Still furiously angry at his mother’s death, Henry Brulard uses his account of his childhood to present his young self as a rebel, even in infancy. Two of his earliest memories are of angering his family: by biting the proffered cheek of a cousin, Mme Marie-Louise Pison du Galland, who had demanded, and naively been expecting, a kiss; and by dropping a pair of scissors from a first-floor window onto a neighbour, Mme Benoîte Chenevaz. Plainly, at about the ages of three and four when, respectively, he perpetrated these two outrages, Henry had precious little idea what he was doing, and neither act tells us anything at all about either his innate or his acquired moral character. This, however, seems not to have been the perception of his family, and in particular of the allegedly malevolent Séraphie, whom we are told responded to the latter act by promptly accusing Henry of attempted murder. It was on the strength of these two crimes that Henry was first identified as ‘a monster’ (OI, II, p. 551) and ‘atrocious’ (OI, II, p. 551; p. 552) by his aunt. Brulard dates the start of his moral life not just to his mother’s death, therefore, but to these incidents, or rather to the burning sense of renewed injustice they provoked in him. Again, Henry is following the example provided by Rousseau, for Les Confessions date the start of Jean-Jacques’s moral life not just to the death of his mother, but to his burning sense of injustice at being falsely accused of breaking a comb. ‘I revolted,’ Henry notes of his four-year-old self (OI, II, p. 552).
Yet Brulard deliberately plays up to the image of him projected by Séraphie: he seems to congratulate himself on refusing to meet the soppy expectations of Mme Pison du Galland, for to frustrate expectations is to make oneself free; and on trying to do away with his neighbour, not least because she went on to become the mother of a particularly ghastly stuffed shirt (the absurdly named Candide Chenevaz, who eventually proceeded iniquitously to exercise the functions of magistrate in Restoration Grenoble). The infant Henry was already a tyrannicide, as though in anticipation of the Revolution to come: these incidents do, after all, so Henry hopes, say something about either his innate or his acquired moral character – no, they don’t.
It is the imputation of atrocity by his pestilential aunt that appears to have prompted the young Henry to go about acquiring a range of ever more shocking opinions, seemingly as deliberate affronts to the conservative values and monarchist sympathies of his family, especially his father and aunt. If they wanted a monster, a monster is what they were going to get. In adulthood, Stendhal similarly took childish pleasure in shocking the salons of Paris with his outrageous views, seemingly as his way of compensating for the shyness that never left him, but also because he viewed all normative nineteenth-century morality as hypocritical cant to be fearlessly challenged.
At the age of five, Henry took advantage of the view from his grandfather’s flat overlooking Place Grenette allegedly to witness the ‘Day of Tiles’ – a riot in protest at a clumsy government attempt to restrict the rights of the parlements, one of Grenoble’s few distinctions being that it was precisely the seat of a parlement, thanks to its status as the capital of the Dauphiné. This event is generally identified by historians as an important precursor to the 1789 Revolution in Paris, not that Henry could have understood what was really happening, or the historical significance it would go on to acquire, but, then again, no other member of his family is likely to have done so either. Henry remembers seeing the blood of a protester who had been bayonetted in the small of his back and who died minutes later (OI, II, p. 582), and also hearing an old woman scream, ‘I’m revorting [sic]! I’m revorting!’ (OI, II, p. 583).
Around the same time, Henry allegedly met Mme d’Agoult-Montmaur, or, as Henry puts it, ‘I met Mme de Merteuil’ (OI, II, p. 593), for she was the woman alleged to have served as Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ model for the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1782), Laclos having been stationed as an officer in Grenoble; eventually, again allegedly, Stendhal was to meet Laclos in a box at La Scala while himself stationed in Milan in 1800–1801. Brulard tells us Mme de Merteuil fed him candied walnuts.1
Henry seems to turn up with unaccountable frequency a passive witness to Grenoble’s infrequent brushes with political and literary history. It is fitting that he should have received a small act of kindness from Merteuil, for Henry’s own revolt was very similar to hers: like Merteuil, he arrived at a set of principles in the self-reliant pursuit of freedom and thought of himself as his own creation. Indeed, one of Stendhal’s most remarkable personal achievements was to recognize the Merteuils who crossed his path and genuinely to admire them. It is, after all, rare to find men who applaud women for their ruthless pursuit of freedom. He would go on to create a series of his own Merteuils, including the wonderfully self-reliant Mathilde de La Mole, who quotes Corneille’s Medea on behalf of both herself and Stendhal: ‘In the midst of so many perils, I still have myself!’ (ORC, I, p. 645).
After his mother’s death, and once the Revolution had hit its stride, executing Louis XVI and otherwise resorting to the Terror in a paranoid – or not so paranoid – bid to stave off the forces of reaction, an only slightly older Henry developed what Brulard describes as his ‘instinctive, filial love’ for the Republic (OI, II, p. 552), as well as an ever deeper suspicion of the reactionaries who made up his birth family. In particular, he rejected any notion of filial duty to his actual father, ‘the Bastard’, announcing one day that if Chérubin loved him so much, then he could give Henry enough money to live his life as he pleased, for example by joining the Republican army as soon as he had come of age (OI, II, p. 624). It turned out that Chérubin did not love him so much – Henry compares his father’s furious reaction to that of Tsar Nicholas I berating his inexplicably recalcitrant Polish subjects for insufficiently loving of his august person, dispassionately concluding that ‘all tyrannies are alike’ (OI, II, p. 624). It is at this time that Henry developed his passion for tyrannicides, quite literally so in the case of Charlotte Corday:
All forms of tyranny revolted me and I did not like established power. I did my exercises (essays, translations, verses on the subject of a fly drowning in a bowl of milk) on a pretty little walnut table [. . .] I had the idea of writing on the wood of this table the names of all the assassins of princes, for example: Poltrot, the Duc de Guise, at . . . in 15 . . . My grandfather, as he was helping me compose my verses, or rather composing them himself, saw this list: his soul, gentle, tranquil, opposed to all violence, was saddened by it; he almost became convinced, as a result, that Séraphie was right to represent my character as atrocious. Perhaps I was prompted to compile my list of assassins by the actions of Charlotte Corday – on 11 or 12 July 1793, for I was mad about her. (OI, II, p. 726)
It did not matter to him what kind of tyrant these assassins killed, so long as they expressed their revolt through violence: that the killer, in Charlotte’s case, should be a woman excited him beyond all measure, which perhaps explains the folly of his enthusiasm for her, no matter that the tyrant she killed was a Jacobin. Henry, of course, normally approved of Jacobins, but Corday, a Girondin like Mme Roland, could not have appeared more attractive to him, hence, no doubt, his fantasy of himself as her widower. The glamour of Revolutionary violence never abated; nor did the appeal of brave, headstrong women unafraid of death – Mathilde de La Mole is at her most attractive when (spoiler alert) she takes possession of Julien Sorel’s severed head. Similarly, Henry Brulard tells us he thrilled to Louis XVI’s decapitation and never subsequently disapproved of it: ‘I was seized by one of the most profound feelings of joy I have experienced in the course of my life. The reader may think me cruel, but I’m the same person at the age of 52 as I was at the age of ten.’ (OI, II, p. 634)
He continues:
I conclude from this memory, so fresh before my eyes, that in 1793, 42 years ago, I went about the hunt for happiness exactly as I do today; or, to put it more simply, my character was exactly the same then as it is now. All compromise when it comes to the interests of the nation still strikes me as puerile.
I would say criminal, were it not for my limitless contempt for those lacking in character. (For example M. Félix Faure [. . .] talking to his son [. . .] in the summer of 1828 about the death of Louis XVI: ‘he was put to death by bad men’). (OI, II, p. 635)
To Stendhal, the regicides remained forever tyrannicides, that is, heroes fighting for the survival of the Republic, their political violence fully justified. As an adult, he would go on likewise to justify the execution of a number of other more minor historical figures whom he regarded as traitors to the nation, whatever the horror his opinions inspired among his acquaintances: ‘I can honestly say that I am utterly indifferent to the good opinion of people I consider to be lacking in character. They strike me as mad; I can see quite clearly that they do not understand what’s at stake.’ (OI, p. 635)
But how plausible is it that young Henry should have arrived at such unshakeably draconian republican idealism by the age of ten, or five, or four, or three? Only insofar as Henry’s hatred of tyrants stood in for his hatred of his father. ‘The Bastard’ is not some random insult: as has already been noted, it reflects Stendhal’s insight that all ‘legitimate’, that is, patriarchal, power is in fact illegitimate and that, if we are born slaves, whether to a father or to a king, it lies within our power to free ourselves from our unwanted masters, so long as we first learn, like Merteuil, to recognize that all claims to power over us are in fact fraudulent. (Of course, admiring illegitimacy as he did, Stendhal might also be according some small measure of grudging respect to his father by referring to him as ‘the Bastard’.)
Henry’s sense of himself as a revolutionary rested, to a large extent, on his perception of himself as a ‘slave’. This perception, in turn, rested on his sense of his own isolation. The young Henry was kept away from other children, especially ‘common children’ (OI, II, p. 608). This did little either for his mood or for his social development. In the Vie de Henry Brulard, Stendhal writes that he spent his moral life ‘carefully considering five or six main ideas’ (OI, II, p. 547). One of these, as we have already seen, was his attitude to political violence and, in particular, the Terror. Another, unquestionably, was his social engagement with people from a lower social class. Looking back as an adult, Henry notes that his political opinions have always been republican and that he has always admired the people of France: the citizens who came together to form the Republic. At the same time, he concedes that his parents successfully inculcated aristocratic tastes in him: cleanliness and good manners mattered to Henry, which is why, when he finally managed to attend a meeting of Grenoble’s Jacobins, aged eleven, or possibly twelve, he found himself repelled by the unexpected absence of such genteel qualities:
I found them horribly vulgar despite wanting to love them [. . .] In short, I was then exactly as I am now: I love the common people and hate their oppressors, but it would be a never-ending ordeal for me to have to live among them. (OI, II, p. 686).
Put another way,
I have to admit that, despite being, at heart, perfectly a republican in those days, my parents had just as perfectly communicated their reserved and aristocratic habits to me. This defect has stayed with me [. . .] I abhor having anything to do with the rabble even though, when they are called the people, I am passionately committed to their happiness [. . .]
I have a horror of everything dirty and the people always appear dirty to me. The people of Rome serve as an exception, but in their case their dirtiness is hidden by their ferocity. (OI, II, pp. 678–9)
He is not proud of these sentiments: it is just the way things turned out. Forced to choose, in his life and in his fictions, he always opted – I think and hope – for courage, warmth and generosity over wit, polite conversation and manners. At least, I love him as a writer in good part because, over and over again, he appears to make that choice. Certainly, the precise nature of (his own) courage and generosity can be added to the list of five or six main ideas that Stendhal spent his life considering.
Another way of looking at all this is that Stendhal thought obsessively about his profound loneliness and therefore about the complicity and companionship that he craved. Julien Sorel’s mother never appears in Le Rouge et le Noir; as a result, he too grows up isolated within his family – in fact, even more so than Henry – but the psychological effect appears much the same. Insofar as there is a key to Julien’s character, this is it. He cannot believe that anyone sincerely likes him, not even the youngest of Mme de Rênal’s children, of whom he is particularly fond. Thus the thought that ‘he at least does not yet hold me in contempt’ is quickly replaced by the thought that ‘the children stroke me the way they stroke the young hunting dog they bought yesterday’ (OI, I, p. 403). If the narrator is to be believed, Julien is characterized as much by his ‘complete absence of fellow-feeling’ as by his ‘hypocrisy’ (OI, I, p. 415), hence his astonishing failures of generosity when it comes to Mme de Rênal, ironically the character who most believes in his generosity (OI, I, p. 383), for she is herself generous and so attributes her own qualities to him: ‘in others, we can only esteem ourselves’ (HPI, p. 235).
Stendhal likewise found it very difficult to believe that anyone sincerely liked him. It is for this reason that friendship appears in his texts, if anything, as an even higher value than romantic love, for romantic love is founded not just on reciprocal esteem, but far more problematically, on desire. Friendship, by contrast, rests solely on a reciprocal esteem that finds its expression in the sacred language that Stendhal spent his life trying to formulate. But it is precisely because Stendhal found it very difficult to believe that anyone sincerely liked him that all his life he sought out those who appeared to do so. Henry’s childhood, marked as it was by his revolt against his family, his isolation and his inflexible republicanism, came in fact to be defined by his friendships with two grown men: Vincent Lamberton and Louis-Gabriel Gros. It is worth taking the time to try to understand why.
Stendhal’s writings repeatedly return to the idea that human beings generally divide into con artists (fripons) and their marks (dupes): in any given interaction, one party becomes dominant and imposes its will on the other, generally to obtain some sort of benefit, usually, but not always, pecuniary. As Baudelaire, always a fine judge, was to observe of Stendhal: ‘he was much afraid of being duped.’2 François Leuwen, Lucien’s father, eventually notes that ‘the main way of being duped is to fall in love’ (ORC, II, p. 457). But, as we shall see, Stendhal was already well ahead of that particular game: as early as 1805, he had noted that ‘the worst way of being duped takes the form of never falling in love, once one has come to know women, for fear of being played false’ (OI, I, p. 213).
The status of the dupe or the con artist’s mark is another of the five or six ideas that came to dominate Stendhal’s moral life. The ideal to which Stendhal aspired was a state of grace or exception to the con artist/mark paradigm, which we might reframe as the narcissist/empath paradigm: what Stendhal was always hoping to find, at whatever personal cost, was a perfect exchange of empathetic goodwill, founded on open communication and allowing for unresolved disagreement. On this last point, Mérimée reports that Stendhal would shut down discussions with his friends once an obvious difference of opinion had emerged with the words ‘You’re a cat, I’m a rat’ (HB, p. 445). The sacred language of friendship is not to be employed to persuade others to see the world the way one sees it oneself; if anything, it serves to bring out the differences that friendship alone can accommodate.
Stendhal’s fictions include numerous representations of perfect friendships. These are often between members of the same sex: in Le Rouge et le Noir and Lucien Leuwen, respectively, Fouqué is to Julien and Gros is to Lucien what Mme Derville is to Louise de Rênal and Mme de Constance is to Bathilde de Chasteller. Occasionally, even more exceptionally, they cross and blur the gender divide: Théodelinde de Serpierre and Lucien are friends in this sense, esteeming each other and conversing freely, despite the marked differences of their outlooks. All these fictional friendships find their origins in their author’s childhood.
The first of Henry’s own intense friendships was not with a boy or girl of his own age, but with Vincent Lamberton, Dr Gagnon’s valet, known to him as Lambert. Insofar as the young Henry managed not to feel isolated after the death of his mother, it was thanks to Lambert, but when Henry was ten, Lambert died, three days after falling from the branches of a tree. Writing in his fifties, Henry observes,
Where today is the memory of Lambert still to be found, other than in the heart of his friend?
I’ll add this, who still remembers Alexandrine [of whom more later], who died in January 1815, twenty years ago?
Who still remembers Métilde [of whom much more later], who died in 1825?
Are they not mine now, do they not belong to me who loves them more than anyone else in the world, who thinks passionately about them ten times a week and often for two hours at a time? (OI, II, p. 679)
Stendhal knew that, in life, the answer to his rhetorical question was in fact no, these people did not belong to him, for people do not belong to each other, or they would not be free. However, in death, maybe things are different? There’s an interesting slippage in the passage just cited between his love for his friend (Lambert) and for two women to whom he made sexual advances that were comprehensively and in the latter case indignantly rebuffed. What Brulard is expressing here is the grief of his loss: all three individuals, differently, but finally equally, made Henry feel that he was not alone when he found himself admitted to their sweet proximity, and to that extent, he loved them all in exactly the same way, for all three possessed his esteem, which is another way of saying that all three allowed him to esteem himself in them.
Skipping forward to 1830 and his Parisian middle age, Stendhal ruefully observes that there is not a single one of his current friends who would not be delighted to see him drenched in filthy water were he to step out onto the street in fine clothes. Silly though this example may seem, to Stendhal such innocently petty spite was enough to damp the ardour of his own sentiments. In his fiction, Stendhal also explores such pettiness between friends, for example in his account of the relationship between Lucien Leuwen and Coffe. Lucien’s tactless, blundering goodwill meets with Coffe’s laconic, fair-minded, but finally cold and detached judgementalism. Stendhal’s fictional friendships mostly do not suffer from such defects. His fictional love affairs are much messier, founded as they are not just on esteem, but on desire.
The critic René Girard has identified Stendhal as perhaps the most important of a series of authors – also including Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Proust – to have anticipated his own anthropological theory of mimetic desire. Stendhal, so Girard argues, came to understand that we think we desire directly, but actually can only ever desire what we believe others to desire. The primary relationship is therefore not with the nominal object of one’s affections but with the mediator of that object: the rival. The pattern set up is once again antagonistic: a battle between an eventual winner and an eventual loser for a doubtful illusory prize. Stendhal both had that thought and found it unbearable, just as he found unbearable the thought that all friendship might in fact be no more than disguised competition. To this extent, and almost only to this extent, Stendhal was a Romantic. He believed in the possibility of true friendship, entirely exempt from rivalry, and even in the possibility of true love, entirely exempt from external mediation, for he appears to have believed that desire could, however fleetingly and infrequently in a nineteenth century largely devoid of heroism, take the form of sincere, reciprocated passion, founded not on rivalry, but rather on mutual esteem and the mutual exercise of what he terms ‘the faculty of wanting’ (VF, p. 37).
Clearly, Stendhal’s wanting to believe in the reality of friendship and love would not have been enough to prevent these concepts from turning out to be illusory and, having spent his life trying to develop the critical distance that would allow him to see things as they are, the horror of discovering that his isolation was in fact radical and incurable would not have been enough to prevent him from acknowledging that true examples of friendship and passion can only be found in fictions such as the novels he would one day write. However, when Brulard was twelve, the course of his intellectual and moral life was again decisively altered, this time by a series of experiences that convinced him he was not, after all, radically alone.