Stendhal

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Stendhal collapsed on a Paris street on the 23rd of March 1842 and died a few hours later. He had spent decades writing under false names, hiding behind more than a hundred pseudonyms, signing letters as "William Crocodile" or "Don Phlegm" or "Poverino." He had crossed the Berezina River during Napoleon's catastrophic retreat from Moscow, shaving daily even as the army disintegrated around him. He had written a book about love that almost nobody read during his lifetime, then been called a first-rate psychologist long after he was gone. Who was Marie-Henri Beyle, the man the world came to know as Stendhal? And why did a writer so obsessed with hiding behind masks leave behind some of the most psychologically penetrating fiction in the French language?

• 2. A Childhood in Shadow

  ›

  Marie-Henri Beyle was born in Grenoble, Isere, on the 23rd of January 1783. His mother, Henriette Gagnon, died in childbirth when he was seven, a loss he never recovered from. He described his father, the advocate and landowner Cherubin Beyle, as "unimaginative," and the word carries the full weight of a child's contempt. His closest companion in those early years was his younger sister, Pauline, with whom he kept up a steady correspondence throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century. The family spent time at their country house in Claix, near Grenoble, and belonged to the bourgeois class of the Ancien Regime. That social position, Beyle later recognized, shaped his ambiguous feelings toward Napoleon, the Bourbon Restoration, and the monarchy all at once. The tension between admiring power and mistrusting it runs through everything he wrote.

• 3. War, Moscow, and the Retreat

  ›

  The military world of the First French Empire hit Beyle like a revelation. He served as an assistant war commissioner in the administration of the Kingdom of Westphalia, one of Napoleon's client states in Germany, and from 1807 to 1808 he lived in Braunschweig, where he fell in love with Wilhelmine von Griesheim, a woman he called Minette. He wrote of her: "I have no inclination, now, except for Minette, for this blonde and charming Minette, this soul of the north, such as I have never seen in France or Italy." On the 3rd of August 1810 he was named an auditor with the Conseil d'Etat, and two years later he traveled with Napoleon's army into Russia. He witnessed the burning of Moscow from outside the city and then lived through the winter retreat. Appointed Commissioner of War Supplies, he was sent to Smolensk to prepare provisions for the returning army. When the pontoon bridge across the Berezina River became overwhelmed, he found a usable ford instead, a decision that likely saved his life and the lives of those with him. He arrived back in Paris in 1813 largely unaware of the scale of what had gone wrong. What his comrades remembered was his composure: his sang-froid and clear-headedness, and the fact that he shaved every single day during the retreat.

• 4. Italy and the Liberal Heart

  ›

  After the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau ended Napoleon's reign, Beyle left for Milan, where he settled and stayed until June 1821. He called those years in Italy the happiest of his life, leaving only out of fear of being implicated in the Carbonari troubles. He carried with him to Paris what he described as a sum of around 3,500 francs, and a mood so bleak that he wrote he saw his only happiness in blowing his brains out once that money ran out. Italy did not let him go so easily. He was appointed French consul at Trieste and Civitavecchia in 1830, and he regarded Italy as a more sincere and passionate country than Restoration France. His novel The Charterhouse of Parma is set there, written in 52 days, and it contains a direct aside to his French readers: "I must explain that in Italy, a country very far away from us, people are still driven to despair by love." His sojourn had also convinced him that Romanticism was the literary counterpart of liberalism in politics. When he was appointed to the consular post in Trieste, the Austrian statesman Metternich refused to grant his exequatur, citing Stendhal's liberalism and anti-clericalism.

• 5. The Science of Pseudonyms

  ›

  Before settling on the name Stendhal, Beyle published under several aliases, including "Louis Alexandre Bombet" and "Anastasius Serpiere." The only book he ever published under his real name was The History of Painting in 1817. From September 1817 onward, he published as "M. de Stendhal, officier de cavalerie." The name came from the German city of Stendal, birthplace of the art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Whether Beyle chose it as a tribute to Winckelmann or simply knew the place as a communications hub between Berlin and Hanover is not clear; he did add an extra "H" to sharpen the Germanic sound. He did not stop there. Over his lifetime he used more than a hundred pseudonyms, some only once, others returned to repeatedly. "Dominique" and "Salviati" functioned as intimate pet names. Others were deliberately absurd: "Giorgio Vasari," "Baron de Cutendre," "Poverino." His correspondent Prosper Merimee observed drily that he never wrote a letter without signing a false name. In his diary for 1814, Stendhal gave himself this instruction: "Look upon life as a masked ball." In Memoirs of an Egotist he went further, asking whether anyone would believe him if he said he would wear a mask with pleasure and be delighted to change his name.

• 6. Love, Crystallization, and Psychology

  ›

  De l'amour, published in 1822, was based in part on Stendhal's unrequited love for Mathilde, Countess Dembowska, whom he met while living in Milan. The book was largely ignored when it appeared, but it introduced a concept that has outlasted most of his contemporaries: "crystallization." Stendhal described the birth of love as a journey analogous to traveling from Bologna to Rome. Bologna represents indifference; Rome represents perfect love. Between them, the lover climbs the Apennines and passes through four stages: admiration, acknowledgement, hope, and delight. The entire crystallization process, Stendhal specified, was sketched out on the back of a playing card during a conversation with Madame Gherardi at the Salzburg salt mine. Sharon Brehm, a president of the American Psychological Association, later called Stendhal "a first-rate psychologist before the official term was coined." The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche named him "France's last great psychologist" in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886. Even Nietzsche's encounter with Dostoevsky, which he called the most beautiful accident of his life, ranked only second to his discovery of Stendhal.

• 7. Realism and Its Discontents

  ›

  Contemporary readers did not fully appreciate Stendhal's realistic style during the Romantic period; genuine recognition came only at the start of the twentieth century. He had dedicated his writing to "the Happy Few," the phrase written in English in the original. The reference is most likely to Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, parts of which Stendhal had memorized while teaching himself English. In that novel, the phrase is used ironically, describing the tiny audience for the title character's obscure treatise. Erich Auerbach, in his landmark study Mimesis, argued that modern serious realism began with Stendhal and Balzac. He wrote that a scene in The Red and the Black would be "almost incomprehensible" without precise knowledge of the political and social conditions in France just before the July Revolution. The literary theorist Kornelije Kvas pointed to Stendhal's own metaphor in that novel: the realistic novel as a mirror carried in a basket, a mirror that cannot and should not reflect all of reality, but must select, unify, and achieve what Stendhal called the cognitive function of a work of art. Hippolyte Taine found the psychological portraits real because they were complex, many-sided, and particular. Emile Zola praised the psychological accuracy while deploring the implausibilities. Ford Madox Ford, in The English Novel, credited Diderot and Stendhal as the writers who made it suddenly evident that the novel could be a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case. Not everyone agreed: Vladimir Nabokov called Le Rouge et le Noir "much overrated" and found Stendhal's style "paltry."

• 8. Stendhal Syndrome

  ›

  In 1817 Stendhal visited Florence for the first time. Emerging from the porch of Santa Croce, he was seized, as he recorded it, with a fierce palpitation of the heart; the well-spring of life was dried up within him, and he walked in constant fear of falling to the ground. He described this episode in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio. More than a century and a half later, in 1979, Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini gave the condition a name. She had observed similar psychosomatic symptoms, including racing heartbeat, nausea, and dizziness, among first-time visitors to Florence, and named the syndrome after the writer who had described it so precisely. As a further tribute, the rail company Trenitalia named their overnight train service from Paris to Venice the Stendhal Express, a route that threads through the Italian landscape Stendhal loved above all others.