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Tragic and Melodramatic: A Profile of Stendhal
Cynthia Grenier
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Marie-Henri Beyle, aka "Stendhal"
Stendhal, one of the giants of nineteenth-century French literature, came into the world in Grenoble, January 23, 1783, as Marie-Henri Beyle, although that was only one of myriad--some claim over two hundred--names under which he chose to conceal his real identity, assigning himself colorful pseudonyms even in his copious journals and letters to friends. He was truly a drole d'oiseau (odd bird) no matter how one looks at his life, indeed as Henry James observed quite justly of him: "Stendhal was a most singular character." Yet his two great novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma continue to be read--far more today than in his lifetime--and both in recent years have been translated anew.
Henri Beyle (biographers refer to him thus, dropping the "Marie") was born into a comfortable bourgeois family. He loathed his father, a lawyer, from earliest childhood for what he perceived to be his hypocrisy. His young mother, however, he utterly worshipped. Indeed he declared he wanted to cover her with kisses, adding "and that should be with no clothes. I returned her embraces with such ardor that she was often forced to leave the room." She died in childbirth when Henri was barely seven. He never really ever recovered from her death. Her loss certainly colored all his future relations with women. He never married.
At age 17 young Beyle set off to Paris as Napoleon Bonaparte was coming to power with the famous coup d'etat of 18th Brumaire. He imagined his arrival in the French capital with notions he would later bestow on his most celebrated literary creations--Fabrizio del Dongo and Julien Sorel. "My idea was that a pretty woman, a Parisian, would have a carriage accident while I happened to be nearby, or else encounter into some sort of danger from which I should rescue her and afterwards become her lover."
Thanks to a cousin of his father--Pierre Daru--young Beyle's life took a turn that totally changed his future. Napoleon appointed cousin Daru Secretary of War. In that capacity Daru reorganized the French army from top to bottom. It was due largely to his efforts that Napoleon's Grande Armee became the powerful fighting machine that dominated Europe for fifteen years. Beyle moved into his cousin's home where he felt very much the self-conscious provincial rather than the debonair young rake he fancied himself to be. What was worse, he recognized his own mediocrity. Again, these were traits that he would later incorporate into the young Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black.
Cousin Daru realizing his youthful relation was floundering about hopelessly with his life obtained a clerical position for him at the Ministry of War. While Stendhal got off to a poor start by frequently misspelling simple words--not that this ever embarrassed him--indeed he later wrote of penchant for misspelling: "I make a lot of them and I love them." This trait too he transferred to Julien Sorel. .
In May 1800, Napoleon prepared a secret attack on Austrian forces in northern Italy. Cousin Daru sent Beyle off in the humblest unit of a reserve rearguard that seemed unlikely to ever come under fire. The French reserve army arrived in the Italian town of Novara at the same time the Teatro Nuovo presented Dominico Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto (The Secret Marriage). Attending a performance in June 1800 profoundly affected Stendhal's life. He fell passionately in love with the opera, with music and with Italy. In his novels Cimarosa's music is used again and again to underline an emotional point.
From Novara and Cimarosa it was only a step as it were to Milan and La Scala Opera House, a theater whose performances Stendhal never missed attending if he could help it. Milan during the latter half of the eighteenth century was the most exciting city in Europe according to many, its salons rivaling those of Paris where intellectuals enjoyed a freedom guaranteed under the relatively benign Habsburg government. In a memoir about Napoleon that Stendhal began writing thirty-seven years later, he digressed going into positive ecstasies over life in Milan, saying of young officers like himself: "None of them, no matter how prosaic, ambitious and greedy they might later have become, ever forgot their stay in Milan. It was the most glorious moment of a glorious youth."
Once again Cousin Daru advanced Beyle's career, obtaining for him a commission of second lieutenant in the 6th Dragoons regiment. Sick leave terminated his military career for a time; it would be five years before he donned a uniform again, and ten before he would see Italy again. He indulged in his love of theater when back in Paris, as well as falling in love and pursuing women hopelessly (his program ran to thoughts like "when I've got new clothes and some money, I'll have her.") Also during this time he endeavored to write--without ever completing--a dramatic piece.
Eventually by 1806, once again through nepotism he was appointed a commissaire des guerres, a kind of quartermaster whose role was to obtain provisions and supplies for the army. These two years spent in Germany, although he never developed any affection for that country, did bring him in contact for the first time with the fully evolved romantic sensibility of northern Europe.
Until then he had tended to share the French view of love as a kind of freewheeling amusement, heightening life with the joys of pursuit and possession, whereas the German way was filled with yearning, heart-searching, noble repression and sentimental heroism--feelings which Stendhal certainly abundantly infused his romantic hero Julien Sorel, even while endowing him with considerable cynicism and hypocrisy.
His second posting as quartermaster was with the French army invading Bavaria, striking at the very heart of the Austrian empire: its capital Vienna. That campaign was one of Napoleon's bloodiest and most bitterly contested. For the first time Stendhal encountered the full ghastly horror of warfare such as he had never had to face while in Italy. It is in his personal writings from that time that we first discover that Stendhal as a master of style has arrived. (He claimed he had learned how to write by studying the language of le Code Civil that codification of civil law by Napoleon still in effect in France today.)
Napoleon rode into Vienna as its conqueror. Stendhal succeeded in being assigned to that sophisticated capital for the next two years. There too he contracted syphilis that kept him from taking part in the battle of Wagram, one of the Emperor's most costly victories. It left him too with the disease that almost certainly contributed to the attack of apoplexy on a Paris street that caused his death at age 59 in 1841.
Eighteen-twelve found Stendhal in Moscow with Napoleon, and once again the novelist came to experience the horrors of war, even more horrific than those of the Austrian campaign as the French army was forced to retreat slowly and desperately across Russia. Once back in Paris he seemed troubled most by the loss of a notebook of one of his journals, along with the first draft of Histoire de la Peinture en Italie (History of Painting in Italy) rather than the death of a quarter-million fellow Frenchmen in wretched conditions. He participated in no military action himself although he did witness one pitched battle, observation of which made its way into the description of the Battle of Waterloo as viewed so memorably from the sidelines in The Charterhouse of Parma. Those passages still stand today as one of the best descriptions of a battlefield.
In the years following, Stendhal produced a travel book, Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817, his History of Painting, and the rather bizarre work De l'Amour (About Love), that he claimed was his favorite among all his writings. In all his jottings and letters, he sprinkled English words and expressions throughout with a fine disregard for grammar.
Two rather sensational murder cases involving working class young men, one of who had studied for the priesthood, and both of who had attempted murdering their bourgeois married mistresses gave Stendhal all the elements he needed for writing The Red and the Black. As he noted: "Probably all great men from now on will arise from the class to which M. Lafargue [one of his two models] belongs. Napoleon, in the past, blended similar conditions: a good education, an ardent imagination and extreme poverty."
The novel was published after the "July Revolution" of 1830 that saw open fighting in the streets of Paris. Stendhal stayed in his apartment, reading Las Cases' Memorial de Sainte-Helene, the most popular of essays expressing nostalgia for Bonaparte. At each new round of shots in the street heard outside, he scribbled in the margin of page 147 of the book: "fusillade from firing parties while I read this page, 28 July 1830."
With the advent of the July Monarchy, in September Stendhal was assigned the post of His Most Christian Majesty's consul-general at the Austrian Imperial port of Trieste. In April of the following year Stendhal was appointed as consul to Civitavecchia in the Papal States where he was to spend much of the next eleven years, although with considerable time spent in Rome.
In the summer of 1838, he came across a seventeenth-century account of the meteoric rise of the Farnese family from obscurity to glory, great wealth and power. Everything came together in Stendhal's mind and on November 4, 1838 he shut himself away in his apartment in Paris and began dictating what was to be The Charterhouse of Parma. On December 26--a scant six weeks--he sent six enormous folios of the completed work to a cousin, asking him to find a publisher, who was found within the next month. Unfortunately, the publisher wanting to keep costs down, kept asking Stendhal to tighten his manuscript which may well account for the singularly abrupt last chapter in which the eponymous charterhouse is introduced for the first time in the next to last paragraph of the long novel. All the principal characters are abruptly and breathlessly dispatched in a few sentences.
Balzac, at the height of fame himself, declared the work to be "a great and beautiful book," and as for the difference between himself and Stendhal as novelists, he said, "I create a fresco and you create statues." Balzac went on to publish an exceedingly elogious sixty-two-page critical study in the Revue Parisienne. Interestingly, Stendhal believed he would only be appreciated by readers in 1880, and then amended the date to that of 1900.Actually, as it turns out, Stendhal's reputation as an author only really exploded in the twentieth century, confirming his position as a giant among giants in nineteenth century French literature.
Stendhal's two heroes found resonance in our time where poor, ambitious, good-looking young men often had to mask their true nature in order to rise in a power-driven world or to put it in the vernacular are consumed with the need to make it in society. Critics have drawn comparison with Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or Norman Podhoretz's Making It.
In The Charterhouse of Parma, Fabrizio del Dongo is barely seventeen when he sets forth from Italy for Waterloo to take part, he fervently dreams, in the great battle. The first seventy-odd pages of the novel describe the chaotic sometimes bordering at times almost on the comic experiences of an adolescent being caught up in one of history's great battles, seeking only to participate in the action.
Giving evidence of how life can seem at times as bizarre as art, Stendhal tells us near the beginning of the novel of a young French lieutenant traveling through Italy, leaving behind a young woman pregnant with his child. That child grows up to be our hero Fabrizio. In the course of the bewildering day he spends at the Battle of Waterloo,
Fabrizio finds himself following for a time "a tall, slender general." "His expression is severe, his eyes terrible." Stendhal informs us "This general was none other than Count d'A- [as in text], our Lieutenant Robert of May 15, 1796. How happy he would have been to see Fabrizio del Dongo!" Thus father and son pass one another at the Battle of Waterloo with neither aware of their relationship.
Henry James as well as Balzac deemed The Charterhouse of Parma a "masterpiece." Dramatic and appealing as the opening sequences of the novel are, perhaps the novel's most unforgettable characters are the hero's beautiful aunt, the seductive Duchess of Sanseverina and her lover, Count Mosca, who scheme to further Fabrizio's political career at the treacherous court of Parma in a dashing tale that illuminates an entire epoch of European history with considerable verve. As an epigraph to the novel, Stendhal used the words of the revolutionary icon, Danton: "The truth, the bitter truth."
In The Red and the Black, two of its protagonists have barely turned eighteen. Julien Sorel, a virtual model for ambitious, poor youths desiring to succeed in the world, is placed as tutor to the young children of a local mayor. The mayor's wife, Madame de Real, "about thirty, but still quite pretty," discovers passion with young Julien, but Julien ever ambitious arranges to be appointed to a more prominent household, that of the Marquis de La Mole, living in Paris. (Julien has "an unshakeable determination to undergo a thousand deaths rather than fail to achieve success.") He and Mathilde de La Mole, the Marquis' beautiful young daughter, fall in love. The Marquis finally even goes so far at the passionate insistence of his daughter to agree to their marriage, until he receives a letter from Madame de Real denouncing Julien as a wicked, godless, faithless fellow. Julien, feeling the fulfillment of his ambitions being snatched from him, goes to the church service that Madame de Real is attending and shoots her.
Not fatally, but nonetheless he is condemned to the guillotine. (Stendhal based Julien's fate on a similar case that created a sensation in the press of the day.) Julien faces his death with calm and courage. Mathilde now pregnant with Julien's child wraps her beloved's head in a silk scarf, bearing it off for burial in a special shrine. She is following in the steps of her ancestor, as she has recounted to Julien, the death and treatment of the lover's remains. (As a literary curiosity, a near contemporary of Stendhal, Alexandre Dumas described in his 1845 novel La Reine Margot, the eponymous queen bearing away the head of her executed lover Hyacinthe de La Mole. Could The Red and the Black, published in 1830, have inspired Dumas?)
Cynthia Grenier is a contributing editor with The World & I
Online.
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