Stendhal

Stendhal
Stendhal in 1840. Painting by Olof Johan Södermark.
Born	Marie-Henri Beyle 23 January 1783 Grenoble, France
Died	23 March 1842 (aged 59) Paris, France
Pen name	Stendhal
Occupation	Novelist, writer on art and travel, consul
Notable works	Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) La Chartreuse de Parme (1839)
Signature

Stendhal (French: [stɛ̃dal]; 23 January 1783 – 23 March 1842) was the pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle, a French writer. He is best known for two novels. The first is Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830). The second is La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839). He also wrote books about love, art, music and travel. Several of his books tell the story of his own life. He was born in Grenoble, and he died in Paris.

Stendhal had an unhappy childhood. His mother died when he was seven, and he did not love his father. As a young man, he followed the armies of Napoleon as an official. He went to Italy in 1800, and then to Germany and Austria. In 1812, he went to Russia with the French army.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1814, he went to live in Milan. Italy became the country of his heart. From 1821 to 1830, he lived in Paris. There he was known as a witty talker in the salons, the social gatherings of the time.

In 1831, he became the French consul in Civitavecchia. A consul is an official who represents his country in a foreign town. Civitavecchia was a small port in the lands of the Pope. He died in Paris in 1842, after a stroke, a sudden illness of the brain.

He first became known for books on painting, music and travel. These early books drew heavily on the work of earlier writers, often without saying so. He signed them with false names. In 1817, he used the name Stendhal for the first time. His book De l'amour (On Love, 1822) explains how love grows in the mind. He called this process "crystallisation". In Racine et Shakespeare (1823), he defended a modern literature.

He wrote his first novel, Armance, only at the age of forty-three. The Red and the Black tells the story of Julien Sorel. Julien is a poor and ambitious young man in France after the fall of Napoleon.

Stendhal composed The Charterhouse of Parma in less than two months. He worked from drafts and dictated the text to a copyist. Its chapters on the Battle of Waterloo were admired by Balzac and later by Tolstoy.

Many of his works stayed unfinished. Among them are the novels Lucien Leuwen and Lamiel. Another is the story of his childhood, Vie de Henry Brulard. They were published only many years after his death.

Stendhal wanted a clear and simple style. He later claimed that he read the French Civil Code, the book of French civil law, to find the right tone. He often told his stories through the eyes of one character. At the same time, the narrator often speaks with humour and irony. The narrator is the voice that tells the story.

His heroes are young people full of energy. They look for happiness in a society that blocks their way. He wrote for a few readers who could feel as he did. He called them "the happy few".

His novels had only limited and uneven success during his life. But Balzac praised The Charterhouse of Parma in a long article. Stendhal believed that readers would understand him around 1880. At the end of the 19th century, he became one of the most loved writers in France. Today he is seen as one of the great novelists of the 19th century. Writers such as Tolstoy and Friedrich Nietzsche admired him.

Life

Family and childhood (1783–1796)

Much of what is known about Stendhal's childhood comes from his own account, the Life of Henry Brulard, which he wrote in 1835 and 1836. This book is not always exact. Michael Wood shows that its opening scene is a fiction. Victor Brombert shows that it hides as much as it shows: Stendhal wanted to be sincere, but he also enjoyed disguise. Many of the stories below are his own memories, told many years later.

The house where Stendhal was born, at 14 rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau in Grenoble.

Marie-Henri Beyle was born on 23 January 1783 in Grenoble. The house stood in a narrow street, then called rue des Vieux-Jésuites. Today it is number 14, rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. Henri was the oldest of three children and the only son. His sister Pauline was born in 1786, and his sister Zénaïde in 1788.

His father, Chérubin Beyle, was a lawyer at the parliament of Grenoble. In France before the Revolution, a parliament was a high court of law. In his memories, Henri described his father as a cold man who thought all the time about buying and selling land.

His mother, Henriette Gagnon, died in childbirth on 23 November 1790. She was thirty-three years old. Henri was seven. Much later, in his autobiography, the story of his own life, he described his love for her as a great passion. He wrote about it very openly. He also wrote that his inner life, the life of his mind and feelings, began with her death.

He later remembered that at first he could not cry. He cried for her only more than a year later, alone in his bed at night. He began his autobiography on 23 November 1835. This was forty-five years to the day after her death.

After this loss, the family lived a closed and quiet life. His mother's sister, Séraphie Gagnon, was very religious. In his memories, the boy saw her as an enemy. From December 1792, a priest called Raillane was his private teacher. He later wrote that he hated him.

As he told it later, the adults kept him away from other children. He was not allowed to play in the street. He was not allowed to swim in the river Isère either. Raillane always spoke about the dangers of swimming, and Henri never learned to swim. His sister Pauline was his friend. His younger sister Zénaïde often told the adults what he did.

In his account, his best refuge was his grandfather, Henri Gagnon. He was a respected doctor in Grenoble. He was also a man of the Enlightenment. This was the movement of the 18th century that trusted reason and science. His large house on the place Grenette was only about a hundred steps from the Beyle house. On its sunny terrace, the doctor taught the boy the names of the stars and of plants.

The grandfather spoke Italian. The boy came to believe that the Gagnon family had come from Italy. In his mind, the Beyle side of the family meant power, money and coldness. The Gagnon side meant culture, wit, gaiety and tenderness. He connected this happy side with Italy.

His great-aunt Élisabeth Gagnon and his uncle Romain Gagnon belonged to this side too. Romain was a lawyer who liked women. He took the boy to the theatre.

Books gave him another way to escape. He talked about many of them with his grandfather. Among them were the French writers Fénelon and Molière, and the Latin poets Horace and Ovid. His mother had read Dante in Italian. Henri wrote his name for the first known time in her copy of the Divine Comedy.

The long Italian poems of Ariosto and Tasso gave him a lasting love of passionate adventure stories. He also read La Nouvelle Héloïse, a novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in secret. In the family's country house at Claix, he read Don Quixote. He later remembered that the book made him laugh for the first time since his mother's death. His father, he wrote, tried several times to take it away from him.

The Revolution seen by a child

Henri grew up during the French Revolution. On 7 June 1788, the people of Grenoble rose against the king's soldiers. They threw tiles from the roofs. The event became known as the Day of the Tiles. The boy was five years old. He later remembered seeing a wounded worker slowly climb the stairs of the house next door.

His family supported the king, but Henri became a passionate republican. King Louis XVI was executed on 21 January 1793. His family was in despair. He later wrote that he secretly felt great joy.

On 26 April 1793, the revolutionary authorities in Grenoble published lists of people suspected of being against the Republic. His father's name was on the list of the "notoriously suspect". Goldzink writes that his father was held until July 1794.

In the spring of 1794, Henri wrote a false letter to join the Battalion of Hope. This was a group of children organised by the Jacobins, the most active revolutionaries. His family discovered the trick.

School and mathematics (1796–1799)

Pupils of the École centrale of Grenoble. Drawing by their teacher Louis-Joseph Jay. Henri Beyle may be one of them.

On 21 November 1796, Henri entered the École centrale of Grenoble. The Revolution had created such state schools to replace the old religious schools. For the first time, he had friends of his own age. Two of them were Félix Faure and Louis Crozet. His teacher of literature, Dubois-Fontanelle, showed him the great foreign writers. One of them was Shakespeare. He also learned drawing and logic.

In these years he discovered music. He later called it his strongest and most costly passion. His aunt Séraphie died in 1797.

Mathematics became his way out of Grenoble. Good students in mathematics could enter the new École Polytechnique, a school for engineers in Paris. Henri took private lessons from Gabriel Gros, a teacher who did not work at the school. Much later, the name Gros appeared again in The Red and the Black. On 15 September 1799, Henri won the first prize in mathematics. On 30 October, he left Grenoble for Paris. He later remembered that his father cried when he left.

Paris and the first journey to Italy (1799–1802)

On 9 November 1799, he stopped at the coach station of Nemours. There he heard the news of a coup d'état. A coup d'état is a sudden and illegal seizure of power. General Bonaparte had taken control of the French government. Henri arrived in Paris the next day. He then changed his plans. He did not take the entrance examination of the École Polytechnique.

Paris disappointed him. He felt very lonely, and he soon fell ill. His relatives, the Daru family, took care of him. Noël Daru, the head of the family, was a first cousin of his grandfather. In January 1800, his cousin Pierre Daru gave him a job at the Ministry of War. Pierre Daru was a powerful official. He was a hard and demanding master. He always thought that his young cousin knew nothing.

On 7 May 1800, Henri left Paris to join Pierre Daru and his brother Martial, who were with the army on its way to Italy. On the way, a captain named Burelvillers taught him how to ride a horse. He also taught him how to use a sword. Henri crossed the Alps by the Great St Bernard Pass. At the top of the pass stood a hospice, a house where monks received travellers. He arrived there wet, tired and hungry.

On the way to Milan, he heard an opera by Domenico Cimarosa. It was Il matrimonio segreto (The Secret Marriage). He felt a pure and perfect happiness. He never forgot it. Later, he often called himself "Dominique" in his private writings. The name came from the first name of Cimarosa.

He reached Milan on 10 June 1800. There he met Angela Pietragrua, a beautiful married woman. He loved her in silence. He did not dare to tell her. On 23 September 1800, he became a second lieutenant in the 6th regiment of dragoons. He owed this post to Pierre Daru. Dragoons were soldiers who fought on horseback.

He later used this experience of army life in his novel Lucien Leuwen. In 1801, General Michaud took him on his staff as an aide-de-camp, an officer who helps a general in his work. But the army bored him. In December 1801, he went back to France because he was ill. In a letter of 20 July 1802, he resigned from the army. He wanted to become a poet.

Learning to be a writer (1802–1806)

From 1802 to 1806, Henri lived mostly in Paris. His father sent him money every month, first 150 francs and then 200 francs. It was enough to live on. It was not enough to dress in fashion. He wanted to become a great writer for the theatre. He started many plays. For years he worked on a comedy called Letellier, but he never finished it.

In the opinion of Jean Goldzink, he had chosen the wrong form. He expected everything from the theatre. He came to the novel only in 1827.

He read a great deal. He studied philosophers such as Hobbes, Condillac, Helvétius and Destutt de Tracy. Again and again, he read the plays of Shakespeare, Corneille and Molière. He also read those of the Italian poet Alfieri. His teachers in thought were the Idéologues. They were a group of thinkers who studied how the mind forms ideas.

For Beyle, reading, writing and living were closely joined. He used books to understand himself and other people. He also kept a diary, his Journal. The part that survives begins on 18 April 1801.

In these years, he worked out a personal method for finding happiness. It is known as "beylism", from his family name. Its aim was to know society and to know oneself. A person cannot change the world. But a person can change himself, and so take as much pleasure from life as possible. In long letters, he tried to teach these ideas to his sister Pauline.

At this time, he did not admire Napoleon. He was a republican. In his diary, he attacked the union of religion and tyranny. His great admiration for the Emperor came only later.

In December 1804, he met a young actress, Mélanie Guilbert, in a class for actors. Her stage name was Louason. She was one of only two women with whom he ever lived as a couple. In 1805, she went to work at the theatre of Marseille, and he followed her. In Marseille, he worked for a business that exported goods.

In Marseille, he also wanted to start a bank. But his father refused to give him the money. So he worked for a trading house and kept its accounts, from July 1805 to May 1806. Mélanie left Marseille on 1 March 1806. By then, Henri had failed in love, in literature and in business.

In the service of Napoleon (1806–1814)

On 16 October 1806, Henri followed Martial Daru to Germany. On 27 October, he entered Berlin behind Napoleon's army, which had just defeated the Prussians. Two days later, he became an assistant to the war commissioners. These were the officials who supplied the army.

On 8 November, he left with Martial Daru for the city of Brunswick. He worked hard, but he was often bored. He fell in love with Wilhelmine von Griesheim, the daughter of the former governor of Brunswick. He called her Mina.

He left Brunswick in November 1808. In 1809, he followed Pierre Daru in the war against Austria. He was not present at the great Battle of Wagram. But his work was to find lodgings and hospitals for the army. So he saw the war from close behind the front line. According to Goldzink, this experience helped him later. It helped him to describe the Battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma.

A decree of 1 August 1810 made him an auditor at the Council of State. Auditors were young officials who helped this high council of the government in its work. He was also made an inspector of the furniture and buildings of the Crown. He worked on the lists of the Musée Napoléon, today the Louvre. This work opened the history of art to him.

Now he lived like a rich young man. He wrote his name "de Beyle", as if he were a noble. He had a carriage, fine clothes and debts. His mistress, Angelina Bereyter, was a singer. She sang the music of Cimarosa and Mozart for him. In secret, he loved Alexandrine Daru, the wife of Pierre Daru.

On 29 August 1811, he left for Italy. He felt that he needed to love and to be loved. In Milan, he knocked at the door of Angela Pietragrua, eleven years after their first meeting. She recognised him and cried out that he was "the Chinese man". On 21 September 1811, she finally became his lover. He wrote the date and the hour on his braces. During this journey, he had the idea of a book on the history of Italian painting.

On 23 July 1812, he left Paris in a carriage. He was going to follow the Grande Armée, Napoleon's great army, into Russia, as a messenger of the Emperor. He carried official letters, the unfinished Letellier, and the manuscript of his book on Italian painting. He saw the city of Smolensk in flames. Then he saw the great fire of Moscow in September 1812. In Moscow, he took only one book, a volume of Voltaire.

During the terrible retreat, the army suffered from hunger, cold and the attacks of the Cossacks. Beyle kept his calm. He even took time to shave in freezing weather. He crossed the bridges of the Berezina River early, before the great crowd arrived. The manuscript on painting was lost on the way. Only Letellier came back.

He was back in Paris on 31 January 1813. In April, he was sent to Germany again, where the war had started once more. On 20 May 1813, he watched the Battle of Bautzen. He wrote that all one can see of a battle is nothing. But illness sent him home. He spent the autumn of 1813 in Milan. In December 1813, he was named assistant to Count de Saint-Vallier. The count had to organise the defence of Grenoble against the allied armies.

At the end of March 1814, he returned to Paris. On 30 March, the armies fought on the hill of Montmartre, at the edge of the city. These events left him indifferent. He saw the fall of Napoleon and the return of the Bourbon kings. The new government ended the post of auditor, and Beyle lost his position. He later wrote that the fall of the Empire had given him pleasure. He sold everything and decided to live in Italy, where life cost half as much.

Milan (1814–1821)

In the spring and early summer of 1814, he wrote his first book. It was called Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase (Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio). Much of it was copied from other authors. He left Paris on 20 July. He reached Milan on 10 August 1814. He lived in Milan until 1821, with some long journeys.

His love for Angela Pietragrua did not bring him happiness. She kept him at a distance and sent him away on journeys. On 15 October 1815, he wrote in his diary that his love was dead. In December 1815, she ended the relationship.

Later, his friend Prosper Mérimée told a story about this break. Stendhal, he said, had seen Angela with another man through a hole in a door. Goldzink doubts this story. He thinks that it belongs to the image of himself that Stendhal liked to give to others.

In these years, he signed his books with false names. His first book was signed Louis-Alexandre-César Bombet. The next one was signed M.B.A.A. The letters meant "Monsieur Beyle, Ancien Auditeur" (Mr Beyle, former auditor). This was the Histoire de la peinture en Italie (History of Painting in Italy, 1817). Again, Beyle copied large parts of it from other books.

The same year, Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 (Rome, Naples and Florence in 1817) appeared. It was signed "M. de Stendhal, cavalry officer". This was the first time that the name Stendhal appeared.

The name comes from Stendal, a small town in Prussia, on the road from Hanover to Berlin. Beyle had probably passed through it in 1806. He added an "h" to the name.

Stendal was also the birthplace of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Some writers think that this is why he chose it.

Milan was the city of his heart. Every evening, he went to the opera house La Scala. He stayed there from seven o'clock until midnight. The private boxes of La Scala were like drawing rooms, where people met and talked.

On 15 October 1816, at La Scala, he met the English poet Lord Byron. They met in the box of his friend Ludovico di Breme. He told Byron amazing stories about Napoleon. Many of them were not true.

Between 1814 and 1821, he spent about two years away from Milan. He travelled in Italy, went back to France, and visited England in 1817. During a stay in Paris in 1817, he met Destutt de Tracy, whose books he had admired for twelve years. The philosopher came to see him at his hotel. Stendhal admired him so much that he could hardly talk to him.

In Milan, he also took part in the debates about Romanticism. This was a new movement in literature and the arts. He wrote three short essays on these questions, but they were not published at the time. He later used these ideas in his book Racine et Shakespeare.

On 4 March 1818, he met Matilde Dembowski. He always called her Métilde. She was twenty-eight. She lived apart from her husband, a violent Polish general. Stendhal loved her with a passion that made him shy and clumsy. She never returned his love.

She was also close to the Carbonari. These were secret groups that fought against Austrian rule in Italy.

In June 1819, he followed her in secret to the small town of Volterra, where her two sons were at school. He wore green glasses so that she would not recognise him. But she saw him at once, and she was angry. From this unhappy love came his book De l'amour (On Love). He found its main idea on 29 December 1819. He called this day his "day of genius". He finished the book in March 1820.

His father died in Grenoble on 20 June 1819 and left him almost nothing. The Austrian police now arrested many patriots among the friends of Métilde. People advised Stendhal to go back to France. He left Milan on 13 June 1821. In his own words, Milan remained for him "the flower of his life".

Paris, the salons and the first novels (1821–1830)

Stendhal reached Paris on 21 June 1821. He hid his pain from his friends. In his memoir Souvenirs d'égotisme, he wrote that his only idea was "not to be guessed".

So he wore a mask. In company, he became a witty, provocative and cynical talker. He liked to shock people with his words. According to F. W. J. Hemmings, people began at this time to see him as a brilliant talker, and also a dangerous one.

He spent his evenings in the salons of Paris. On Saturdays, he went to the scientist Georges Cuvier. On Sundays, he went to the philosopher Destutt de Tracy. On Tuesdays, he went to Madame Ancelot. Destutt de Tracy was the founder of "Ideology". He had been Stendhal's master in thought since his youth.

From February 1822, he also went to the attic room of the critic Étienne-Jean Delécluze. He went there on Sunday afternoons. Young writers met there to talk and to argue.

He needed money. On 1 November 1822, he began to write for an English magazine, the New Monthly Magazine. Later he also wrote for the London Magazine and others. He wrote them in French, and they were translated into English. For the New Monthly Magazine alone, he received about 200 pounds a year. From 1824, he also wrote about art and music for a Paris newspaper, the Journal de Paris. In 1824, he wrote seventeen articles on the great art exhibition of that year, the Salon. Between 1822 and 1829, he published more than a hundred articles.

He visited England in 1821, and again in 1826. In London, he saw the actor Edmund Kean play Shakespeare's Othello.

His books of these years made his name known. De l'amour appeared in August 1822, but it had no success. His Vie de Rossini (Life of Rossini, 1823) was his first real success. The same year, he published Racine et Shakespeare. This short book argued for a modern literature. The first edition had only three hundred copies. A second part followed in 1825. That year, Métilde Dembowski died in Milan.

In 1824, he began a love affair with Clémentine Curial, a married countess. It lasted about two years. Later, his cousin Romain Colomb destroyed her many letters to him. Stendhal came back from England in 1826. He then found that she had a new lover. He suffered greatly.

In 1826, at the age of forty-three, he wrote his first novel, Armance. It appeared in August 1827, and it failed. From 1827, his income from journalism fell. He had serious money problems. On 1 January 1828, he arrived in Milan. The Austrian police gave him twelve hours to leave. The reason was his book Rome, Naples et Florence, which had appeared again in 1827.

In 1829, he published Promenades dans Rome (Walks in Rome), a guide to the city. He also published a short story, Vanina Vanini. The same year, he had a short affair with Alberthe de Rubempré. She was a cousin of the painter Eugène Delacroix.

During a journey in the south of France, he had the idea for a new novel. It came to him in Marseille, on the night of 25–26 October 1829. The novel became Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black). In February 1830, a young Italian woman, Giulia Rinieri, told him that she loved him. She knew, she said, that he was old and ugly. She became his lover on 22 March 1830. She was born in Siena in 1801, and she lived in Paris in the house of her guardian, the Tuscan minister Berlinghieri.

Then came the July Revolution of 1830. King Charles X lost his throne. Louis-Philippe became king of the French. Stendhal watched the fighting from Giulia's home. He asked to be made a prefect, the head of the government in a French department. But he did not get the post.

On 25 September 1830, he was made a consul instead. He asked to marry Giulia, but her guardian refused. On 6 November 1830, Stendhal left Paris for Trieste. The Red and the Black appeared on 13 November, after he had gone.

Consul at Civitavecchia (1831–1836)

Stendhal in the uniform of a consul, about 1835. Painting by Silvestro Valeri.

Stendhal arrived in Trieste on 25 November 1830. But Trieste belonged to the Austrian Empire. In December, the Austrian government refused to accept him. It saw him as a dangerous liberal, who had already been sent out of Milan. The Austrian chancellor, Metternich, refused to accept him as consul.

Stendhal was sent instead to Civitavecchia. This was a port of the Papal States, on the Mediterranean Sea. The Papal States were the lands ruled by the Pope in central Italy. He began work there on 17 April 1831.

Civitavecchia was a small and dirty town of about 7,500 people. A thousand convicts also lived there, in chains. The town lay about eighty kilometres from Rome.

His pay fell from 15,000 to 10,000 francs a year. He was bored and lonely. He went to Rome as often as he could. Goldzink has counted his absences. In eleven years, he was away from Civitavecchia for about four and a half years.

His best friend in the town was Donato Bucci, who sold antiques. Bucci later received Stendhal's library. In 1835, Stendhal finally received the cross of the Legion of Honour. He had asked for it for a long time.

In February 1831, he decided not to publish anything while he worked for the government. But he did not stop writing. From 20 June to 4 July 1832, he wrote Souvenirs d'égotisme (Memoirs of an Egotist). It tells the story of his years in Paris.

In May 1834, he began a new novel, Lucien Leuwen. In November 1835, he put it aside. He began to write the story of his childhood, the Vie de Henry Brulard (The Life of Henry Brulard). All these works stayed unfinished. None of them appeared during his life.

Giulia Rinieri married another man in June 1833. They remained friends. In December of that year, he went back to Italy. On a steamboat going down the river Rhône, he met the writers George Sand and Alfred de Musset by chance. They travelled together as far as Marseille. His eyes became weak. From 1 September 1835, he wore glasses. He also began to dictate his texts to a copyist.

Three years in Paris (1836–1839)

On 26 March 1836, he learned that he could go to Paris on leave. He stopped writing Henry Brulard at once. He had a protector, Count Molé. Molé was the head of the French government from 1836 to 1839. Thanks to him, the leave became longer and longer. Stendhal stayed away from his post for three years, from May 1836 to August 1839. He was still paid.

He travelled across France. He also went to Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. From these journeys came the Mémoires d'un touriste (Memoirs of a Tourist), published in June 1838. In 1833, in Rome, he had found some old Italian manuscripts in family archives. He now made stories from them. Most of them appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, a Paris magazine, between 1837 and 1839.

On 16 August 1838, he thought of making a short novel from one of these old Italian stories. In September, he decided to move the action to the 19th century. On 4 November 1838, he shut himself up in his flat in the rue Caumartin, in Paris. On 26 December, he gave his cousin Romain Colomb six large notebooks: the novel was finished. The main writing had taken him less than eight weeks. He signed a contract with the publisher on 24 January 1839.

On 17 March 1839, the newspaper Le Constitutionnel printed the episode of Waterloo in advance. On 6 April 1839, the official list of new books, the Bibliographie de la France, announced La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma). Stendhal had sold it for 2,500 francs. In December 1839, a volume of his Italian stories followed. It took its title from the longest of them, L'Abbesse de Castro. It was the last book that Stendhal published during his life. On 13 April 1839, he began a very different novel, Lamiel. He never managed to finish it.

Last years and death (1839–1842)

Stendhal in August 1841. Drawing by Henri Lehmann.

Count Molé lost power in March 1839. Stendhal had to leave Paris on 24 June. He went back to his post at Civitavecchia in August 1839. On 25 September 1840, Honoré de Balzac published a long article on The Charterhouse of Parma. It appeared in his own magazine, the Revue parisienne. Stendhal read it in Civitavecchia in the middle of October 1840. He then began to correct his novel, as Balzac had advised.

Balzac had already praised the novel in April 1839. In a letter to Madame Hanska, he called it the finest book published in fifty years. In eighteen months, the public bought the 1,200 copies of the first edition.

His health became worse. On 1 January 1840, he fainted while he was correcting Lamiel, and he fell into the fire. On 15 March 1841, he had a stroke. He wrote that he had "fought with nothingness".

In October 1841, he was given leave because of his health. He left for Paris on 21 October. There he seemed to recover. On 21 March 1842, he signed an agreement to write stories for the Revue des Deux Mondes.

In his last months, he was working on an Italian story, Suora Scolastica. On the next day, 22 March 1842, in the early evening, he fell down at the corner of the rue Neuve-des-Capucines. He had had another stroke. He died on 23 March at two in the morning, without waking up. He was fifty-nine years old. He was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery on 24 March.

Some time before, he had written a joke in a letter to his friend Fiore. There was nothing ridiculous, he wrote, about dying in the street. But one should not do it on purpose.

The grave of Stendhal in the Montmartre Cemetery, Paris.

Stendhal had wished to be buried at Andilly, a village near Montmorency, north of Paris. In his will, he added that the Montmartre Cemetery would do if Andilly cost too much. He was buried at Montmartre.

In Souvenirs d'égotisme, Stendhal had written his own epitaph, the words for his grave. He wrote it in Italian: "Errico Beyle, Milanese. Visse, scrisse, amò" ("Henri Beyle, of Milan. He lived, wrote, loved"). A second line said that his soul loved Cimarosa, Mozart and Shakespeare.

The stone on his grave changed the order of the words. It reads "Scrisse, amò, visse" (wrote, loved, lived). It also left out the names of the three artists, and it gives his first name as "Arrigo" instead of "Errico".

The works

During his life, Stendhal published three finished novels. They were Armance (1827), The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). He also published some short stories. Most of them take place in Italy in the time of the Renaissance.

But a large part of his work was found in his papers after his death. Hemmings writes about his fame as a novelist today. In his view, it rests almost as much on these unfinished works as on his published books. The first editions of these papers were often faulty and incomplete.

Books on art, music and travel

Stendhal first became known for books about art, music and travel. His first book, the lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, was signed with the false name Bombet. Goldzink calls it an undeniable plagiarism: much of it was taken from other writers. With this book began one of his favourite kinds of writing, the life of an artist. He paid for the printing himself. A thousand copies were printed, but only a little more than a hundred were sold.

The History of Painting in Italy (1817) was also largely taken from others. Alter and Cosman note that more than two thirds of it was compiled from writers such as Lanzi, Reynolds and Vasari. But at that time, authors of such compilations did not have to give references, and Stendhal knew that he was using sources. But Goldzink finds in it some of the central themes of his work. Art, history and politics meet there, all under the sign of Italy. The book reaches its highest point with Michelangelo and Raphael.

With Rome, Naples and Florence in 1817, Beyle found his pen name. He also found one of his favourite forms, the travel diary. And he found his own way of mixing tourism, the arts, the manners of a people and politics. A new and much changed version of the book appeared in 1827.

His first success came from music, and therefore from Italy. It was the Life of Rossini (1823), a book about the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini.

Walks in Rome (1829) looks like a tourist guide written as a diary. For generations, travellers took it with them to Rome. Goldzink sees in it much more than a guide. For him, it is the most convenient way to travel inside Stendhal's mind. Stendhal gave his readers some advice. They should cross out each short article with a pencil. They should do it as soon as they had seen the monument.

In the Memoirs of a Tourist (1838), the narrator pretends to be a travelling salesman of iron goods. He journeys through France. Goldzink notes that Stendhal helped to bring two English words into French. They were égotisme (egotism, the habit of talking and writing about oneself) and tourisme (tourism).

For Michel Crouzet, the Italy of these books is not only a real country. It is also a "myth", a set of desires for which Italy serves as a mirror. In this sense, Italy belongs to Stendhal's own work. He wrote it as much as he described it.

De l'amour

De l'amour (On Love, 1822) was born from his unhappy passion for Métilde Dembowski. Goldzink calls it a confession dressed up as a treatise, a serious study of love. In fact, it deals mostly with passionate love. The book shows how close love and art are to each other. In this way, Goldzink writes, it gives a key to all of Stendhal's work. It is one of his least read books. But some critics see it as the secret centre of his work.

The book describes the birth of love step by step. First comes admiration. Then a person imagines the pleasure of kissing the loved one. Hope follows, and then love is born. After that comes "crystallisation", the most famous idea of the book.

Stendhal took the word from the salt mines of Salzburg. Workers threw a bare branch into the deep parts of the mine. Two or three months later, they took it out. It was covered with shining crystals, like diamonds.

In the same way, the mind of a lover finds new perfections in the loved person. It finds them in everything around it. Later comes doubt. Then a "second crystallisation" adds the certainty of being loved in return.

Stendhal also divided love into four kinds. The first is passionate love, like the love of Héloïse for Abélard. The second is love as a matter of taste, the kind that was common in Paris. The third is physical love. The fourth is love from vanity, when a man wants to be admired for winning a woman. Dominique Fernandez points out that Stendhal mixed these serious classes with comments that make fun of them. The book had no success at all when it appeared. According to a story told later, the publisher sold the unsold copies as ballast for a ship.

Racine et Shakespeare

Racine et Shakespeare (1823 and 1825) is a short polemical book. Such a book is written to attack some ideas and to defend others. It defends a modern, energetic and original literature. Stendhal had developed its ideas in Milan. According to Goldzink, he turned the Italian word romanticismo into a French word, romanticisme. He is also often credited with making the word romantisme known in France. In Milan, he had already planned essays called "What is romanticism?" and "On romanticism in the fine arts".

His definition was simple. Romantic art gives people the works that bring them the most pleasure. It takes into account their present habits and beliefs. Classic art gives them the works that pleased their great-grandfathers. In this sense, he wrote, the Greek poets Sophocles and Euripides had been romantic in their own time. So had the French poet Racine.

For the theatre, this meant historical and national plays written in prose, not in verse. The second part of the book (1825) answered an attack on Romanticism. The attack came from Auger, a member of the Académie française.

Yet Stendhal did not fit easily into the Romantic school of his time. Romantic plays bored him, and he disliked their grand verse. He could not bear the "infamous rhetoric" of the followers of Chateaubriand. Goldzink calls him a son of the Enlightenment and a child of the Revolution. Still, some people of his time saw him as a leader of the new movement. He himself said that he had thrown himself into the quarrel of the Romantics. Michel Crouzet adds that Stendhal found in these debates a theory of art based on energy and strong emotion. In the language of the 18th century, this was called the "sublime".

In 1825, Stendhal also published a short pamphlet, D'un nouveau complot contre les industriels (On a New Plot against the Industrialists). In it, he attacked people in his own liberal camp. They saw the owners of industry as the saviours of humanity.

Armance

Armance (1827) was Stendhal's first novel. Its subtitle is "Some scenes from a Paris salon in 1827". According to Yves Ansel, the publisher, Urbain Canel, chose this subtitle to help the book sell.

The story began with a rumour. In 1825, people said that a fashionable writer, the Duchess of Duras, had written a new novel. Its hero, they said, was impotent: he could not have sexual relations. Another writer, Henri de Latouche, quickly wrote an imitation of it as a literary joke.

In those works, the impotent hero was called Olivier. Stendhal first thought of using this name too. He then chose Octave, and he gave the title of the book to the young woman, Armance.

The hero of Armance is Octave de Malivert, a young nobleman with republican ideas. He has become rich through a new law. This law paid back nobles for the lands they had lost during the Revolution. He has sworn never to love. But he falls in love with his cousin, Armance de Zohiloff. She is an orphan girl who lives with a relative.

Octave marries Armance. Then he kills himself, and he leaves her a letter. He takes poison on a ship near the coast of Greece. Armance and his mother then enter a convent.

The novel never says clearly what Octave's secret is. The reader has to guess his impotence. Goldzink suggests that the secret also works as an image. It stands for all the blocked roads of the young generation in that society. The book was a complete failure. But in Goldzink's view, Stendhal had now found his way. He had not yet found his tone.

The Red and the Black

The first volume of The Red and the Black. The title page gives the year 1831.

Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) began with a real crime. Stendhal took the main lines of his story from the case of Antoine Berthet. A law newspaper, the Gazette des Tribunaux, had reported it at the end of December 1827. Berthet was the son of a village blacksmith. He became the tutor of the children of a rich family at Brangues. He had a love affair with the mother. He was then sent to a seminary, a school for future priests.

Later, Berthet fired two pistol shots at Madame Michoud, who had been his lover. He was executed by the guillotine in February 1828. Hemmings stresses that Stendhal copied only a few events from this case. Julien's character has nothing in common with Berthet's.

Another model was Adrien Lafargue, a young worker from Bagnères-de-Bigorre. His murder trial fascinated Stendhal in 1829. Stendhal saw in Lafargue the same mixture as in the young Napoleon. Both were well educated, full of imagination, and very poor. Hemmings shows that Julien shares these three things.

Stendhal had the idea for the novel in October 1829. He began the real work on 17 January 1830. He signed a contract with the publisher on 8 April, and he corrected the proofs in May. At first, Stendhal thought of calling the book Julien. He found the final title only in May 1830. He looked for the short quotations that open each chapter on 25 May 1830, while he was correcting the proofs.

The book appeared on 13 November 1830. The publisher printed the year 1831 on the title page, as was often done at the time. On the title page, the subtitle was "Chronicle of the 19th century". At the head of the first chapter, the book was called "Chronicle of 1830".

Stendhal summed up the story himself. Julien Sorel is a young peasant who has learned Latin from his priest. He becomes the tutor of the children of M. de Rênal, the mayor of Verrières. This is a small town in the Franche-Comté region. Julien becomes the lover of Madame de Rênal. When people begin to suspect them, he leaves the house for the seminary.

The head of the seminary then finds him a post in Paris. Julien becomes the secretary of the Marquis de La Mole. Julien soon learns the manners of high society. The marquis's daughter, Mathilde, becomes his lover and wants to marry him.

But then a letter from Madame de Rênal arrives. It describes him as a hypocrite, a man who hides his true feelings and only wants to rise in the world. Julien, mad with anger, fires two pistol shots at her. He is condemned and executed.

At his trial, Julien makes a famous speech to the jury. He tells them that he does not have "the honour of belonging to your class". He will be punished more harshly, he says, because he is not judged by his equals. He is judged only by angry members of the middle class.

For Goldzink, it is the novel of energy. Julien is a poor and proud young man who attacks society and ends on the scaffold. The novel shows a time when the Restoration blocked the ambition of young men. In Stendhal's words, there were "two hundred thousand Julien Sorels" in France.

The meaning of the title has been much discussed. Most readers agree that black is the colour of the Church. Red has been read as the colour of the republic, of the army, or of the gambling table. Fernandez finds none of these explanations fully convincing.

No other character in the novel, not even Mathilde, takes the first place away from Julien. Goldzink suggests that the figure of Mathilde owes something to Giulia Rinieri. Jean Mourot stresses that the novel is told from Julien's point of view. But the narrator also moves into the minds of other characters. When Madame de Rênal first meets Julien, the reader sees him through her eyes. The ball at the Hôtel de Retz is seen largely through the eyes of Mathilde.

Many early readers found Julien strange and even hateful. In the 1860s, the critic Hippolyte Taine answered them. Julien seems to be made of opposites, Taine wrote, but he is always true to himself. For Taine, no character was better constructed. The poet Victor Hugo saw only bad French in the book. But the German writer Goethe praised it at once as Stendhal's best work.

Lucien Leuwen

Stendhal wrote Lucien Leuwen at Civitavecchia in 1834 and 1835. He planned three parts, each set in a different place. Only the first two parts were written; the third was never begun. He then left the novel for the Life of Henry Brulard, which he did not finish either. His notes in the manuscript show the dates of his work. In 1835, for example, he stopped writing on 16 May because of fever and gout, and he started again on 20 June. The novel was published only in 1894.

The hero, Lucien, is the son of a rich Paris banker. He is sent away from the École Polytechnique for his republican ideas. Around 1833, he becomes a second lieutenant in a regiment at Nancy. On the day he arrives, he falls from his horse under the window of a pretty woman. For him, it is the worst of humiliations.

The woman is Madame de Chasteller, a young noblewoman who supports the old royal family. Lucien falls in love with her. A doctor, du Poirier, makes him believe that she has secretly given birth to a child. Lucien leaves Nancy in despair.

In Paris, he becomes the secretary of the minister of the Interior, M. de Vaize. He helps him in dishonest dealings on the stock exchange and in elections. De Vaize is based on a real minister, Count d'Argout, and the novel makes fun of him. The second part ends with the death of Lucien's father and the ruin of his family. Lucien then leaves for a post at the French embassy in a town called Capel. Capel stands for Rome. The third part was to take place in Rome, and to bring the two lovers together again.

Stendhal never chose the final title. One possible title was Le Rouge et le Blanc (The Red and the White). Stendhal explained it himself: red for the republican Lucien, white for the young royalist Madame de Chasteller.

The novel also draws on his own life. His year as a young officer in Italy helped him to describe Lucien's life in the army. Goldzink admires the portrait of Lucien's father, the kind of father that Stendhal would have wished for. Blin calls Lucien Leuwen Stendhal's best "study of the true". In this novel, invented events and real history are closely joined.

For the critic Pierre Barbéris, Lucien Leuwen is a "republican" novel without a people. The poor appear only as weavers against whom soldiers are sent. Lucien looks for a party, a political group. He finds none, except the movements of his own heart. In the margin, Stendhal wrote that "to be human is a party".

The Charterhouse of Parma

La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839) began with an old Italian manuscript. It told how the Farnese family had risen to greatness. Stendhal had brought it back from Rome. On 16 August 1838, he thought of making a short novel from it. In September, he decided to move the story to his own century.

He had already dictated the scenes of Waterloo on 2 September. At first, the hero was called Alexandre, like the young Alessandro Farnese of the old story. On 8 November, Stendhal changed the name to Fabrice. The last chapters of the first part combine two old chronicles. The beginning of the second part, with its court intrigues and Fabrice's prison, also draws on them.

Stendhal wrote the main part of the novel between 4 November and 26 December 1838, in fifty-two or fifty-three days. For a long time, readers saw this speed as a mystery and a miracle.

Béatrice Didier accepts the view of another scholar, G. Rannaud. Stendhal improvised as he dictated, but he worked from earlier drafts and notes that are now lost. He then kept the natural sound of spoken words. He did not correct the text much. Didier also shows that the novel is built much more solidly than its speed might suggest.

The novel opens in May 1796. The young general Bonaparte and the French army enter Milan. The hero, Fabrice del Dongo, was born in 1798 in the castle of Grianta, in Lombardy. His aunt Gina, later the Duchess Sanseverina, loves him. Count Mosca, the prime minister of the prince of Parma, loves the duchess.

As a young man, Fabrice runs away to join Napoleon. He takes part in the Battle of Waterloo. Back in Italy, the duchess and Mosca want to make him an archbishop. But Fabrice kills a jealous rival in a fight, and he is sent to prison. He falls in love with Clélia Conti, the daughter of the governor of the prison. He escapes.

Clélia has made a vow, a solemn promise, and she has to marry another man. The duchess has the prince of Parma killed. Fabrice is set free and becomes a powerful churchman. Clélia has also promised never to see him again, so she meets him only in the dark. When their child dies, Clélia dies too. Fabrice retires to a charterhouse, a monastery of the Carthusian monks, and he dies there.

The famous prison, the Farnese Tower, is imaginary. Stendhal placed it in the middle of Parma. He had no special love for the city of Parma. But he was a French consul who had long been in conflict with the Austrian police. So he could not set the story in the parts of Italy ruled by Austria.

Goldzink sees Angela Pietragrua behind the figure of the Duchess Sanseverina. Mariella Di Maio thinks that a mysterious woman named Cleria, whom Stendhal loved late in his life, probably inspired the figure of Clélia. Fernandez sees in the duchess all the values of Stendhal's personal "religion". She never acts with prudence. She follows the feeling of the moment, and she is always herself. According to Hemmings, the characters are as Italian as the people of Italian novels such as The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. Their speech sounds as if it had been translated from Italian.

In the chapters on Waterloo, Fabrice sees only a few pieces of the battle. He sees noise, smoke, and a field that suddenly flies up. Only later does he understand that cannonballs were falling around him. Jean Mourot notes that Stendhal had already described a battle in this way in an early text, as a series of broken pictures without order. For Blin, this episode is the best example of one of Stendhal's methods. He tells the story through the limited view of one character. Hemmings notes that Fabrice often wonders whether he is really taking part in a real battle. All through his life, he stays a kind of spectator, looking at the world from above.

In September 1838, Stendhal had written an account of Waterloo for two girls. They were Paquita and Eugénie, the daughters of the Countess of Montijo. Eugénie later became the wife of Emperor Napoleon III. Stendhal's way of showing war in these chapters influenced the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. The writer Max Nordau even claimed that War and Peace had been modelled on The Charterhouse of Parma.

Balzac admired the novel greatly. He wrote to Stendhal that the description of the battle had made him jealous. In another letter, he called it a great and beautiful book. If Machiavelli wrote a novel today, Balzac said, it would be The Charterhouse of Parma. He also gave advice. Stendhal should not have named the real city of Parma, and the beginning was too long. Stendhal promised to make changes.

For the Italian writer Italo Calvino, the book is truly Italian because of its view of politics. Politics there is a game of calculated deals. Count Mosca, for example, goes from Napoleon's army to the head of the party of the old order. Yet nothing changes inside him.

Italian chronicles and short stories

The title Chroniques italiennes (Italian Chronicles) was not chosen by Stendhal. He published these stories one by one in magazines. Then he collected some of them in the volume L'Abbesse de Castro (1839). After his death, his cousin Romain Colomb gave them the title that later publishers kept.

They are based on old Italian manuscripts that he had found in Rome. Among them are Vittoria Accoramboni, Les Cenci and La Duchesse de Palliano. In these stories, Stendhal admired the passions and the energy of the Italians of that time. He compared them with the France of his own day, which was ruled, he wrote, by vanity. An earlier story, Vanina Vanini (1829), is about the Carbonari in the Papal States.

Hemmings shows that all of Stendhal's fiction follows one basic pattern. It is the "imaginary biography" of a hero. In spite of its many unfinished pieces, Hemmings finds the work very unified.

Other novels and stories

Stendhal began several other novels that he did not finish. Among them are Une position sociale (A Social Position, 1832), Le Rose et le Vert (The Pink and the Green, 1837) and Féder ou le mari d'argent (1839). His first attempt at fiction seems to be a short fragment written in Milan in 1819, known as Le Roman de Métilde. Hemmings thinks that it was probably meant for Métilde Dembowski. Stendhal perhaps wanted to calm her, or to win back her attention.

He also wrote short stories. Le Coffre et le revenant (The Chest and the Ghost) appeared in May 1830 in the Revue de Paris. It takes place in Spain. It seems to come from a short journey to Barcelona in September 1829.

Another story, Le Philtre (The Love Potion), appeared in the same magazine in 1830. A third, Mina de Vanghel, was almost finished at that time. But it was published only in 1854. Hemmings notes that the year before his departure for Trieste was a time of very intense work.

Lamiel

The first edition of Lamiel, published by Casimir Stryienski in 1889.

Stendhal began Lamiel on 13 April 1839, a week after The Charterhouse of Parma appeared. He worked on it again and again, but he could not finish it. Richardson sees it as a kind of companion to The Red and the Black. The heroine is a young girl from a village in Normandy. She hates cowardice, and she follows her desires without fear.

Around her are a duchess, a student of the École Polytechnique and his valet. There are also a church officer, his wife, and some priests. There is also a sharp-minded doctor named Sansfin. Fernandez calls the novel a comic opera in the Italian manner. It mixes political satire with the free spirit of 18th-century novels. In his view, Stendhal was never closer to Molière.

Goldzink sees the actress Mélanie Guilbert behind the figure of Lamiel. The novel appeared only in 1889, and in a more complete form in 1929.

The writings about himself

Stendhal wrote about himself all his life. His Journal begins in 1801 and becomes rich from 1804. It fades during his years in Milan, when he became a real writer. In it, Fernandez writes, he tried to catch himself in the emotion of the moment, without any distance. On 31 December 1804, he wrote that he could make a work that would please only himself. It would be thought beautiful, he added, in the year 2000.

Souvenirs d'égotisme (Memoirs of an Egotist) tells the story of his years in Paris after 1821. He wrote it in about two weeks in 1832. He stopped suddenly after chapter twelve.

The Life of Henry Brulard is the story of his childhood and youth. It begins with a scene in Rome. Standing on the Janiculum hill, he realises that he will soon be fifty. He asks himself what he has been, and he decides to write his life to find out. In the book, he dates this scene 16 October 1832. He even says that he wrote the date on the belt of his trousers, in a secret code. But Michael Wood points out that the scene is a fiction. Stendhal was already fifty-two when he wrote it, in 1835.

The name Brulard replaced his father's name.

The story stops in 1800, at his arrival in Milan. Goldzink believes that it is impossible to understand Stendhal without this book. It mixes memories of the past with the thoughts of the ageing writer. Goldzink also notes a link between two books. The Charterhouse of Parma takes up the story exactly where Henry Brulard ends: the French army enters Milan.

These writings were published long after his death. The Journal appeared in 1888, the Life of Henry Brulard in 1890, and Souvenirs d'égotisme in 1892.

His ideas and his art

The hunt for happiness

For Goldzink, the "hunt for happiness" was the centre of Stendhal's life. He shared it with the heroes of his novels. His method was "beylism". It asked a person to know society and to know himself. Then he could change himself, in order to draw as much pleasure as possible from life. Beylism also taught him to open his heart only to a few tender souls. From the others, he should hide it.

Fernandez sees beylism as a struggle between opposites. Stendhal claimed that he read the Civil Code to keep his prose dry and exact. Yet his books lead the reader into the most delicate dreams.

The key word of his world was energy. Goldzink finds it in the sons of the Revolution, such as Napoleon, Julien Sorel or Beyle himself. He also finds it in the great women of his novels. It is the energy of the heart and of style.

Stendhal wrote for a small number of readers who could feel as he did. He called them "the happy few", using English words. The History of Painting in Italy was dedicated "To the Happy Few". He described them as readers who were under thirty-five years old. They also had enough money to live comfortably. The same English words appear again at the end of Walks in Rome. They also close The Charterhouse of Parma.

The novel as a mirror

In The Red and the Black, Stendhal compared a novel to a mirror carried along a main road. Sometimes it reflects the blue of the sky, he wrote, and sometimes the mud of the road. People should not blame the mirror for showing the mud. Michael Wood notes that this mirror does not stay still. It tilts and jumps, and many things are left out of the picture. In one chapter heading, he presented the same idea as a quotation from an older writer, Saint-Réal. Fernandez sees this false quotation as one of his many jokes on the reader.

In his book of 1954, Georges Blin studied this "aesthetics of the mirror", Stendhal's theory of the novel as a mirror. For Blin, Stendhal was the writer who brought the reality of the present day into the novel. He called his novels "chronicles", and he looked for the "small true facts".

But Blin also shows the other side. Stendhal had no taste for exact descriptions and long documentation. Later, the Naturalist writers wanted the novel to describe society very exactly. They were disappointed by him.

The places in his novels do not form a real social setting. He gave his main characters an ideal beauty, and he turned his minor characters into caricatures. Didier adds that Stendhal hated writing descriptions. He never lingers over them.

The critic Taine wanted to link him with the later Realist and Naturalist movements. According to Blin, Émile Zola tried a few times to claim him for Naturalism. But more often he had to give up.

The narrator and his heroes

Blin's best-known idea concerns the point of view. Many novels of the 19th century were told by a narrator who seemed to see and know everything. Stendhal often did the opposite. He told the story as one character saw it, within that character's limited "field".

Blin connects this with Stendhal's belief that everything is relative. In a phrase quoted by Blin, nobody can see both sides of an orange at the same time. Stendhal did not write novels in the first person. But he often let the reader hear the thoughts of his heroes. And he usually kept the story close to the view of one main character.

At the same time, the narrator of his novels often speaks in his own voice. He comments and jokes. He takes the side of his heroes, or he criticises them. Blin sees these "intrusions of the author" as perhaps the most typical mark of Stendhal's way of writing.

Among his models, Blin names the French writer Scarron and the British novelists Henry Fielding and Walter Scott. He also names Denis Diderot and his novel Jacques the Fatalist. Yet Blin also stresses that Stendhal left his heroes very free. He refused to define them in advance, or to decide too early what they would do. Hemmings finds that all his novels follow the same basic form, the "imaginary biography" of a hero.

Style

Stendhal wanted a clear and simple style. He hated what he called "infamous rhetoric". By this he meant the fine words and grand sentences of the followers of Chateaubriand. He preferred small, clear and true facts.

In a letter to Balzac in October 1840, he described how he had written The Charterhouse of Parma. To find the right tone, he said, he read some pages of the Civil Code. Stendhal wrote several drafts of this letter. In one of them, he read these pages "from time to time". In another, he read them every morning. Alter and Cosman think that he probably invented this for Balzac, to show him his idea of a good style. Some called him a writer "without style". Yet for Fernandez, he has stayed the most alive and the newest of the classics of the 19th century.

Goldzink quotes a passage by Michel Crouzet about his style. Crouzet finds in it a lightness that comes from the Italian comic opera. This was the opera buffa that Stendhal loved.

For Crouzet, writing was also the way in which Beyle became himself. For many years, he was a writer who did not write. He was looking for a way to write. In the end, "Stendhal", the writer, appeared as a second and deeper person behind "Beyle", the ordinary man.

Music and painting

Music mattered more to Stendhal than almost anything else. Yet his musical education was poor. According to Fernandez, his father stopped him from studying music when he was ten. At sixteen, he learned to play the violin and the clarinet, and to sing. Then mathematics took him away from music.

Fernandez writes that he really came back to music only in Germany, between 1806 and 1810, and then in Italy, between 1814 and 1821. From then on, his passion for it never grew weaker. In 1832, he wrote that he had become a kind of expert simply by being happy at La Scala.

He loved above all the comic operas of Cimarosa and Rossini, and the music of Mozart. In a passage quoted by Goldzink, Michel Crouzet shows two sides of his taste. The comic opera gave him speed, gaiety and freedom. Mozart's music gave him a gentle sadness that brought comfort.

In painting, his favourite artist was Correggio. Fernandez notes that his three favourite painters, Correggio, Guido Reni and Raphael, all painted the beauty and grace of women. Stendhal hated crowds in museums. He tried to stay alone in front of the pictures he loved.

Italy and France

Italy was the country of his heart, but it was also a country of his own making. Crouzet speaks of an Italian "myth" in his work. For Stendhal, the Italian was the opposite of the divided modern man. He lived without the inner split that moral and social life brings.

Above all, the Italians had no vanity, which Stendhal saw as the great fault of French society. In Milan, Goldzink writes, he found a society where poverty was not a shame. He also found a politics that went well with music and love. In the same way, Fernandez notes that Lucien Leuwen has only one handicap. He is French, and his education in Paris has taught him only vanity.

Politics and religion

Stendhal belonged to the liberal side of his time. As a child, he had been a passionate republican. In the salons of the 1820s, his provocative ideas sometimes shocked people of his own side.

He was generally seen as an atheist. The materialist thinkers of the 18th century, who believed that only matter exists, had a strong influence on him. Goldzink calls him an atheist and a materialist. But he could also speak more carefully. According to Jonathan Keates, he once told the poet Alphonse de Lamartine that he could not say whether God existed or not. He simply knew nothing about it. Joanna Richardson notes that some people think his atheism was more an attitude than a real conviction. His friend Mérimée remembered one of his jokes: "What excuses God is that he does not exist." The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche later praised him as a "sincere" atheist, a rare kind of man in France.

His feelings about Napoleon changed over time. As a young republican, he did not admire the Emperor. After the defeat of 1815, many people attacked Napoleon. Stendhal then became one of the first writers to sing his praises. The young Eugénie de Montijo remembered how he came to her mother's house every Thursday evening. He told her and her sister stories about the Emperor.

After his death

From a small public to lasting fame

During his life, Stendhal was not unknown. Since 1815, he had built a good name as a writer. He was known for his lives of artists and his travel books. He was also known for his book on love and his polemical writings. But fame did not come to him through the novel. Still, The Red and the Black was much talked about in some circles. The writer Comtesse Dash remembered that people snatched the book from one another, while conventional readers protested against it. When he died, the Paris newspapers gave him an obituary of only three lines.

He was sure that later readers would understand him better. He wrote that he would be understood around 1880. In a note, he even dreamed of being printed again in 1900. Long after his death, some writers still did not like him. In 1878, Gustave Flaubert called him an "anti-artist".

His friend Prosper Mérimée wrote a famous portrait of him. In 1850, Mérimée published H. B., a small book. It was printed in only twenty-five copies, without the author's name. A new version opened the first collection of Stendhal's letters in 1855. Some readers said that this text showed a ridiculous and immoral Stendhal. Goldzink finds it one-sided but charming.

In the 1860s, the critic Hippolyte Taine published an enthusiastic essay on Stendhal. Goldzink sees it as a turning point. It stands between the years of neglect and the great fame of the end of the century. In 1883, the critic Paul Bourget wrote a portrait of Stendhal in his Essais de psychologie contemporaine. He treated him as a writer of his own time, and his portrait summed up the new fashion for Stendhal.

At the end of the 19th century, many unpublished works appeared at last. Scholars such as Chuquet, Stryienski, Paupe and Cordier published them from 1888 onwards. The scholar Casimir Stryienski published the Journal in 1888 and Lamiel in 1889. He then published the Life of Henry Brulard in 1890 and Souvenirs d'égotisme in 1892. Lucien Leuwen followed in 1894.

From this time, Stendhal gained a group of very devoted readers. Goldzink speaks of a loving cult like no other writer's. He explains it by the wish of each reader to belong to the "happy few". By the end of the century, he stood firmly among the great French authors.

His admirers also wrote about him with humour. In 1904, Stryienski published a book called Soirées du Stendhal Club (Evenings of the Stendhal Club). It described the meetings of a club of Stendhal lovers. In 1914, Stryienski's co-author, Paul Arbelet, explained that the club had never existed. It was a witty invention of Stryienski.

Arbelet later became the first editor of Stendhal's complete works. Henri Martineau prepared new editions that were checked against the manuscripts. One of them was the Life of Henry Brulard in 1927.

Influence

Many great writers have admired Stendhal. Balzac praised The Charterhouse of Parma in a long article in 1840. Leo Tolstoy learned from his way of showing war. Nietzsche loved his heroes. They are young people who look for the best way to express themselves. He said that his discovery of Stendhal was one of the happiest chances of his life.

The poet Paul Valéry wrote a preface to Lucien Leuwen. He called Stendhal one of the "demigods" of French literature. Joanna Richardson finds his influence in the scientific precision of Émile Zola, and perhaps in the inner monologues of Marcel Proust. The novelist Julien Gracq stressed how much Stendhal still belonged to the 18th century. For Gracq, The Red and the Black sometimes reads like a book by Laclos or Diderot. It is as if these writers of the 18th century had told the story of the Restoration.

His novels were also made into films. The French film of The Red and the Black by Claude Autant-Lara starred Gérard Philipe and Danielle Darrieux. Gérard Philipe also played Fabrice del Dongo in the film of The Charterhouse of Parma by Christian-Jaque.

Stendhal's name is also given to the "Stendhal syndrome". It is a strong emotion that a person may feel in front of great beauty. Sometimes the person even faints. Fernandez notes that Stendhal described such a feeling in his diary in September 1811. He felt it in Florence, in the church of Santa Croce.

The man behind the masks

Stendhal in 1835. Portrait by Jean-Louis Ducis.

Stendhal loved masks. He used false names in his books, in his articles and in his letters. Fernandez counts more than a hundred of them. Jonathan Keates speaks of more than two hundred.

His cousin Romain Colomb said that he rarely gave his real name. He hid it even from his tailor and his shoemaker. In Milan, he sometimes said that he was a former officer of dragoons. He also claimed to be the son of a general.

He also enjoyed false quotations and invented stories about himself. He once wrote that he was used to seeming the opposite of what he was.

Goldzink speaks of two Stendhals. One is the man his friends knew: biting, without respect, insolent and very funny. The other is the man that later readers discovered in his private writings. The first was a mask, Goldzink writes, but not a false Stendhal. His private writings show a tender and secret man. But they do not cancel the witty, free-living man that his friends described.

Main works

The years given are the years of first publication as books. Many works can be read in French at Wikisource.

• Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase (1815), lives of three artists, signed Bombet. French text
• Histoire de la peinture en Italie (1817), a history of Italian painting.
• Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 (1817), a travel book, the first signed "Stendhal". French text
• De l'amour (1822), an essay on love. French text
• Racine et Shakespeare (1823; second part 1825), polemical writings on Romanticism. French text
• Vie de Rossini (1823), a life of the composer Rossini.
• D'un nouveau complot contre les industriels (1825), a pamphlet.
• Armance (1827), a novel. French text
• Rome, Naples et Florence (1827), a new version of the travel book of 1817. French text
• Promenades dans Rome (1829), a guide to Rome. French text
• Le Rouge et le Noir (1830, dated 1831), a novel. French text
• Mémoires d'un touriste (1838), travels in France. French text
• La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), a novel. French text
• L'Abbesse de Castro (1839), Italian stories. French text

Published after his death:

• Chroniques italiennes, Italian stories collected under this title by Romain Colomb. French text
• Journal (1888), his diary.
• Lamiel (1889), an unfinished novel. French text
• Vie de Henry Brulard (1890), an unfinished autobiography. French text
• Souvenirs d'égotisme (1892), memories of his years in Paris. French text
• Lucien Leuwen (1894), an unfinished novel. French text

Notes and references

Books used to write this article

• Alter, Robert; Cosman, Carol (1980). Stendhal: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-928042-2.
• Ansel, Yves (2001). Stendhal littéral : Le Rouge et le Noir (in French). Paris: Kimé. ISBN 2-84174-226-1.
• Blin, Georges (1954). Stendhal et les problèmes du roman (in French). Paris: José Corti.
• Brombert, Victor (2018). Stendhal: Fiction and the Themes of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. First published in 1968.
• Clewes, Howard (1950). Stendhal: An Introduction to the Novelist. The European Novelists.
• Crouzet, Michel (1982). Stendhal et l'italianité : essai de mythologie romantique (in French). Paris: José Corti. ISBN 2-7143-0003-0.
• Crouzet, Michel (1983). La Poétique de Stendhal : forme et société, le sublime. Essai sur la genèse du romantisme, vol. I (in French). Paris: Flammarion.
• Didier, Béatrice (2002). Stendhal ou la dictée du bonheur : paroles, échos et écritures dans La Chartreuse de Parme. Bibliothèque du XIXe siècle (in French). Paris: Klincksieck. ISBN 2-252-03367-3.
• Fernandez, Dominique (2013). Dictionnaire amoureux de Stendhal (in French). Drawings by Alain Bouldouyre. Paris: Plon. ISBN 978-2-259-22064-4. Electronic edition.
• Fillipetti, Sandrine (2015). Stendhal (in French). Paris: Gallimard. Electronic edition.
• Goldzink, Jean (1992). Stendhal : l'Italie au cœur. Découvertes Gallimard (in French). Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-053193-7.
• Gutwirth, Marcel (1971). Stendhal. New York: Twayne Publishers. LCCN 77-120508.
• Hemmings, F. W. J. (1964). Stendhal: A Study of His Novels. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Keates, Jonathan (1998). Stendhal. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-0545-0. First published in 1994.
• Lacouture, Jean (2004). Stendhal : le bonheur vagabond (in French). Paris: Seuil. ISBN 2-02-062650-0.
• Mourot, Jean (1987). Stendhal et le roman (in French). Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy.
• Richardson, Joanna (1974). Stendhal. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan.
• Scheiber, Claude (1988). Stendhal et l'écriture de La Chartreuse de Parme (in French). Paris: Lettres modernes.
• Stendhal (1982). Lucien Leuwen. GF (in French). Vol. II. Paris: Flammarion. ISBN 978-2-08-140566-0. Electronic edition, 2016.
• Stendhal (2013). Berthier, Philippe (ed.). Souvenirs d'égotisme. GF (in French). Chronology by Fabienne Bercegol. Paris: Flammarion. ISBN 978-2-08-129743-2. Electronic edition.
• Stendhal (2014a). Bourdenet, Xavier (ed.). De l'amour. GF (in French). Paris: Flammarion. ISBN 978-2-08-133434-2. Electronic edition.
• Stendhal (2014b). Di Maio, Mariella (ed.). La Chartreuse de Parme. Folio classique (in French). Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 978-2-07-256798-8. Electronic edition.
• Talbot, Emile (1985). Stendhal and Romantic Esthetics. Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum. ISBN 0-917058-62-3.
• Wood, Michael (1971). Stendhal. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Related pages

• Romanticism
• Realism
• Naturalism
• Honoré de Balzac
• Prosper Mérimée

Other websites

• Works of Stendhal in French at French Wikisource
• Works by or about Stendhal (Internet Archive)