Henry’s school career ended with a series of prizes, including the prize for mathematics, although he was less the prodigy of his imagination than an enthusiast. Nevertheless, by the age of sixteen it had become clear that he would be a plausible candidate for the elite École Polytechnique in Paris. With the unqualified support of his family – now minus Séraphie who had died in 1797, which perhaps explains the unqualified support – Henry shipped himself off to Paris with a view to preparing for the entrance exam. He arrived in November 1799, exactly one day after Napoleon’s coup d’état of 18 Brumaire. Napoleon was indeed about to become the King of France, or rather, in relatively quick succession, First Consul (1799), First Consul for Life (1802) and Emperor (1804).
Henry found Paris, the capital of his beloved Republic, much less glamorous than expected. In particular, he was shocked by the lack of mountains and the prissily pollarded trees. Stendhal liked both trees and humans to be allowed to grow wild. As has already been noted, Stendhal had never thought much of Grenoble. He had been quite pleased by its early role in the Revolution and by the fact that it briefly was known as ‘Grelibre’, as a play on the way it had turned against the nobility by championing the cause of liberty. He took for granted its natural setting, at the confluence of two valleys, surrounded by imposing mountains, until he realized that not all cities were similarly blessed. But mostly, he thought ill of his hometown, referring to it contemptuously by its Gaulish name, Cularo, presumably with the stress on the cul (arse). By contrast, he came to think of Paris, the city in which he died and is buried, as the only truly tolerable place in France in which to live. What he valued about the capital was its status as a republic unto itself, whatever the nominal system of government currently holding sway over France as a whole. In particular, he would eventually discover that it was possible to live anonymously in Paris, in a fifth-floor apartment, ‘solitary and mad as a Spaniard, a million miles away from real life’ (OI, II, p. 538). The very reasons Rousseau found to dislike Paris and view it as a vast Babylon led Stendhal to think of it as the last bastion of freedom. For the time being, though, Henry Brulard found himself unexpectedly homesick in Paris.
Very quickly, Henry started to formulate a new plan of (in)action, possibly with a view to frustrating yet further his family’s expectations. Stendhal never did take the exam for the École Polytechnique, contenting himself with eventually sending Octave de Malivert and Lucien Leuwen, two of his fictional characters most closely modelled on Henri Beyle, to that élite institution. Instead, after a period of illness and apathy, and again with the support of his family, eager to see him make a career or rather finally earn an income for himself, Stendhal hitched his wagon to his Parisian cousins, the Darus.
Noël Daru, the patriarch, and his son Pierre were quite good cousins to have in the age of Napoleon. Noël was well connected, rich and crafty, so Pierre was already making a brilliant career for himself as a bureaucrat, one that would eventually see him rise to the most senior civilian position within Napoleon’s imperial war machine. This would, of course, prove useful, but nowhere near as useful as it ought to have been.
Stendhal never mastered the art of schmoozing Pierre Daru – his eventually falling in love with Alexandrine Daru, Pierre’s wife, cannot have helped much either, although she appears to have found a way of averting complete disaster on Stendhal’s behalf. Nor did he ever master the art of impressing his notoriously hard-to-please patron – he got off to a bad start, mistranscribing the relatively simple word cela as cella when taking dictation (OI, II, p. 920), before going backwards. Henri Beyle could come across as a complete idiot, not least when he wasn’t concentrating, but even when he was. Pierre Daru, ‘that volcano of insults’ (OC, II, p. 920), had made a profession out of not suffering complete idiots gladly or indeed at all. Looking back, Henry Brulard thinks he knows why: Pierre Daru was ‘furious and always angry about something because he was himself always afraid’: ‘he lived in mortal fear of Napoleon and I lived in mortal fear of him’ (OC, II, p. 919).
Copy by Virginie Géo-Rémy after Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), Pierre Daru, 1813, oil painting.
To start with, the Darus made do with welcoming their anxious and odd provincial relative, helping him recover from his illness. Pierre then had him appointed to a supernumerary position in the Ministry of War. Stendhal was a mixed bag as a bureaucrat. When he focused, as during Napoleon’s retreat from Russia, he appears to have been capable of getting through an enormous amount of work quickly and well. When bored, he appears to have done very little work, slowly and badly – notoriously, he would go on, as a consul in later life, to send a coded message in the same envelope as its cipher, possibly as a joke or a show of contempt, but equally possibly as a mark of his continuing capacity for complete idiocy. What he started to learn in 1800, and then continued to learn after 1807, was how to write reports by bringing together different sources. It was a method that he would go on to apply to his non-fiction writing: the art of précis, or, as it is sometimes otherwise called, plagiarism.
Stendhal soon tired of being shouted at as an unskilled clerk in a pretend job. He decided to cash in his chips with Pierre Daru in exchange for an army commission. Short on training, experience and aptitude, Henri Beyle was made a second lieutenant in the dragoons. Finally he was realizing his ambition to leave his family and join a Republican army, for France was still nominally a Republic, despite Napoleon’s coup. Stendhal’s first posting took him to the scene of the First Consul’s great triumphs at the head of the Republican army: Italy.
Stendhal has a tendency to tell the story of his life, whether in autobiography or in fiction, in such a way as to bring the reader with him as far as the first discovery of Italy and then to break off the narrative, there being no words to describe certain subjects. In general, Stendhal finds it difficult to talk to us about his feelings at moments of supreme emotion because to do so would be to cheapen those experiences, the way that Romantic literature cheapens what it is to feel something, especially when that Romantic literature is written by Chateaubriand. Stendhal would go on to settle for a deliberately dry writing style. He famously wrote, in the draft of a letter to Balzac of 1840, that, when composing La Chartreuse de Parme, he would read a few pages of the Napoleonic Code to find the right tone. ‘Allow me to express myself crudely: I don’t want to wank off [branler] the reader’s soul’ (CG, VI, p. 411).
The more emotional Stendhal becomes, the more laconically, or crudely, he expresses himself: the final page of La Chartreuse de Parme is an object lesson in emotional continence precisely because the emotion of the characters is, at this stage in the narrative, entirely incontinent in its intensity. But sometimes it is not enough even to be emotionally continent: only an abrupt lapse into silence will do. There is an irony, here: Stendhal gives his name to the modern-day Stendhal syndrome, an affliction imputed by Italians to the tourists who flock to Rome, Florence and Venice and find themselves overcome by the beauty of the cityscapes on show. To experience the shock of first encountering Italy in Stendhal’s manner has come to mean to gush inanely, even though, to recap, Stendhal in fact found it very hard to write about his first experience of Italy. We know of his arrival, over the Mont Cenis pass (he loved the Alpine scenery), and of his descent through the Valle d’Aosta: familiar, partly Francophone territory, not dissimilar culturally or geographically from the French part of Savoy that neighboured the Dauphiné. We then know of his arrival in the Lombard plain and his entry into Milan.
Something of the euphoria of this first experience of the city can be found in the opening chapter of La Chartreuse de Parme, recounting the triumphant entry into Milan of Napoleon’s Republican conscript army in 1796. Henry arrived in 1800, the other side of the Treaty of Campo Formio of 1797. He dates Napoleon’s fall from grace surprisingly early: not to 1815 after Waterloo, nor to 1814, when he was first comprehensively defeated, nor to 1813, when he was retreating chaotically from Moscow, nor to 1804, when he had himself proclaimed Emperor and formally brought the Republic to an end, nor even to 1799, when he staged his Caesarist coup, but to 1797, when, despite all his rhetoric in support of Italian freedom, he occupied and then pragmatically ceded Venice and the Veneto to the Austrians. ‘Here ends Napoleon’s heroic phase’ (N, p. 618):
The occupation of Venice in May 1797 marks the end of the poetic and perfectly noble part of Napoleon’s life. Thenceforth, in order to safeguard his position, he had to resign himself to measures and expedients which were no doubt perfectly legitimate, but which can no longer give rise to passionate enthusiasm. (N, p. 571)
Put yet another way still, ‘In 1797, one could love him passionately and unreservedly; he had yet to rob his country of its liberty; nobody of his grandeur had emerged for centuries’ (N, p. 253).
For all Napoleon’s moral decline, the Milanese court of his stepson and viceroy, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, is repeatedly cited as a byword for glamour in La Chartreuse de Parme. Certainly Stendhal, as a young second lieutenant, found Milan and its environs a congenial place. Privileged young men had, of course, been finding all of Italy a congenial place for generations. Stendhal, used only to the drab provincialism of Grenoble and the Republican asceticism of Paris, suddenly found his life transformed: over a very short period of time, he had his first ice cream, tasted his first proper coffee, went to his first opera, lost his virginity, contracted syphilis and fell in love with Angela Pietragrua, who would eventually become his mistress on his return to Milan in 1811. Add to that allegedly sitting next to the author of Les Liaisons dangereuses in a box at La Scala, and you have a pretty overwhelming set of experiences for any seventeen year old.
Stendhal appears not to have had all that much to do as a soldier: he probably spent a lot of 1800–1801 thinking about sex. It used to be argued by literary critics that Stendhal’s novels were written as exercises in wish-fulfilment. All of Stendhal’s heroes are young and physically attractive in a way that gives rise to considerable sexual interest from his young and physically attractive heroines. The sex that is not described between these characters is simply fantastic – the sex that is described much less so, for it becomes worth describing precisely as it begins to subside into risible imperfection. It is hard to imagine Stendhal having perfect sex with anyone, even as a young man, not least given his own foregrounded accounts of intermittent erectile dysfunction, but actually his journal records what sounds like a lot of high-functioning sex with a very wide variety of women. Stendhal came especially to admire a number of these sexual partners, most notably Angela Pietragrua and Alberthe de Rubempré, but equally lots of other women with whom he did not have sexual relations. There are many times in his writings, whether fictional or private, when he quite clearly posits women as falling into two categories: potentially agreeable sexual partners and potentially agreeable conversational partners. He and his characters think of seducing the former but come to adore only the latter. Thus Stendhal describes Henry Brulard in Vienna in 1809 as ‘having a mistress I was screwing [que j’enfilais] and a mistress I adored’ (OI, II, p. 916). Lucien Leuwen likewise ponders the merits of having ‘a mistress in two volumes’: ‘Mme de Chasteller for the pleasures of the heart and Mme d’Hocquincourt for less metaphysical moments’ (ORC, II, p. 333). But actually Stendhal appears more aware than any other male French author of the nineteenth century I have come across that the purpose of women is not to divert men, but rather to satisfy themselves: his final novel, Lamiel, is seemingly written with the specific object of making this point as forcefully as possible. Stendhal’s various pronouncements quite often take the form of bravado, often calculated to chime with, and mock, the known prejudices of his interlocutors. This bravado also proceeded from his shyness, for let us not forget that Stendhal was, in his private thoughts, chiefly anxious and odd. In particular, Stendhal was often timid around the people he loved, remaining loyal to them long after they had broken off all contact, just as he remained loyal to the memory of Lambert.
In his young adulthood in Italy, Stendhal was particularly shy and self-conscious, especially around women. He endeavoured to conquer his timidity by learning how to have sex using exactly the same method he employed to learn how to do everything else: by studying the theory of the act, at least insofar as his sexually predatory fellow soldiers purported to understand it, in the hope of discovering in advance exactly what to do and say at the moment of performance (OI, I, pp. 20–21). Mérimée reports that, until the age of thirty, Stendhal had it as his rule, or at least so he claimed, to try to seduce any woman with whom he found himself alone: ‘“It pays off one time in every ten attempts”, he would say. “Well, the chance of one success in ten makes it worthwhile to meet with nine rebuffs”’ (HB, p. 455). Mérimée goes on to say that Stendhal ‘had suffered, as so many others do, from shyness in his youth. It’s a difficult thing for a young man to enter a salon. He imagines everyone is looking at him and is always afraid of not behaving correctly’ (HB, p. 455). Stendhal therefore devised a method for appearing calm in such situations, which consisted of making no changes to his bearing until such time as ‘the emotions of entering had passed’ (HB, p. 455).
Stendhal both dreaded and enjoyed performance. In particular, he made it his business to use performance to overcome his physical and mental disadvantages: his portliness, his timidity, his anxiety, his oddity. Surely, then, we can assume that he used his fictional alter egos, whether male or female, simply to erase all of his imperfections, or rather to substitute them with perfections: for portly, anxious and odd, read svelte, brave and singular.
However, this would be to miss the further point that the physical beauty of his fictional hero(in)es is intended as a joke on the profane reader, in thrall to conventional ideas of what we ought to envy in others, for their sexual attractiveness in fact works against them every bit as much as it works for them. Stendhal’s hero(in)es find themselves again and again reduced to their physical beauty, as though their intellect and their courage pale by comparison. To be physically beautiful, Stendhal concluded, is to remain, in some senses, invisible, precisely on account of the attention one attracts, just as passing for plain produces a different invisibility, on account of the attention one fails to attract – in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Merteuil writes approvingly about the value of invisibility and in particular about the time for observation and reflection that invisibility creates for the unfairly overlooked. For his part, Stendhal observes in De l’Amour that on the second day of acquaintance, beautiful people appear more ordinary, for the initial shock of their physical appearance has by then passed and this diminution of interest further obscures their real qualities (DA, p. 95); plain people, on the other hand, may generate sudden interest by revealing qualities of intelligence or character on the second day. As Stendhal argues, explicitly and implicitly, what we hold most dear in the people we love are their imperfections, of body and of mind, perhaps because these imperfections function as the signifiers of the intellect and courage and singularity that constitutes their real beauty. All that said, Stendhal gives every impression of knowing what it feels like to know oneself to be physically ugly and to observe not just intelligently, but invisibly and enviously, those generally understood to be beautiful. In this sense, the awkwardly tall (as opposed to fat) and physically ugly Théodelinde de Serpierre in Lucien Leuwen functions as Stendhal’s double, conceiving as she does a tender friendship for Lucien that ‘wasn’t love, for the poor girl didn’t dare; she was well aware of, and perhaps even exaggerated to herself, the defects of her height and her face’ (ORC, II, p. 386).
The young Stendhal sought to make up for his natural disadvantages by playing to his acquired advantages: his imagination and his logic. Another way of putting this is that he sought, with what we have already seen Gide refer to as ‘inverted sincerity’, to imagine himself as the person he wanted to be and then actually to become this person through a long process of habituation. Yet another way of putting this is that he sought not to delude himself but rather to see himself as he was, also as a means of understanding how others saw him. His chief object, nevertheless, was to make himself estimable, in his own eyes and, possibly even more importantly, in the eyes of those he himself esteemed. This process started in childhood. It would take him a long time to realize that even those who appeared to disdain him in fact also in part esteemed him, just as those who esteemed him also in part disdained him; it took him even longer to come to terms with that thought, for Stendhal trained himself to perceive other people in as much layered detail as possible, but would then be hampered by an impulse to accord them either all or none of his regard. He wanted either to adore as he adored his mother or to detest as he detested his father, to extend his esteem as he extended this to Pauline or to evince his contempt as he evinced this to Zénaïde – it is possible he came to understand that he never really knew anything solid about any of those people and that both his esteem and his contempt were frequently misplaced, although not always so.
After a while, towards the end of 1801, Stendhal tired of his life in Italy and decided to return to Paris to dedicate himself more fully to study and, for the first time, to literature. If Milan had proved the equivalent of a gap year, the bulk of the next five years was given over to serious study, with the exception, towards the end of that period, of a brief adventure in Marseille.
Stendhal’s real motive for returning to Paris may well have been his desire to become a famous writer or, put more accurately, to acquire literary glory. Whether military or literary, glory always appealed strongly to him, perhaps because glory alone justifies pride. But, as Lucien Leuwen puts it, ‘How can one talk about true virtue, glory or beauty to fools who understand nothing and try to sully with their mockery everything that is delicate?’ (ORC, II, p. 636). To Stendhal, glory was real in a way that literary reputation was not. He was fond of observing that the journalist Simon Linguet was as famous in his own era as Voltaire, more so even. Salvandy was similarly a famous and respected writer in Stendhal’s era. But Stendhal would come to understand that his own best works were lottery tickets that would one day win him literary glory, however posthumous; the tickets of Linguet, Salvandy and the other stuffed shirts who come to dominate any given literary market would, instead, be certain never to come up.
Armed with such insights, Stendhal set about acquiring his first ticket. He decided to write an epic poem, to be entitled La Pharsale (The Pharsalia). Stendhal may have been thinking of the way Voltaire greatly contributed to his early glory by producing an epic poem, La Henriade (The Henriad, 1728). Eventually, Stendhal was to acquire the insight that the novel would become the dominant genre of the nineteenth century, but in 1802, the epic poem seemed both more prestigious and timeless.
Already on 9 March 1800 Stendhal’s first extant letter, written to his sister Pauline, had advised her to read Plutarch’s Greek Lives, as these had ‘formed the character of the man with the most beautiful soul and greatest genius ever, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ (CG, I, p. 4). By 22 January 1803, much preparatory reading and theoretical study having been undertaken in order to create the right conditions for La Pharsale to emerge, Stendhal wrote to his sister Pauline with the discovery that Plutarch was in fact more important even than Rousseau: his Parallel Lives, it turned out, constituted ‘the book of books: whoever reads it properly discovers that all other books are but their copies’ (CG, I, p. 71). Plutarch was the mother lode: almost all recent political events could be traced back to the Lives of his Greek and Roman heroes. Henry’s insight when he met Gros turned out to have a more universal application: Mme Roland, and Danton and Napoleon, were all Plutarchan heroes for the modern age, men and women of the Greek and Roman model, and to recognize them as such was to want to die if one couldn’t be just like them. What better material for stirring literature? Maybe La Pharsale would allow Stendhal to produce an artful allegory of recent political events? Bound to come up as a winning combination.
The year 1802 also saw the publication of Chateaubriand’s René, the dominant urtext of what would become the French version of Romanticism, eventually parodied by Stendhal in Armance. Chateaubriand could see that the epic poem would not, in fact, turn out to be the genre of the age. His antihero, René, was characterized by extremes of inaction and self-pity, all rendered in sonorous prose. Stendhal was repelled, at the time and throughout his life: ‘in general, I have to say, once and for all, that Chateaubriand’s ways of thinking, the gloominess of René, etc., could not be more opposed to [my] own way of thinking’ (OI, I, p. 1075). Chateaubriand was mediocre and false, a hypocrite and a liar, all posturing and fake emotion, forever ‘branl[ant]’ his readers (CG, VI, p. 411). Moreover, literature had to be about men and women who did things, however foolishly, with the aim not just of wasting their lives away. They might be tyrannical, they might be idealistic, but literary hero(in)es should never be inactive. Rather, they should turn themselves into modern-day versions of Charlotte Corday or Napoleon, Marcus Brutus or Julius Caesar. Stendhal was beginning to see that from Plutarch had sprung Montaigne and Rousseau, as well as a new wave of European tragedians, most notably Schiller and Vittorio Alfieri. To that list, he hoped eventually to add himself.
For the time being, Stendhal was focusing on a very specific type of Plutarchan hero: the great generals and conquerors, for example Julius Caesar, as his bombastic choice of subject demonstrated. The Battle of Pharsalus saw Caesar gain a decisive victory over Pompey’s republican forces in the civil war. As one biographer, Victor Del Litto, points out in some perplexity, ‘it seems curious that, at a time when young Beyle claims to adhere to the most intransigent Jacobinism, he should admire the figure of Julius Caesar.’1 As he goes about composing his poem, Stendhal defines Caesar in overtly Napoleonic terms. Some thirty years later, Stendhal would still be writing of Napoleon as ‘the greatest man to appear in the world since Caesar’ (N, p. 257).
So did Stendhal indeed hopelessly detach himself from his childhood Republicanism and embark on a career as a craven apologist for Napoleon’s evident will to power? Henry Brulard comments that in this period he had wished for two things: to study the political and military career of Turenne, a leader of men and conqueror admired by Napoleon, and ‘to write comedies like Molière and live with an actress’ (OI, II, p. 537). So much for the idealism of youth. But in 1803 Stendhal’s interest in La Pharsale started to wane and he instead conceived of a new project, Les Deux Hommes (The Two Men), about a con artist and his mark. In a marginal note Stendhal compares the dupe, an idealistic product of an Enlightenment education, to Caesar’s assassin, Marcus Brutus. By July 1804, a couple of months after the Senate had proclaimed Napoleon Emperor, Stendhal was clear in his mind that Brutus was the Plutarchan exemplar he most admired. Napoleon was out, intransigent Jacobinism was back in. From this point on, whatever his personal enthusiasm for the emperor, Stendhal appears consistently aware that the empire itself was a more or less enlightened tyranny. For example, ‘from 1807 onwards, I passionately desired that he [Napoleon] fail to conquer England, for where would one then find asylum?’ (OI, II, p. 858).
As Stendhal went about pursuing his literary endeavours, he was also busy acquiring a general education. His approach was methodical, based around a self-devised programme of study. His aim was to turn himself into a philosopher, a product not just of the Enlightenment, but of more contemporary thought, most notably as produced by Ideologues such as Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis. Dutifully, Stendhal ploughed through textbooks and treatises. It was just like going to university. But it wasn’t helping him to write great literature, or indeed any literature. In July 1805 he ran away to Marseille to live with an actress. By the middle of 1806, he was back in Paris, where he appears to have noticed that Pierre Daru was significantly further advanced in his stellar career. It was time to stop reading and to give up on the idea of writing: it was time instead to do something.
In many ways, this was the lesson that Stendhal spent the two years from 1804 to 1806 trying to teach himself. In particular, Stendhal had come to understand that he had fallen too much under the spell not so much of Plutarch but of Rousseau – Rousseau and Napoleon would eventually become the two dominant influences on Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et le Noir and likewise conspire to drive him a bit mad. If Stendhal’s life in Paris did indeed see him become ‘solitary and mad as a Spaniard’ (OI, II, p. 538), it was in large part because of his tendency to judge events using his imagination – in Le Rouge et le Noir, we are eventually told that this is ‘the error of a superior man’ (ORC, I, p. 672). If he came to ‘venerate’ Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy and Jean-Baptiste Say (OI, II, p. 538), it was in a bid to rid himself of this error, although even his engagement with hard-headed logic took the form of unbridled enthusiasm.
On and off, Rousseau had been a dominant influence on Stendhal since his teenage years. As early as July 1804, however, Stendhal was starting to see that this influence might have been unhealthy:
Construct my soul in such a way as to allow it the greatest possible happiness in the career that I expect to follow. I’ll be happier and frequently less virtuous [. . .] For example, last year I was made unhappy by my hatred for tyrants; I’ve been happier this year now that I hate them less. Yesterday, I read the life of the divine Brutus (Marcus, not Junius). It restored my hatred for tyrants, and since yesterday I’ve again been unhappy [. . .]
Hatred for tyrants has been my strongest passion after my love of glory.2
There are a number of things to be said about this note to self. First, it confirms Stendhal’s determination to do something with his life. Octave de Malivert and Lucien Leuwen, the two male characters most closely based on Stendhal’s own affective life, and even the impulsively energetic Julien Sorel, all run the risk of failing to develop their potential, giving way instead to the ever more concentrated, ever madder thoughts that swirl restlessly in their minds. Stendhal always gives the impression of constant, restless thought. He had a cult of energy; he was easily bored; he had a need to express himself, often using too many words. In adult life, he was self-assured and strong-willed, vivid and extrovert, overwhelming and overpowering, prone at every turn to challenge social norms and the injustice they seek to legitimate. He had a cult of generosity and cared little for money. He was extraordinarily sensitive, to himself and to others, and still really quite odd. He appears to have spent the bulk of his life trying to make that oddity work for him and staving off the recurring temptation to kill himself. If Stendhal valued singularity, it was no doubt because he was himself singular.
His experience of the Revolution and his studies, not just of the Ideologues, but of the philosopher Maine de Biran, from whom he derived his key idea of habituation – that is, the active training of perception as opposed to the passive experience of sensation – all predisposed him to the project of self-construction. At the very heart of this project, again and again, we find Rousseau just as we find Plutarch and Stendhal’s other key idea of emulation. All his adult life, Stendhal sought to habituate himself to respond according to the character he wished for himself, in emulation of the historical figures he most esteemed: Caesar, Danton and Napoleon; Marcus Brutus, Charlotte Corday and Mme Roland. But he also understood that emulation could lead to the madness of quixotry and the paranoid delusions of Rousseau.
Rousseau’s sense of himself as relatively good and natural in the midst of corrupt civilization prompted him to use Les Confessions to construct a narrative of himself to which he endeavoured to conform in his life. There was a problem though, as Stendhal increasingly came to acknowledge: Rousseau couldn’t see things as they were, having fallen peculiarly prey to his imagination. In particular, Stendhal appears acutely sensitive to Rousseau’s paranoia, no doubt because he was himself, to some extent, paranoid. As Mérimée puts it,
People claim that the police were everywhere under the Empire, and that Fouché knew everything that was being said in the salons of Paris. Beyle was convinced that this gigantic network of spies had retained all its occult power. As a result, he surrounded his every minor action with all manner of precautions. He would never write a letter without signing it using an assumed name: César Bombet, Cotonet, etc [. . .] and often he would start it with a sentence such as ‘I have today received your raw silk which I have sent to a warehouse pending its shipment.’ (HB, p. 456)
In part, these were reasonable precautions for someone whose adulthood was spent dodging the intrusions first of Fouché’s secret police and then of the Austrian police in Milan – he would eventually be thrown out of Milan in 1821, having come under suspicion of working as a spy, quite possibly because he never signed letters in his own name. But Stendhal was also simply paranoid, which is no doubt why Baudelaire intuited that he had a great fear of being made a dupe. Such paranoia came to define his emotional life as well. In one of the complements to De l’Amour, he defines love as a function of paranoia – ‘To be in love is always to be fearful’ (DA, p. 343) – and, as we’ve already seen, his entire system of friendship was founded on the notion that he feared only those he esteemed. But was Stendhal more than merely anxious and odd: was he in fact ‘mad as a Spaniard’ (OI, II, p. 538)?
When we consider his obsessive desire to be esteemed and to esteem, his paranoia and his documented tendency to contemplate suicide, we might conclude that he suffered from what might today be termed a borderline personality disorder. I think it much more likely that he was extremely perceptive and self-mocking, had read a lot of Rousseau and had made a conscious moral choice to be sincere and generous in his dealings with others. Stendhal – possibly like Octave in Armance – was not so much mentally ill as a Romantic.
Stendhal valued sincerity because he wished to make himself known to his friends. Similarly, he hoped to make sense of his friends by dint of generosity. This last concept rested on Stendhal’s empathetic attempt to see the world from the perspective of others, possibly also in order to find out the worst of what others thought of him – hence the paranoia. It is never good to find out the worst of what one’s friends think of you, particularly if you come across as singular. If Stendhal’s friends thought the worst of him, probably this was because they found it hard to make sense of his singular and suspicious nature. Put another way, they were probably quite frightened by his powers of perception as suddenly revealed to them in moments of inexplicable insight. They appear not to have really understood how he thought. It is thanks to this understanding that he could use his novels to reveal, in quite astonishing detail, the processes by which his protagonists think. It is the detail of his understanding of how minds work – what he more generally terms ‘the genius of suspicion’ (OI, II, p. 430) – that makes Stendhal a ‘question mark of a man’ and ‘France’s last great psychologist’, to quote Nietzsche (himself, of course, quite singular).3 In particular, Stendhal used self-analysis and the analysis of his friends and exemplars in order the better to construct himself.
There appear to have been two impulses behind Stendhal’s decision to construct himself: the desire to make himself estimable, if not to the general run of his peers then at least to himself and eventually to the happy few; and the desire not to give himself up entirely to paranoia, misanthropy and apathetic isolation. It was time to invent a relatively stable imaginary self to which to conform.
This imaginary self would have a career, playing its part in society. The decision to participate actively in a corrupt world is analysed at length in Lucien Leuwen: it comes down to Montaigne’s advice to ‘grapple with necessity’ (ORC, II, p. 369). How can one know anything about oneself if one refuses to engage with the world and to assert oneself, as well as the counter-normative values one holds dear? As Stendhal put it to Mérimée when the latter announced he was starting to learn Greek, aged 25, ‘You’re on the field of battle [. . .]; now’s not the time to polish your rifle; you need to start shooting’ (HB, p. 455).
Stendhal’s imaginary self would come to be defined by the related philosophies contained within his notions of beylisme (a term that first surfaces in Stendhal’s writings in 1811) and égotisme (which Stendhal associates particularly with his return to Paris in 1821). For the time being, though, it was largely defined by a rejection of Rousseau’s influence (and the equally brooding influence of the Italian tragedian Vittorio Alfieri) in favour of what he would go on to term the hunt for happiness.
Stendhal coins the verb dérousseauiser in a journal entry of 21 November 1804. It was then that he committed himself fully to the study of Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis and a broad range of other contemporary thinkers. The aim was to ‘de-Rousseauize my judgement’ (OI, I, p. 152), that is, temper his Rousseauvian proto-Romanticism with realism, by which he meant a logical, detached – and if at all possible, amused – apprehension of things as they are. At heart, this was a Voltairean project. Of the major novelists of the nineteenth century, Stendhal’s birth in 1783 made him by far the most eighteenth century of the major novelists of the nineteenth century. The title of Le Rouge et le Noir is, in addition to the many other things already discussed, a nod in the direction of Voltaire’s Le Blanc et le Noir (The White and the Black, 1764): Stendhal’s novel plays endlessly and artfully with a range of eighteenth-century intertexts, functioning at times especially as a three-way dialogue between Stendhal, Voltaire and Rousseau.
On 30 April 1805, Stendhal lays a bout of ‘madness’ at Rousseau’s door; on 6 February 1806, he says he should resolve himself to become a hypocrite; and so on. The need to shrug off Rousseau’s influence, and with it the dupery of sincerity, appears as a thread running through Stendhal’s writings all the way up to 1811. A first attempt to grapple with necessity led him, in July 1805, to run off to Marseille to live with the actress Mélanie Guilbert. Given Rousseau’s stated horror of the theatre, this was a promising start. While in Marseille, Stendhal additionally decided to try his hand at commerce by working for an export company, Charles Meunier & Cie. Quite rapidly, the world of business ceased to appeal, and so, against all the odds, did living with an actress.
Stendhal was easily bored. He could be very charming, especially with women, whom he tended very much to like, as well as with children, whom he finally could not be bothered with, but whom he refused to patronize with hypocritical nonsense – a refreshing change for them, then as now. It is one thing to charm, though, and quite another to cohabit. Stendhal found domestic life extremely difficult, even in its highly approximate and unconventional form as Mélanie Guilbert’s live-in lover.
Mérimée observes wearily that ‘I never once saw him not in love with a woman or thinking himself so’ (HB, p. 449). Brulard, for his part, tells us that ‘For me, love has always been the most important thing in my life, or rather the only important thing’ (OI, II, p. 767). What Stendhal meant by love is artfully picked over in De l’Amour and then in the first four of his novels. The fifth, Lamiel, is very radically written from the perspective of a highly intelligent young woman, and so finds nothing but amused contempt for the love that men have to offer. Stendhal truly did understand that love takes the form of a will to power: ‘true passions are selfish’ (ORC, I, p. 469); ‘all true passion thinks only of itself’ (ORC, I, p. 559). He also understood that passion was no more than euphoric infatuation, which, in his case, on account of his sincerity and his powers of empathy, he could sustain indefinitely, albeit mostly intermittently so. Mérimée offers the following testament to the constancy of Stendhal’s infatuations:
Page from the Vie de Henry Brulard, written and drawn in Stendhal’s hand, setting out the paths his life could have taken: the path of madness; the path of the art of making oneself read; the path of worldy success; the path of acquiring wealth through commerce or position. The starting point A is the moment of birth (OI, II, pp. 670–71).
He’d just seen Madame Curial, then aged 47, and had found himself to be every bit as much in love with her as on the first day. They’d both had many other passions in the meantime. ‘How can you still love me at my age?’, she’d said. He’d shown her how very well, and I never saw him betray so much emotion. He was welling up as he told me about it. (HB, pp. 449–50)
The states and phases of Stendhal’s infatuations are described in amused, self-critical detail in De l’Amour, and then again in the novels. In Le Rouge et le Noir, Julien Sorel famously falls in love with two women: Louise de Rênal and Mathilde de La Mole. In a complement to De l’Amour, Stendhal observes that ‘Nobody can give themselves over to two loves’ and ‘A new love chases out the old’ (DA, pp. 341–3). These maxims are illustrated by the third, generally less remarked upon love of Julien’s life: Amanda Binet. Amanda works behind a bar in Besançon; Julien enters the bar; he falls in love with her; he quarrels with a man whom he perceives as his rival for Amanda’s affections; they come close to fighting; he leaves; Amanda is forgotten. But perhaps, if he had ever seen her again, he would immediately have reverted to loving her.
A page spread from the Vie de Henry Brulard, written in Stendhal’s hand, listing the loves of Stendhal’s life (OI, II, p. 541).
Biographies of Stendhal always run the risk of losing themselves in Stendhal’s love affairs, whether consummated or not. At any given moment in time, he is in some phase or other of courtship. In 1802, he fell in love with a cousin, Adèle Rebuffel; not long after, he was sleeping with her mother; in 1803, he fell in love with Victorine Mounier; not long after, he was in Marseille cohabiting with Mélanie Guilbert, having met her while taking lessons with the actor Dugazon. Napoleon famously took acting lessons from François-Joseph Talma. In part, Stendhal was following the emperor’s example; in part, he was trying to prepare himself for a career as a playwright.
Given that Stendhal is about to head off around Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s armies, with a view to having as much sex as possible, I do not propose to chronicle his romantic life in extenso. Instead, I shall follow Brulard’s prudent lead and focus only on those relationships that reshaped Stendhal’s outlook and therefore helped define both his sense of self and his fictions. Chivalrously, Brulard lists twelve such relationships, but there are essentially only six: Wilhelmine (more usually given as Mina or Minette) von (more usually given as de) Griesheim, Angela Pietragrua, Métilde Dembowski, Clémentine Curial, Alberthe de Rubempré and Giulia Rinieri. Other women mattered to him enormously also, whether he wanted to sleep with them or not, but insofar as his relationships allowed him to rethink everything about the way human beings engage with each other, these six were the ones that mattered.
Stendhal left Mélanie Guilbert to her career, abandoned his own and returned to Paris in the summer of 1806. On 3 August of that year, he joined a masonic lodge. But Stendhal also had the Darus to fall back on, and they were suddenly proving themselves to be incredibly useful. Less than three months later, Stendhal accompanied Martial Daru, Pierre’s much-less-daunting brother, to Berlin, arriving in Napoleon’s wake on 27 October. A few days later, Pierre Daru appointed him to a provisional position as an imperial administrator in Brunswick. On 13 November, he arrived to take up his first proper post. He was suddenly launched in his career as a bureaucrat.
Second of two pages from the Vie de Henry Brulard listing the loves of Stendhal’s life (OI, II, pp. 541–2).
It was while he was in Brunswick, trying to learn how to be a civilian and military administrator, how to write administrative reports and how to get on with the understandably frosty local notables, that he met Mina de Griesheim, a model for the heroines of Mina de Vanghel (composed 1829–30), Tamira Wanghen (composed 1837) and Le Rose et le vert (The Pink and the Green, composed 1837), as well as, more obscurely, for Bathilde de Chasteller in Lucien Leuwen. What is immediately striking about the narrative of Mina de Vanghel in particular is how self-willed its heroine appears: there is no sense of her wishing in any way to fit around, or meet the expectations of, the male object of her affections. Rather it is he who is expected to meet her expectations, such as they are, for actually, even when she is thinking about him, she is in fact thinking only of herself. Mina de Griesheim was haughty, distant and self-absorbed, while also being capable of sincerity. What is striking about the majority of the women Stendhal pursued is that sense of fierce independence, bordering on a complete lack of cooperation.
The reason Stendhal has frequently been identified as a proto-feminist is that he consistently places his female characters at the centre of their own narratives, seemingly valuing women precisely for their agency as subjects, including as sexual subjects. Stendhal consistently identifies women as being freer than their oppressors, more sexually dominant than their male lovers, more intelligent than their male peers, braver than the men who imagine themselves heroes, less conventional than even the most singular of their suitors. He also consistently identifies them as possessing the hauteur of a Mme Roland, a Charlotte Corday or a Mina de Griesheim, whatever their outward appearance of either boldness or timidity. All women, Stendhal seems to think, potentially possess such hauteur, for they have met men and been left unimpressed.
Stendhal tells us he never did manage to sleep with Mina who, undeniably, possessed hauteur. In De l’Amour, he revealingly tells us that there isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t swap half of his remaining days for the chance to see the woman he loves naked. Female nudity, including that of his mother when he was an infant, was important to Stendhal: more so, it would seem, than sex – in De l’Amour, he suggests that sex is only really satisfying if timed correctly at the peak of obsessive interest. Sex for Stendhal was finally more a physical than a cerebral pleasure, and therefore both coarse and secondary. Stendhal expressed his love for women by talking with them.
Stendhal as bureaucrat, here in a portrait attributed to Edme Quenedey (1756–1830), c. 1807, physionotrace charcoal portrait.
Anonymous artist, Minette (Mina) de Griesheim, c. 1820, miniature portrait.
Admiration, esteem, or the recognition of what Stendhal refers to as merit, each play a huge part in Stendhal’s definitions of love. Certainly, he admired Mina de Griesheim. Certainly, also, he could never have settled down with her, particularly not in Brunswick, nor anywhere. He records her squeezing his hand on one occasion, and that appears to have been enough for him. What he really wanted to do was to one day write about her. As for his immediate sexual needs, he appears to have found it quite easy to meet these, first in Brunswick and then on a series of further bureaucratic missions, every new assignment bringing with it a new set of potential assignations.
Stendhal’s gradually accelerating administrative career took him from Brunswick, where he had been permanently appointed as an adjunct War Commissar on 11 July 1807, to a more glamorous post jointly administering the newly created Department of the Ocker in Westphalia. He was authorized to style himself an Intendant of the Imperial Domains and, for the first time in his life, found himself a person of some consequence, at least in his own little corner of Napoleon’s empire.
Perversely, he decided to mark his elevation with a return to thoughts of writing. Part of 1808 was given over to an ill-starred history of the War of the Spanish Succession: even with such a gift of a topic, he was still struggling to find his voice. More positively, he managed to find a way of leaving Westphalia, first for Paris, then for Vienna – where, in 1809, he attended a performance of Mozart’s Requiem to mark the death of Haydn a few days earlier – and thence to Hungary. Busy as he was, he found the time to fall in love with Alexandrine Daru, the wife of his patron Pierre. What part attempted career suicide played in this unexpected turn of events is hard to gauge. She appears to have been very fond of him, which is, no doubt, why he fell in love with her, and to have been really quite extraordinarily patient in her dealings with him.
It is at this point that he visited Salzburg and saw the salt mine that would lead to his famous theory of cristallisation: the process of falling in love is likened by Stendhal, in De l’Amour, to taking a stick and throwing it into a salt mine. When you pull the stick out, it is covered in crystals and so looks much better than it really is. Love is not about things (or individuals) as they are, but rather things (or individuals) as we reimagine them. Love is quixotic. There’s a limit, I think, to how interesting or helpful this image actually is, but it has ended up as something for which Stendhal is quite widely known.
In 1810, he again returned to Paris, and it is at this point that he became somebody not just in his own eyes, but in the eyes of his peers. In August, he was appointed as an auditor in Napoleon’s Conseil d’État, finally joining the fast stream. Stendhal celebrated by falling in love with an opera singer, Angéline Bereyter, considering marriage to a certain Jenny Leschenault and then choosing this precise moment to declare himself to Alexandrine Daru – who very kindly rebuffed him with a minimum of fuss on her part – before heading off on a tour of the west of France in the company of two childhood friends, Louis Crozet and Félix Faure. He then took another period of leave and returned to Milan in 1811, where his new wealth and status appears to have prompted Angela Pietragrua to see him in a radically new light. He declared himself, a mere eleven years after first falling for her, and they quickly became lovers. He then set off on a triumphal tour of Italy, all in some style. Life would never be this good again, at least looked at from a vulgar perspective.
Stendhal’s long Italian idyll eventually came to an end and he returned to Paris, where Napoleon was preparing his next campaign. Stendhal would be allowed to join the Grande Armée in its assault on Russia. The march on Moscow and subsequent disastrous retreat are the only major historical events from the Napoleonic period that Stendhal witnessed at first hand – he was in Vienna at the right time for the battle of Aspern-Essling, but wisely stuck to sightseeing; he was ill and stayed in bed for the battle of Wagram, despite his claim in the opening paragraph of the Vie de Henry Brulard to having witnessed it. Understandably, neither battle made a particularly strong impression on him, except perhaps in his imagination.
Stendhal arrived in Moscow on 14 September 1812, working on his new literary project, of which more later, and contracting a fever. While there, he rescued – or looted – a book from one of the burning houses: Voltaire’s Facéties. Mérimée tells us that Stendhal felt a kind of guilt on account of its being a volume from a magnificently bound set of Voltaire’s works, now rendered incomplete thanks to him. On 16 October, Stendhal headed off back west to Smolensk, arriving only on 2 November. It was not an easy journey at that time of year, made yet more difficult by Cossack harrying. His mission was to organize supplies for the retreat. This he managed to do, receiving Pierre Daru’s congratulations in the name of the emperor for eventually providing the Grande Armée with bread somewhere between the town of Orsha and the Bobr River on or around 23 November – these would be the only rations they would receive as they made their way back to the natural obstacle provided by another river, the Berezina.
Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), Alexandrine Daru, 1810, oil painting.
Stendhal was very interested in the question of whether or not he was brave. At various points between 1800 and 1812, he had found himself confronted with real danger, and he was pleased, on the whole, with how he had comported himself at those moments. But Russia was to provide a quite different sort of challenge, to which, admittedly mainly by his own account, he rose magnificently.
First page of a letter by Stendhal to his sister Pauline, 5 May 1810, at 2 o’clock in the morning: Stendhal is responding to the news that a former flame, Victorine Mounier, is getting married, by bemoaning his relative poverty and the consequent impossibility of his marrying (CG, II, pp. 24–5).
We know from Mérimée the stories Stendhal subsequently told his friends of this period in his life. Many of these focus on the calm he was determined to keep in a crisis. This calm was the product of habituation, Stendhal having taught himself tricks to master his emotions at moments of great peril. Thus Mérimée tells us that when fighting a duel, Stendhal would preserve the appropriate sangfroid by looking at a tree while his opponent was taking aim and counting its leaves (HB, p. 455). He needed all his sangfroid now, for he was about to re-cross the Berezina and so participate in one of the most horrific episodes in European military history:
One morning, in the vicinity of the Berezina, he appeared before M. D[aru], clean-shaven and dressed with some care. ‘You’ve shaved!’, M. D[aru] told him. ‘You have a stout heart.’ M. B[ergonié], one of the Auditors of the Conseil d’État, told me that he owed his life to B[eyle]. Foreseeing how congested the bridges would become, he had made him cross the Berezina the evening before the rout. It had almost been necessary to employ force to get him to walk a few hundred yards. M. B[ergonié] hailed the composure shown by B[eyle], as well as the good sense which did not fail him at a time when even the most resolute were losing their heads. (HB, p. 448)
To put Stendhal’s self-possession and foresight in perspective, the following day around 80,000 men tried to cross a partially frozen, marshy river in sub-zero temperatures under continuous Russian bombardment. The bridges were soon destroyed, so four hundred Dutch engineers built a pontoon bridge out of scrapwood that required constant repair as it collapsed under fire. Four Swiss infantry regiments fought a rearguard action to protect the Dutch as they worked for hours in the water. Only eight of the Dutch engineers survived, and only three hundred of the 4,000 or so Swiss. Russian eyewitnesses reported the eerie spectacle of dead Dutch engineers suspended in the ice of the river, still clutching their tools.
Stendhal appears to have been fascinated by the overwhelming majority that collectively lost their heads, and by the minority that kept theirs, even as they lost their lives. He was likewise fascinated by later routs of the French army. Mérimée goes on to report the following alleged incident:
In 1813, B[eyle] by chance witnessed an entire brigade being routed by the unexpected charge of five Cossacks. B[eyle] saw approximately two thousand men, including five generals, identifiable by their brimmed hats, all in full flight. He was running away with the rest of them, with difficulty, for he was wearing one of his boots and carrying the other in his hand. Only two men out of the entire French corps proved brave enough to confront the Cossacks: a military policeman [. . .] and a conscript, who managed to kill the policeman’s horse while trying to fire at the Cossacks. B[eyle] was given the task of reporting on this mass panic to the Emperor, who heard him out in a cold fury, whilst turning in his hands one of those iron contraptions designed to hold window shutters in place. An attempt was made to find the policeman in order to award him the Legion of Honour, but at first he tried to hide, before denying that he’d been present at the engagement, convinced that nothing good can come from attracting attention to oneself in a rout. He thought he would be shot. (HB, pp. 448–9)
On his return from Moscow, Stendhal was discouraged, exhausted and chronically ill. He had been hoping for a posting in Italy, there to resume the high life of 1811. Failing that, he had been hoping to be promoted to the rank of prefect and given his own department to administer. Instead, he was overlooked, possibly on account of his failure to hide his contempt and boredom when mixing with his peers, possibly because he was not in fact as good at his job as he liked to think he was.
In Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal uses two epigraphs attributed to Danton: the first, as has already been noted, points the reader to the truth, the bitter truth; the second reads, ‘Oh Lord, grant me mediocrity!’ (ORC, I, p. 749). We might envisage Stendhal’s failure to advance further in his career in the light of these two epigraphs. The bitter truth is probably that Stendhal’s chief qualities – his wit, powers of perception, decisiveness, irritation when presented either with details or with fools – made him a lot of enemies among the many people who had succeeded in advancing themselves precisely by never demonstrating any of these peculiarities; there is a further bitter truth that his singularity made him suitable only for a position of leadership and yet he was forever being asked to follow. The even more flattering way of saying all of this is that Stendhal was in no way mediocre – one has but to read a page by him to realize this basic fact about the man – and his superiority could not but help get right up the noses of his contemporaries. Stendhal’s novels lightly represent the plight of singularity and superiority drowning in an ocean of mediocrity. But in his own life, there must have been a great deal of sadness at the indifference with which his best efforts were met. The last of the five or six main ideas that kept him occupied throughout his adult life was unquestionably the idea of failure.
In the spring of 1813, having spent a couple of months resting in Paris and catching up with both Mélanie Guilbert and Angéline Bereyter, Stendhal was packed off by Pierre Daru – very much against his will, his enthusiasm for the empire, as opposed to the emperor, having long been dissipating – to help organize the defensive campaign against Prussia. He left Paris on 19 April; passed through Dresden to have a look at some paintings by Correggio; observed the battle of Bautzen; and eventually witnessed the rout reported by Mérimée. As a result of this last incident, Stendhal was allegedly invited to a private interview with Napoleon, who again allegedly went so far as to touch him, grabbing his lapel in a moment of high emotion (CG, II, p. 644) – it’s just about possible that this really happened. Certainly, Stendhal submitted a report on the rout (CG, II, pp. 416–17) and had ‘a long conversation with His Majesty’ (CG, II, p. 419).
On paper, Stendhal’s career peaked in June 1813, when he was named intendant of the province of Sagan (now Żagań) in Lower Silesia (now in Poland). He had become the equivalent, however temporarily, of a prefect, at the head of his own ‘government’, ‘playing at being a tyrant’ (CG, II, p. 397). It was dull work. In July, he fell ill; in August Pierre Daru took pity on him and allowed him to return to Paris; in September he was back in Milan, for no good official reason, trying to make what sense he could of the mixed reception accorded to him by Angela Pietragrua; in November he set off back to Paris, via Grenoble, where Dr Gagnon had recently died; in December he was sent from Paris back to Grenoble, tasked with organizing the defence of the Dauphiné – things had not been going well for Napoleon. When would it all end? Soon enough.
