to use Stendhal’s own habitual idioms: ‘The contempt of those I find contemptible is a matter of indifference to me’ (S, p. 57). Quite. The corollary is that we should very much care about the opinions of the happy few we do in fact esteem, hence the fear they inspire, for ‘in others, we can only esteem ourselves’ (HPI, p. 235) and so, when those we esteem do not esteem us, it is as though we were discovering our own contempt for ourselves. Stendhal had met Napoleon – it is possible he did not know Napoleon quite as well as he said he did. He esteemed him personally as an ‘ardent soul’ (N, p. 285).
As far as Stendhal was concerned, Napoleon sometimes made decisions squalidly in his self-interest – of course he did, what political leader doesn’t? – but also sometimes disinterestedly for the benefit of the French nation, all to the best of his ability and informed by an ever-changing set of partial perspectives. ‘For,’ as Napoleon himself asks, ‘what is a man once he no longer esteems himself?’ (N, p. 548). Stendhal thinks his memoir will be worth something thanks to the delicacy with which he will make sense of Napoleon’s perspectives and also on account of what he refers to as the ‘unaffected originality’ of his own manner: ‘if I had to censor myself, I wouldn’t have the patience to keep going’ (N, p. 247). To save time, Stendhal intended the bulk of his biography to be made up of extracts culled from other books. In the end, he did not have the patience to keep going.
This biography will not copy from other books, but it will be as personal and as sincere and as generous as I can make it. Other biographies of Stendhal set out the known facts, exhaustively and exhaustingly. If you want to find out where Stendhal was on any given day, or which woman he may or may not have been in the process of pursuing at that particular moment in time, there are better books for you to consult. But if you want an intimate and intricate personal account of Stendhal’s changing perspectives on the world, then hopefully you will have the patience to keep reading – I shall think of you as a friend.